Admittedly, Peter Milward, in his June 24 letter "Cute description of creation," laid himself open to misinterpretation by injudiciously using a term like "intelligent design" in his reaction to Rowan Hooper's June 13 article, "Religion's cute, but creation chemistry is complex." But Milward did not deserve the severe roasting given him by Carlos Marks in the July 1 letter, "Getting closer to the truth."
The point that Milward was trying to make, as I see it, was that the field of science is limited in its scope, and beyond that what he calls philosophy takes over. In this connection it is pertinent to refer to the late Stephen Jay Gould's "Rocks of Ages," in which he starts from the principle that science and religion can never be synthesized under a common scheme, although that does not mean that they necessarily conflict. Each must stick to its own territory and not make pronouncement on matters that belong to the other's domain.
As regards natural selection, Hooper admitted in his March 8, 2006, article "New signals abound of our genetic evolution" that "Despite the name of his most famous book, Charles Darwin most clearly showed the origin of adaptations, not the origin of species. . . . It has been hard to find hard evidence that natural selection explains the origin of the 30 million to 100 million different species estimated to inhabit the Earth" (Hooper did cite a recent Vanderbilt University study that found a link between the degree of adaptation to different environments by closely related groups and the extent to which they can interbreed).
In other words, no amount of breeding will turn a fish into a mammal. Science tells us only the order in which different creatures evolved, and the length of time required for the process, but cannot tell us why evolution should have taken one direction rather than another, if only mechanical processes are involved. Scientists have satisfied themselves that the universe began with the Big Bang, but will never be able to prove what was there before the Big Bang.
And so we come around to religion, which is a matter of believing without being able to prove. To be sure, in the old days, belief was mixed up with superstition, but today believers, or at least the majority of them, are guided by reason, as Milward argues.
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