Most of us in the modern West—religious or irreligious— have inherited a worldview that was formed largely in the seventeenth century. In this perspective, our world is best compared to a machine. God, if God exists, created the universe like a huge clock: the complex mechanism was designed and wound up in the beginning, was set in motion, and has been ticking away ever since, slowly winding down through a process called entropy. Or it could be compared to brightly colored billiard balls racked up on a green felt table: in the beginning, God arranged the table and hit the white cue ball, and
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