Creationists are an extreme example of the psychological finding that brains are excellent at amplifying the currently held beliefs no matter which data it is fed by cherry picking just the notions that support the belief system.
The corollary of this is that it is pointless to argument with creationists.
Once I understood this cherry picking done automatically by brains I realized that lots of popular religious material is probably not created by malicious omission of facts but by just simply ... processing information in academically non-rigorous manner.
Like editing video to convey the message the original authors wish to convey, for example.
http://evolutionwiki.org/wiki/Dawkins_could_not_give_an_exam...
Creationists are an extreme example of the psychological finding that brains are excellent at amplifying the currently held beliefs no matter which data it is fed by cherry picking just the notions that support the belief system.
The corollary of this is that it is pointless to argument with creationists.
Once I understood this cherry picking done automatically by brains I realized that lots of popular religious material is probably not created by malicious omission of facts but by just simply ... processing information in academically non-rigorous manner.
Like editing video to convey the message the original authors wish to convey, for example.