Nutters in Wimbledon...

And I was singing that to myself, all the way back, on the bus, this afternoon (to the tune, if you're interested, of Inner City Unit's "Skinheads in Leningrad". If that helps...) There are some splendid examples of loonies there at the moment (well, seeing as it's about 1 in the morning, probably not right now, but, anyway...) - Christians, I think, who stand there with flip-charts, and shout a lot. Ian Paisley, style. But American. And not shouting "No!!" so much. But, anyway, having a few minutes to kill before the next bus, I listened to one, for a while - he was hilarious and infuriating in equal measure. Hilarious because he was talking obvious rubbish. Infuriating because he knew so much of it was rubbish, and was just lying a lot. For instance, he gave some clearly fictional anecdote about meeting a Russian physicist, and asking him what people in Russia believed, and after being told that they believed that the universe sprang into being from the Big Bang, asked him (allegedly) if he'd ever heard of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. This was meant to be his big put-down. Unfortunately, the second law states that the entropy of a closed system either increases or stays constant (more or less...) - not really anything to do with the creation of new systems. Presumably, he meant the first law - the one stating that matter can neither be created nor destroyed. Which is all well and good, but surely a Russian physicist would have noticed his error? And surely, also, the physicist would have pointed out that the 1st Law can't really be applied under the singularity conditions, when all laws of physics break down? However, apparently not, this top physicist acquiesced, and simply said that, in reality, people knew it was all down to god, and only communism, evil, bad communism, kept them from saying it. Then he went on to point out that science is all wrong, and that it's only god who can explain the universe. A point he underlined nicely with his use of the phrase "Hitler was right" (OK, I quote him somewhat out of context - I think his full quote was "Hitler was right - people will believe anything if you repeat it to them long enough". But still, an odd choice of person to be quoting for a self-declared Christian - surely someone else has said this, too?)
Well, I don't know if there is a god or not. I can point out bits of the bible which are clearly untrue, bits which don't cohere with other bits, and various points of some religious beliefs that can be refuted. However, if people want to claim that god
was the initial spark which set off the universe, that's up to them. It doesn't really imply any reason for believing that this god had any intelligence or design, though, does it? Much less, any moral purpose. Indeed, we look at the state of the world, if anything, it seems the reverse if true - either that god had no purpose, or that it wasn't a particularly pleasant one (shades of the Manichean heresy rearing their heads in Puskas's blog. Aren't we all grateful?) And if the best this all-powerful, all-loving god can do is some half-wit American nutter shouting on a cold Sunday afternoon, on a street corner in Wimbledon, one really does wonder as to the evidence for it all.