Where Have All the Creatures Gone?

According to the fossil record, 99% of all species that ever lived on earth are now extinct. Take a few moments to let that sink in. Almost everything that ever lived is now dead. Knowing that 99 out of every 100 things that ever lived on the planet is now gone forever, I can’t help but recall Woody Allen’s remark; “The best thing I can say about god is that he is an underachiever.”


99%!! If 99 out of 100 aircraft designed by aeronautical engineers crashed, nobody in their right mind would go near one of the damned things. Yet god creates millions of species and only one percent survives? Intelligent design indeed!
Here is a quote from Stephen fry during an interview by bigthink.com in December of 09.

"I love how when people watch, I don’t know, David Attenborough or Discovery Planet type thing, you know, where you see the absolute phenomenal majesty and complexity and bewildering beauty of nature, and you stare at it and then … somebody next to you goes, 'And how can you say there is no God? Look at that.' And then five minutes later you’re looking at the life cycle of a parasitic worm whose job is to bury itself in the eyeball of a little lamb and eat the eyeball from inside while the lamb dies in horrible agony and then you turn to them and say, 'Yeah, where is your God now?' "

Carl Sagan asked, “Who are we?” And then answered his own question. “We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.

“For me,” he said, “it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”  THE VASTNESS IS BEARABLE ONLY THROUGH LOVE!
What a wonderful way to put it. He was talking about the love for each other, not the love of some make believe celestial dictator who reads our very thoughts.

In a previous commentary titled “Belief,” I tried to show just how weak and absurd beliefs are. This has fascinated me for years. The things people can believe or be convinced to believe. And here’s the most fascinating part. When you point out to them how ridiculous opposing belief systems are, they will heartily agree. But when you point out that their beliefs are just as ridiculous, they will immediately get their knickers in a knot, bristling at the notion that their beliefs may be just as preposterous.

Here’s an example of why “belief” is such a weak word.

Imagine you are in a room and have been told to drink from one of two glasses of clear liquid, one which is plain water, and the other is a deadly poison. You ask an attendant which one contains the poison.  The aide points to one of the glasses.

Which answer had you rather hear? 1. “I believe the poison is in that one,” OR,  2. “the poison is in that one.”

Now consider this. The dinosaurs ruled the earth for 200 million years before they went extinct. If our brains were proportionately the size of a dinosaur’s brain, ours would be about the size of a pea. Yet somehow, these lumbering behemoths survived for 200 million years with their tiny brains.

We evolved to our present state some 200,000 years ago with a brain proportionately 100 times as big as a dinosaur. Dinosaurs survived a thousand times longer than we have so far. What do you think the chances are that we will survive another 200 years at the rate we are going, much less 200 million. Unless we give up our idiotic superstitions, we don’t have a snowball’s chance in your imaginary hell.

Go ahead and build your creationist museums and dumb down our children. You will reap what you sow. In fact you are reaping it now. If you doubt that, take another good look at the Republican candidates for President. All are delusional.