What is God?
First of all, do I care? I am an aetheist, a devout aetheist. However that doesn't mean I can't marvel at creation. I can even marvel at the strength religious people gain from their religions - but I think this is something which comes from within - an inner god if you will.
Were we created? Yes, I suppose we were - I like to think of it more as forged though, forged in the fire of an inhospitable world. The Earth for most of it's life has been an inhospitable place. Life as far as we can tell began on Earth around 4 billion years ago, between then and now we have had numerous mass extinctions. When there's a mass extinction there tends to be a great explosion of diversity - the most notable of which happened around 560 million years ago and was known as the Cambrian Explosion. Of course Cambrian and Pre-Cambrian long pre-date the dinosaurs. The other famous mass extinction was the suggested impact which occurred at the KT Boundary and wiped out the dinosaurs (The KT Bounday is the Cretaceous, Tertiary boudary, named KT because in German, Cretaceous is spelled with a K).
There have been many more.
Its difficult to say exactly why we evolved, evolution is an incredibly complex area of science, which in order to understand fully - you have to have in depth knowledge of various disciplines. Geology, biology, paleantology, eco-systems and more...
Current evidence suggests that humans closest relative is the Pan Paniscus or Bonobo Ape. Our scientific name as a species is currently Homo Sapiens, and our closest relatives are Pan Paniscus and Pan Troglodytes - or the chimpanzee. People ask - why are these still around if we evolved from them? Well the fact is we didn't - we just shared a common ancestor. Actually Homo Sapiens is the only surviving species of the branch which diverged from the common ancestor around 6 million years ago. We've found evidence of other branches such as Australopithecus, or the more famous Homo Erectus.
The fact is the idea of a tree of life which is often printed in books and magazines is a flawed vision. Really we should think of it as more of a forest of life, whereby may trees didn't grow very tall at all, branches broke off - trees died.
For some time there was confusion as to how the Ediacara biota, or soft bodied large organisms of the Ediacaran period evolved into the diverse hard shelled creatures of the Cambrian Explosion, and eventually true Tripoblasts. However at a later date Ediacaran soft bodied fossils were later found and dated post Cambrian Explosion, meaning they were probably a seperate group of species which died out because of competition from the newly evolved species of the Cambrian Explosion.
All our fossil records are incomplete, fossilisation is incredibly rare. Given the vast number of Tyranosaurus that must have lived, and the fact that the creature is so iconic in the human perception of dinosaurs that any indication that a skeleton has been found evokes an urgent recovery process... It's remarkable that less than 30 specimens have been found to date. Before the popularisation of dinosaurs by Jurassic Park this number was significantly less, less than 10.
I still think we have enough evidence, to conclude that in the light of all the current evidence of evolution speciation and gene mutation, against the evidence of their being an intelligient creator - evolution wins hands down.
At best God is the human created anthropomorhic personification of the amazing processes that nature perfoms on it's own.
