Large Number Anaesthesia

When I was a child, there was a politically incorrect joke: How do Newsiest [people who live in Newfoundland] count fish? One fish; two fish; three fish; anudder fish; anudder fish… Though most people can do arithmetic with large numbers, their intuitions are at sea with them. For example, the biggest government scandals involve under $100,000 because people can relate to what that number means. Scandals in the billions or trillions are just big numbers.

In particular people have a problem with time intuition. About the longest span they can intuitively grasp is 80 years. They have absolutely no intuitive feel for just how long a billion years is. When evolutionists talk about a change that took a billion years of natural selection and tens of millions of generations, all they can envisage is the same change happening in a few seconds, like a movie of a man morphing into a werewolf, without any generations. Because they can’t picture such a long gradual evolution, they idiotically postulate an evil old man building creatures in his workshop in the sky.

~ Roedy (born:1948-02-04 age:68)