He had seen that crime and immorality exist now, just as they had existed before the belief in one personal God, and just as they promise to exist beyond our time. He had scrutinized evidence revealing the incontestable fact that most criminals were religious, and absolutely and proportionately, a smaller number of criminals were non-believers in a personal deity. Judging by these alone, a belief in a benevolent, loving, omniscient, omnipotent, and compassionate Being could not be sustained. Furthermore, if such a God ever existed, he certainly would have revealed his true religion to the first man, Adam. If he required prayer to satisfy his vanity, he surely would have told Adam how, when, why, and where to pray. Then again, once having neglected to inform his first model about all this, since He is omnipotent, he would certainly have instilled into the minds of men "the" true creed so that no doubt could have ever entered into any one's mind. What a universe of suffering He would have saved! The Martian is aware that a great number of earthlings hold that every event must have a cause, therefore the Universe must have had a cause, which cause was God. Everything as it now exists in the universe is the result of an infinite series of causes and effects. Everything that happens is the result of something else that happened previously and so on backwards to all eternity. Applying this reasoning that everything is the effect of some cause, and that a cause is the effect of some other causes, the theists work back from effect to cause and from cause to effect until they reach a First Cause. By predicating a First Cause, however, the theist removes the mystery a stage further back. This First Cause they assume to be a cause that was not caused and this First Cause is God. Such a belief is a logical absurdity, and is an example of the ancient custom of creating a mystery to explain a mystery. If everything must have a cause, then the First Cause must be caused and therefore: Who made God? To say that this First Cause always existed is to deny the basic assumption of this "Theory." Moreover, if it is reasonable to assume a First Cause as having always existed, why is it unreasonable to assume that the materials of the universe always existed? To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy.