Fourty-five percent of the American population believe that God created humans and placed them on the Earth less than 10,000 years ago. It is an incredible statistic. That's 135,512,978 people in the USA who believe the Earth is 10,000 years old, twice the population of the UK.

The question of faith has always been a contentious, and interesting one. Causing more wars than anything else in history, religion has certainly been one of the more interesting phenomena that humanity has created for itself. The dominating religion in the Western world is Christianity and it is certainly hard to get away from it.

As scientific thinking and theories have improved over the last couple of hundred years there have been those religious fanatics who have chosen to reject reasonable ideas and logical thinking and cling to their spiritual beliefs in the wake of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

What got me thinking about religion and it's conflict with science was a particular branch of Christianity; Creationism. Creationism is the belief that evolution is a myth and that everything was created by an intelligent designer. In this case the designer is God. Strangely it isn't actually the theory of intelligent design that irks me here, I like to think I'm fairly open to new ideas and generally accepting of religious beliefs, even if I do not agree with them. What does bother me is how the creationists present their views, and how they have such a large population completely brainwashed into the belief.

The creationist argument is that life and the universe as we understand it is so complex, infinitely so, that for it to have happened by chance is ridiculous. They believe that the Earth and all the life that lives on it has been designed and placed there by a divine creator, a God. Obviously this flies in the face of evolution, the theory with millions of years worth of hard evidence.

A common theory put forward by well known creationists is that the banana presents the 'atheist's nightmare'. They say that the banana is perfectly suited for a human hand, is colour coordinated to show how ripe it is, has a bio-degradable wrapper, is good to eat and is perfectly shaped for the human mouth. They say that with all these things taken into account it is so obvious that the banana has been designed for humans to eat and hasn't just occurred by chance. What they fail to mention however, is that the wild banana is quite different. Filled with hard black seeds it is completely inedible. The banana that we know has been genetically modified over thousands of years into it's current form. In fact the designer of the banana is Man himself, hardly proof of a divine creator.

They then go on to compare various man made structures to naturally occurring phenomenon. They say that to say a building has no designer is ridiculous, and so therefore it is also ridiculous to say that nature has no designer. What they fail to mention is that everything that is naturally occurring has had millions, or billions of years to evolve and come into being. To say that an eye has naturally evolved does initially seem far fetched, but when it is backed up with billions of years of chance it suddenly doesn't seem so hard to believe.

Imagine playing the lottery every day for five billion years. You'd win quite a few times wouldn't you? Well this is how evolution works. Over such massive time frames tiny chances of things happening become almost certain to happen. I would guess that religious believers have difficulty in comprehending the vast amount of time that existed before Man. The problem with religion and creationism is that everything is so centered around our own species when really we've only been around for an astronomical blink of an eye. Even in our own planet's history we are quite insignificant, we've been around for 200,000 years as opposed to the 500 million years that fish have existed for. To say that a God has designed everything just for us seems entirely implausible to me.

Of course one could never be 100 percent sure that there was no God. You could never say that without having absolute knowledge of everything that exists, has existed or will exist. In this regard I am open to the fact that a God may exist, although I do not believe that one does.

I think that fabricating beliefs based on an old book and presenting them as fact is wrong, however. Surely science and rational thinking should be the basis on which opinion is formed. The purpose of science is to find evidence and present theories based on it. By turning yourself over to a religion you are able to just explain everything away with 'God did it'. Against such an point of view it becomes difficult to construct an argument. Inevitably they will ask some questions that science does not have an answer for yet, and then they can answer it with 'God did it'. Science does not pretend to have answers for things it does not understand yet, but preset facts based on real evidence and testing.

Organised religion and faith are relics from the past, unneeded in today's society. They were used to govern primitive people and give answers to things that people could not understand yet. Essentially ruling people with the fear of going to Hell, religion is no longer needed now that we have organised rules and police forces. By perpetuating the falsehood of creationism and presenting religion as fact these people are slowing the scientific advancement and development of our species.

Religious evangelism needs to accept science or cease spreading its lies, for the good of everyone.