I can't get my head round this

cathy, evolution has been proved beyond any reasonable doubt. We are not 'descended from monkeys' , or at least not from monkeys as they are now. It is probable that at some stage in evolution the creatures that became homo sapiens and the creatures that became modern anthropoid apes branched off from a common ancestor. They have evolved separately from us. That is why there are still monkeys. I am not a scientist, but I have read books and articles and watched many TV programmes that I understand evolution reasonably well. Any scientists reading this, feel free to put me right.

You've said it well, anno. Anyone who doesn't believe in evolution is simply ignorant of it. That is not an insult. I just mean that they haven't learned enough about it, either by accident or on purpose. Believing in evolution does not depend on faith.

Oh, and there are plenty of people who believe in evolution and in some sort of god. It seems the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

I feel that it is even more of a wonder that everything is so intricate and interdependent without the aid of a conscious designer. Everything has a niche that it fits perfectly, with food to eat, a way to replicate itself, and a final destiny to become food for another species. Even the mightiest is eaten by small creatures and microbes when it is no longer a viable individual.

It was not set up in one vast unchanging scenario. There have been massive changes, from the composition of the atmosphere to the redistribution of continents, from barren rocks and molten lava to uncountable varieties of living plants and animals. Dinosaurs developed, thrived, then vanished. As each change happened, other things were affected and other changes followed, and after each the balance stabilised again - to a different norm. All on an unimaginable timescale.

There is no need to posit a "deus ex machina" to operate all the changes. They are a result of the interactions of all the parts upon each other.

We are descendents of our human greatgreatgrandparents. So are our distant cousins who could be living far away from us. Those graetgreatgrandparents are not still alive, but their other descendents are still distantly related to us. The further back you go to find ancestors, the more distant the relationship, but it still exists.

If you go far enough back, our ancestors had not taken the form we have today. The fossil record shows gradual changes. The fossil records of the monkeys and apes also show gradual changes, until you get back to a time when they merge.

A monkey will not give birth to a human, or a human to a monkey, but a many-times-great ancestor long long ago was common to both.

We are not descended from monkeys any more than we are descended from our cousins. We are descended from the same long-dead many-times-greatgrandparent that the other primates are descended from.

And if you go back far enough, we have the same ancestor as a fish or a bird.

There is an aetiological argument for the existence of God. Mankind everywhere has always had some idea of God however "primitive" and a desire to connect with him. Would this happen if God did not exist? In the same way as Would we experience thirst if we lived in a Universe without water? I know many of you will not be happy with this argument and it is somewhat clinical. Christians would say that God pursues them as much as they pursue Him and it is a leap of faith to form a relationship with Him.

This is a useful way of looking at the original question.

www.ttgst.ac.kr/upload/ttgst_resources13/20124-270pdf

Although I try to apply to same standards of analysis and evidence to questions of religion as I do to any other aspect of my life, I am hard pressed to find any evidence of a higher power, at least one which is in any way present in our day-to-day lives. If such a power does exist, I tend to think that humans were some kind of experiment in free will - one that has failed and in which that power has now lost interest.

The devil is at play and works to test our faith in order to feed his evil..

As Voltaire said, if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. He/she/it doesn't, and people did. The idea of a loving supreme being is very comforting, faced with the complexities of the universe. The ancient gods of Rome, Egypt, etc. were not thought to be necessarily benign, so the message of Christianity must have been very welcome. At last, a god who did not share the failings of humans and was willing to forgive all wrongdoings.
I don't feel any special awe about the way things are, which does not mean I don't get great pleasure out of a piece of music, a beautiful view or the love of my family.
There are an infinite number of ways in which the world could have developed - what we have is simply the one that happened.
It is not magical, just physics , chemistry and biology.
I am a happy atheist, I don't feel that I am obliged to apologise for my lack of belief, nor do I criticise anybody else who wants/needs to believe.
I do enjoy an informed discussion.

I am not familiar with the works of Voltaire so my question is why would it be necessary to invent Him? This is a genuine question.

Because he/she/it fills a god-shaped hole in our understanding - i.e. helps to explain the unexplainable.

Thanks, Mishap, I was watching TV!
I would only have added that the world must have seemed totally inexplicable to early man (it still is, in spite of the advances in science) so it was necessary to find some way of explaining it.

If the hole is god-shaped ,does not this suggest that God exists?

I was listening to a phone in on the radio some weeks back about religion. A man phoned in who sounded very rational, he explained his belief in God and why bad things happen by likening God's role to that of his own, as a father. He said if his son came to him, in distress because he couldn't do his homework, he would understand his pain but he wouldn't take it away by doing the homework as actually, that wouldn't help his son. Ergo, man has to suffer and God understands but doesn't stop the suffering. I thought it was such a simple but effective explanation.

But if I was a father with Gods powers [like creating the Universe and suchlike] I'd surely be able to find a way of helping my son with his homework by, say, making him really really clever.

Tegan I think the point this chap was making was that his job, as a father was to guide his son, not to make his life easy (by making him really clever for instance) His son had to take responsibility. I just thought it was a very simple analogy.

How does a child take responsibility for having cancer? Or being drowned in a tsunami? That is hardly exercising free will.

I think part of the difficulty is the extreme individualism we have developed in the West. The Jews, at least in Biblical times, believed in the concept of corporate personality :everyone was inter-related to each other - a part of the whole. Thus ,what happens to one, happens to all and we should all take responsibility for the effect of our actions upon others. No man is an island.

I am not sure I follow your post, Gorki. How can any human take responsibility for natural disasters such as earthquakes?

I think it's interesting that we are not seeing many defenders of faith - any faith - in this discussion. If this were taking place in the USA, Gransnet would have been denounced and boycotted long ago.
This is part of what I love about the UK - there IS real tolerance (for the most part) and room for everyone to be who they want to be, so long as beliefs do not impinge on anyone else's right to believe. It's not perfect in this regard, but it's better than most places!

YankeeGran - we have had some very interesting discussions
on religion and we atheists all made it clear that we had no argument with individual believers - we just don't believe and in some cases we do not like the actions of some organised religions, particular in relation to their treatment of women.
I know some Christians share our disquiet and are doing what they can from the grassroots to change the thinking of the hierarchy - who are mainly men, of course!
Two of our most committed Christian members have now become my friends - we respect each other, but not each other's beliefs. A fine distinction which seems to elude some people.
I don't think there are nearly as many believers in the USA as surveys would suggest - people are just too scared of the right wing fundamentalists to speak their mind.
It is not so long ago that when you were asked your religion in Britain , such as when going into hospital, and you replied 'None', the clerk/nurse would say, 'Oh, C of E then'. You can guess how I dealt with that!
We still have some way to go to achieve true secularisation in Britain - prayers in Parliament and state-aided religious schools, for example.
I look forward to the disestablishment of the Church of England in my lifetime - it is doing a pretty good job of imploding anyway, with deep splits over women clergy and homosexuality.

That is something else Greatnan I believe the universe is still evolving and the best analogy I can think of is that of reproduction. The foetus is created but while in the womb sometimes thing go wrong and the baby arrives imperfectly To my mind ,the natural world is like this and there are natural disasters.This is an analogy so you will be able to find fault with it but it is the best I can do with my limited brain and I find it helpful.In the end I believe I must become the "reverent agnostic" and echo the Biblical "I believe,help thou my unbelief "I may not have got that quote quite right but it is the gist.

Cathy Miracles? Where's the evidence?

I think it likely that had there ever been a miracle, which would require the setting aside of the laws of physics, then probably none of us would be here - and neither would the universe!