Religion conflicting with science

[Tonus]

Lots of peoples default position is there is a god and they never have cause to evaluate it.

Yeah, this is what I found about myself. I'd been raised to accept that god does exist, and cannot recall being exposed to the idea that it might not be so. Subconsciously, I accepted this as absolutely true and thus had no reason to even attempt to challenge it. So any discovery that might challenge my belief in god had to be made to fit the belief, or I could always fall back on the idea that it was the scientists who were mistaken. They had to be, because god's existence was a given.

Confirmation bias and urban legends helped to solidify the beliefs. I've explained the way it works with prayer before. But there were also many anecdotes about how people were experiencing god's intervention. Unless they were of a different denomination or faith, in which case it was Satan deceiving them. Everything that we considered would provide "evidence" for god being real and his detractors being deluded and wrong.

If you start from a particular proposition and refuse to challenge it, you are forced to defend it no matter what. If it is a poorly-supported proposition then you are either going to have to plead ignorance ("we can't know the mind of god") or build an elaborate (and sometimes spectacularly bizarre) structure to deal with it.