Lance

Holy crap, Steve. You're either smarter than I give you credit for or you're really giving your thesaurus a workout.

I hadn't realized the connection between that article about greed and Smith's stuff. He was much earlier, right? Eighteenth century? Most of what I know about him comes from watching "A Beautiful Mind."

John makes a good point in his last post - I often wrestle with the thought that belief in God may only stem from a fear of death.

However, pointing out that there is an alternative possibility doesn't logically refute existence of God. If we're working exclusively through logic, God and Creationism can't be proven, but can't be ruled out either.

Likewise, we can't rule out life on other planets. We have no evidence of it - in fact, it was only a few years ago that we found any evidence there even are other planets around other stars, and we still haven't found any that would support life (as we know it, anyway).

Knowing so little, how can we rule anything out, and in the case of God's existence, why would we? I find it too important of a question to simply lay it down because there are other, simpler explanations.