God’s Intelligent Design? Part Two

One alleged proof of an Almighty deity is that life, the Universe and everything (LUE) is apparently designed in an intelligent, not in a random way. Part of that life is of course human beings, like you. Are you intelligently designed? If you answer “Yes”, I’ll say “Bull”! Is the rest of LUE intelligently designed to optimise your love and respect of your alleged Almighty Creator? If you answer “Yes” yet again, I’ll say “Bull yet again”!

Human beings are apparently the apex of all of that which God created. As such, all of that which God created should benefit or be beneficial to us. Life, the Universe and everything (LUE) has been designed by God with us in mind since LUE was created before us, in preparation for us. It (LUE) therefore must be an intelligently designed, since God is, presumably, intelligent (though creating the human species sort of makes you wonder). Now, the question is, does the rhetoric meet the reality?

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

If God created everything, God also created the various principles relating to metallurgy. Now the creation of metal objects like knives and swords and spears and guillotine blades and bullets can put holes in the human bodies that God designed, holes big enough to make that human body an extinct human body. By allowing metallurgy, well so much for God wanting His apex of creation, human beings, to live long and prosper.

If God created everything, God created all of terrestrial biology. Terrestrial biology has a habit of getting in the way of the human ideal of utopia, like a Garden of Eden. I mean there’s food poisoning, all manner of natural venoms and toxins like snake and spider bites and wasp stings and scorpions and jellyfish; predators that can snack on human prey like crocodiles, sharks, tigers, wolf/hyena packs, etc. Then there are those fatal illnesses caused by killer viruses and other microbes that do you in with the flu, AIDS, Ebola, ALS (a motor neuron disease), and a hundred more nasties. Ask your family doctor for a list of how biology can do you a mischief, but allow lots of time for what will prove to be a rather lengthy lecture. 

If God created everything, God created all of our traits and characteristics. Just one generation after God created the pinnacle of all that was and ever will be (Adam and Eve), Cain murdered Abel. Things have just snowballed from there and also incorporate rape and incest and legalised murder (warfare) and enough variations on human atrocities to fill an encyclopaedia with. Did God create for us an intelligent state of mind (which isn’t quite the same thing as an intelligent mind)? Well, our intelligent state of mind can use those intelligent physics and chemistry and even biology that God so intelligently created to raise all sorts of non-intelligent havoc. We’ve all heard of CBR – chemical, biological and radiological warfare.

IMHO, God has got to accept some responsibility here in the same way that a parent has to accept responsibility for the behaviour of their children.

Speaking of parents, parents are usually given (or figure out for themselves) safety tips on how to keep their yard, home and contents a safe place for their kids – like keeping medicines out of reach is but one example. In the case of God the Father (and Mother) it appears as if He has taken the opposite route and bobby-trapped our yard, home and contents. I suppose that’s an intelligent design of sorts if that’s your objective, but God’s intelligent design message is then “boy have I got it in for you lot” (actually that’s just a continuation of His Old Testament ways).

On the other hand, Mother Nature is neutral. So, are we being cared for by a loving God, the apex of His creative intelligence, or a neutral Mother Nature who just requires that we pay our money and take our chances? At least Mother Nature is intellectually honest. Our Supreme Being, the Almighty Creator God, who’s all loving and merciful and compassionate, on the other hand, has intelligently designed all myriad of ways to snuff you out of existence!

Now let’s consider the subject of waste. To waste resources is not considered intelligent. To design an inefficient whatever when there are more efficient options available is not considered intelligent. It’s not very intelligent or efficient to design and build a car with square wheels! That’s a waste of resources. But God tends to waste a lot of resources. For example, since we are the apex of God’s creations, I ask if we really need any more resources and real estate that is contained with the solar system itself. The rest of the vast cosmos is a waste of space and stuff. Who needs it? We don’t. And when the Sun runs low on fuel in four or five billion years time, well surely we can rely on God to change the batteries, and thus life goes on.

More down to earth, we note that God created life. Okay, over the course of its lifetime, a tree might produce billions of seeds, of which perhaps one or two might survive and thrive and make it into tree-hood. All the rest are wasted effort on the part of the parent tree. Of course you might argue that the unlucky seeds ended up as a food resource supply for various animals and thus weren’t really wasted at all. And while there’s something to be said for that, what about those billions of male sperm cells and dozens of female egg cells that never get their act together and thus never get into the act. That too is an extravagant waste of time and energy and other bodily resources that went into that wasted production. God could have designed a system whereby one sperm was produced and one egg was produced and the two would unite and live happy ever after!

There are vast deposits of valuable minerals deep down inside the Earth – fat lot of good they do us. 99.999% of the Sun’s energy output misses our planet (and the rest of the solar system’s real estate) and heads off into the depths of interstellar space. More waste.

Lastly, and on a more philosophical note, if there is intelligent design behind LUE, then that implies that there must be a purpose(s) or reason(s) behind all of those bits and pieces that collectively make up LUE. But that’s clearly nonsense. Who’s the recipient or beneficiary? It has to be something living for non-living things cannot appreciate intelligent design. A grain of sand understands no design or purpose in being tossed about by the ocean waves, presumably a part of God’s intelligent design. But then a microbe has no comprehension of the existence or purpose or significance of say the planet Mercury or the planetoid Pluto (again a part of God’s intelligent design). Ditto that of a tree. In fact ditto that right on up the ‘tree of life’ until you get to us. So apparently we are the recipient or beneficiary of God’s intelligent design – the apex of God’s creation. Okay, that makes sense, except for one tiny flaw hinted at in the beginning paragraph – The intelligently designed Universe has been around for 13.7 billion years. Intelligently designed Planet Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years. God’s apex (defined as Homo sapiens) has been around for about 200,000 years - maximum duration. Oops – that’s a lot of waste. Waste isn’t intelligent, so the whole intelligent design bit ultimately crumbles like a house made out of playing cards. . It’s almost as if we were just a minor afterthought and not the apex of God’s creative abilities after all.  

God's Intelligent Design? Part One

One alleged proof of an Almighty deity is that life, the Universe and everything (LUE) is apparently designed in an intelligent, not in a random way. Part of that life is of course human beings, like you. Are you intelligently designed? If you answer “Yes”, I’ll say “Bull”! Is the rest of LUE intelligently designed to optimise your love and respect of your alleged Almighty Creator? If you answer “Yes” yet again, I’ll say “Bull yet again”!

Human beings are apparently the apex of all of that which God created. As such, all of that which God created should benefit or be beneficial to us. Life, the Universe and everything (LUE) has been designed by God with us in mind since LUE was created before us, in preparation for us. It (LUE) therefore must be an intelligently designed, since God is, presumably, intelligent (though creating the human species sort of makes you wonder). That intelligent design includes the design of God’s apex creation itself – the human being. Now, the question is, does the rhetoric meet the reality? Let’s start with the alleged intelligent design or construction of the human being.

Do you need a hearing aid? Do you need glasses? Did you require your tonsils or appendix or wisdom teeth to be removed? Do you suffer from haemorrhoids or back problems?  Have your hips, knees, and ankles let you down? Can your bones break? Do you suffer from baldness, tooth decay, arthritis, acne, colds, the flu, even cancer? Do you have issues with your sexuality or the functioning of your private parts? Do you suffer from mental illness? Who created the human species and therefore by definition created you? God, that’s who, created you! Who created your physiology and anatomy? Did I hear you say “God”? So who created all of your psychological, physiological and anatomical problems? Did I hear you say “God” again? Is this what you would consider Intelligent Design? I don’t think so! Did God fail Anatomy 101? I think so.

As an example of so-called ‘intelligent design’ our nakedness relative to our furry primate and hominid ancestors and current primate ‘relatives’ is another clue that God failed Anatomy 101 – there are multi-dozens upon dozens of primates; only one ‘naked ape’ (humans). Why did God create us without fur? I mean when the temperature drops much below the comfort threshold, we require in no uncertain terms clothing. When it hits freezing point, we can’t survive without clothing, yet our furry animal cousins seem to manage A-OK. There’s many an image of a furry mammal surviving, even thriving in the snow. Quite apart from the fact that fur is a better regulator of temperature than just sweating (our primary temperature regulation mechanism), loss of fur resulted in two other highly negative evolutionary rock and hard place restrictions.

We’ve been given (by God) a temperature regulation mechanism via sweating. Humans of all the mammals are the species that sweat the most. The retrograde step of temperature control via sweating instead of fur imposed two additional restrictions on us. 1) We were forced to stay close to reliable sources of fresh water. 2) It also makes us way more dependent on supplies of salt since salt is excreted from the body via sweat. Salt supplies in the natural environment are rare – so rare that once upon a time salt was extremely valuable and you got paid in salt. It’s where we get our word, salary from. If only the Almighty had given us our fur.

Another screw-up by our Supreme Being has to do with our bipedal gait relative to the rest of the mammals. Can you name me one other mammal that routinely walks on two legs?  No? That’s probably because there are many negatives to a bipedal gait, like loss of stability. Humans are more prone to losing their balance and falling over than say a cow or a cat. If you’re alone and quadrupedal (or an insect or even better a spider) and lose the use of a leg, you’re hurting but not critically. If you’re alone and bipedal and lose the use of a leg, you’re up fertilizer creek. God should have given us six limbs – four legs and two arms! Now that would have been intelligent design.  

Further, as a benefit to God’s apex human species, it would have been really intelligent to cap off the aging process at say the 30 year mark. No wrinkles, no balding, no grey hairs, no liver spots, no need for a walking stick/cane, etc. Now we still have to eventually kick-the-bucket, but why have to suffer through the afflictions of old age? Be a 70-year-old in a 30-year-old body then have a sudden death heart attack that ends things on a still relatively youthful high note (as it were). I mean God created the animals that way – when’s the last time you saw an elderly grey-haired, wrinkled cat? How about a bald-headed dog? Animals don’t tend to show the aging process as obviously as us humans. Thanks God!

Quite apart from human beings, did God design an intelligently constructed universe? If God created humans, the be-all-and-end-all of His creations, then surely He would, as any parent would, design an environment that would protect us from harms way and certainly not put us in danger. Well, considering that many bits and pieces of God’s cosmic construction that could wipe out us human beings, I’d have to answer in the negative. God’s a bad parent. I mean there are gamma-ray bursts, supernovae explosions, black holes that can eat us as just a minor snack, solar flares and of course the now and again loose asteroid impact cannon that could just about make our day our last day. Who needs the Book of Revelation with all this potential cosmic end of days that’s so part and parcel of God’s Universe? 

Then you have oddballs like planets having days longer than their years and planets that rotate on their sides instead of having a rotation axis up-down. Maybe the Almighty has a warped sense of humour or likes variety!

But back to the dangers to human life and limb, how many of God’s so beloved subjects are wiped out by terrestrial, never mind extraterrestrial, “Acts of God” every year? How can I wipe ye out – let me count the ways. Floods are a given, even after Noah’s time; landslides and avalanches of course; drought and famine; wicked winds via hurricanes (cyclones or typhoons) and of course tornadoes; wildfires; tsunamis; earthquakes; volcanoes; and God’s favourite, bolts of lightning from the sky*, and a host of other natural ways and means of translating the you that is you into the late you that was you. Why does God enact “Acts of God” when God created you and loves you, and is merciful and compassionate? Something’s screwy somewhere!

Speaking of screwy, I tend to find it pretty incredible that people who survive an “Act of God” (i.e. – a natural disaster) attribute their good fortune to a miracle (as in “it’s a miracle we survived”), as in a supernatural intervention when it was just the luck of the draw. And then to top it off, they will “Thank God” for having survived. Do you “Thank God” for an “Act of God”? I think not. How about giving God the Big Finger for sending the “Act of God” your way in the first damn place! 

If God created everything, God created the laws of physics. That includes the laws that govern nuclear fission and fusion. Nuclear fusion and fission can create items that go ‘Ka-Boom’. An atomic or nuclear explosion in your neck of the woods can also ruin your day! Even a peaceful nuclear power plant meltdown can be detrimental to your health. So much for God’s design of intelligent physics! Now of course our Sun is powered by nuclear fusion, but an intelligent all-powerful God I’m sure could have created an alternative form of solar energy.

But here again maybe God’s sense of funny-bone humour comes into play. If God created physics then He created quantum physics and no doubt God is rolling on Heaven’s floor laughing his posterior off at the inability of His subjects to come to terms with the associated absurdities that He mandated regarding all things quantum. Einstein said that God does not throw dice. Einstein shouldn’t tell God what to do. God not only throws dice, He throws them where you can’t even see them.

If God created everything, God also created the laws of chemistry. That includes various mixtures which, albeit on a lesser scale, can also go ‘Ka-Boom’, like gunpowder. How many of God’s human subjects, get to join God in Heaven somewhat prematurely as a result of the use and misuse of gunpowder or dynamite or nitro-glycerine? An intelligent God might have bypassed the design and need of chemical explosives.

As an analogy, does a rational parent give their ten-year-old child a loaded gun to ‘play’ with? 

To be continued…

*Oops – sorry, I meant Zeus. I have lots of trouble telling the two apart since they both look so much alike!

God: the Intelligent Designer? Oops! [+] Intermission

One alleged proof of an Almighty is that life, the universe and everything is apparently designed in an intelligent, not in a random way. Part of that life is of course human beings, like you. Are you intelligently designed? If you answer “Yes”, I’ll say “Bull”!

Do you need a hearing aid? Do you need glasses? Did you require your tonsils or appendix or wisdom teeth to be removed? Do you suffer from haemorrhoids or back problems? Have your hips, knees, and ankles let you down? Do you suffer from baldness, tooth decay, arthritis, acne, colds, the flu, even cancer? Do you have issues with your sexuality or the functioning of your private parts? Do you suffer from mental illness? Who created the human species and therefore by definition created you? Mr. Supreme Being, that's who, created you! Who created your physiology and anatomy? Did I hear you say "the Almighty"? So who created all of your psychological, physiological and anatomical problems? Did I hear you say "the Almighty" again? Is this what you would consider Intelligent Design? I don't think so! Did the Almighty fail Anatomy 101? I think so.

As an example of so-called ‘intelligent design’ our nakedness relative to our furry primate ancestors and current primate ‘relatives’ is another clue that God failed Anatomy 101 – there are multi-dozens upon dozens of primates; only one ‘naked ape’ (humans). Why did we get created without fur? I mean when the temperature drops much below the comfort threshold, we require in no uncertain terms clothing. When it hits freezing point, we can’t survive without clothing, yet our furry animal cousins seem to manage A-OK. There’s many an image of a furry mammal surviving, even thriving in the snow. Quite apart from the fact that fur is a better regulator of temperature than just sweating, loss of fur resulted in two other highly negative evolutionary rock and hard place restrictions. We’ve been given a temperature regulation mechanism via sweating. Humans of all the mammals are the species that sweat the most. The retrograde step of temperature control via sweating instead of fur imposed two additional restrictions on us. 1) We were forced to stay close to reliable sources of fresh water. 2) It also makes us way more dependent on supplies of salt since salt is excreted from the body via sweat. Salt supplies in the natural environment are rare – so rare that once upon a time salt was extremely valuable and you got paid in salt. It’s were we get our word, salary from. If only the Almighty had given us our fur.

Another screw-up by our Supreme Being has to do with our bipedal gait relative to the rest of the mammals. Name me one other mammal that routinely walks on two legs?  That’s probably because there are many negatives to a bipedal gait, like loss of stability. Humans are more prone to losing balance and falling over than say a cow or a cat. If you’re alone and quadrupedal (or an insect or even better a spider) and lose the use of a leg, you’re hurting but not critically. If your alone and bipedal and lose the use of a leg, you’re up fertilizer creek. God should have given us six limbs – four legs and two arms! Now that would have been intelligent design.   

That’s probably enough Bible-bashing and kicking God’s privates for the moment. I’ll be back on both bashing and kicking on both an irregular as well as an irreligious basis. Meantime, see also, if so inclined, my “All Things Extraterrestrial and “All Things Natural Philosophy” blogs.

Is our Supreme Being A Deity For All the People?

If you believe the Bible, the Almighty has His Chosen People - the Hebrews. The Almighty has His Promised Land for His Chosen People. That Promised Land isn't America (far less California) or Australia/New Zealand or Europe (with or without Great Britain) or Antarctica or Asia or Africa or Russia, etc. Those Chosen Peoples aren't the Italians, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Aboriginals, the Amerindians, the Polynesians or the Turks, and especially not the Egyptians! The Promised Land is the Land of Canaan, now called Israel; The Chosen People are, obviously, the Israelites. In fact the Bible (King James Version) makes crystal clear, not once, but 201 times that the Almighty is the "God of Israel". So, if you ain't associated with the Almighty's Chosen People and His Promised Land, it's impossible to believe that you are one of those in His holy grace! In short, it's safe to give your alleged Supreme Being your Big Middle Finger, even both of them!

The All-God: All This, All That, All the Next Thing

God is certainly considered by the faithful to be omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent and of course omni-warm and omni-fuzzy.

Can a Supreme Being Be All-Present?Since the Almighty is a physical being, after all He utters sounds and causes things to happen, and as such, cannot be in all places at all times. That’s just total nonsense. Scratch omnipresent.

Can a Supreme Being Be All-Knowing? Hardly! If such a being is omniscient, what's the point in the whole creation business? There's no fun or satisfaction to a creation if you know to the tiniest detail, exactly what will happen at each and every moment to everything, everyone, and everywhere. Would your life be worth living if at say age 10, you had absolute knowledge of the future and knew exactly what each and every future second would be like for you in advance? So a Supreme Being created Adam and Eve, but since that Supreme Being is alleged to be an all-knowing deity, then He knew even then what would happen in the Garden of Eden, so why bother instructing Adam and Eve not to eat forbidden fruit? What would be the point? That's why people don't usually want to be told the resolution to a film they haven't yet seen. If you're told before-the-fact whodunit, why see the film or read the novel?

That applies equally to that final Biblical New Testament Book of Revelation. The Bible is the Almighty's Holy Word. Revelation is therefore the Almighty's Holy Word. Everything that is to come is spelt out in detail. The ending is not in doubt. How the ending is achieved is not in doubt. The Almighty knows all of this in advance. Satan, being a literate sort of entity, knows all of this as well. Therefore, what's the point in enacting out the scenario? If everyone has to go through the fixed Revelation scenario, then that confirms everything is predestined and that there is no such thing as Free Will despite the Almighty's utterances to the contrary. Just like in a novel or a film, the plot plays out the exact same each and every time. The characters have no choice but to follow the plot line - they have no Free Will. Scratch omniscient.

Can a Supreme Deity Be All-Powerful? Hardly! If such a Deity can not prevent evil, then that Deity is not omnipotent. If that Deity can prevent evil, but chooses not to, then that Deity is hardly benevolent. If that Deity allows evil to exist in humans, and that Deity created humans, then that Deity must share some responsibility for that evil. It's akin to parents having to shoulder responsibility if their child or children runs amuck.

The Almighty is not omnipotent since not even He can get around the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics, which states that it is impossible to know simultaneously any particle's precise position and trajectory.

Presumably, the Almighty, like gravity waves, and anything comprised of mass and/or energy can't operate at faster than light speed. If our Supreme Being wants to smite you down, and He is ten light-years away, then you're safe for a decade before His bolt of lightning hits you.

If the Almighty exists in a physical location within the Universe, then He can't know about an event until the light (or other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum; or gravity) from that event reaches Him. Since light has a finite speed, the Almighty is in the 'dark' as it were until the light and information it contains reaches Him. For example, if the Almighty is residing on Planet Earth, and for some reason our Sun goes supernova, the Almighty (as well as the rest of humanity) won't know about it for other eight-plus minutes - the time it takes light to reach Earth from the Sun.

Not even a Supreme Being can change the past. I mean, there are any number of instances where to correct some mistake; it would have been easier to backtrack in time and undo something, like going back in time and posting a "No Trespassing: Keep Out: Serpents Will Be Shot On Sight: This Means You" sign at the entrance to the Garden of Eden.

Nor can a Supreme Being accomplish something that is self-contradictory, like creating a spherical cube or a cubical sphere! Can a deity, any deity draw more than one straight line between two points on a flat piece of paper. I think not.

If the Almighty is so omnipotent, why did He need to rest on the Seventh Day? Scratch omnipotent.

Is the Almighty an All-Loving, Merciful, Compassionate, and Forgiving Deity? Yes you say? You have got to be joking! Have those spouting off such nonsense actually read the Old Testament? From the universal flood, to Sodom and Gomorrah, to the tenth plague, to the invasion of the Land of Canaan, to countless other large-scale right down to individual (i.e. - Abraham and Job) atrocities committed, the Almighty is the driving force. Hitler in his wildest dreams couldn't conceive of such death and destruction as Mr. Supreme Deity inflicted on not only His enemies, but also on His own Chosen People. If 'military intelligence' is a contradiction in terms, even more so is the phrase 'the loving Almighty'. I'd sooner take my chances with 'a loving person-eating shark'! Scratch God being all omni-warm and omni-fuzzy.

The Almighty does in fact have one 'All' quality. He's an all-nothing. The Almighty, the supernatural deity, doesn't exist.

Reasons to Question an Alleged Supreme Being’s Bona-Fides

There are lots of names applied to our monotheistic deity. There's God, the Almighty, the Supreme Being, the Lord, and so on. But no matter the name, no matter which way you slice and dice the concept, it retains such philosophical baggage that any rational being has just got to question the bona-fides of such a deity.

There’s something odd about God’s origin and nature. It’s downright illogical at best; in fact it’s really quite impossible! The concept of God has the same degree of believability as the concept of Santa Claus.

If a Supreme Being created the Universe, then what, or who, created that Being? Who are the Almighty's parents in other words? Causality applies to Supreme Beings as well as anything else. And if something or someone created the Supreme Being, what then created that something or someone and so on and so on down the line? It's an infinite regression. It's far easier to believe the cosmos has always existed though that doesn't mean our Universe didn't have a point-in-time origin or beginning since a previous universe can give rise to another universe (like ours) in sequence.

Actually, I strongly suspect the answer to 'who created the Almighty?' is fairly easy, probably downright obvious in an intuitive sort of way. Humans created the Almighty in mans' image (and probably all other supreme deities as well), rather than the reverse - The Almighty didn't create humans in His own image.

However, as an afterthought, perhaps man was created in the image of the Almighty. Based on the texts of the Biblical Old Testament, our Supreme Being has to be described as a dictator what with all those "thou shall not..." commandments. The Almighty is also a hypocrite as in 'do as I say, not as I do', for example "Thou shall not kill". Further, the Almighty is someone who's vain and petty always demanding all and sundry to bow and scrape to Him. He's also someone who sanctions any number of atrocities in His name, such as the Battle of Jericho, which if committed today would results in charges of war crimes. All up, the Almighty is just someone who's cruel, jealous, nasty, raciest, and sexist; someone who's totally up Himself, highly demanding and basically an all around Son of a Bitch. Remind you of anyone you know, or know of, like your average run-of-the-mill Homo sapiens?

If cats have a deity, I'm sure their supreme deity would have whiskers and claws and purr (or more likely go 'meow-meow'). I suspect that humans have a quasi hard-wired need to believe in a something(s) that one can always fall back on to explain and answer those unanswerable questions, as well as provide comfort for that ultimate question - the nature of death and what follows on from that.

Anyway, if the Almighty has always existed, then He is infinitely old, beating Methuselah's longevity by a mile. In that case, an infinite amount of time had to pass before His (I'll keep with tradition and assume the masculine) creation of our Universe - which is an absurdity. How is it that you exist for an infinite amount of time and the get then all of a sudden get this bright idea or urge to create a Universe? What was our Supreme Being doing the 'day' before He created our Universe? Perhaps one answer is that He has always created universes, one after another after another - creating universes, that's the Almighty's thing! And if the Almighty is infinitely old, then there must have been, or are, an infinite number of universes created and in existence. Well, some cosmologists do postulate that our Universe is one of many - the concept of the Multiverse.

Speaking of creation, but assuming just one Universe, that's an awful lot of Universe created just for little old us! Seriously, and for example, if Mr. Supreme Deity created everything, then He created the planetoid Pluto (and associated moons). My question is what was the point of expending the resources to do that? We can't see Pluto with the naked eye. Even with a telescope Pluto is just a tiny dot. If Pluto didn't exist would anything on Earth be different? Pluto adds nothing to our quality of life (or lack of it) and presumably ditto applies to any extraterrestrials in our solar system (assuming that Pluto and moon are uninhabited that is, and that's a fairly safe bet). Of course you may argue that perhaps Pluto was impacted by a killer asteroid that otherwise would have hit us and therefore has affected our quality of life. Then wouldn't it have been easier on Mr. Supreme Deity not to have created Pluto and not created that asteroid as well? This creation of things with no relevance to the apparent pinnacle of creation (the be-all-and-end-all of the Almighty's efforts), that is to say, us, makes no sense. It's sort of like buying a china teapot or a baseball bat, for your pet canary. What would be the point? Further a field, we couldn't see 99.99% of the observable universe, and 99.99% of the observable universe has no bearing on our day-to-day existence. What's the point then of creating all that extra 99.99%?

If the Almighty exists, why doesn't He show His warts-and-all face today? I mean, He wasn't all that shy about getting in humanity's face way back in the days of the Old Testament, so what is He so wary of today? Maybe He's afraid of our nukes! But that's silly seeing as how He's all-powerful. That aside, it wouldn't be all the difficult for a Supreme Being to make a showing today akin to some of the stunts He pulled way back when!

If the Almighty so wants humans to believe in Him, then it would have been so ultra easy to have just one sentence somewhere in the Bible that would be understandable to later generations, even if that Biblical sentence were baffling to contemporaries. The sentence would have been a sentence attributed to an Almighty that something only an Almighty (or an extraterrestrial) could have known at the time. For example, if kiwi birds had been mentioned, or icebergs, or that bright light in the sky that moves slowly through the heavens had rings around it, or that sugar was a mixture of several things, or what about another commandment akin to "Thou shall not travel faster than the speed of light". Just one simple little sentence - that's all it would have taken - something, anything one-off that illustrated a knowledge of biology, geography, astronomy, chemistry or physics that the natives of the time wouldn't have known about. Alas, it was not to be. Methinks the Almighty missed a golden opportunity to reveal His actual existence beyond reasonable question. Or, updating to the present, our Supreme Being could fuse the Ten Commandments onto the surface of the Moon, easily visible through modest telescopes, or do a repeat of one of those Biblical happenings like making the Red Sea split asunder for a spell!

If a Supreme Being exists, yet we can explain life, the Universe, and simply everything without requiring an Almighty hypothesis, then the Almighty has gone to extraordinary lengths to make Himself a total irrelevance!

In conclusion, the Almighty, the supernatural deity, doesn't exist. That’s the most obvious logical option when looking at the Almighty’s bona-fides. One line of evidence in support of that is that our alleged Supreme Being hasn't struck me down dead by lightning by writing and posting this! So you see, blasphemy is a victimless 'crime'. And no, I don't hate the Almighty. You can't hate something that doesn't exist.

Jesus of Nazareth: R.I.P.

Assuming that the Christian religious figurehead known as Jesus Christ or Jesus of Nazareth actually existed, and that is not a given by any stretch of the imagination, then the odds are, IMHO, that he was just another mortal human and not an immortal supernatural deity, the alleged ‘Son of God’.

There's this concept or character of Jesus Christ (JC), or Jesus of Nazareth (depending on religious philosophy), the alleged Son of God. JC is probably the most famous or most well known character in all of recorded history, even if in his own time he was as unknown and unheard of as 99.9% of rock and film star wannabes are today. But did Jesus actually exist? It would really be a bummer if JC had all the reality of other famous and well known but fictional characters like Sherlock Holmes, James Bond and Santa Claus. Yet for someone so famous after-the-fact, there's damn little documentation outside of religious texts to support his reality, and all of that 'reality' was penned many decades after-the-fact. Not only that, but the four main New Testament gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, that detail the life and times of JC don’t always agree on various key points.

While there is relatively little doubt in my mind that there really was an historical figure that went by the name of Jesus, there are those scholars who would, and do, argue that Jesus was as totally a mythological figure as Zeus and Apollo, or for that matter Santa. That aside, I suggest that JC was a person who was very human, born in the normal way, died as any human eventually does, and has remained dead ever since.

If JC is indeed an historical figure, I suggest that while he existed he was seen as a very charismatic character, but one who alas, would most certainly have been mentally ill. Our mental institutions or asylums are full of people who sincerely believe that they are this person, or that person, or a reincarnation of this or that historical figure, but in reality, are totally delusional. I'm sure this syndrome is not unique to this era. I just mean that I'm sure mental illness existed some 2100 years ago - then as now - and it's possible that JC could have suffered from delusions of grandeur to some greater or lesser degree assuming he made some extraordinary claims about himself.

There have been lots of charismatic religious figures over the centuries, which, in another time and place, if claiming to be the Son of God, would have attracted a massive following, and a near mythological aura. Perhaps JC just happened to be in the right place, at the right time, with the right personality to pull the charade off - in fact JC probably sincerely believed his own story. I'm no expert on what exactly JC said about himself, or has been alleged he said (if any of his quotations can be taken a face value). Perhaps he made relatively few claims at all and it was only others who embellished him as something he never really claimed to be. If that's the case, then of course maybe he wasn't mentally ill. Regardless, the bottom line is that JC, whatever he and/or others thought he was, was the son of a man and a woman, not the Son of God. To accept JC as a deity is to, IMHO, accept one of Alice’s White Queen's pre-breakfast impossibilities.