Matthew Chapman

“This is the central barrier to understanding evolution. We understand time through the experience of our own short lives. To truly imagine three and a half billion years is virtually impossible. Imagine yourself living to seventy-I mean really imagine seventy years: being born, a decade and a half of education, many more decades of employment, wars, elections, scientific discoveries, parents lost, middle age, old age-innumerable memories marked off by seventy birthdays and seventy summers and winters.
Now try to imagine fifty million of those lifetimes-fifty million of them! Because that is how long life has been developing on earth.
But how can you begin to conceive of such an expanse of time?
Try this. If, at a modest clip-which I'd recommend, given what I'm proposing-it takes you a minute to count out loud to a hundred, it will take you almost a week of nonstop counting to reach a million. That is, counting without a single break and no sleep.
If you could keep counting for twenty-four hours a day for 350 days, you'd reach fifty million. But these are not just meaningless numbers-each one of them represents a lifetime. But almost a year without sleep is inconceivable, so let's try and make it "doable", as Behe would say.
Put in eight hours of counting a day, seven days a week. Take a two-week vacation each year.
Under these still-harsh working conditions (no weekends off), it will now take you three years to count out these fifty million lifetimes.
(You will reach, incidentally, the birth of Christ within the first half minute, and the oldest age of the earth, according to believers in a literal Genesis, within the first two minutes.)
But to really comprehend this expanse of time, you would still have to be capable of imagining-as each of those numbers came tripping off your tongue, hour after hour, week after week, month after month, year after year, for three years-that each of those numbers signified a lifetime.
Even if you chose to do this, and even if you were capable of the extraordinary effort of will and imagination needed to conceive of what you were actually doing, I suspect that at the end of it you would still be only a little closer to comprehending the vast amount of time involved.
In all probability, you would give up long before you finished, overwhelmed by depression at your own insignificance. It is offensive to one's sense of self to imagine this huge expanse of time that came before you and within which
you had no relevance.
No, it is more than offensive; it is terrifying. How much easier-and how much more comforting-to just put in those first two minutes and imagine, in one way or another, a designer who placed you at the center of it all.”
― Matthew Chapman