Your book The GOD Delusion is very interesting. You debunked many things that I never believed in, but I think you have thrown out the baby with the bathwater.

Well, you’re not alone. A newspaper reported of a 59-year-old Anglican high school teacher who recited his favourite prayer every day on his way to work, and suddenly he just stopped praying. “I stopped because I lost my faith, I now truly loath any sight or sound of religion. I blush at what I used to believe.” He now is an avowed atheist. Sadly, he’s messed up for life, and hundreds of millions like him.

I grew up rather irreligious. When I read the bible, out of curiosity in my twenties, I found nothing I could believe in. My last 50 years have been devoted in trying to understand what an incredible nature and universe we live in that, to my mind, couldn’t be all accidental.

I share your opinion that, ‘God retired’ after the big bang. Because, if scientists can say that the whole universe was smaller than an atom, some 14 billion years ago, which is unbelievable, then is it any less credible to suggest and believe that a creator, who is as intangible and invisible as is our mind, used the big bang to make a material universe possible?

Actually matter, as we think of it, does not exist, as everything is energy. A simple hydrogen atom, whose electron orbits the nucleus with some hundred million billion circuits every second makes ‘matter’ real to us time-space creatures. But where is the dynamo or battery or the source that makes all this possible?

Imagine if all the space within the atoms were taken out of our body, there would be nothing left of us to look at. So much for our present material importance.

I have no problem with the broad term ‘evolution’. But ‘Darwinian evolution’ devoid of ‘mind’ could not have a goal; it selects for what is useful now, not for what it might become useful in the future. When you say that natural selection is a ‘cumulative’ process, then who or what is the ‘selector’? Doesn’t ‘evolve’ suggest that there is intelligence behind it? Or is it all just happenstance, as far as you and atheists believe?

To simplify my personal beliefs of these complex phenomena that, evolution is the process of creation; I made up the word creavolution, some 20 years ago, and creavolution compliments the Anthropic Principle.

It is mind-boggling to read that Stephen Hawking believes that the universe has no creator, yet he believes that the universe can create itself spontaneously out of nothing. Wow!

Yes Mr Dawkins, fundamental religions have ruled humanity virtually forever, but this could only happen in cahoots with politicians and the money-manipulators. You forgot to mention this. People need to re-discover their birthright.

Regardless, what you or anybody else believes, we have a responsibility, a mandate, to take care of our planet for future generations, and we’re failing miserably. I’m deeply ashamed.

I humbly share the opinion of the late physicist John Wheeler, “We do not know the first thing about the universe, about ourselves, and about our place in the universe.”

Gunther Ostermann

Canada