Love this XKCD cartoon today; this is exactly how technical teams behave. The excitement and imagination involved in innovation often manifests itself as this kind of gap filling game; I think it's part of the stimulating the very same circuits in our brains that are needed to make real intellectual bridges between what we know and what we don't but desire to explain. Of course in rational spheres, evidence and the scientific method serve to invalidate these ideas so that only the correct ones live on and eventually acquire the status of knowledge.
Many religious people (particularly the fundies) play this exact same game of course, but it seems to me that in their case the crazy ideas they pluck from their butts get elevated to "knowledge" (only in their minds) by shear weight of authority, time and numbers. Re-enforced and spread by the indoctrination of children with those ideas, and, the shoring up of the original memes by apologetics along with threats of violence or exclusion (often perceived to be worse than physical pain for a social animal like Homo Sapiens). Humans always seem to prefer easy or stupid explanations rather than no explanations at all.
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