I rather like it the way things are.

"The larger question of why a god who allegedly sparked evolution is deserving of human devotion, however, still remains to be answered."

Because this was directed at me, I'll respond. I don't think we're alone in the universe. Far from it. I imagine there all kinds of planets that support life out there. There was nothing narcissistic about my comments. I also don't want to speculate about the nature of the "supreme being." I'm just saying the evidence indicates there is something of a lot higher order than man at work here. The "coincidence" is too huge. My point of view comes from humility, not narcissism.

Chiefley fills out what I was saying earlier…..many millions of Christians have accepted evolution as the best explanation of how life developed here on earth.

The larger question of why a god who allegedly sparked evolution is deserving of human devotion, however, still remains to be answered.

jimmie……it's all, literally, overwhelming…isn't it? Man made god in his own image, and made themselves the center of that god's attention. Narcissism on steroids.

I am talking about the Roman Catholics, the Episcopalians, the Presbyterians, the United Methodists, and the ELCA Lutherans. The Lutherans don't have a social statement, but Lutheran writers are prolific in the area of science and religion.

A good example of a social statement is the one from the Episcopalians:

http://www.episcopalchurch.org/19021_58398_ENG_HTM.htm

All of these denominations firmly believe that God is the Creator of the Universe, but they also accept the scientific findings that this creation took place billions of years ago and the diversity of life on the planet is best explained by evolution.

Chris Matthews is a turd, you'll get no argument about that from the right.

The Hubble Space telescope took an image in 2003 called the Ultra Deep Field. The Hubble stared at a blank patch of space for 11 days. The field of view was equivalent to a grain of rice held at arms length. In this small patch there were 10,000 visible galaxies. That's 27,000,000th of the whole sky.

Get a planet that's the correct distance from a star, add some water and over a few billion years you may get life of some sort.

What's truly amazing are the odds that we are alive and have a form of consciousness we recognize as ourselves.

When you try to wrap your mind around these numbers it's truly boggling. And it leads me to the exact opposite conclusion that King made. A supreme being created this tiny little planet out of the entire universe just for us? Talk about narcissism! 2,000 years ago if you thought all that existed was our earth, the sun and the stars overhead, I can see how the god of the Bible made sense.

My answer is that the exact opposite is true. Everywhere around us is evidence of a higher power than man at work. Everywhere. All of our greatest scientific minds are engaged in one pursuit – to understand what has already been placed here in advance. Man hasn't created anything. It was all put here for us. We merely "discover" how to use what was already placed into existence long before we arrived. Creation does imply a creator of some sort, in my opinion. Different people have different ideas about the nature of that creator, but the alternative is to believe it is all some kind of incredibly enormous cosmic coincidence. Highly unlikely, if you ask me. The "coincidence" theory (atheism, if you will) has roughly the same odds that a monkey could write the collected works of Shakespeare on it's first try if you sat him in front of a computer keyboard. Theoretically possible, but it'd be foolish to believe it would happen. The intricately ordered structure of the universe, of our planet, from the quantum level on up, is a mind-boggling set of interdependent systems resulting in life on earth. Whether you call it natural or supernatural is ultimately irrelevant. The fact that this all exists in the first place is the testament to the miracle.

Hypocrisy is bad enough and we see it all the time.

But self-unaware hypocrisy that relishes in the pummeling of perceived lessers is especially repugnant.