RAZD defined cognitive dissonance here a few times. It is the psychological response to an input of information which causes conflict, or dissonance, with one's beliefs. Those beliefs can be adapted to accommodate the new information, or a battery of other responses can be used in order to protect the beliefs if one does not want to change them and feels they are under threat.

One category of response is to lash out at the information being presented. For example:

-- creating a strawman (i.e. "rocks turn into people") and then ridiculing it

-- finding any flaws, however small, and magnifying them out of proportion until the whole body of information can be dismissed (i.e. scientists do not agree 100% on how the tree of life should look, therefore they are wrong, therefore evolutoion is wrong)

-- going straight to the dismissal (i.e. there are no transitional fossils, the fossil record is just a lot of bones, the patterns don't mean anything)

Another category is associating the information with anything that one perceives as distasteful or immoral. If the information is perceived as being somehow evil, then one need not attempt to engage with it. This would obviously include claiming that evolution is responsible for moral decline in society.

Still another category, of course, is lashing out at the bringer of the information. If the person who gave the information is discredited, then the information can be ignored or dismissed. For example:

-- Darwin and family, friends, etc, were racist, therefore evolution is a racist conspiracy

-- Evolutionists are all atheist materialists

-- Evolutionists worship Darwin and have a deep-seated need to believe in their "religion."

-- In order to do this, evolutionists just cherry-pick anything that supports their "religious" views, whether that evidence is true or false

-- Also in order to do this, evolutionists will lie about anything and everything if necessary.

-- Evolutionists think that "survival of the fittest" means it's OK for people to be amoral and to participate in whatever Machiavellian schemes are required in order to become top dog, because we're nothing but animals anyway.

-- Evolutionists are all racist, materialist, Christian-bashing, atheist, hate-filled deceivers.

You get the idea.

It's been interesting watching this occur here. What new brush will we all be painted with I wonder? None of the evolutionists here seem to want to engage in stereotyping the fundamentalists, mind, nor do we start threads about creationism with names like "the big lie" or "the big joke." It's OK, though, it's educational to see how people's minds work.