When I was studying religion at school, I remember my teacher telling us his reasoning as to why there must have been a creator. It went something like this:
"Imagine the world as a mechanical watch. All of the different components that make it possible for life on Earth represent the different cogs and springs that make the watch able to keep time.
Imagine trying to make that watch from it's component parts by holding them in your hand and throwing them onto the floor in front of you. What do you suppose the chances would be of all the pieces landing in the correct places so that the watch is fully functional.
Imagine the amazing odds of the same thing happening to Earth. For all of the necessary parts that make our lives possible to have all happened by complete chance. It's probably even larger than the chances of the watch forming."
For some reason I was thinking of this last night. And whilst my impressionable 13 year old brain couldn't refute this simple analogy, now it seems incredibly flimsy. In dissecting the statement I discovered an interesting truth about religion.
Ok so the analogy is very intellectually flawed. What the analogy is doing is taking the current situation (our existence) and then jumping back to out pre-existence and working from that point to work out how we got here with one simple experiment, without looking at a single thing that happened in between.
It would be the same as showing a layman a fully built car, then giving him all of the components of that car in a pile and then expecting him to put it all together. That simply wouldn't happen as the person would have no idea which bits went where.
And this is what religion has done. It's taken our current state of existence, then jumped back to pre-existence in the hope of understanding our existence. This is not only an impossibility, but a very flawed tactic indeed.
Back to our car. Now, if you were to let the person take the finished car to pieces, bit by bit, logging every item he finds, remembering where it goes, learning about it's function within the car, by the time the person is left with the pile of bits that make up the car, he would have a pretty good understanding of how a car works, and furthermore, he'd be able to rebuild the car exactly how he found it.
And this is what science has done. It has slowly reverse-engineered our universe, uncovering more of it with each new discovery, and fully understanding the mechanics of how it works and how it came to be.
This really is the difference between the two methods of understanding. And the religious method simply can never work, you can never gain any insights into the universe through that flawed technique. This is perhaps why the supernatural has to be involved, because without being able to recreate the steps necessary to get to the point where we are at, it's pretty much the only conclusion you could draw.
Thoughts?
"Imagine the world as a mechanical watch. All of the different components that make it possible for life on Earth represent the different cogs and springs that make the watch able to keep time.
Imagine trying to make that watch from it's component parts by holding them in your hand and throwing them onto the floor in front of you. What do you suppose the chances would be of all the pieces landing in the correct places so that the watch is fully functional.
Imagine the amazing odds of the same thing happening to Earth. For all of the necessary parts that make our lives possible to have all happened by complete chance. It's probably even larger than the chances of the watch forming."
For some reason I was thinking of this last night. And whilst my impressionable 13 year old brain couldn't refute this simple analogy, now it seems incredibly flimsy. In dissecting the statement I discovered an interesting truth about religion.
Ok so the analogy is very intellectually flawed. What the analogy is doing is taking the current situation (our existence) and then jumping back to out pre-existence and working from that point to work out how we got here with one simple experiment, without looking at a single thing that happened in between.
It would be the same as showing a layman a fully built car, then giving him all of the components of that car in a pile and then expecting him to put it all together. That simply wouldn't happen as the person would have no idea which bits went where.
And this is what religion has done. It's taken our current state of existence, then jumped back to pre-existence in the hope of understanding our existence. This is not only an impossibility, but a very flawed tactic indeed.
Back to our car. Now, if you were to let the person take the finished car to pieces, bit by bit, logging every item he finds, remembering where it goes, learning about it's function within the car, by the time the person is left with the pile of bits that make up the car, he would have a pretty good understanding of how a car works, and furthermore, he'd be able to rebuild the car exactly how he found it.
And this is what science has done. It has slowly reverse-engineered our universe, uncovering more of it with each new discovery, and fully understanding the mechanics of how it works and how it came to be.
This really is the difference between the two methods of understanding. And the religious method simply can never work, you can never gain any insights into the universe through that flawed technique. This is perhaps why the supernatural has to be involved, because without being able to recreate the steps necessary to get to the point where we are at, it's pretty much the only conclusion you could draw.
Thoughts?
