I was born in England, near Manchester, in a well-off family, and sent to Sunday School when I was about six or seven, but I never really believed any of it even then. They told me the church was always open for me to come in and pray whenever I liked, and this gave me an idea. I was fond of wandering about the neighbourhood and had a particular liking for ponds and streams, which meant I often had wet feet when I came home. My mother really worried about this because she shared the current belief that wet feet were the cause of many fatal illnesses. That she was clearly mistaken was obvious to me even then, but I suddenly realised that here was a splendid way round the problem. I would secrete a supply of oatmeal under the pew (my Children's Encylopedia told me that oatmeal was a good way to dry wet shoes) and my problem was solved. Brilliant!

That was about as far as I got with religious belief. Perhaps I was lucky. I still wonder what they thought when they discovered the oatmeal. I went on with life nevertheless, giving the occasional lip-service when getting married and so forth. I spent WW2 at sea and then went to London University to study chemistry, folowed by happy marriage, children, lots more research, a new job in Australia, and time to think, read philosopy, and get my ideas some sort of firm foundation.

Popper set me right on the question of what we know and how we know it. His answer was that we don't know anything for certain and never will. Even if we did ever stumble on the ultimate truth we have no way of knowing that we have done so. We proceed by conjecture and refutation, in science and in everything else. We form a theory and then do our very best to demolish it. When we succeed we think of a better theory and demolish that so gradually the theories get better and better. That is what we do, in fact. Faith is eyewash.

There are one or two conditions. Theories must be refutable of couurse otherwise they are no good. Theories like "God exists" are not testable by experiment and so are disallowed as not scientific. You could try, of course. You could do a lot of praying and see if your prayers were answered but that doesn't seem to convince people even if they aren't. A scientific theory must make predictions which can be clearly either verified or falsified by experiment, otherwise it is not scientific and therefore useless. Read some Popper to get the full sp.

If we ask ourselves why religions got started at all in the first place it seems clear that people have always asked questions like "What are we", "Where did we come from". Some wise elder would eventually jump up and claim he had the answer because he had this vision and so forth, but that's no good. All the world-pictures formed that way have turned out to be either plainly wrong, or just not testable. Good, solid, testable stuff is what we need.

We have the answer from Charles Darwin closely followed by Richard Dawkins. Chemisry, just chemistry, is what we are, and how we got here, and for all the processes involved and how they worked we have good, testable, unrefuted theories. There is no more to be said.

But religion is not just wrong, it is dangerously harmful. The maniacs who blow themselves up in the name of Allah are obviously deluded. The promised houris of paradise waiting for them to arrive are simply not there - at least there is no evidence that they are, and the doctrines that promise them are themselves discredited. If only we could persuade them so perhhaps the threat of terrorism would vanish away, so why don't we do it? Because we ourselves are wrapt in religion. All we can do is say "Our's is better than your's", and back to the Crusades we go. If Bush would stop prating about God we might have a leg to stand on, but as things are, what hope have we?

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