Tony Smith makes an extremely valid point in his letter “Bible can guide us” (Letters, February 25), when he says, “The vastness and complexity of creation cries out that there must be a designer”. This statement lies at the very heart of our religious dilemma. It harks back to a time before we understood how the theory of evolution works.

It is almost wrong to call evolution a “theory”. It is a scientific “truth” that has been extremely well verified across many platforms.

It’s very easy to see how the many forms of religious belief came about. You just have to look at the incredible diversity and complexity of life on Earth to see that the illusion of intelligent design is an extremely powerful one. I even believed in it myself once. Then I read about evolution.

I will concede that the early stages of this process are not yet proven but progress is being made and at least it is plausible.

Surely it is much more likely that life went from extreme simplicity to complexity. If you postulate an intelligent designer (deity) then he would necessarily have to be extremely complex himself and would also have had to evolved in some way, which you would then have to explain. This intelligent designer is a complete cop-out and just makes the enigma worse.

Most Christians do seem to embrace evolution now, although I do not really see how it can sit with their beliefs. Big bang theory too seems to be gaining their acceptance.

How the universe came into existence is a big mystery but even here physicists have made a little headway, firstly by proving that there really was a big bang start to the universe (and even dating it to 13.7 billion years ago) and secondly by discovering that it has actually come out of nothing. This is completely counter intuitive to our common sense but the universe does not care about common sense and, amazingly, this is allowed in quantum theory.

Tony makes lots of references to the Bible but he would do well to realise that the Bible was copied by hand from generation to generation, each scribe adding his own embellishments. The earliest known copy, Codex Sinaiticus, is very different to the modern one.

R Shaw, Aberdeen Road, Brighton