What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals. -           Hamlet, William Shakespeare Not only man, each species of living organisms, is a breathtaking piece of design, occupying its niche in nature with perfect poise. One cannot but exclaim in awe at the wonderful process that designed this machine. An intelligent designer who created this perfect design seemed inevitable. Charles Robert Darwin busted the myth of a creator with the publication in 1859, of his book, The Origin of Species. Alfred Russel Wallace simultaneously arrived at this marvellous explanation – the theory of Natural Selection. Millions of species are designed for their habitat in nature, not by an ‘all seeing’ eye of a creator, but by the blind process of Natural Selection. Theory of evolution by natural selection took the wind o

In 1964, a pair of radio-astronomers, Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson, were experimenting on the huge twenty-feet antenna of the Bell Telephone Laboratory at Crawford Hill, New Jersey. They were trying to measure the radio waves emitted by our galaxy, the Milky Way. A constant noise bugged them and confounded their experiment. Frantic search for the source of noise revealed a pair of pigeons roosting on the antenna. They had left there 'a white dielectric material’ – young scientists reported in a delicate jargon. Pigeons were shooed away and antenna scraped off the contamination. But the noise persisted. Penzias and Wilson found that the noise was recorded with equal intensity irrespective of the direction in which antenna faced the sky. Radio waves were evidently not being emitted by a galaxy, but emanated from the whole space in the universe. They also found that these were microwaves with a wavelength of about 7.35 centimetres. This wavelength corresponded to a temperature

Theism is belief in a god or gods. Atheism is ‘a’, i.e., ‘without’ theism, or without belief in a god or gods. It is theists who are claiming a positive belief. Therefore, the onus of proof lies on their shoulders. Atheists are not asserting a belief. They merely do not find theists’ belief convincing. If the evidence is not forthcoming, is insufficient, or self-contradictory, the belief can be rejected forthwith. Einstein did not believe that Newton’s definition of gravity as the force of attraction between two bodies was the correct interpretation of gravity. He held that gravity results from warping of spacetime by massive bodies. He could not readily summon the maths to prove his theory. But he did not relinquish the job of proving his hypothesis to the Newtonians. He worked for ten years to arrive at the concise mathematical formulation of his theory of gravitation. Result was the theory of General Relativity – believed to be one of the most beautiful inventions of human mind.