I was at her house tonight. I asked a few probing questions to get a framework of what I’d say:
1) How old do you believe the earth is (her answer was something like a few million, which seemed pretty arbitrary to me but which was apparently based off of a particular argument she’d read)
2) Do you believe in microevolution? (the answer is yes, but not because of knowledge of evolution—it’s because of the practicality of fitting all the animals onto the ark. Two of each “platonic” animal that then evolved into similar things)
3) What exactly do you want to know? (the answer was “enough background knowledge so that when she goes to argue with her friend she’ll know what she’s talking about.” But she also was genuinely interested in having some conversations with me about it, just to get a better understanding of what I believe and why)
4) Could you think of any circumstances that might change your position on macroevolution?
The answer was no.
After a quiet mental facepalm, I steered the conversation towards the ability to change our minds and hard but necessary an ability it is. I don’t think this was necessarily optimal, but past experience has taught me that when I hear a creationist make that kind of statement, I know that the discussion is already over—anything else we say is just for fun. Her answer was consistent an unapologetic: “The only way to change what I believe is to prove that Jesus wasn’t the son of God.”
A lot of people recommended simply stating the facts. I think you really grossly underestimate how much bias at work here and how non-obvious your interpretations are to someone with no scientific training. We didn’t have internet so I wasn’t able to grab a reference to transitional fossils. I’ll be linking her to Talk Origins. (Rereading it, I was almost surprised at how good a reference it was. I had forgotten. But it’s a little intimidating to just throw at someone).
We did have a good long conversation, which I considered somewhat productive. It ended up focusing more on the Bible than on evolution. She seemed less confident towards the end. (She kept saying stuff like “Josephus is an independent historian who mentions Jesus” and I said “yeah but his testimony came 100 years later and basically carries no wait” and she said “no.… lemme look it up… oh… huh”). Past experiences suggest that these temporary lapses in confidence will be repaired within a few days.
Eventually the conversation turned back towards evolution, and I ended with the “math and genetics” angle, but by then she was tired and I think I wasted the moment.
I still feel like there needs to be a Pro-Evolution book that very carefully unpackages it in a way that doesn’t automatically set off a creationist’s memetic immune system. (I’ll check out Why Evolution is True and see if it comes close). I actually think I’m pretty good at that, but I’m not a biologist and I don’t care enough to do all the research necessary to write an all encompassing book.
Interesting. I’m by no means an expert on deconversion, so take all of this with lots of salt, but it does look as if a book on evolution, no matter how good, could never put up a fight against her massive mental investments (kind of like how no single book could on its own push my prior on the existence of, say, reincarnation, beyond the boundaries of the negligible). If you regularly hang out with her, you might be able to not waste time and just approach the core problem i.e. her Christianity.
Something to consider is that, if she says that the divinity of Jesus directly and necessarily implies the existence of Noah’s Ark, she is probably heavily invested in the Bible being literally and completely true (sun stopping over Joshua and all). Perhaps you might try to tackle, over multiple occasions, the subject of the more blatantly inconsistent and/or repugnant passages in the Bible; I have read of more than a few crises of faith that began that way. Even if she only moves to a non-literal form of Christianity (I have also read of people who changed that way), it would still be a significant improvement in sanity.
I was at her house tonight. I asked a few probing questions to get a framework of what I’d say:
1) How old do you believe the earth is (her answer was something like a few million, which seemed pretty arbitrary to me but which was apparently based off of a particular argument she’d read)
2) Do you believe in microevolution? (the answer is yes, but not because of knowledge of evolution—it’s because of the practicality of fitting all the animals onto the ark. Two of each “platonic” animal that then evolved into similar things)
3) What exactly do you want to know? (the answer was “enough background knowledge so that when she goes to argue with her friend she’ll know what she’s talking about.” But she also was genuinely interested in having some conversations with me about it, just to get a better understanding of what I believe and why)
4) Could you think of any circumstances that might change your position on macroevolution?
The answer was no.
After a quiet mental facepalm, I steered the conversation towards the ability to change our minds and hard but necessary an ability it is. I don’t think this was necessarily optimal, but past experience has taught me that when I hear a creationist make that kind of statement, I know that the discussion is already over—anything else we say is just for fun. Her answer was consistent an unapologetic: “The only way to change what I believe is to prove that Jesus wasn’t the son of God.”
A lot of people recommended simply stating the facts. I think you really grossly underestimate how much bias at work here and how non-obvious your interpretations are to someone with no scientific training. We didn’t have internet so I wasn’t able to grab a reference to transitional fossils. I’ll be linking her to Talk Origins. (Rereading it, I was almost surprised at how good a reference it was. I had forgotten. But it’s a little intimidating to just throw at someone).
We did have a good long conversation, which I considered somewhat productive. It ended up focusing more on the Bible than on evolution. She seemed less confident towards the end. (She kept saying stuff like “Josephus is an independent historian who mentions Jesus” and I said “yeah but his testimony came 100 years later and basically carries no wait” and she said “no.… lemme look it up… oh… huh”). Past experiences suggest that these temporary lapses in confidence will be repaired within a few days.
Eventually the conversation turned back towards evolution, and I ended with the “math and genetics” angle, but by then she was tired and I think I wasted the moment.
I still feel like there needs to be a Pro-Evolution book that very carefully unpackages it in a way that doesn’t automatically set off a creationist’s memetic immune system. (I’ll check out Why Evolution is True and see if it comes close). I actually think I’m pretty good at that, but I’m not a biologist and I don’t care enough to do all the research necessary to write an all encompassing book.
Interesting. I’m by no means an expert on deconversion, so take all of this with lots of salt, but it does look as if a book on evolution, no matter how good, could never put up a fight against her massive mental investments (kind of like how no single book could on its own push my prior on the existence of, say, reincarnation, beyond the boundaries of the negligible). If you regularly hang out with her, you might be able to not waste time and just approach the core problem i.e. her Christianity.
Something to consider is that, if she says that the divinity of Jesus directly and necessarily implies the existence of Noah’s Ark, she is probably heavily invested in the Bible being literally and completely true (sun stopping over Joshua and all). Perhaps you might try to tackle, over multiple occasions, the subject of the more blatantly inconsistent and/or repugnant passages in the Bible; I have read of more than a few crises of faith that began that way. Even if she only moves to a non-literal form of Christianity (I have also read of people who changed that way), it would still be a significant improvement in sanity.