God III, The Fisking

Faithful Reader, for the last few days I have had quite some feedback on my post God and Spider Dunstan, a whimsical musing on the subject of God resulting from my interaction with believers over the last few weeks.

One among your number even saw fit to pen me a riposte detailing my errors and general waywardness in the form of a fisking. Said correspondent being a little reclusive, I have agreed to allow them to retain their anonymity and shall refer to them only as ‘Withburga’. As I am sure you all know, St Withburga was a virgin Benedictine nun who established a nunnery after her father died in battle. She is not the patron saint of fast food, although she ought to be.

Withburga takes issue with many of the points that I made in my post and offers a rebuttal to several of them. In the post below, the original text from my blog post is in bold and Withburga’s response is in italics. My further comments are in normal text.

The bible is very clearly a book written by men and men with an agenda. The New Testament's agenda is the promotion of Christ­worship and more especially of the Pauline branch of Christ­worship. The 4 main stories of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, were chosen from several to form what we currently call the gospels at (I believe ­ I don't have my internet at present) the Council of Nicea in around 300AD.

It was written by about 40 different men over a period of 2000 or so years. Given that all these were of different backgrounds and lived at different times in history, and that from the first verse to the last the 66 books form a harmonious whole with a central theme are we saying that they all had the same agenda and if so what was their motive for this? I am also not sure what ‘Pauline branch’ means as throughout the NT Christians are urged to be unified in belief and purpose. Worship of Christ is nowhere promoted, Christ himself did not allow or encourage worship of himself (or his mother for that matter) but only ever directed worship to God.

That the set of books we call ‘The Bible’ was written by a number of different men over a long period of time is undoubted. That the 66 (or 73 or 81) books of the Bible “form a harmonious whole” is very much doubted and even the most charitable reading would find that “harmonious” is a sympathetic adjective to use.

The Pauline branch of Christianity (ie that version of Christianity promoted by Saul of Tarsus, later St Paul) is the branch that we consider to be Christianity today. There is little doubt that there were competing interpretations of Christ’s teaching and of what Christianity should be. The major sect competing with Pauline Christianity appears to have been that championed by James the Just (Jesus’ brother) along with Jesus’ closest disciples and (possibly) his wider family. Not a great deal is known definitively, probably because they lost the battle, but it does appear that James saw Christianity as a renewed form of Judaism whereas Paul saw Christianity as a completely new and separate religion. Much of the argument centred on the extent to which Gentiles were expected to keep the Mosaic Law.

Not much of this is contested by Bible scholars and I think it would be fairly non-controversial. My reference to “the Pauline branch” might be unnecessarily specific, but I think accurate. Think of it as a literary flourish.

As for the divinity of Jesus, he certainly never says that he is god, but he does allude to it. He says, for example that “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30) and “before Abraham was born, I am!” (John 8:58). Each of these is open to interpretation I suppose, but less easy to deny is that Jesus encouraged worship of himself. At several points, Jesus is worshipped and does not discourage it (Matthew 2:11, 14:33, 28:9, Luke 24:52, John 9:38). Beyond that, it’s a little disingenuous to claim that the CHRISTian church is not based on the worship of Christ.

The idea that men in the church decided upon the bible canon at the council of Nicea is historically not correct. In Paul’s letter to Christians in Rome he said at Romans 3:2 that Jews were entrusted with the sacred pronouncements of God, indicating that Jews believed that they were custodians of the holy writings. The Muratorian Fragment dated between 170 and 200 CE lists most of the books of the Greek scriptures (New Testament) including these 4 gospels which shows that the canon was already set before then, so long before 300 CE and more likely by the Jews than the church.

It’s probably not wise to use the New Testament’s say so to decide on the historicity of the New Testament, but in any case, the holy writings being referred to by Paul are almost certainly the Jewish writings that we think of as the Old Testament.

As for the Council of Nicea deciding on the canon, you are correct, I misremembered. Certainly the canon was beginning to be finalised around then but the Council made no specific decree on the matter.

The Muratorian Fragment is actually dated to around 600-700CE and mentions only two of the gospels by name (Luke and John) although it appears to be saying that there are four in total; it refers to Luke as the third and John as the fourth. The original text is often dated earlier as it refers to Pius I as having “recently” been Bishop of Rome (ie Pope). Pius I died around 155CE, hence the dating.

I find this fairly flimsy evidence that the NT canon was settled so early. By the seventh century the canon was certainly well established, at least in terms of the gospels. The translator would have known this full well and would have been unlikely to accurately translate a document that contradicted established beliefs.

Titus Flavius Clemens (Clement of Alexandria) certainly did not consider that the 27 books that we use today were canonical. He is known to have used the Gospel of the Hebrews, the Gospel of the Egyptians and the Revelation of Peter among others. Clement died around 215CE, which, for me, is another reason to doubt the accuracy of the Muratorian fragment.

Certainly by 400CE the currently accepted NT canon of 27 books had been largely agreed with the addition of Revelation being the final step. What is certain is that the four books we think of as gospel today were chosen from several that were written in the period from about 50CE to about 150CE.

That is to say that the final story of the Nazarene's life was not agreed until nearly 300 years after he died. Rather like concluding the definitive biography of JS Bach around about now. It would, for instance, be a struggle to interview any of contemporaries.

‘Agreed’ by who though? Matthew and John were apostles therefore among Jesus closest friends, they accompanied him, were directly instructed and trained by him, they were there, they compiled eyewitness accounts.

There are very few left that would argue that the gospels of Matthew and John were written by the disciples. In the case of Matthew, it was almost certainly originally originally written in Greek and it’s unlikely that the disciple Matthew spoke Greek. There is no early evidence of it being attributed to Matthew, nor is there any claim by the author of being an eyewitness to the events described.

The authorship of gospel of John is a little more problematic. There are five works attributed to John; the gospel, three epistles and Revelation. There is some consistency in the style of the works with the exception of Revelation which, it’s generally agreed has different authorship from the other four works.

The scholars most sympathetic to a direct link to the apostle John seem to contend that the gospel and the epistles were written by a community of John’s followers with some input from the ageing apostle himself. Dating of the book is fairly consistently agreed to be around 90 – 120CE, which would have seen John at a very advanced age indeed.

Even if we concede that John was written by, or at least had input from, an eyewitness, we are then left with the problem of this gospel differing widely from the three synoptic gospels both in terms of detail and in thematic terms. Just to pick one example, the gospel of John has Jesus referring to himself much more often than the synoptic gospels. The synoptics emphasise the works of Jesus, whereas John emphasises faith in Jesus himself. It’s problematic, especially if John is the only book with input from an eyewitness.

We know with some certainty that the books were written in the order Mark around 50­70AD, then Matthew and Luke at about the same time around 70­90AD and finally John around 100­120AD. When you know this and you read them in the order they were written rather the order that they are usually published, you begin to see something interesting; the stories gets progressively more fanciful over time.

The end of some manuscripts give 41 CE as the year Matthew was written so just 8 years after Jesus death. At Acts 1:1 Luke refers to his earlier account, being his gospel. Since Acts was written around 61 CE while Luke was in Rome with Paul, that puts the date of his gospel earlier, likely 56­58 CE after accompanying Paul on his 3rd missionary trip. Without going into too much detail here, Mark’s association with Paul and internal evidence suggests 60­65 CE for his gospel and John wrote his about 98 CE.

I’m not sure what you mean by “The end of some manuscripts give 41 CE as the year Matthew was written”. The widely held view among scholars is that Matthew was written sometime after 70CE with very few opting for a date before that.

As for Luke and Acts, there is very little sympathy for the view that they were written by Luke the Evangelist, a companion of Paul. The most optimistic assessment would be that they include some portions of an earlier text written or contributed to by Luke.

The earliest possible date for Acts would be 63CE, when Paul was imprisoned in Rome, however I struggle to imagine someone pounding away on their laptop late one afternoon in 63CE to be sure that they’ll meet the evening edition. These texts were not generally written in a short period of time, which would mean that “earliest possible” becomes more like mid 60s CE. Most scholars tend to a later date, generally 80-90 CE for the pair.

The most commonly adopted theory today is that Mark was written first, then Matthew and Luke both drew from Mark and from an unknown source (generally referred to as “Q”). I find the whole “Q” business problematic – surely we would have found scraps of it at least – but scholars more dedicated that me are insisting that this is the case.

If you do hold that Matthew predates Mark, do you believe that Mark had access to the gospel of Matthew? If so, can you explain why Mark chose to leave out so much of Matthew’s gospel?

Perhaps the most important and most fanciful of the gospel stories is the story of the resurrection, so perhaps this is the one place where you would expect to see a fairly strict concordance between the four gospels but alas, no.

It needs to be acknowledged that the 4 writers wrote in their own style, from different perspectives and with different audiences in mind. Considering and comparing all four in piecing together what happened gives a clearer picture of Jesus life and ministry.

Indeed there were four different styles, but facts are not subject to stylistic differences.

The first gospel, Mark is the shortest and in it's original form (the verses after 16:8 are a later addition) it says the two Marys and Salome went to the tomb and found that the rock had been rolled away. Some kid is sitting inside and tells them that Jesus came back to life, which gives them the screaming heebie­jeebies, and they don't tell anyone what happened. That's it. The question of how Mark found out about it is left unanswered. Presumably he developed a close enough relationship with one of the ladies in question that they let their secret be known.

I agree that Mark is the shortest gospel and ends with 16:8. He names Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Salome. Since Mark’s style is action packed and fast paced throughout it’s not all that surprising that it ends so abruptly. Perhaps someone didn’t like the abruptness of it and therefore decided to add a short and long conclusion after vs 8? Mark’s relationship with one of the ladies sounds like a wild guess. Mark was with Peter in Babylon and in 1 Peter 5:13 Peter calls him “my son” ­ my common sense says it was more likely Peter, another apostle and eyewitness, that told him.

My speculations on Mark’s relationships with the ladies was not only a wild guess, it was meant to be taken tongue-in-cheek. My point was more that the ladies didn’t tell anyone and yet Mark got to write about it.

The second and third gospels (Matthew and Luke) tell a story that is a little more elaborate. Matthew says that two Marys (he's not sure which ones) went to the tomb and there was an earthquake and an angel rolled the stone away. The angel told them that Jesus came back from the dead and while that did give them the willies, they were pretty happy about it too. They rushed off to tell the disciples about it. Luke leaves the names out of it and just says that these women and those women went to the tomb and found the stone rolled away, angels being unnecessary in that case. Two blokes wearing shiny clothes turn up and tell them that Jesus has come back from the dead and these women don't get the willies at all but are pretty much down with the whole thing. They rush off to tell everyone about it.

Matthew and Luke can’t be called ‘more fanciful’ than Mark as they were written first, so clearly not embellishments. Matt 28:1 names Mary Magdalene and the other Mary and Luke 24:10 names Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary the mother of James also the rest of the women....etc. Like Mark both report the women feeling fear.

You’re in a very small minority if you believe that Matthew and Luke were both written before Mark.

Matthew indeed names Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary” which I find lacks a little in specificity. Luke doesn’t specifically name the women that went to the tomb, but does list out some of the women that went to the disciples to tell them what had been found at the tomb. You can infer I suppose, that these were the women that went to the tomb in the first place, but Luke’s not clear on that. In either case, there are fundamental differences in the accounts of the three synoptic gospels on the question of who went to the tomb and what they found when they got there.

Then we come to John, who is to gospels what James Cameron is to movies. According to John, the story is much more elaborate with only one Mary finding the tomb empty but then she rushes off and brings back a couple of the disciples. One of these disciples is named only as the one "whom Jesus loved" which is either a dead giveaway of Jesus' sexual preferences or a suggestion that the big J wasn't fond of most of the disciples. John goes on to detail several fascinating factoids on the location of various bits of cloth before sending everyone but Mary home without any of them thinking to look into the tomb. Doh! We then have two angels appearing magically to Mary and then Jesus himself rocks up disguised as a gardener.

Not sure I understand the James Cameron analogy. Most of the material in this gospel supplements the other 3, but even so in 21:25 John says there was even so much more to write but if all the details were included the world would not be able to contain the scrolls written.

I understand that John may have been pressed for time when writing his account, but surely he could have noted who the eyewitnesses to the empty tomb were? We’re left with a fundamental difference in the four gospels on the key question of who the eyewitnesses were.

So we can already see that the gospels can't all be infallible because only one of them can be right on the subject of the resurrection, but you can see the same progressive elaboration and exaggeration in many of the bible stories that are shared between all four gospels (there are many that aren't) and you can't help but wonder whether they were simply trying to go one­up on the guy who'd written the gospel immediately prior.

It has to be admitted though that actually all of them are right on the subject of the resurrection as far as testifying that there was a resurrection, he appeared to hundreds afterwards. Gospel means “good news”, and they all tell of the good news about Jesus. They are also very candid about their own faults and failings, some serious ones, which doesn’t really fit with the idea of one­upmanship

Pointing out that they all include a resurrection story of some sort is hardly convincing. The claim that a man died and then came back from the dead is a pretty big claim. It’s not something that happens every day. A neutral observer hearing about it might be inclined to scoff.

Imagine for a moment that I told you that a few of us had nailed my friend Dennis to a tree and that when he died we shoved him under the house. Then we came back a few days later and he’d disappeared! Then he turned up again and wasn’t dead after all!!

I suspect you’d have a few questions for me and my colleagues and the fact that we all had the same basic story might not convince you. You’d be keen to know exactly what happened and who saw it. You’d be automatically suspicions of discrepancies in our stories. You want to know who was there when Dennis was nailed to the tree, what did Dennis have to say in all this, who took him down from the tree and what did you do then, who shoved him under the house, who saw that he was missing and so on.

The difficulty with the gospels, even if we exclude John and only consider the synoptic gospels, is that so many of these details vary. I used the resurrection as an example, but there are many more. For example what were the last words of Jesus? Surely this should be clear but there are three different accounts depending on which gospel you read.

There are plenty more examples of the bible being internally contradictory (there are TWO creation stories for heaven's sake, one after the other ­ Genesis 1:1­2:3 and 2:4­9) and plenty where it is simply immoral (God killing children because they made fun of a prophet by calling him baldy 2 Kings 2:23­25, a raped virgin being forced to marry her attacker Deuteronomy 22:28­29) and other areas where it is simply comedic (in the space of just two verses Genesis 9:20­21, Noah becomes a farmer, grows grapes, makes wine, gets pissed and passes out naked in his tent) so you can see why none of my interlocutors are keen to argue from a biblical standpoint.

There are not two creation stories, the references are the same thing, the second account being a ‘close up’ if you like of creation as regards man.

I admire your enthusiasm, but I’m afraid that dog’s not going to hunt. There are two distinct creation stories that derive from separate sources. The two stories use different words for “God” and have creation in different order. In the first, man is created on the sixth day and plants on the third. In the second, man is created and then plants are created.

If there is a God as in creator of all things, almighty of all the universe, gross disrespect for a prophet of God is a serious matter.

I wont comment here except to say that you think it’s fair enough for children to be mauled to death by bears as a penalty for calling a prophet “baldy”.

As regards the virgin ­ well the man who raped her had to give her father compensation, he had to marry her and was not allowed to divorce her his whole life. This law was a protection for women I think. Imagine for a moment if our society had such a law what a deterrent it would be.

Again no comment from me except to note that you are justifying a fine as penalty for rape.

In the case of Noah, I personally don’t have a problem with all those things condensed into 2 verses. The Bible is a very big book and includes enough info and detail for an individual to make an informed choice.

I love Noah. He was a guy that knew how to party wild.

Instead what I usually hear is something along the lines of one of the following;

            ·   This thing is a really good thing and I don't know how it happened, therefore God dunnit. 


            ·   This thing is a really strange thing and I don't know how it happened, therefore God dunnit. 


            ·   Stuff happened that nobody knows how it happened, therefore God dunnit. 


            ·   Stuff exists, therefore someone must have created stuff, therefore God dunnit.


What is a devout atheists view on all the above, that BigBang­dunnit? 


Not at all, the atheistic view is “let’s find out how it happened”.

The first three of these are what is generally known as the "God of the gaps" argument. Essentially it goes like this: I find this thing really awesome and incredibly cool so I reckon God dunnit and you can't tell me otherwise.


BigBang­dunnit and you can’t tell me otherwise? 


Not at all, having a pre-conceived notion of cause and working the evidence to meet that pre-conceived notion is strictly the purview of the religious.

There are things we understand and things we don't understand. Anything we don't understand: GODDUNNIT! 
A few thousand years ago the awesome and cool things that we didn't understand included the Sun coming up every morning and the rain coming at the same time each year. As these things were explained and as the 
human race's understanding of the world increased, we began to shrink down the number of things that were assigned to the GODDUNNIT category.

As our understanding of the world continues to increase, I am with Paul at Romans 1:20 that we see more clearly God’s invisible qualities (power, wisdom, love to name a few) with increased understanding.

Diseases used to be GODDUNIT and cows with two heads and mountains and floods and meteors and so on and so forth. All of these have moved quietly out of the GODDUNNIT category and into the 'oh, I see' category.

The Bible has explained all along why we have disease and death and suffering and genetic deformities and it has never attributed these to God. Not that long ago people thought the earth was flat while around 700 BCE Isaiah 40:22 says it’s a circle. Not that long ago people had many theories as to how the earth is held up (elephants, turtles etc) while around 1470 BCE Job 26:7 says it is suspended upon nothing. Isaiah 40:26 speaks of God’s dynamic energy ­ I’m thinking E=MC squared? When you talk about religion and you talk about the Bible it’s not the same thing. The Bible is a book of truth therefore leaves no room for superstition

Well in fact the bible does attribute disease to god, “If thou wilt diligently hearken to the voice of the LORD thy God, and wilt do that which is right in his sight, and wilt give ear to his commandments, and keep all his statutes, I will put none of these diseases upon thee.” (Exodus 15:26)

As for flat earth, that’s exactly what Isaiah seems to be suggesting, that the world is a flat disc. Job 26:7 is Job speaking, not god and seems to contradict 1 Samuel 2:8 wherein god has set the world upon pillars.

To draw a link between Isaiah 40:26 and the equivalence of mass and energy is, shall we say, a long bow. The same verse talks about the stars not failing which is directly in contradiction of what we now know.

We live now in and era where our understanding of the world, indeed of the universe is extraordinary in its depth and perhaps the most extraordinary thing is our detailed understanding of the things we don't know. Which ­ in Rumsfeld speak ­ is the known unknowns. The GODDUNNIT arguers are these days reduced to arguing that we don't know what atoms are made of or, if they are a little more savvy (we do know what atoms are made of) that we don't know why electrons behave the way they do or even that Schrödinger's cat is a dead giveaway that GODDUNNIT. Schrödinger and his cat don't have a lot to say on this case because, in the case of Schrödinger, he is dead and in the case of his cat, it is locked in a box with a pellet of poison and we don't know whether it’s dead or alive.

In my brain, you either know something or you don’t. Accepting a ‘known unknown’ sounds like credulity to me. How different is this to a blind belief in God? We are all free to choose how we believe but anything anyone believes must have a solid foundation

There are known unknowns all around us. To give a simple example, let’s say I give you a wrapped present. You don’t know what it is until you unwrap it. It’s a known unknown. You know the problem exists (what’s in the box) but you haven’t yet found the solution.

The fundamental difference between the science based approach and the faith based approach is that science approaches known unknowns with an open mind. We don’t understand this thing so let’s investigate. The faith based approach is to presuppose the existence of a god and then to approach every problem with that solution in mind.

Christopher Hitchens was fond of illustrating this point by quoting the great physicist Laplace, who demonstrated his working model of the solar system to the emperor and Napoleon said, “Well I see there’s no God in this system,” and Laplace said, “Well, Your Majesty, it works without that assumption.”

I do sometimes gently point out that we have been wrong about the GODDUNNIT explanation on every single occasion in the past, so we might just be wrong about it again.

As above, does the Bible say Goddunnit on these occasions referred to? I would probably need specifics to comment.

I suggest gently that it just doesn't seem to stack up as a convincing argument to me. This carries little weight with the religious side and they simply insist that while there are unknowns, there is a space for their God. The incredible shrinking God I suppose.

The other argument that I tend to see a lot is that stuff exists therefore someone must have created stuff. Almost invariably this line of thought leads to the big bang and when I point out that we do in fact know that all the stuff was created with the big bang, they announce triumphantly "Well what happened before the big bang?" At think stage I will generally point out that nothing happened before the big bang, because the universe was created with time not in time. I will then pause expectantly, hoping that my religious friend will either acknowledge the point and make a counter argument or will ask me to clarify further. Needless to say, I am always disappointed.

The question for me isn’t so much what happened before the big bang as who or what caused the big bang? Cause and Effect, effect being the bang and cause being..??

Why do you need to presume a cause? If you do need to presume a cause, what evidence can we look at to determine what the cause might be?

I have never yet been queried on what is meant by "the universe was created with time not in time" because the interlocutor will generally ignore any point that I might make and will repeatedly leap back to the idea that the universe was created and therefore it must have a creator, repeating it over and over as if it were an incantation. They will state this conclusion with a raised eyebrow and smile brimming with confidence and it will often be prefaced with the words "ah yes" as in "Ah yes, but if the universe was created, then there must be a creator..."

For me it’s more about if you examine any single thing from the minutest that cannot be seen with the naked eye to the most colossal it all shouts DESIGN (snowflakes geometric in shape and no two the same; the mathematical fraction required to makes a spiral ­ genius; I could go on and on). You see, as soon as you use the word ‘design’ there must be a design­ER.

Much of it shouts “very poor design indeed”, but I am going to hand over to Christopher Hitchens again here as he says it much better than me.

“If this was the plan - was it made by someone who likes us? And if so, why have 99.9% of all the other species that have ever been created already died out? And part of what plan was that?; If it is a plan or a design, the planner must be either very capricious - really toying with his creation; and/or very clumsy, very tinkering and fantastically wasteful - throw away 99.9% of what you've made; or very cruel and very callous; or just perhaps very indifferent; or some combination of all the above. And so it's no good saying that He moves in mysterious ways, or that He has purposes that are opaque to us, because even that kind of evasion has to make itself predicate on the assumption that the person saying this knows more than I do about the supernatural, and I haven't yet met anyone who does have a private line to the creator, of the sort that would be required even to speculate about it. In other words, I haven't met anyone, in holy orders or out of it, who isn't also a primate. And neither have you.”

The last two paragraphs actually cover a lot of ground in a very small period of time and they need to be explained further. Before I do though I would caution you that at this point I do not generally devolve the discussion into violence and rain down upon my foe a volley of punches. I leave that sort of thing for the Christian God to do. No, at this stage my usual reaction is to remind myself of the adage that one should not argue with an idiot as they will bring you down to their level and then beat you with experience.

The first point is that the idea that the universe was created with time, not in time is a tricky one. What it means is that time itself did not exist before the big bang. When I think about this for a long time it gives me a headache, so I caution you to use an egg timer to ration the amount of time you spend thinking about it. Time (apparently) is the fourth dimension, meaning that we have three dimensions in space and one dimension in time. This gives me an even worse headache. Physicists of note assure me that there is no special reason why there can't be more dimensions in both time and space. Thinking about this for too long generally leads to heavy drinking and psychotropic drugs followed by a long period of rehab.

Yes tricky, but if there was no time before the big bang are we saying the bang was a definite beginning? So whether we say Creator or Big Bang are we saying that the first few words of the Bible “In the beginning” are not actually wrong?

I tell you what, for brevity I will concede that there are three words in the bible that just might be correct.

In terms of what happened at the time of the big bang, we actually know a great deal. A large number of physicists with goatee beards, Star Trek t­shirts and poor social skills are quite fascinated with what happened just after the big bang. I should explain here that while you and I might consider "5 minutes later" to be the same as "just after" and anything less than "one minute later" to be the same as "immediately after”, these guys are pretty full on. We know with a great deal of certainty exactly what happened immediately after the big bang where "immediately after" is defined in seconds by writing a decimal point followed by writing zeroes until your hand is tired and then writing the numeral 1. At present there are about 50 zeroes. That’s 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds.

Yes, my brain hurts trying to comprehend numbers like this. I have seen these big numbers before in relation to the improbability of life occurring spontaneously.

Don’t go there, it will be nasty for you.

So we know what the universe looked like one gazillionth of a second after the big bang but what about one gazillionth before the big bang? Well we can't know because there was no time then. See? I told you it's headache inducing. The universe, including all three dimensions of space and the single dimension of time were created all at the same time.

We know about the universe a gazillionth of a second after the big bang because the universe has left us plenty of clues. We don't know about it before because any possible clues are wiped out by the big bang and the creation of time. It means, among other things, that even if there was a cause, there is no way to know what it was because it is completely outside our universe.

So the argument from the religious will go that we can't know and therefore GODDUNNIT. They will prevaricate on this point by using terminology such as "higher power" or "supreme being" but there is no question that they really mean GODDUNNIT and I have to concede at this point because it is indeed possible I suppose that a being from outside our dimensions was involved in some way with the creation of the universe. Whether that

being was supreme or otherwise and indeed whether the act of creation was deliberate or accidental cannot be known at all.

I personally struggle to believe that the perfect order and precision timing in the universe, plus design, artistry and that the right kind of proteins and just the right kind of amino acids coming together to form life etc etc could be accidental. In any case none of this answers life’s most perplexing questions that all people ask regardless of belief, race and so on whereas the Bible does. Nor does it tell what’s going to happen in the future, most people the world over are interested in what the future will be for their children and their children’s children and for this exquisite planet we call home.

What you or I personally believe or struggle to believe is of little moment. What we can demonstrate to be true is what matters.

I’d be very interested to hear of any perplexing questions that the bible answers clearly and unambiguously.

What we can be pretty certain of is that this supreme being, if it in fact exists, bears absolutely no resemblance to any of the gods that mankind has created over the last 10,000 years or so.

Of course he doesn’t, the gods mankind has created don’t exist, they are not real. (There is a passage in the Bible that speaks of the absurdity of a man who chops down a tree half of which he burns to cook food and the other half of which he makes a god that he bows to and says save me for you are my god)

So we agree that gods don’t exist?

It is a supreme being that made no imprint of the world beyond kicking off the big bang and continues to have no impact on our lives. There is not the slightest shred of evidence that the being is in any way interested in our tiny lump of rock let along the carbon­based bipedal life forms that roam around it wondering whether the being exists.

Strongly disagree, very much interested and very much in control ­ Huge subject but the Bible explains all this also. The carbon based bipedal life forms are also made of many things that are abstract in nature. I LOVE life and roaming around here. Whatever people believe we can agree that there is indeed much that inspires awe.

There is indeed much that inspires awe, but in the words of Douglas Adams, “Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

Indeed the only evidence that I have yet been able to find for a supreme being is the fact, faithful reader, that you have read this far. Thank you so much for your attention.

I have enjoyed dissecting this blog immensely. It is as an ancient proverb says ‘as iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens his friend’

For those of you asking about my literary efforts, I have to confess that the novella that I planned to release has indeed been written and it’s called “Spider Dunstan’s Teeth”. Sadly, after circulating it to a few readers I find that it has been greeted with responses that are, shall we say, lukewarm. Some of them might be used as an illustration of the phrase "damning with faint praise". For that reason, I could not bear to charge money for it and hence I have not released it. If you are especially keen to read it anyway, send me a request by email and I will send it to you. Your payment will be that you actually read it and give me a review here at my blog. I am actually very confident that you wont read it, but hey, we will both feel better about the world.

What harm could there be in releasing it anyway? People will make their own choice whether they want to pay for it or not. What have you got to lose is what I am thinking?

You’ve talked me into it.