A problem with Watchmen

I just picked up the graphic novel about a week ago, been reading a chapter or two each day. I loved every bit of it, except for something Jon said at the end of chapter nine. Essentially, he says it's somewhat of a miracle that there are like a bajillion sperm and only one of them makes it to the egg, and the odds that the one that made it was you were astronomical.

I don't buy that though. What if for example, you have a cup that can fit one tennis ball in it, and you unload a dump truck full of tennis balls directly on top of it and one of them goes in. It's only one out of a million, but does that make that one ball special? No, I don't think so. If it wasn't your exact sperm that made it, it'd have been some other sperm, and a different person would have been born.

It was just by chance that you made it. A long shot, but an equally long shot for all the other sperm. I mean, it's unlikely that YOU will win the lottery, but someone is bound to, and it's no less likely for you as it would be for anyone else that participates. And the big difference here is that no one chose your exact sperm before it reached that egg. If someone marked only one of the tennis balls and hoped for or predicted that that exact one would go into the cup, and it did, THEN it would be something amazing. But no one picked your exact sperm before you were born, they just wanted any one of them to reach the egg, and randomly you are the one that made it.

So, I don't know what the point of this discussion was... That part just bothered me, because up until that point, Jon was making a lot of sense. It felt like some bullsh*t excuse to show that sometimes women know best, or that emotions can trump science. As though they were purposely making the book turn corny, cliche, and irrational for no reason. It was the first thing in the book that a suspension of disbelief wouldn't permit for me. I wanted to know if it bothered anyone else.

Also there is a quote that follows this scene from Jung, and it says something along the lines of The meaning of life is to make/search for a meaning in life. I just find that stupid. That's just something he said to fill in the gaps because he doesn't understand what the meaning of life actually is. Not that I do, but I'm not trying to lie to myself, just to make myself feel better. I'd rather take my uncertainty about my existence as it is, naked, and true than to cover it with a pretty mask, and pretend there's not a great mystery behind it.

Saying something like that is like believing in God. I mean, that's fine if it's making your life better, but don't pretend that you know your religion to be truth. The fact is that you really don't have a clue, and you HOPE it's true, you'd like it to be true, you live as though it's true, but you know deep down in your (possibly non-existent) soul, that you aren't 100% sure that you believe it. You simply can't! To do so would be to lie to yourself.

If I tell you that I have blue eyes. Do you believe me? Well you shouldn't because you've never seen my eyes. You can simply accept what I say, but you can't know something like that. What if I don't have blue eyes, and you just said that you knew that I did. You had blind faith and you thought you knew but because there was a chance you were wrong, it means you couldn't have really known. And if it did turn out that my eyes were blue, it'd only be by chance that you were right. Nothing else. No offense to any religious people out there, it was an offensive analogy I know, but let's not turn this discussion into a religious debate. I want to talk about Watchmen not God. And that's my two cents on that.

At this point I have finished the book, and it seems that that part didn't effect the outcome of the plot enough to ruin it for me. It was great. But for just that one scene, for Dr. Manhattan, an omniscient, not even limited by the force of time, to be convinced otherwise of anything by anyone, especially something so stupid, seems illogical based on the nature of his character, and I had a difficult time accepting that it made its way into a piece of literature of this caliber. If I had one complaint about Watchmen, that would be it. (Actually I guess I listed two complains...)