This was my response to a post on a Facebook group that I follow regarding the Big Bang. The poster had been in the habit of berating people for thinking that a Big Bang type of event could be responsible for the universe as we know it. He also tended to insult people for thinking that evolution could be responsible for ... well, anything.
If a lightning strike fells a tree, where was the purpose in that event? It is not possible (I think) to discover the causal chain of events that led up to the final demise of the tree. The felling of that particular tree at that precise second was the result of a discharge of electrical power that had many elements of randomness. One minute there was a mighty oak tree, and the next, there was just a wreck. It had been standing there, growing for decades and a random event destroyed it in an instant.
What were the odds that lightning strike would happen at that precise place at that precise instant? Astronomical. And yet, it occurred. That is the nature of probability. When you're dealing with immense amounts of time and immense amounts of matter interacting in all sorts of ways, it would be surprising if something as rare and astonishing as life did not emerge from time to time.
Here's the second thing I wanted to say. Where would we be today if Kepler and Galileo had just thrown in the towel and said "God makes the planets move. It is not for us lowly humans to question the will of God. Let us not question why. Let us just accept."? They had every reason to throw in the towel. They were as devoutly religious as it is possible to be and were appalled by their findings. They were pressured on every side to just let it be. But the evidence compelled them. So, against their instincts, their better judgment, and their fervent wish that things were otherwise, they bravely incurred the undying enmity of the church and published their findings.
The knowledge they discovered and refined with so much effort and risk has brought us riches beyond price. Truly their contributions kicked off a revolution that has transformed the world from a place where people lived for thirty years on average in the most primitive, filthy, disease-ridden, pain saturated conditions imaginable. It is science that has transformed the world, not religion. Remember it was the church that fought progress every step of the way, decrying it as unnatural, an affront to God, and condemning its followers to eternal damnation.
So where would we be if we just thew our hands in the air and said "well, we'll never understand so we might as well just give up trying."? At every opportunity when we have pushed against the boundaries of knowledge, we have found that what had previously been thought to be in the domain of God's will was really just the operation of discoverable, testable laws working blindly, relentlessly in their particular domains.
There are a million small and large things that science had done to improve our lives. What has religion given us? Persecution, intolerance, inquisitions, jihads, holy wars, Protestants bombing Catholics, Catholics bombing Protestants, Shias murdering Sunnis, Sunnis murdering Shias, Buddhists and Hindus at each other's throats: an endless list of examples of man's inhumanity toward man.
And why do we put up with this state of affairs? Because we persist in believing in the existence of supernatural beings who command us to behave in these terrible ways. So we revere religion that has been the curse and the bane of this world for millennia and we deride and scorn science that has given us long life, prosperity, light, and truth. Can anyone imagine a state of affairs more absurd?
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