Silting Up the Sea of Faith

Young-Earthers, Biblical literalists and other intellectual eminences will doubtless be exalted to find another test of faith from their whimsical deity. Thousands of fossilised jellyfish, sponges, worms and other cultural conservatives have been discovered among the lands of the Heathen Chinee, where the divine prankster was fooling around with the mud some little time ago. He then solidified the mud into rock, onto which He then threw a bit of make-up to give an impression of seniority. At least one victim of the evidence delusion has already proclaimed that such fossils "help us to tease apart how complex organs such as brains could be assembled through blind evolutionary processes" rather than through the creative rigours of the divine will to trickery.