You may care to give this section a miss, since it recounts all the pie-in-the-sky notions I have about the beginnings of existence—not our existence as life forms but existence of anything and everything. I have not a shred of scientific ability to justify any of my suggestions and conclusions, so, as I say, you might just as well not bother to read further.

It perplexes me why and how God-based religions continue to hold sway in the world—I can only assume that the powerful largest religious institutions have brain-washed an intelligent populace through succeeding generations and from childhood, so that I should have termed them as the otherwise intelligent populace. The stories appear so fanciful that no normal person would accept them as factual, unless of course there is good evidence available to show the credibility of the incredible. Instead the followers are compelled to fall back on “belief” and “faith” as an alternative to exercising critical assessment.

It was most welcome to find at last a champion in Professor Richard Dawkins to articulate and promulgate all the objections which I have had, or would have had were I to have been as learned as the professor. His seems to be a lone voice of authority in the noisome crowd of religious evangelicals. The meticulous analyses and the detailed argument set out in his recent book “The God Delusion” provide a pleasant contrast to religious preachings and dogma. It’s quite an achievement for virtually just one man to take on and defeat the enormous religious institutions, for defeat I take it to be, if the minuscule and weak attempts by some prelates to question his conclusions are enough to go by.

But Professor Dawkins has been most absorbed with the origins and development of living things, showing that natural selection allows no room for the theory of creationists or for that of “intelligent design”. To me, the Darwinian theory is so well evidenced that it is blindingly obvious. Nevertheless, my curiosity goes beyond (or before) that—how did anything, not just life, come into existence?

I am not alone in this! The scientific effort and resources expended in search of what I might blasphemously call this “Holy Grail” has been immense, as the CERN project provides testament. This is concentrated on trying to understand the micro-world, sub-atomic particles and the like. That in turn relates to the “Big Bang” theory which is supposed to explain everything, except that I am left in doubt about what seems to be such a glibly propounded solution—answering everything? It strikes me as being close, but not that close, to the “God” solution.

My being unable to understand much of the pronouncements of the scientific community, so far as concerns these subjects and exotica (such as string theory, worm-holes, multiple dimensions, and more), I’m left to mull it over for myself, which is what I have done.

It seemed best to convert my thoughts, my disparate thoughts, to paper to see if any of them stand up to scrutiny or whether they are just the daft ruminations of a doddering septuagenarian with too much time on his hands. Anyway, what I have so far put together is contained in a PDF file which you may foolishly download for reading by clicking HERE.

Any brickbats: by e-mail .