Why the Biological Evolution of Species is so difficult to comprehend

A reader has made the comment:

"Everything I've read (about Evolution) is theory. Too many unanswered questions. Like a male and female human are quite different, not just in body.

And each species having there own DNA, ie. A pig cannot cross with a cow, but if evolution were true, then it should happen. Its blind faith, in something you cannot see happening, but you should be able to. The evidence we have with archaeology, and history, along with prophecy holds a lot more proof in a higher intelligence. Even the way that each species, and male and female are intricately formed is way too amazing." - Suusie.

I sympathise with someone writing those words. I know that Evolution is a fact and every Biologist on Earth knows that it happened. Even the Christian Biologists are convinced that Evolution happened the way that the Biology textbooks explain it to us. But the problem is that the idea that humans evolved from some sort of primordial slime is counterintuitive to the lay person not educated in a science like Biology.

We are used to thinking that something with design has to have a designer. Our brains can't accommodate the concept that given long periods of time, living things can design themselves by following the natural laws of the universe. Therefore we reject the idea because it does not "feel" right in our heads. We don't emotionally "feel" comfortable believing something that goes against all that we know about the way that things work

However throughout the history of humankind we have been forced to accept things that at first appeared to be counterintuitive to us. Ancient people thought that the sky was solid and contained the stars, the Sun and the Moon. They thought this because the night sky appeared to rotate around the Earth. Intuitively they imagined the Earth to be flat and those heavenly objects were moving. It was entirely counterintuitive to conceive that those objects were stationary and that it was the Earth that was spinning to give us the illusion that the heavens were rotating around us. But we now know that it was an illusion that the sky was moving. Our human intuitions were wrong.

Ancients thought that if the Earth were not flat, we would all fall off the sides. They understood up and down and that up things fall down. If you told an ancient British Celt about Australia he would imagine that humans would fall off the ground and into the sky of Australia, because they were in an upside down country. But he would have been wrong. Thanks to gravity I am typing this note in Melbourne and I am stuck to the Australian ground in exactly the same way as people in the UK even though I am upside down to them. But to the ancient Briton it would have been counterintuitive and he would have refused to accept the idea.

Before Galileo, people thought that an empty eggshell would fall more slowly than an egg shaped of lead. It was counterintuitive to think that they would both fall at the same speed. But they were wrong.

Electrons have spin. It is counterintuitive to think that they can spin in all possible different directions at the same time. But they do.

Electrons rotate around the nucleus of an atom. If the atom is heated and the electron drops to a lower energy level it emits a photon of light, or a packet stream of photons. It is counterintuitive to believe that the photon comes from nowhere. The electron does not possess the photon before it gives it away. It does not carry a bag of photons and throw out a handful when it gets exited. The photons come from the released energy; but they are still produced out of thin air, having not existed before.

We watch a clock on the surface of the Earth to observe the passage of time. It is counterintuitive to think that the same clock would record the passing of time more slowly on the surface of the Sun and yet more quickly if it were floating out in deep space. But we have proved that gravity slows the passing of time.

It is counterintuitive to think that time passes more slowly on the outer rim of your rotating speeding car wheels than at the axles where there is no rotational speed. But scientists have proved that movement slows time proportionate to speed.

It is counterintuitive that empty space is packed with interesting things that form a fabric that can be stretched, twisted and even torn. But it is true.

It is counterintuitive that sub atomic particles passing through the Higgs field "talk" with the Higgs bosons in the field by exchanging messenger particles and that the result of this "conversation" is that each subatomic particle is given mass that it would not otherwise possess. Our minds cannot conceive of such an outlandish thing happening. But billions of dollars spent at the Large Hadron Collider proved that this is true and won a Nobel Prize for Professor Higgs.

It is counterintuitive that some scientific experiments give different results depending on whether or not humans are observing the experiments. But it's true.

It is counterintuitive that in the renowned "Two slit light experiment" a single photon travelling through one slit "knows" what would have happened if it had travelled through the other slit and can interact with itself as if it had also passed through the other slit; which it did not! Yet it's true. We can watch the result on the other side of the slits.

It is counterintuitive that everything that we see with our eyes is an illusion. All solid, liquid and gas material is almost entirely composed of nothing. If you compressed all of the trillions of stars, galaxies, planets and gas in our entire universe and pressed out all of the "nothing" within that mass; it would become a nugget so small that it would take powerful microscope to even detect it!  

I could go on for hours explaining thousands of things that are wildly counterintuitive to our minds and yet science has demonstrated them to be true. Overcoming erroneous human intuition has been the history of the progress of science.

The unknowing source of the awesome design seen in nature is merely another human intuition that has been overturned and the counterintuitive truth has been proved by science. Living organisms did design themselves and they used random mutations and death of the mistakes as the mechanism by which they did it. They did not know what they were doing and they were not following a plan. But beautiful design came to be; just as snowflakes gain an intricate beauty of form as they fall from the sky. No god designs each one differently. They design themselves by obeying the physical laws of the universe.

Yes the concept of Evolution is counterintuitive. It is very difficult to get our heads around it. But like many other things that we know to be real; human intuition is not the benchmark of truth. Empirical evidence is the benchmark of truth.

Christadelphians can say as often as they want that they do not believe in Evolution. They do not understand the subject; they have not studied it and they are not willing to investigate it with an open unbiased mind. Therefore, regrettably, their opinion counts for nothing. Whether they like it or not, Evolution did happen. It proves their Bible to be false and there is nothing that they can do about it.