Are there any 100% sure thing that could convince him, He is very sure that intelligent design is the answer and he doesnt quite beleive my comments
Loggins
He hasn’t been convinced by an overwhelming, indisputable, irrefutable mountain of evidence so far. So IMHO nothing will convince him.
Many prior threads on this:
This might help with a Religious Person
This subject has been debated time and again here, but so you can get advice I’ll slide it over to IMHO.
One of the biggest stumbling blocks is our lack of intuitive grasp of the sheer scale of geologic/evolutionary time. Even if you understand the principle of natural selection, and you accept that small changes can occur, given what we see in the world around us on a human timescale, it seems ridiculous that something like a monkey could ever be able to change into a human; let alone that our more distant ancestors were bacteria.
Has your friend visited the Grand Canyon? I think that’s a good place to get acquainted with the scale of geologic time. Although the rocks themselves are much older, the time it took to erode from a flat plain is around 5-6 million years. That works out to only around 1/100 inch of vertical erosion per year, so it’s clearly adequate time.
That happens to be roughly the same amount of time since humans and chimpanzees diverged from a common ancestor. Does it seem so absurd that an ancestral species that looked like an ape could accumulate enough changes very gradually, generation upon generation, to evolve into a human in around the same amount of time that it took a flat plain to erode into the Grand Canyon?
Then bear in mind also that the time it took to erode the Grand Canyon is only about one thousandth the age of the planet.
What’s his argument?
Is this part really hard to believe? Yes, understanding the long and complex path from bacteria to monkeys is tough, but I just never could see any difficulty grasping the concept that monkeys could evolve into men. As far as I could tell the objection to humans evolving from monkeys was an emotional egotistical response, not a failure to see the incredible similarities between monkeys and ourselves. I think that one was the argument for evolution that was too close to home and sparked fear of the entire concept.
A bigger stumbling block is that people are ignorant and stubborn as fuck.
In all fairness, while I can grasp a monkey evolving into a human over time, basic proteins evolving into bacteria evolving into simple and then more complex organisms is a bit harder for me to grasp.
Like how did a single cell organism suddenly mutate into a multi-cell organism that still worked? Or the first generation of creature to have a working eyeball? Or to figure out that it could breath on land? I’m not arguing against evolution or anything. Some of these evolutionary changes are harder to wrap one’s brain around because they are kind of irreducible. A partial eye or liver doesn’t offer an evolutionary advantage and in many cases may be a disadvantage.
But then again, we are talking about tiny changes over billions of years across quadrillions of organisms.
If their friend is the Young Earth kind of creationist, they may very well believe all of that was laid down by the Flood, and eroded by the retreating floodwaters.
Even if they’re not, most people just don’t look at rocks and think about them at all, I find.
This is bullshit, handily dealt with in many sources, e.g. Dawkin’s Climbing Mount Improbable.
Partial organs, like the simpler precursors of eyes, are still immensely useful. And that’s even leaving aside the idea of exaptation.
I don’t think we can really respond until we know this. As is often said, you can’t logic someone out of a position that they didn’t logic themselves into. That is, if he doesn’t (or won’t) believe in evolution because of his religion, there’s little you can do to change his mind.
OTOH, if he doesn’t believe in it because of a misunderstanding of the science, that’s different and something you can work with.
Also, is there a good reason to change his mind? If he’s not hurting anyone it hardly seems worth it to be stressed about it. Like when you learn to avoid your CT uncle at Christmas and if he ropes you in, just smile and nod because you’re not going to change his mind.
Personally, the hard part for me to intuitively grasp is not how monkeys could evolve into humans (or, in general, one species could evolve into another), but how the difference between monkeys and humans (or whatever the two species are) in that case is discrete rather than continuous. In other words, we have monkeys, and we have humans, but we don’t have all the intermediate steps in between.
And one of the things that helps me accept evolution is to look at human languages, which are also more-or-less clearly distinct but which have evolved from other languages over time.
If he is open to reading a book, or if you are open to reading a book so that you can share its arguments with him, I could recommend The Language of God by Francis Collins, part of which is an argument for evolution, and against competing “theories” like Intelligent Design, from the perspective of a man who is both a Christian (it might be fair to call him an Evangelical Christian) and a scientist (he was head of the Human Genome Project).
Five hundred years ago they didn’t. Nor did they believe that the sun was the center of the solar system. They held those old beliefs to be immutable. When faced with new conclusive evidence, they re-wrote their beliefs. If they changed historical facts once, how can believe anything that’s in their book of irrefutable facts.
It’s so much easier to think everything has been created. It takes more neurons to understand evolution.
The first thing to do is to ask him what he thinks evolution says. I’ve seen creationists who think that evolution says that cats turn into dogs, for instance, which isn’t even close to being correct.
And in this thread we see a form of this even from someone who accepts evolution.
Monkeys didn’t evolve into humans - at least not the monkeys we see today. There are common ancestors of monkeys and humans from a long time ago. Thus, you are not going to see intermediate steps. There are species that have characteristics that put them between us and monkeys, but they are not intermediate in the sense meant here. There are species between us and the common ancestor, all of whom are extinct.
It’s a subtle point, but if misunderstood leads to creationists not understanding what the theory of evolution actually says.
Here you go:
The most incontrovertible evidence lies in molecular evolution. The DNA sequence of human and chimp genomes can be aligned almost perfectly, including parts of the genome that serve absolutely no function. How could sequence that serves no function be the same for chimps and humans unless we inherited it from a common ancestor?
When we look at the parts of the genome that serve no function, we find that differences that we do see are evenly distributed across the genome with a certain low frequency for humans vs chimps; evenly distributed with a slightly higher frequency for humans vs gorillas; and so on with increasing frequency for other species pairs. This is perfectly consistent with the sequence being inherited from a common ancestor, and then mutating in proportion for the time available since each pair of species separated.
As has been said, it’s not a matter of monkeys turning into humans. It’s a matter of ancestral primates turning into monkeys, humans, and other apes.
And we have quite a lot of intermediary forms; various hominins, some of whom almost certainly interbred with each other. It wasn’t discrete; we’re just looking, now, at a discrete difference caused by a large accumulation of changes. We have those intermediary forms in fossil form, and fossilization of hominins is unusual, so we’ve only got a small sample of forms over a (by human standards) long period of time: that’s why it can look discrete at a fast glance.
Speaking of intermediary forms: When I was a child, the Museum of Natural History in New York City had a display – ah, they still do, though it’s been updated. https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/permanent/advanced-mammals/evolution-of-horses. If the cousin actually has a possibly open mind, drawing attention to that might be useful; it’s quite a clear showing of how one form over enough time can shift into something quite different.
Yes, I know. Just to be clear:
- My “objection” isn’t about monkeys and humans specifically, but about different species in general. It’s about the fact that distinct species exist, that are not just part of some continuum.
- My “objection” is just about the part I find intuitively hardest to grasp. It’s not about what I actually believe or need to be argued out of. And, as I said, the existence of distinct languages does help me to intuitively accept it.
I had a conversation with a very minor vendor of ours at work. He spontaneously brought up the fact that he didn’t believe in evolution and laid out the following thought exercise:
Suppose you put all of the parts of a fine Rolex in a bag and shook it up, expecting to get a watch out after. Ah-Ha! Watches are too complicated and you’d never pull a complete watch out of the bag. I wasn’t going to engage him but, if I were to, I’d bring up that it doesn’t need to happen within a reasonable number of shakes. But also, after each shake, a duplicate bag of parts is created which is then shaken along with its ‘parent’ and you’d soon have billions of bags of watch parts shaking.