I am going to come in my pants again

[Squeamous]

I'll let you know!

Wot after the Dawkins?

Well I didn't squirt, but I did have a one sided rant at my OH where he looked a bit resigned and asked 'are you going to lecture me again?'

Kind of dampened the ardour

[The Flying Cow]

Is he a Christian?

[Agrajag]

Is he a Christian?

Don't dabble in rodding, young one.

[CrabGirl]

Wot after the Dawkins?

Well I didn't squirt, but I did have a one sided rant at my OH where he looked a bit resigned and asked 'are you going to lecture me again?'

Kind of dampened the ardour

Oh god. I do that. Cheese just looks at me and shifts uncomfortably whilst I rant on and on and on.

[Sanka113]

Look's like you're going to "double bag it" so that you can last through the entire movie.

[Squeamous]

Oh god. I do that. Cheese just looks at me and shifts uncomfortably whilst I rant on and on and on.

He probably knows he's not really required to contribute to the 'conversation'

Nope, he's not a Christian. Anyway, it suddenly hit me that Dawkins was wrong and had reached some pretty spurious conclusions. I was actually arguing in favour of religion .

[Barbarossa]

Oh god. I do that. Cheese just looks at me and shifts uncomfortably whilst I rant on and on and on.

He probably knows he's not really required to contribute to the 'conversation'

Nope, he's not a Christian. Anyway, it suddenly hit me that Dawkins was wrong and had reached some pretty spurious conclusions. I was actually arguing in favour of religion .

Dawkins very cleverly glossed over the things they don't know in order to hammer home the things that they do know, while at every available opportunity having a swipe at religion

That's not exactly helpful to the cause. Also, I didn't really learn anything new. Also I found his attitude pretty annoying.

Oh, and the biggest question Darwin couldn't answer wasn't how traits are passed from one generation to the next, but how life began in the first place. Evolution still hasn't got an answer for that, and it's never ever been recreated in a laboratory.

I'm hoping for something better in the next two programmes to be honest. Also I'm pretty sure he planted those fossils on the beach, I've been to Lyme Regis loads of times and never found anything that good

[Squeamous]

Oh it has been recreated in the laboratory Barbie. Miller-Urey Experiment. Don't forget the Earth is 4.6 billion years old, and we didn't even get crustaceans and the like until 570ma. That's several billions of years for a primordial soup of inorganic molecules and chemicals to combine to make organic ones, and to eventually make the bulding blocks of life.

That's not what concerns me though. It's hard to explain without going off on one, and since you're not married to me I'll let you off that particular unpleasantness. In short I feel that evolution is an undeniable fact, but just because evolution through natural selection exists doesn't mean it's responsible for major evolutionary leaps like limb formation or eyes. It's only ever been proven on a short and minor scale and I feel like Dawkins is making the mistake of extrapolating too much information from very little.

If I were 'the Creator' and I wanted to create life I would go about it in a very scientific way. I'd think 'how do I do this with the least effort, ensuring life can change and grow independently of me?' I'd create a code that could be altered to make an almost infinate number of permutations, enough to cope with any flux in environment, and then I'd use that, switching bits on and off to create novel features and body plans. When my work was done I'd disappear and let natural selection drive changes, and then maybe as time went by and I noticed my experiment coming along nicely I'd think 'wow, the planet's doing well but it needs a bit here and there'. God could have been a glorified terra former for all we know, creating certain types of life at the right time by altering the code to allow the Earth to go from a volcanic wasteland to the blue sphere it is now.

For all we know a creator could have been engineering all the great modifications that separate life into the larger groups and then allowed life to progress into the smaller modifications.

Not that I believe in God you understand

[Squeamous]

Oh and I might show you my fossils tonight .....I found a trilobite and an ancient sea urchin on the beach

[Barbarossa]

Oh it has been recreated in the laboratory Barbie. Miller-Urey Experiment.

Fuck me, why doesn't someone tell Bill Bryson!

Actually, that's really interesting stuff.