E.g., the Grand Canyon totally proves a global flood, but scientists refuse to accept that because of their "faith" in the earth being billions of years old.
If you were in charge, what would you test?
To make it personal, think about it like this: if you start by saying to yourself "this thing society thinks is acceptable is wrong," and if you then go on and apply that mindset to everything else, there is a nonzero chance that your honest first-principles evaluation of, say, young-earth creationism would come out positive. Unless you think your inner compass has a zero false positive rate, spin that wheel again for every single commonly accepted belief and you're essentially guaranteed to end up believing at least one think that might appear in a study like this.
“which was partly independent from religion, politics, age, education, agency detection, analytical thinking and perception of randomness.”
Plenty of smart people suffer from cognitive bias, I’d bet most do to some degree.
My understanding is that this is basically true though. That is, even fundamentalist Christians didn't believe in young earth creationism before the 1920s or so, and the reason it became a popular is that it was a reaction to that fact that mainstream science rejected the existence of climate change and tectonic plates.
There's a good talk about this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMaUzNlDnSY
It's basically the same as how homeopathy was created as a reaction to the fact that mainstream medicine had a success rate that was substantially lower than placebo treatments.
In each case science basically just got forked. And once it gets forked, it's impossible to use science on one side of the fork to convince people on the other side of the fork that they're wrong, because all the commits are out of order in way that changes the meaning of the diffs.
> Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience.
> Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking non-sense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.
> The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.
> If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?
Of course, this is functionally indistinguishable from an argument that the world was created last Tuesday, with all evidence of prior existence intact.