You are quite right. Crossing the inferential gap of trying to convey how absurdly long (in human terms) a few billion years is… well, Dawkins has spent a lot of time trying to show it in visceral terms, but even his examples are too big to really grasp. Even with an example like “If one inch was a century, then 4 billion years would be over a thousand kilometers, or over 630 miles” … I really don’t know how someone could internalize that without spending all kinds of time listening to their internal Sagan. I suspect that the only way to convey that kind of mathematical wonder to a theist is to bring it up whenever you can around them. Stuff like, “There are about 10x as many bacterial cells in your body as cells that you would call human.” Or “billions and billions of stars.” Or “5 earth-like planets in their star’s goldilocks zone”. But that doesn’t directly relate to evolution.
You are quite right. Crossing the inferential gap of trying to convey how absurdly long (in human terms) a few billion years is… well, Dawkins has spent a lot of time trying to show it in visceral terms, but even his examples are too big to really grasp. Even with an example like “If one inch was a century, then 4 billion years would be over a thousand kilometers, or over 630 miles” … I really don’t know how someone could internalize that without spending all kinds of time listening to their internal Sagan. I suspect that the only way to convey that kind of mathematical wonder to a theist is to bring it up whenever you can around them. Stuff like, “There are about 10x as many bacterial cells in your body as cells that you would call human.” Or “billions and billions of stars.” Or “5 earth-like planets in their star’s goldilocks zone”. But that doesn’t directly relate to evolution.