what are the chances?

Well good evening to you all and welcome once again to my blog, my slow, ponderous rant against the various foibles and fallacies that I face in the daily hell that we chose to call existence.

Now as you know I am one who loves a good ruminate but more than that I like to discuss my ruminations with others, rather like an intellectual cow that’s now sitting alone in a field chewing its cud and wondering “Why do we eat this vile cud? And what insane deity created me to have four separate stomachs so it takes hours for me to be able to digest anything?” but having no fellow cattle to discuss such issues with. However my pantheistic bovine does neatly bring me into my discussion for today and it’s one that I think may well cause a little controversy, it’s the creationist principle or perhaps, as I prefer to call it the creationist myth. Now as we’re all well aware there are, in general terms, two camps regarding the creation of the world the sciency one that says we’re basically one giant mistake so just enjoy yourself while you’re here and the creationist principle that says a divine deity be it god, Buddha, Allah, Zeus or that annoying blonde creature from the Rice Krispies box (Crackle? I think) has decided billions of years ago that you were to exist.

The major complaints regarding this seem to be the general lack of evidence to support such a theory after all the scientists do have evidence nothing conclusive yet but who knows what this giant world-destroying machine they’ve built under Switzerland is capable of but nevertheless at least the scientists are trying. Even today we find they’ve uncovered an ancient fossil which links us to our primatical forebears and I rather like the idea that the Stepehn Hawking of the ancient ape world decided ona better way of doing things, e.g. standing upright and talking and whatnot and created us whereas the Wayne Roney of the ancient ape-world (Who ironically enough probably looked a lot like Wayne Rooney) decided to just sit in a tree scratching it’s scrotum. Yes indeed we human types, or so the scientist would tell us, are the most intelligent creatures ever we developed over millions of years to become an elite species capable of mastering complex skills like surgery, ironmongery, dentistry and that thing some people can do where they can bend their fingers right back all these wonderful things created because we are the best of the best. But none of this would be available to us without exhaustive sc ientific research undertaken by men in labs wearing holey tank tops and with breath that would make a toucan flinch. As for the creationists however they just seem lazy by comparison I mean there is so little evidence out there to support the theories espoused by theologians the world over but this just does not get mentioned or assessed. Now the “evidence” of a creator myth is interesting because it isn’t evidence as such the general idea seems to be that we should look at the world and see the fact that our planet is the only one capable of supporting life and it’s a certain distance from the sun that makes it habitable and this cannot be a coincidence but this is quite simply a self-destroying idea the reason this planet supports ife is because, as the religious types have already pointed out it’s the only planet CAPABLE of creating life. If I get 9 pads of cotton wool dampen them all and put cress seeds on one of them then come back to them a week later and bellow “Behold, this cotton wool pad is the only one that has grown cress it is clearly the evidence of divine provenance at work!” no it’s just that that the only one that is capable of growing the cress. Alternatively we could put cress seeds on all the pieces of cotton wool then put one in the freezer, one in the oven, one in a boiling kettle put one underground and leave one on the windowsill and come back again in a week and say “Lo! This piece of cotton wool has grown the cress seeds and none of the others have, fear my wrath!” apart from getting carted off to a hospital for the clinically insane for talking to cress you have to accept that the conditions for the other cress seedlings were not ambient, who’s to say life never existed on Mercury but, like our cotton wool pad in the oven, it was simply too hot to support life or maybe life existed on Pluto but, like the frozen cress pad, it was too cold to support life, we just don’t know. The simple fact though is that these ridiculous statements that the religious zealots of the world espouse have no basis in fact they’re just truisms that can’t be disproved.

Personally I find the whole idea of creationism also to be ridiculously pressurised how can anyone who truly believes live under such conditions. If we take all the humans on the earth and we use the latest figures that suggest the population is about 7 biliion people and you add in all the animals and plants and other living flora and fauna on the planet the number you get would be uncalculable. I mean there are about 24 billion chickens in the world which means you were four times more likely to be born a chicken even more fun there are over 10 QUINTILLION (18 0’s I believe) insects on this planet so you are over a billion times more likely to have been born a beetle than a human (that’s just a beetle not even an insect in general) even with the luck of that German octopus you are talking incredibly slim odds and yet some higher power has decided that you were to be born. Even of the world was just insects, humans and chickens you’re still talking about a 1 in 1,428,571,433 chance of being born a human how can you possibly live with yourself knowing that god has forsaken that many lives as insects and chickens not to mention the thousands of sloths, giant pandas, blue whales out there just so you can sit there eating an éclair?

The alternative is to think of it in the scientific way to say that no-one has decided that you were going to be born it’s just a glorious mistake. Bear in mind that the chances of winning the lottery are about 1 in 14,000,000 just by being born human you have basically won the lottery 102 times now isn’t that a nice thought for your evening?

This week Matt:

• Discovered a very pleasant bottle of red and inadvertantly drank it all in one evening.

• Had an amazing time listening to some wonderful jazz in amazing surroundings.

• Decided he officially needs a holiday before he goes mad(der)