Elf Sternberg

Of course, there's the question of how you define what the Earth is. If you're just talking about the solids, liquids, and gasses, then yes. If you're talking about the magnetic field it's really lumpy and irregular. The Ionosphere is shaped like a raindrop, tapering off in the direction opposite the sun. If you're talking about it as a gravitational body, it's a shallow dimple in spacetime with a smaller depression overlapping it (the moon). But yes. All of those agree. The earth is not a sphere. :)

The real problem as I see it with the religious point of view is that it's too egocentric and myopic. Pretend for a second that God exists. Okay, great. So now God is spontaneously created out of the void and chaos instead of the universe. So either some other process created God came from somewhere else and if he came from somewhere else, then what created that elsewhere? It's a simple scoping problem. At some level, something has to have been spontaneously created from chaos and nothing.

The real question is simply: Do you believe that emergent thing was a bunch of matter and energy which had the potential to give rise to life and then thought or do you believe that emergent thing was a fully formed consciousness capable of creating something as complex as the universe.

Faced with those two choices, one is considerably more plausible than the other.