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 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.