Faith

"Faith" has been defined as "a belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence" (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition).

Would you ride in an airplane designed and built without any reference to objective knowledge of aerodynamics, which had never been tested to determine objectively whether it could actually fly?

If you were sick, would you take a medicine which had never been tested to determine whether it actually did any good or was even safe?

If you were at work and you smelled smoke, heard the fire alarm go off, and saw people running for the exits, but a co-worker told you he "just knew" there couldn't really be a fire, would you take his word for it and stay put?

If you rented a car for a long drive across the desert, and noticed that the gas gauge was hovering near "E", but the rental agency guy told you he was sure it actually had a full tank despite this evidence, would you take his word for it and confidently set off into the wasteland?

So why do some people accept beliefs unsupported by evidence -- and indeed contradicted by all the available evidence -- as the final word on the origin of our species, or on the rightness or wrongness of human behavior?