Hi °C | Lo °C Perhaps if Wilson Fitzgerald (Write Back, July 13) had paid more attention to the various TV and radio creation debates which have failed to sway his faith, then he would know that Darwin did not come up with the big bang theory.
The theory was first proposed by Georges Lemaître, a Belgian physicist and Roman Catholic priest, and at the time critics claimed he was trying to insert his religious beliefs into science with a theory derived from the passages of Genesis!
Furthermore, the Earth is not “perfectly round”, but an oblate spheroid that bulges at the equator, and humans did not evolve from “monkeys” but rather an ape-like ancestor shared by all primates.
The reason other “monkeys” still exist is because the Earth still contains sufficiently diverse habitats to support them, though this may change with our own species' increasingly negative impact on the environment. As for the suggestion that the big bang explosion would need to be intelligent in order to create a universe so perfectly attuned to our needs, I am reminded of Douglas Adams's self-aware puddle — astonished to find itself lying in such a neatly-fitting hole.
Jim Marcus
Larne
