How today helped me understand religion

[Warning-- after reading through this, I felt the tone came out a little weird.  Just to be clear, this was not meant to be entirely serious.  Take with salt.]

As a science-y person, I look at my watch, and I see that it is mid-afternoon.  By the strict rules of logic, I can infer that time has passed since I arrived at work this morning.  This is evidence.  This is data.  I have to give it credence.  And yet, if I consult my own anecdotal memories and experiences of the day, I am at a loss.  I mean, I remember eating lunch.  And I think I answered some e-mails.  And I finished up that one batch I was working on most of yesterday.  But that couldn't have taken that long, surely?  Not 5 or 6 hours?

This discrepancy between what the evidence tells me and what my conscious awareness tells me to be true can be awfully disturbing, and it's tempting to chuck the data and go with my gut.  I've been trained to understand that human awareness is flaky and imprecise, where logic is not, and so I can make the deliberate effort to ignore what I deep down know is true (that nothing's happened since I got to work and therefore it must somehow still be 10 AM) in favor of what must be true in light of the evidence (Hey, look at the clock.  Almost the weekend already.).

But on the other hand, I can absolutely understand the natural tendency to place the evidence of your personal experience first.  The clocks must be wrong.  Or I fell asleep over my morning cocoa and I'm dreaming.  Maybe I'm still in bed and I haven't even gotten to work yet!  But according to the inexorable ticking of science, I've done just about as much work as I'm going to do this week, and soon it will be time to rest.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying it can be all too easy sometimes to go with what feels right instead of what can be proven. 

I am a proud card-carrying member of an evidence-based reality. But today, I gained a little insight into why some people belong to religions.  Some things science tells us are difficult to accept, because they don't seem to make sense.  But some of the things that are easy to accept don't always fare so well under scrutiny.