re: #17 freetoken

That link of yours about history and timescales - this is why evolution and climate change are so difficult to grasp viscerally. Since both work on time scales well beyond a single person’s own concerns or experiences, both evolution and climate change need to be studied abstractly, so to speak, outside of personal experience.

It’s a tough uphill battle.

That’s one of the arguments against evolution by the Ken Ham camp (Answers in Genesis). While he was “debating” Bill Nye, Ham repeatedly brought up the question, “Were you there? Did you see it happen?” or something like it.Ham’s shtick about “observational science” gets right down to this personal experience idea, which I might add is a feature of most Pentecostal thought — personal experiences with God/Jesus, or “your personal saviour” as being the sine qua non of your faith. Getting such people to think “outside the box,” as it were, is almost impossible, because their entire psychology is based on “personal experience” or the perception that they have had one. Nye tried to turn the tables on Ham by asking if Ham were there during Noah building the Ark, but failed to penetrate through Ham’s wall of denial. Of course, Ham wasn’t there but he believes the Bible came straight from God himself — a true and accurate account of history as seen by its Creator — because (and I am assuming here) Ham has had a “personal experience” in which he connected with God/Jesus and learned the Truth.

That clip that Moyers found of Broun preaching to the choir is a good example of what I mean.