A new paper by philosopher Neil Van Leeuwen offers a third possibility: That
factual belief isn't the same as
religious belief. Even though we use the same word, our attitudes toward the respective propositions — that humans evolved thousands and thousands of years ago, that humans were created quite recently — could differ considerably.
To get your intuitions going, consider some ways in which you might entertain a proposition — say, that humans were created. You could
imagine that humans were created. You could
hypothesize that humans were created. You could
assume for the sake of argument that humans were created ... and so on. Each of these "attitudes" toward a proposition is distinct, and Van Leeuwen aims to show that factual and religious beliefs are similarly distinct. If he's right, then our initial "contradiction" may be no more mysterious than the following:
Devon
believes that humans evolved from earlier primates over 100,000 years ago.
Devon
imagines that humans were created less than 10,000 years ago.
Behind the common word "belief" is something like this:
Devon
(factually) believes that humans evolved from earlier primates over 100,000 years ago.
Devon
(religiously) believes that humans were created less than 10,000 years ago.
But why suspect two meanings when we use a single word?