I think that's the effect of having an epiphany. Is it that this woman started reading the Bible and thought okay, this makes sense to me? Or was there a moment when she experienced a moment of clarity, or understanding, or 'the hand of GOD' or some other transcendent feeling? Lots of people claim to experience the latter, and it can mark a huge shift in how they perceive the world. When you think about it, something like the half-life of uranium... why did she accept that it was 4.5 billion years before? She read it or heard it, most likely, and accepted it as it had no particular impact on her life. To believe that now could impact her new reality, and so when she reads or hears that it's really 5,000 it is more meaningful. To her it helps to confirm her new reality. It's not just a random factoid, it becomes an underpinning of her belief system.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
