Is God a beetle?

Since the end of your second world war, there has been quite a strange thing happening with you lot. On the one hand you're inventing/resurrecting religions/belief systems left, right and centre because the ones you have don't appeal to you any more. They were made for simpler times when people were less well educated and too busy trying to stay alive to worry about the whichness of the why.

On the other hand you've whole gangs going around stripping any changes that might have been made to their religion to take account of societal development and taking a fundamentalist view. I guess those people just don't want to think for themselves at all. The 'Good Book', whichever one you choose, has done all the thinking for you!

Now it's said that around 50% of Americans believe in a literal interpretation of Christianity's creation myth, ie God created the earth and everything in it in six days! Now I find the percentage hard to credit but even if it's off by a factor of 2, that's a hell of a lot of people.

Now I 'believe' in evolution by natural selection. That is, I think it's the best solution to the variety of life on the planet that anyone's come up with. It might not be completely true but it's so good at explaining things that, like quantum mechanics, it's got to be close. A lot closer than some omnipotent god. I look at King Penguins and I look at me and we're pretty much the same, except we're bigger. Now a King wouldn't last a month here, that's why they breed closer to the sea. Not enough fat or stamina. Doesn't it make more sense to think that some ancestor of a King who was just a little bigger and a little fatter could better his/her chances of survival by moving further inland away from predators and eventually get to be us? Or would you rather believe some omnipotent deity made Emperors and the Kings are just half baked runts? First attempts?

Now I want to conduct a little experiment. You don't believe as I do and so conjecture that at some 'time' an omnipotent being woke up one 'Monday morning' and thought, "What shall I do today? I know I'll make a planet!" Well OK, it was probably more like he/she was looking into the featureless void and thinking, "Now what that needs is a nice little blue/green planet, some flecks of white here and there. Go nice with all those little lamps I made eons ago. Be a nice focal point for the void, I think"

I think we also have to assume that world making is not God's main day job. Given the time at his/her disposal, we'd be up to our ears in planets if it were. So it's a vanity project. A bit like Russell Crowe or David Hasselhof playing rock music (badly), something they do when they're not doing what they usually do, although I don't know what God's day job actually is, nor Hasselhof's for that matter, at least Crowe can act (a bit).

So on the Monday morning God starts work. Fashions a big rock, adds water, air, creates all this false history in the rocks like seas where land is and vice versa, remains of animals that aren't around anymore. Stuff like that. Sometime later, he/she thinks life might be a good idea. Something other than him/herself to admire the handiwork, this is a vanity project, remember. So he/she creates the seemingly endless variety of life we all see every day. Right at the end he/she fashions two creatures, in his/her own image, plonks them in a prehistoric MacDonalds and says, "Enjoy your meal! Have a nice day!"

Now Thomas Huxley, one of the twentieth century's great biologists, once remarked that God must be inordinately fond of beetles. Whether he nicked that from Linnaeus or not I don't know. Anyhow, he made the comment because something like 25% of all the different species on the planet are beetles! Now, and here comes the experiment, imagine you're God involved in a vanity project. In what way do you make your own 'image' visible in the world you've created? By creating two versions of yourself or creating millions. You can probably reckon which side I come down on.

So God is a beetle. Isn't that just as plausible? Remember, the experiment doesn't allow you to postulate fast population turnover, a very plastic body plan, no internal skeleton, small size and so a wide variety of micro-niches to evolve into etc etc.

No, you have to conclude that God is a beetle.