Show me the evidence

Some questions needing answers from believers in divine creation.

For those who reject science-based attempts at explaining the existence of the Universe and of ourselves – beings uniquely capable of contemplating our origins – in favour of the concept of a divine creator, here are a few questions requiring answers

First, how is it more credible that your creator existed, and will exist throughout eternity, than that life sprang spontaneously from matter that was, and is, similarly everlasting and omnipresent?

If we owe our existence to him, to whom does he owe his? Did he have a father and mother? What invalidates the view that your god was created by man to explain the, then, inexplicable, or as a political control mechanism, as suggested in Karl Marx’s dictum that ‘religion is the opium of the people’?

What is your god’s race? Why, in the light of the conflicts to which apparent racial diversity has so often led, are we not all of one ethnic group? If your god created man in his image, in whose image was woman created? Is there nothing more than a blasphemous witticism in the statement: ‘I saw God last night. She’s black’?

What language did Adam and Eve speak, and why do not all human beings speak that same language?

Why did your god create mankind as two sexes, if human procreation by sexual intercourse came about only after the temptation and fall from grace? Why, too, did he create male and female in most life forms, while leaving others, such as the amoeba, to reproduce asexually by cellular division? How do you explain the existence of hermaphrodites (creatures possessing both male and female genitalia) in some species, and of human transsexuals? And how do you account for male and female homosexuality in humans?

For what purpose did your god equip all men and other male mammals with nipples? Did he provide Eve with nipples, when she had no need of them initially? If not, how did she suckle her offspring? Did he also give Adam and Eve navels, though neither had a mother to whom they required connection by an umbilicus? If mankind was created in his image, does your god have a navel?

If we did not evolve, but were created as we are today, why are we so physically imperfect? Why, in large numbers of us, are visual, auditory, masticatory and locomotive capabilities not enduringly efficient throughout our lives? Why are some people infertile? Why are some people mentally and/or physically handicapped? Why are we susceptible to disease: indeed, why do diseases exist and proliferate? Did your god create the virus which causes AIDS? As Stephen Fry once said, what kind of god would do that to people, just for loving each other?

The Bible contains prohibitions against incest, as do the beliefs, customs or laws of most societies (although the ancient Egyptian ruling families practised it), so with whom did the progeny of Adam and Eve procreate? Was the existence of mankind founded on the breach of this taboo? If so, should not all that inter-breeding have rendered us all physical and mental degenerates?

If you do not accept the truth of evolutionary theory, how do you suggest a pair, at least, of sexually procreating creatures of every species could have been accommodated on Noah’s Ark? Does not the sheer volume of animal, bird and insect species known to exist, or to have existed, in, say, the last 2,000 years, show the story of the flood and the Ark to be no more than a myth? Do you seriously believe that Noah’s living cargo included dinosaurs along with the creatures we know today? Did dinosaurs co-exist with man, or had they all perished before the flood, becoming the fossils through which we know of them today?

If you say there is no evidence of evolution in the fossil record, what is archaeopteryx, the fossilised transitional lizard-bird? Is it some brilliant archaeological forgery; an academic’s joke? Remember, that is what learned people thought of the remains of the duckbilled platypus, when they first reached Britain from Australia, but that weird egg-laying aquatic mammal does exist.

Moving from archaeology to modernity, is what has happened in Stalinist Russia, the Nazi Third Reich’s concentration camps and subsequently in Cambodia, Rwanda, the Balkans, New York, Washington, London, Belfast, Derry, Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, Iraq and Gaza, your god’s responsibility? Is it, instead, the result of man’s exercise of a god-given free will? If so, in what way can the tortured, raped and murdered – or the innocent ‘collaterally’ maimed or dead casualties of bombing in pursuit of a ‘war on terrorism’, led by an American fundamentalist Christian President and a British Anglican, now turned Roman Catholic, former Prime Minister - be said to have exercised their freedom of will?

For those Christians who see a solution to the supposed problems caused by modern youth in the return of National Service, to teach the tearaways discipline, why did not that discipline – or your omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent god - prevent three British regular soldiers, based in Cyprus, from attempting to rape a young Danish woman, after chasing off her Cypriot boyfriend, and, having failed, battering her to death with a trenching tool? More importantly, where was your god then, and what freedom of choice did the victim have? Should she have chosen to accept violation? Why did your god not permit her and other victims of violence a survival option, or protect them? If all has been your god’s responsibility, ultimately, how can he be considered benignly caring?

What credence can be given to the benevolence of a god in whose name believing man is inhumane to believing man, as in conflicts between Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians and Bosnian and ethnic Albanian Muslims in the former Yugoslavia; Roman Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, or Jews and Muslims in Israel/Palestine? Are not such conflicts confirmation of the view propounded by Professor A J Ayer, the late philosopher and humanist, that a god, if one existed, might be malevolent rather than benevolent?

Is it a kindly creator who has given us a seemingly endless succession of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, floods, droughts, storms, hurricanes and typhoons, forest fires and, in this century, the monstrous tidal waves of the South East Asian Tsunami, and the equally horrific Haitian earthquake?

These are questions for all believers in the divine creator. Now, here is one specifically for Christian readers. How does the symbolic (or literal, according to believers in transubstantiation) eating and drinking of the flesh and blood of Christ, in order to achieve communion with him, differ from the cannibals’ age-old practice of eating those whom they admired, like the mightiest warriors, to acquire their distinctive attributes? Is not the Eucharist simply a manifestation of the enduring concept that we are what we eat?

Until we can have sensible answers to these questions, without accompanying Biblical or Koranic citations, which are meaningless to non-believers, many more will, I think, reject the divine mythology - just as I did soon after discovering in childhood my father leaving my Christmas presents by my bed in his role as Santa Claus. 'If Santa is a myth, why is not talk of a divine creator also fiction,' I thought.

I have since seen, read, heard of or otherwise experienced nothing to change my view that religion, far from revealing it, obscures truth and has been at least as much a force for evil as for good since primitive man, seeking to answer questions beyond his ken, attributed all existence to a being beyond himself. I suspect that he, having thus found a satisfactory explanation of the inexplicable, passed on his belief in a divine being to others, perhaps using his supposed knowledge as a means to control and exploit his fellows, as have many priests, shamans and witchdoctors since then.

I need no such explanation for my existence; nor do I seek one. I am content to accept the pronouncement of the French philosopher Rene Descartes (made, as was academic practice at the time, in Latin): ‘Cogito ergo sum’, which means, ‘I think, therefore I am’.

Further, I feel no compulsion to apply my capacity for thought to questions of how and why I have come to be here. Nor do I see any reason to believe that this is not my only shot at life; indeed, I think that belief in a better life to come after their death has led many oppressed and exploited people to tolerate privations against which they should have railed and risen up.

Looking at the conditions – in, for example, Latin America - under which many poverty-stricken Roman Catholic worshippers in the richest of the great monotheistic churches live, it is no surprise that its hierarchy is so dogmatically anti-suicidal, ranking self-destruction among the most heinous of sins. With the prospect of better to come after death, suicide must be powerfully attractive to the unfortunates of this world and life.

It isn't to me, except as an alternative to a long drawn-out, painful terminal illness