Madam, - The letter from Anthony Sheridan (September 8th) certainly takes the biscuit for smug satisfaction. Move over the countless philosophers and intellectual giants down the centuries who sought the meaning in a God hypothesis when confronting the mysteries of life. No, just join me in my superior rung of the evolutionary ladder, see how your brain is programmed and all is well.
The basic question for all of us is whether life has meaning or not. Is it, as a character in Macbeth put it, "just a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" or does it have a significant meaning? Is each one of us just a collection of cells, due for a brief existence and then exterminated? I think not.
Faced with the incredible modern outreach into space and the enormous complexity of human life, we find it much more beautiful and intellectually satisfying to believe in a supreme being who, however mysteriously, is behind all creation than to believe in a world of blind chance, a prison where each of us "struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more".
For the Christian that supreme being is revealed as a loving person, God, whom we are called upon to love and serve. Sadly, many of our lives don't match our beliefs, but that's another story. - Yours, etc,
CHRISTOPHER FOX, Waterford Road, Kilkenny.