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SystemsGuy comments on Professing and Cheering - Less Wrong
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I too am both a pagan and a scientist, and I will happily switch between tales of the Green Mother's handfasting to the Dying King and Gould's theory of Punctuated Equilibrium. I find it no more ridiculous than Francis Collins, the leader of the Human Genome Project and a man I respect greatly, publicly embracing evangelical Christianity.
Our brains are complex creations, with many levels and conflicting functions. The scientific method, with its falsifiable hypotheses and reductive materialism, is a stellar belief system for those systems responsible for predicting and understanding how the physical world works. Unfortunately, it provides little if any support for those pre-rational, emotional, and social systems all our brains share. Your amygdala needs something a bit different than physics.
Many of my fellow biologists share your confusion when confronted with the common person's dislike of Darwinian theory. What they fail to understand is that creation myths serve a critical function in people's lives that has *nothing* to do with what "really happened". Think about the function of belief from an evolutionary perspective for a moment. What survival benefit is there in understanding what "really happened" when the universe was formed billions of years ago -- especially to our ancestors on the savanna? Yet *all* cultures place a great importance in their creation myths, despite the fact that most can be easily disproved. It is a universal in human experience.
You may want to ask yourself what the evolutionary function of a creation myth is, and why they are a universal human conceit. With that knowledge in hand, you may have a better understanding of how a creation myth should be judged, and you may finally understand what your pagan panelist was trying to tell you.
Some individuals (and I presume more here than most venues) struggle with any internal inconsistency, while others readily compartmentalize and move on. I am an engineer by training and of course most of my workmates are engineers, yet they represent a variety of religions as well. Most have some questions and doubts about their own, and plenty more about others, and yet that doesn't make a huge difference for day-to-day life.
Some would quickly conclude that such an engineer's judgement is questionable, and discount their work, but most seem to be adequately logical in other spheres.
Perhaps the better questions is one of utility -- what value does the individual get for their beliefs? I graduated with many Elect Engrs; let's presume one went to work on microprocessor design (driven by quantum theory) and another does correction math for GPS satellites (driven by relativity). It is well understood that the two theories have been objectively demonstrated to work well in their respective domains, and yet are mathematically incompatible (at best each may a simplification of a more universal rule). Both cannot be 'true', and while both could be false and likely are to some degree, they are both incredibly useful.
From a systems perspective I tend to fall back on the Systems rules-of-thumb, like "all models are wrong; some are useful", and "draw a box around what is working together to do what you're interested in, and analyze within". Compartmentalization allows one to get down to the work at hand, in support of a utilitarian view.
I am here to learn, though. Must inconsistency be driven out, or simply embraced as part of the imperfect human machine?