It actually isn’t that easy to apprehend evolution. It’s a very large and complex subject, and it doesn’t do well to be compressed into quick sayings like “descended from monkeys” or “man from ape.”
It is necessary to expand your mind in at least three ways: One, you’ve got to expand it in the dimension of space. And to understand that the medieval church could not believe that small thing, the sun, didn’t revolve around the Earth, even after it was known the Earth was round. And now what we call the Milky Way is the galaxy that we live in, edgeways to us, and some of those big bright stars out there are other galaxies bigger than it and farther away. It’s a huge panorama to think against.
And you really need to understand why we know what we know about the dimension of time—you have to be able to understand at least the rudiments of half-life (the amount of time that it takes for a radioactive element to lose half of its mass) and decay of radioactive elements and in particular radio-carbon dating, which tells us how old every campfire we ever find can be—because that carbon can be dated by the radioactive half-life.
So, it’s not a question of somebody saying, “Well, the world’s 5000 years old, and besides who the hell really knows….” It’s not like that. With the extension of intelligence of science, one can reach back past those 5000 years and read the history in the rocks that goes back millions and billions of years.
And in time and space, things have been going on long enough that there is light traveling toward us at 186,000 miles a second that’s been traveling for hundreds and thousands and millions of years, and the star that gave up that light is dead and doesn’t put out light any more and that light isn’t even here yet and by the time that light gets here, that star will be gone, and maybe us as well.
