Recently, Alex Salmond, Scotland’s former First Minister caused a stir amongst atheists and other secularists when he stated that he preferred people of faith to those with no faith or who had lost their faith. Their reaction was all to predictable, slating him for daring to express his views. They suppress other people’s views about religion by rubbishing them. Too many lobby groups use this technique these days rather than address the issues their opponents raise. All too often it is because their arguments are weak. Because people know they will get abuse if they contradict them so they tend to keep quiet. While agnostics can claim to have no faith the same cannot be said of atheists.

To exclude the possibility of any kind of divine agency and leave everything to blind chance as to the origins of the universe through to life itself requires a high degree of faith. There can be no reason for the universe coming into existence in the first place as that would indicate a divine designer. Despite searches for life elsewhere in the universe we are the only known place in the universe where life, especially intelligent life, is known to exist. When Darwin wrote his Origin of Species very little was known about biochemical processes and life was believed to come about easily. The more we discover in this field the more the odds are stacked against it. Scientists developed a computer programme that calculated the chances of amino acids forming a protein by random processes and found it was billions to one. And that is just one of many required in each cell. Normally such odds would regarded as statistically impossible. But atheists have such a faith in their beliefs that they disregard the science when it contradicts them. DNA contains information, but how could a bunch of chemicals come together by accident and become a complicated code without an intelligence behind it? It takes great faith to believe that. When it comes to alleged human ancestors it also takes a lot of faith to believe. In the past week there was an announcement of another discovery of an alleged human ancestor in South Africa. A collection of bones had been found in a cave. A picture suggested that they were all jumbled up and might have come from more than one individual creature. TV reports then went on to show an artist’s impression of what the creature allegedly looked like. But the process of arriving at this image was only briefly hinted at. What tends to be omitted in these stories is how much of a skeleton is missing, such as the small bones of the hands and feet which are always the first to decay or detach from a skeleton. But they are the very ones which help to show how human these discoveries actually are. The same goes on as to they arrive at the dating of these objects, a date is stated but the details are missing. Yet again it takes a lot of faith to believe it all.

David Rose, 2015.