In my Intro To Logic class that I took a long time ago, the teacher led the class in a deduction about evolution. You could basically lead her through the deduction and invite her to poke at the premises, yourself, if you are confident enough talking about it. You could even sketch it out on a napkin in a restaurant. If my outline is insufficient, just let me know what I can do to help you flesh it out to your satisfaction.
1) Scarcity—there aren’t enough resources for everybody to get all of what they need/want. (In my experience, some Christians deny this, claiming god will provide. You could easily counter that if that were the case, there’d be no such thing as economics. Or point out that there’s half a million people starving to death in Botswana who might disagree).
2) Variability—There’s differences between individuals in a population (I haven’t had any trouble with getting people to agree to this one).
3) Inheritance—Differences between individuals can be passed down to descendants (They might need a prod by saying that kids grow up to look like their parents, or something like that).
4) Because variability can be passed down to future generations (via 2 and 3), any variability that makes you better at getting a bigger slice of scarce resources gives you a better chance to have babies.
I know it isn’t technically a deduction, since I didn’t introduce every term and show how P1 & P2 ⇒ C1, etc, but I imagine formal logic isn’t something your friend cares much about.
A biologist friend of mine has had limited success with this method. He has also suggested that the book “Why Evolution Is True” be read by novices who are open to actual dialogue but don’t know enough to accept evolution.
I suspect this would get J. Random Creationist to accept small-scale evolution but not large-scale. The better-informed class of creationist doesn’t even attempt to refute things like Darwin’s finches; they’ll instead come up with reasons why those arguments don’t scale to full-blown speciation.
One thing leads to another, and before you know it you’re trying to demonstrate why tree fossils crossing strata don’t actually prove Noah’s flood. This is less of a problem if you’re not dealing with a young-earther, of course.
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.
In my Intro To Logic class that I took a long time ago, the teacher led the class in a deduction about evolution. You could basically lead her through the deduction and invite her to poke at the premises, yourself, if you are confident enough talking about it. You could even sketch it out on a napkin in a restaurant. If my outline is insufficient, just let me know what I can do to help you flesh it out to your satisfaction.
1) Scarcity—there aren’t enough resources for everybody to get all of what they need/want. (In my experience, some Christians deny this, claiming god will provide. You could easily counter that if that were the case, there’d be no such thing as economics. Or point out that there’s half a million people starving to death in Botswana who might disagree).
2) Variability—There’s differences between individuals in a population (I haven’t had any trouble with getting people to agree to this one).
3) Inheritance—Differences between individuals can be passed down to descendants (They might need a prod by saying that kids grow up to look like their parents, or something like that).
4) Because variability can be passed down to future generations (via 2 and 3), any variability that makes you better at getting a bigger slice of scarce resources gives you a better chance to have babies.
I know it isn’t technically a deduction, since I didn’t introduce every term and show how P1 & P2 ⇒ C1, etc, but I imagine formal logic isn’t something your friend cares much about.
A biologist friend of mine has had limited success with this method. He has also suggested that the book “Why Evolution Is True” be read by novices who are open to actual dialogue but don’t know enough to accept evolution.
I suspect this would get J. Random Creationist to accept small-scale evolution but not large-scale. The better-informed class of creationist doesn’t even attempt to refute things like Darwin’s finches; they’ll instead come up with reasons why those arguments don’t scale to full-blown speciation.
One thing leads to another, and before you know it you’re trying to demonstrate why tree fossils crossing strata don’t actually prove Noah’s flood. This is less of a problem if you’re not dealing with a young-earther, of course.
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.
I second this book.