How Wile E. Coyote teaches us how NOT to think

I have often used this analogy when describing logical thought and how some people (usually religious) refuse to see the obvious shortcomings of how they look at things.

Consider this familiar setting: Wile E. Coyote looks across the canyon and see the Roadrunner. So he gets a bunch of planks of wood and nails one to his end of the canyon. He walks to the end of that plank and nails another plank to the end. He walks to the end of that plank and repeats the process until he runs out of planks almost all the way to the Roadrunner. The Roadrunner points down and runs away. Wile E. Coyote looks down, waves to the camera and falls down the canyon.

Wile E. Coyote extended his thought process without having the proper logical support for the thought he already had and extended himself all the way across the canyon with no support to stand on. Eventually, his entire system collapsed under its own weight, as it should have from the very first plank. And this is the problem with religious faith itself. At some point, religious faith builds upon its own set of presumptions without the logical support to justify them, and followers will eventually end up standing on a number of unsupported planks of wood over a chasm of illogic that they only reached because they did not take care to build a logical infrastructure for their endeavor to understand reality.

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