Why Does It Matter? 379Not to overdo the Fitzgerald, but I shall think of [the creationists] often, as day after
day they beat on, boats against the current of truth, borne back ceaselessly into being
just completely, utterly wrong.One of the chief mechanisms that humans use to hang on to their core beliefs and reduce
cognitive dissonance is called confirmation bias, or remembering the successes and forgetting
the failures. “Psychics,” fortune-tellers, and other con artists take advantage of this human
weakness when they do a “cold reading,” trying to “predict the future” for an unsuspecting
victim. If you listen carefully to what they say, you’ll realize that they throw out a lot of ran-
dom vague guesses until they get a “hit,” then they follow the victim’s body language and
verbal cues to refine their guesses and amaze the victim. If you keep a tally, you’ll see that
most of their guesses are wrong—but the victim only remembers the successful “hits” and
comes away amazed that the “psychic” knew so much.
The same is true of most horoscopes and astrology. Most of the statements are vague
platitudes that tend to be true of most people, and even a detailed personal horoscope will
be full of misses—but most listeners will only be impressed by the “hits.” Confirmation
bias (also called “cherry-picking” the best data or examples) explains how many creation-
ists can ignore the conflicts of different verses in the Bible (discussed in chapter 2) or read a
passage about evolution and “quote mine” just a tiny piece of the text that seems to fit their
beliefs. The power of confirmation bias in the brain completely blocks the overall context of
the evidence or the statements in the text, and only a tiny out-of-context quotation registers
in their cognition as important—because it seems to agree with their existing biases. This is
why quote mining, as we have seen throughout this book, seems so bizarre and frustrating to
most of us—but makes perfect sense to creationists, whose filters and biases can only allow
certain ideas that fit their belief system.
Another factor is at work here as well: tribalism. We are all products of our backgrounds,
especially our families and communities, and we learn and accept whatever our families and
peers teach us. Adopting these ideas is essential to our sense of belonging and acceptance by
our families and communities, and going against their beliefs is very difficult for most peo-
ple. Most people don’t want to be the “black sheep” but just want to fit in and belong. Rebel-
ling or breaking from family or community is truly terrifying to to almost anyone. People
from small towns in rural America know this phenomenon well. The first question people
will ask you after “What is your name?” is “What church do you attend?” Your church mem-
bership in a small town defines your place in that society, and if you’re not a church-going
Christian, you can expect harsh judgment from the rest of the small community. With pow-
erful incentives like this, it is no wonder that most creationists will never listen to evidence
that threatens their core beliefs and their membership in their churches and communities.
In addition, people often don’t realize just how intellectually isolated people in evan-
gelical and fundamentalist churches are. In his brilliant 2008 book The Great Derangement: A
Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion, reporter Matt Taibbi describes the experience
of going “undercover” and immersing himself as a spy within a fundamentalist church in
Texas. He attends all their services throughout the week and goes to their weekend “retreats”
and special seminars about creationism. Although he hides his true beliefs well and doesn’t
give away his reactions to their bizarre notions, he confesses in his writing how he is shocked
and sickened and truly amazed by the kind of illogical behavior these people exhibit. What
is more revealing is their social and intellectual isolation from the rest of the world. Despite