The use of absurdity seems more like a tool to enforce group norms than a means of conversion. That doesn’t mean the beliefs aren’t absurd, just that pointing out the absurdity of outsiders is common practice by in-group members. Most creationist-minded believers would use some similarly absurd way of describing evolution, with the group benefit of passing along “evolution is stupid” meme. That said, it is important to start to tease apart just how many other enforcement strategies are out there, as they are going to need to be dealt with one by one.
While it could have a social function a larger benefit to having an absurdity bias is in limiting the hypothesis space when considering a question to those worth investing cognitive energy in investigating. (Example: when considering the question ‘who ate the cake’ the hypothesises ‘Alice,’ ‘Bob,’ or ‘Carol’ would likely be worth investigating but ‘The president of the united states’ wouldn’t be, and so shouldn’t be investigated.)
The truth is that neither cristians believe in a talking snake nor evolutionists believe in humans coming from monkeys. That’s just a straw man falacy. Cristians believe that’s a metaphor and evolutionists believe they have common ancestors.
The truth is that neither cristians believe in a talking snake nor evolutionists believe in humans coming from monkeys. That’s just a straw man falacy. Cristians believe that’s a metaphor and evolutionists believe they have common ancestors.
Don’t overgeneralise. Many Christians do believe Satan appeared in the form of a human snake. I know many of them. I also don’t consider this to be an inferior epistemic position than pulling out ‘metaphors’ wherever it is convenient.
For that matter many evolutionists do believe we came from monkeys, but only due to ignorance of the details history that they don’t care enough to learn.
Also, surely the common ancestor of man and monkey must be something that could be reasonably described as a monkey. I can’t imagine you can find many people who believe that humans are descended from the actual monkeys alive today.
The surface problem isn’t that naive evolutionists think humans descended from (time-traveling?) extant monkeys. The surface problem is that they don’t understand the difference between apes and monkeys, even though this is very easy to understand; and they don’t understand that there has never been a common ancestor of all and only the monkeys, or that the common ancestor of monkeys and apes was neither a monkey nor an ape.
But these are all, as you rightly note, nitpicky taxonomic details. Given the folk-blurriness between ‘ape’ and ‘monkey,’ and closely related groups, it’s not a particularly serious error to misidentify the common ancestor of humans and monkeys as a monkey (or as an ape). The deep problem here is not an error of fact, but an error of strategy; the ignorance of the evolutionist is not only weakening his/her case should the creationist spend 5 minutes on Google, but also is causing him/her to sacrifice a prime teaching moment. This common misconception about monkeys/apes is a fantastic opportunity to correct a misconception (thus undermining the creationist’s easy confidence in the most frequent soundbites) and springboard into an explanation of what evolution actually is, of the mechanisms and scope of common descent.
There’s also the very closely related error of presuming that evolution is ‘directional,’ thus that humans are ‘more advanced’ than their cousins, who have ‘evolved less’ and thus surely resemble the common ancestor more. In most respects and in most cases, this is misleading.
and they don’t understand that there has never been a common ancestor of all and only the monkeys
This fact though—that monkeys are paraphyletic—argues in favour of (not against) the view that the common ancestor of monkeys and apes was itself monkey-like...
If you think about when the “ape traits” must have evolved, it would be after the new-world monkeys had already diverged away. The common ancestor of monkeys and apes wouldn’t have had them, but must have had those traits common to both old and new-world monkeys. It itself has to be basically a monkey.
(I drew out a phylogenetic tree for this but couldn’t get it to format, alas...)
It is not an ordinary talking snake, it is a snake which was enabled to talk by God or Satan to transmit a message or something. Everything is very “spiritual” in this stories as seen by a believer.
It is not a “common reality” it is an “elevated reality, when God still walked the Earth”.
Nobody believes that an ordinary snake could talk. But into a snake disguised Satan, could talk eloquently.
The use of absurdity seems more like a tool to enforce group norms than a means of conversion. That doesn’t mean the beliefs aren’t absurd, just that pointing out the absurdity of outsiders is common practice by in-group members. Most creationist-minded believers would use some similarly absurd way of describing evolution, with the group benefit of passing along “evolution is stupid” meme. That said, it is important to start to tease apart just how many other enforcement strategies are out there, as they are going to need to be dealt with one by one.
While it could have a social function a larger benefit to having an absurdity bias is in limiting the hypothesis space when considering a question to those worth investing cognitive energy in investigating. (Example: when considering the question ‘who ate the cake’ the hypothesises ‘Alice,’ ‘Bob,’ or ‘Carol’ would likely be worth investigating but ‘The president of the united states’ wouldn’t be, and so shouldn’t be investigated.)
The truth is that neither cristians believe in a talking snake nor evolutionists believe in humans coming from monkeys. That’s just a straw man falacy. Cristians believe that’s a metaphor and evolutionists believe they have common ancestors.
Don’t overgeneralise. Many Christians do believe Satan appeared in the form of a human snake. I know many of them. I also don’t consider this to be an inferior epistemic position than pulling out ‘metaphors’ wherever it is convenient.
For that matter many evolutionists do believe we came from monkeys, but only due to ignorance of the details history that they don’t care enough to learn.
A human snake? Is there an oxymoron heuristic?
Also, surely the common ancestor of man and monkey must be something that could be reasonably described as a monkey. I can’t imagine you can find many people who believe that humans are descended from the actual monkeys alive today.
The surface problem isn’t that naive evolutionists think humans descended from (time-traveling?) extant monkeys. The surface problem is that they don’t understand the difference between apes and monkeys, even though this is very easy to understand; and they don’t understand that there has never been a common ancestor of all and only the monkeys, or that the common ancestor of monkeys and apes was neither a monkey nor an ape.
But these are all, as you rightly note, nitpicky taxonomic details. Given the folk-blurriness between ‘ape’ and ‘monkey,’ and closely related groups, it’s not a particularly serious error to misidentify the common ancestor of humans and monkeys as a monkey (or as an ape). The deep problem here is not an error of fact, but an error of strategy; the ignorance of the evolutionist is not only weakening his/her case should the creationist spend 5 minutes on Google, but also is causing him/her to sacrifice a prime teaching moment. This common misconception about monkeys/apes is a fantastic opportunity to correct a misconception (thus undermining the creationist’s easy confidence in the most frequent soundbites) and springboard into an explanation of what evolution actually is, of the mechanisms and scope of common descent.
There’s also the very closely related error of presuming that evolution is ‘directional,’ thus that humans are ‘more advanced’ than their cousins, who have ‘evolved less’ and thus surely resemble the common ancestor more. In most respects and in most cases, this is misleading.
This fact though—that monkeys are paraphyletic—argues in favour of (not against) the view that the common ancestor of monkeys and apes was itself monkey-like...
If you think about when the “ape traits” must have evolved, it would be after the new-world monkeys had already diverged away. The common ancestor of monkeys and apes wouldn’t have had them, but must have had those traits common to both old and new-world monkeys. It itself has to be basically a monkey.
(I drew out a phylogenetic tree for this but couldn’t get it to format, alas...)
I assure you that many Christians do believe the snake really talked.
Whatever Christians you are personally familiar with don’t comprise the entirety or even the majority of the Christian population of the world.
It is not an ordinary talking snake, it is a snake which was enabled to talk by God or Satan to transmit a message or something. Everything is very “spiritual” in this stories as seen by a believer.
It is not a “common reality” it is an “elevated reality, when God still walked the Earth”.
Nobody believes that an ordinary snake could talk. But into a snake disguised Satan, could talk eloquently.
I cannot recall any instance of a claim in that format turning out to be correct.
In the context of the Bible, without later interpretation, neither God nor Satan was directly involved with the snake.