Why? Because humans reason inductively and not deductively. We use short cuts, quick heuristics, analogies and similes. We anthropomorphize, we look for direct

Why? Because humans reason inductively and not deductively. We use short cuts, quick heuristics, analogies and similes. We anthropomorphize, we look for direct causes and effects over linear time scales. That's just the tip of the ice berg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases - That's a pretty comprehensive list. Memorize and comprehend all of those, and even then you won't get a handle around how badly humans reason - because you are human yourself! It's also why humans find programming difficult (logic is very unnatural to a inductive reasoner). All swans are white programmers will quickly smash into the error caused by unpredictbale black swans coming into the system. Hence that's why you need exceptions, conditionals and containers to deal with the most absurd inputs (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/04/working-with-the-chaos-monkey.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/04/working-with-the-ch...). Humans are animals, with a bunch of neurons in their heads that look for and extract statistically significant patterns from correlated data over short term linear time scales. We mistake correlation for causation thanks to all the mental shortcuts that were used to keep us alive in a less complex world. Why don't we believe in science? The same reason we eat food, drink water and socialize with our peers - to stay alive. Science is deduction from first principles (backed by evidence of course). And that is very, very unnatural. Note: Proud reductionist here! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction