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There was a time when we believed that complex things could arise spontaneously. It was not all that long ago that worms or maggots were thought to spring into existence, fully formed.

We've learned a bit since then. We know that all living things evolved from simpler things. We can disregard the idiotic beliefs of the truly god-soaked who still insist that God must have created us separately, but the supposedly enlightened theists are still apt to insist that, though the evidence of evolution is plain, God's hand must have at least started the process.

As we move closer to understanding what really happened, the religious must move back yet further, and say, yes, life arose from inanimate matter, but God created that matter, and it was His plan for this to occur.

But the theist, busily running backwards, desparately trying to retain what shreds of God's power that he can, has missed something very important: complex things are made from simpler building blocks.

It almost seems silly to say it now, but for a good part of our history, this was not such an obvious fact. While the first known postulation of atoms does go back to early Greek times, the real acceptance of such ideas, in biology and physics, is only very recent.

God has to be complex. No theist can worship a god that is less than what we are ourselves; indeed, gods must be bigger, grander, more powerful, more wise. But how can such a being arise, or even exist, without being composed of simpler building blocks.

It can't, of course. Such a god cannot exist.

But theists never give up, do they? I've only ever met one theist who had ever considered this argument, and he was of the opinion that yes, his God had at one time actually evolved from simpler roots (our dear Pooby sometimes makes noises that sound like this: I wonder if this is his view also?).

Ah, theists. Ain't they wonderful? Reality knocks 'em flat on the canvas, but like Weebles, they just pop right up again. The Evolution of God. So pretty, so poetic, so neat...

Nope. It doesn't work. Anybody who's ever programmed or just played with the Life computer game knows why. Put one cell on the screen and nothing happens. In that game, the rules for change require neighbors, and in real life something quite similar is true. Evolution seems to require competition for resources or at least some outside force. If God, the Creator of all, was once a lonely little lump of non- descript Meta-Energy, what would cause that lump to change? What resources did it need? Where did those resources come from? Who or what was competing for the resources? And let's not forget that evolution as we know it also requires reproduction. Hello, where are God's brother's and sisters?

Oh, well, God is special, right? He just evolves all by himself. Which makes him the product of a pretty strange series of accidents, at least up to the point before he acquires all the fantastic powers the theists attribute to him. That's not a god, that's a freak of creation.

The god theories just don't work out. Naturally they get even more ridiculous than just this simple Creator example, but even at it's core, even stripped of all other religious clap-trap, the base of religion, the concept of god, is impossible and completely at odds with reality.