A Failure of Imagination

I'm reading Thomas Paine right now, The Age of Reason, and he provides the

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perfect opportunity to talk about one of the themes that will come up here:  imagination, and the failure thereof. Here's Paine, in Chapter 10 of the Part 1:

In like manner of reasoning, everything we behold carries in itself the internal evidence that it did not make itself. Every man is an evidence to himself, that he did not make himself; neither could his father make himself, nor his grandfather, nor any of his race; neither could any tree, plant, or animal make itself; and it is the conviction arising from this evidence, that carries us on, as it were, by necessity, to the belief of a first cause eternally existing, of a nature totally different to any material existence we know of, and by the power of which all things exist; and this first cause, man calls God.

The reasoning here is familiar to everyone. I have no wish to refute it. I'm after a different fish:  how it represents a failure of imagination.

What Paine does here -- and what the whole Argument from Design does -- is a basic exercise of imagination. He takes his own experience, and extrapolates from that to reason about something he doesn't have direct experience of. We can call this the first step in imagination. It's an important one, and damn handy. Heck, it's this ability that probably makes our brains such handy blobs of cells to have on hand. We use it all the time -- in trying to understand nature, and even just to understand each other.

The usefulness of it, though, has limits. Our failure of imagination comes in how often we forget that, and settle for that first step. Whether it's Paine making an analogy about makers, or a person trying to decide why their lover is pissed at them, we often stop right there with the first, simple extrapolation from our own experience. We don't go the next step, and ask the Big Question: Yeah, but is it true? That's when imagination truly soars. It's one thing to posit that Nature, like the items we create, must have a creator -- it's another to then ask, but is that true, or could something else be true? Do our experiences fail us here?

Science has shown us, after all, that our experiences and perceptions fail us all the time. Our senses only show us part of the universe. Our brains don't wrap themselves easily around Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity. And Evolution has shown us that the appearance of design is by no means a sure sign that design, in fact, exists.

My biggest gripe with religion is just that failure of imagination:  it settles for the simple analogy, with its horizons set firmly in the boundaries of the human mind. I won't beat up on religion too hard, though, because it's a common human failing -- heck, I could write several books about the ways I've fallen into that trap. But all the incredible stuff we humans have accomplished in the past few hundred years -- all the science and technology, the social advances, you name it -- has come from that second step of the imagination, the daring to envision the possibility that there could be another answer, another possibility. The daring, at the end of the day, to imagine possibilities outside of the confines of our own heads.