There is no point!

I feel that I should be outside in the sunshine, soaking up every last photon while it is here, but I have been doing a little gardening after having played golf and frankly I feel weary. There was a time when i could go on doing physical stuff all day, but clearly those days are behind me and I am on the slippery slope downhill.

Yesterday I ranted about the ill informed and ludicrously self aggrandised member of the ruling classes and his attempts to inform the public of his perceived disasters. Today the press is full of the same sort of arguments and so I feel quite justified in my comments. Having said that, i haven't seen the sun or the mail, and either or both of them are likely to be sucking up to the royals as usual.

I wish that more people would listen to the arguments put forward so eloquently by Richard Dawkins. Now he too is highly opinionated, but at least he bases his opinions on solid facts and not on whims and fairy tales. If you really want to see a cage rattle, then ask Mr Dawkins about his opinions on intelligent design, a topic that because of religious sensibilities, is being mooted as a valid theory in many schools, both here and in the United States. How on Earth can people, when faced with the facts, even begin to believe what was written down by men in the middle east, long before people began to understand the world around them. It isn't as if the process of evolution is subject to dispute. It is very simple and is borne out by evidence. Evidence is of course what the creationists lack but is does not deter them even for a second.

Basically Evolution is based on the following observations

1. Living things reproduce sexually and produce far more offspring than they need to replace themselves.
2. Within the offspring there is variation, due to the process of cell division that produces the sex cells.
3. There is a struggle to survive - eg a female plaice may lay a million eggs, but only two of them need to survive to breed.
4. Some of the offspring may be better suited to survive in the conditions that prevail.
5. They are the ones that become adults and breed, passing their genetic code onto the next generation.

A simple set of ideas put forward by Charles Darwin in the late nineteenth century, and since then more and more evidence is being unearthed that supports what was once referred to as a theory. Evolution is fact and once you accept that there can be no turning back.

Perhaps that is the problem with the creationists - to open your heart to your faith is one thing, but to open your head to common sense and scientific principles might just undermine the shaky ground upon which their faith is based. Once one accepts the principle of evolution as a series of chance events, then the question, why are we here? becomes an irrelevance and we can stop looking for a supernatural raison d'etre.