Sir — Sentimentalists like Richard Dawkins and several of your correspondents dismiss religion, because they cannot believe that a benevolent Creator would allow the pain and misery that dominate our world.
They pooh-pooh miracles and then demand an enormous one, namely that humankind should have been miraculously excluded from the cruelties of natural selection.
Suppose, uniquely, that our species had not sought to compete for the survival of the fittest individuals and civilizations, but had instead devoted to benign scholarship and research the gigantic resources it has expended on armaments and inter-human warfare; then solutions would almost certainly have been discovered for almost all today's problems. But God does not cheat.
Possibly, given a few more millennia, humanity could evolve into a non-competitive species, though it seems more likely that long before that we shall have assured our physical (though possibly not our spiritual) extinction.
Hubert Allen, Marston
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