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In a university psychology course, I recall seeing a movie concerning cognitive development in children. A child was shown a tall, slender cylinder full of water and a wide, shallow dish. Both of these containers could hold the exact same volume of liquid, but when the child was asked which he thought could hold more, he immediately pointed to the tall cylinder. The notion of volume was explained to him and he even watched as the liquid in the cylinder was poured into the dish and filled it exactly. When asked again, he still said the cylinder. His sense of spatial relationships had not developed to the point that he could make such distinctions.
After giving this part of your post some thought, I have come to the conclusion that there is one part of the analogy that is not completely accurate. In the case of the child, one assumes or even expects that the child will over time, with education, and via exploration of the local environment that all children do, that such a misconception about volumes will be overcome. At the very least, one can state, almost all children have the capacity to develop their sense of spatial relationships. Not so with Phillip Johnson, Syamsu, and the majority of fundamentalist creationists. Unlike a child who after observing that previously held misconceptions are false, discards them, creationists and IDists cling to fallacies regardless of and in spite of direct, indirect, or theoretical evidence that directly contradicts their cherished views. Thus, the children in your example are in a process of development. Johnson and Co. are in a state of arrested development. The part of the analogy that holds is that both children and the superstitious make childish errors when it comes to science.
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