I have long struggled to understand how it is that otherwise intelligent adults can make religious claims that make no sense at all. For instance, otherwise intelligent people will claim that Jesus walked on water, or that Mary had a baby even though she was a virgin. These claims have no factual basis. To my ears, these are ludicrous claims. How is it that the human intellect allows these things to be uttered? Well, perhaps the intellect barely tolerates this. The human intellect is a relatively weak Johnny-come-lately to our cognitive apparatus. What really drives our decision-making is a big elephant underneath a tiny lawyer. Each of us is a tiny lawyer riding a big elephant. It turns out, however, that the elephant has almost irresistible power to reach up and invade the lawyer's ability to articulate. It takes great training to resist the elephant and to maintain disciplined abstract self-critical thought.  When we speak words, then, it is rarely the lawyer in full command of the mouth. That elephant is smart in the sense that it was evolutionarily honed over many millions of years to allow us to survive; most of those years, we survived even though we were not even conscious. And that elephant is still powerful, compelling decision-making based upon millions of years of trial and error. And the intellect? We give it far too much credit, even though this is where humans can sometimes shine above and beyond the other animals. After all, other animals cannot calculate a 15% tip, and they cannot figure out how to invent medicines or discover DNA. [More . . . ]