God is smart; Religions are stupid

I'll begin by pointing out that there are different sorts of "smarts" and "stupidity". Religions can be called "quite smart" with respect to how their con-artist operation has been so successful for thousands of years. This Debate will not be about that variety of "smarts". Instead, this Debate will focus on various claims made by Religions about God, and how they are stupid because they are self-contradictory, factually flawed, and/or irrational. This Debate will relate that connection to the overall Abortion Debate, so I would prefer that my opponent in this Debate be someone who opposes abortion at least partly on Religious grounds. To begin (the abortion-related stuff comes later), Religious Fundamentalists, who agree that God is very smart and knowledge-able, also "say" this: God did not know that the Big Bang could produce clouds of hydrogen gas, so He had to Create them, Himself. God did not know that Gravitation could coalesce the clouds into galaxies and stars, so He had to Create them, too. God did not know that if some of the stars were very big, they would shine very brightly, use up their hydrogen very quickly, create heavy elements in the process, and finally explode, seeding Space with clouds of dust, so He had to Create the dust clouds, Himself. God did not know that the clouds of dust could mix with slower-coalescing gas clouds, and ultimately Gravitation could cause stars accompanied by Earthlike planets to form, so He had to Create the Earth Himself. God did not know that when ultraviolet sunlight, geothermal heat, lightning discharges, and radiation from rocks bombard simple chemical molecules (like water, carbon dioxide, ammonia, methane, and various salts), and did so for millions of years, then complex organic molecules could gradually form, break, interact, reform, re-interact, rebreak, and reform in multitudinous ways. Also, God did not know that some organic molecules are tougher than others, and could tend to persist. God did not even know that less stable molecules could randomly obtain a degree of protection if they managed to loosely link to the more stable ones. Certainly God was ignorant of the fact that loose groupings of molecules constitute a crude degree of organization, and that an energy-rich environment could naturally promote more stable organizations over the less stable. We hardly need mention God's further unawareness of the simple fact that the more stable an organization is, the more complex it is capable of becoming. Yes, it is entirely due to God's lack of knowledge of the principles of feedback (wherein simple chemistry, energy, and Time could combine to drive molecular organization toward enormously complex dynamic stability) that God had to Create Life all by Himself. This same lack of information about the evolutionary process ultimately forced God to Create sexual reproduction and multicellular life, also; He merely made it look like a billion years or two had passed, before He got around to it. Then there was all the experimentation with life-forms that God had to conduct, occasionally rejecting up to 90% of them at once with global extinction events, before finally populating the land masses with various mammalian types. And God is so unoriginal with His Creation that He had to maintain the same amino acids and genetic code, from viruses to bacteria, through every plant and animal. Further proof of God's lack of originality comes from the fact that the more closely two species resemble each other, the more genes they usually have in common. Why, God only needed to alter 2% of chimpanzee genes to "Create" Man. As if chimps and humans couldn't possibly have merely evolved 1% in different directions from a common ancestor. If God is truly smart/knowledge-able, then God would have known that the Big Bang would inevitably lead to the Evolution of Man, without God needing to lift a metaphysical finger, at any stage along the way, to help the process along. Fundamentalist Religion Is Therefore Stupid, in calling God smart and knowledge-able, but describing the actions of an ignorant lout, to Create the Universe we see. Next, and applicable for a wider group of Religions than merely the Fundamentalists, is the notion that God is behind-the-scenes of ordinary day-to-day events, causing them all to happen --including human conceptions. There is a logical inconsistency right there. To believe God is in charge of the "miracle of conception" is to preclude believing that "sex causes pregnancy". One or the other claim could make sense, but not both. Because only an idiot would think that God is somehow forced by the sex act to cause a conception to occur! Not to mention that if you want to call a conception a "gift from God", you don't need sex to obtain it (see the "Virgin Mary" incident). Then there is the fact that up to 50% of conceptions Naturally fail to survive (replace the initial dots in links here with standard web-address characters). htt.../ucdavismagazine.ucdavis.edu/issues/su96/Feature/Feature-The_Facts_of_Life.html God is supposed to be perfect, so it is Stupid to claim that God is in charge of conceptions that have, say, fatally defective DNA. Especially when the Law of Cause and Effect (as previously presented for many steps of "Creation"), is quite sufficient to both explain conception and the natural failure rate. This brings me to "the lightning rod incident": htt.....ww.miltontimmons.com/ChruchesVsLightningRod.html The fact that "God's will" in terms of smiting people via lightning can so easily be thwarted simply proves that God's will is not actually behind the average lightning strike --and maybe not behind any lightning strike. Nor is an earthquake necessarily an Act of God, nor is a hurricane, or a tornado, or a meteor impact. Especially because, as our technology improves, we can acquire the means to prevent those things, much as a lightning rod can prevent a lightning strike. htt.../science.howstuffworks.com/nature/natural-disasters/lightning7.htm Large earthquakes, for example, can be prevented by "lubricating" fault lines, by injecting water and pumping it out again. The result will be endless swarms of tiny/unnotice-able quakes. htt.../geology.about.com/b/2012/03/14/fracking-or-just-pumping.htm The drawbacks begin with the fact that you don't want to start doing this on any existing fault that has significant stress on it, unless you would rather have a big quake now instead of a bigger quake later. And for some faults, you need to be able to drill 30+ miles underground to reach them (not yet possible). htt.../geology.about.com/od/earthquakes/a/aa_deeEQs.htm With respect to hurricanes (and tornadoes), both types of weather depend on lots of hot humid air for "fuel". In theory we could take that air and extract energy from it, thereby preventing it from being available for a hurricane or a tornado: htt.../thinkprogress.org/climate/2010/05/27/206094/noaa-atlantic-hurricane-season-forecast-active/ Multi-mile-high towers need to be built to do that, however. And preventing meteor strikes has been enough in the popular mind-set that I shouldn't need to do more than mention a Bruce Willis movie, "Armageddon". Thus God is not behind-the-scenes, of everyday events; God doesn't do boring stuff all the time (and all over the Universe). The Law of Cause and Effect suffices! It happens automatically, because that's the way the Universe is "built". In another Debate ( htt.....ww.debate.org/debate/23785/ ) I pointed out that immortal-soul-creation requires a special Act of God. My opponent, at the end of that debate, claimed that God does it as automatically as causing conception to occur. But, since there is absolutely no reason to think that God automatically causes conceptions (or lightnings) to occur, Religions are stupid to claim that unborn humans have souls.