Absurdities of Creationist Cosmology

The speaker approaches understanding life and humanity through an evolutionary lens, tracing the history of the cosmos and life on Earth. They describe the universe as being around 15 billion years old, with life on Earth evolving over 3.5 billion years. Humans, in particular, evolved from small mammals and split from chimpanzees around 7 million years ago, with modern humans emerging 150,000 years ago and civilization beginning after the last Ice Age, about 15,000 years ago.

The speaker finds value in this broad, evolutionary perspective because it helps explain why we are the way we are, noting that even simple animals share nervous system traits with humans. While this vast timespan can make humans feel insignificant, the speaker argues against this view, emphasizing the importance and complexity of consciousness. They also describe themselves as a psychoanalytic thinker, believing that people consist of sub-personalities that have their own desires, emotions, and perspectives. These sub-personalities are not mechanical but represent lower-resolution versions of a person, particularly when driven by basic urges or emotions like anger or hunger.

Hopefully, well, we'll see how this works. All right, so how do I approach this?

Well, first of all, I think in evolutionary terms, you know? As far as I'm concerned the cosmos is fifteen billion years old and the world is four and a half billion years old.

And there's been life for three and a half billion years and there were creatures that had pretty developed nervous systems three hundred to six hundred million years ago.

And we were living in trees as small mammals sixty million years ago.

We were down on the plains between sixty million and seven million years ago and that's about when we split from chimpanzees.

And modern human beings seem to emerge about a hundred and fifty thousand years ago And civilization pretty much after the last Ice Age, something after fifteen thousand years ago.

Not very long ago at all, you know? And that's the span across which I want to understand.

That's the span across which I want to understand. I want to understand why we are the way we are, looking at life in its continual complexity right from the beginning of life itself.

There's some real utility in that because we share attributes with other animals, even animals as simple as crustaceans, for example,

have nervous system properties that are very much like ours, and it's very much worth knowing that.

And so I think in an evolutionary way. I think it's a grand and remarkable way to think because it has this incredible timespan.

It's amazing that people at the end of the nineteenth century, middle of the nineteenth century, say,

really thought the world was about six thousand years old. Fifteen billion years old, that's a lot more, right? It's a lot grander, it's a lot bigger, but it's also a lot more frightening and alienating in some sense.

Because the cosmos has become so vast, it's either easy for human beings to think of themselves as trivial specks on a trivial speck

out some misbegotten hellhole end of the galaxy, among hundreds of millions of galaxies, right?

It's very easy to see yourself as nothing in that span of time. That's a real challenge for people.

I think it's a mistake to think that way. Because I think consciousness is far more than we think it is, but it's still something we have to grapple with.

I'm a psychoanalytic thinker. And what that means is that I believe that people are collections of sub-personalities, and that those sub-personalities are alive.

They're not machines. They have their viewpoint, they have their wants, they have their perceptions, they have their arguments, they have their emotions.

They're like low-resolution representations of you when you get angry. It's like, it's a very low resolution representation of you.

It only wants rage, or it only wants something to eat, or it only wants water, it only wants sex.