Your Tribune letter
Ralph Nielsen nielsen@uidaho.edu
Wed, 27 May 1998 23:02:53 -0700 (00896353373, v03007808b192ae80dda8@[129.101.112.37])
>Mime-Version: 1.0
>Date: Wed, 27 May 1998 22:48:30 -0700
>To: Ralph Nielsen <nielsen@uidaho.edu>
>From: Don Matteson <matteson@moscow.com>
>Subject: Re: Your Tribune letter
>
>Dear Ralph and Judy:
>
>Thanks for your note. I really freaked out some of the local Bible
>thumpers with the first letter, even got an anonymous letter from Uniontown
>telling me I was an ass and that of course Jesus God could work miracles
>and I was going to regret whatever when I meet my maker. I also got a
>postcard from D. B. Hughes, who might or might not have read my second
>letter before she wrote. As usual, she wasn't too coherent, but you will
>be happy to know that she succesfully refuted evolution back in 1950.
>
>What prompted me to write what I did, of course, is the fundamentalists'
>insistence that there are reasonable scientific doubts about evolution, and
>that there are scientists out there who doubt evolution on scientific
>grounds. I get pretty tired of seeing that lie repeated over and over.
>The fundamentalists might as well attack the law of conservation of
>mass/energy, atoms and molecules, quantum theory, relativity theory, or the
>constancy of the speed of light - and indeed some have argued against
>several of those ideas in their "creation science" journal (available in
>the WSU science library), a truly wacko publication.
>
>It has occurred to me that even if God really did dictate the Holy Koran,
>oops, Bible that is, word for word, there is no way that people more than a
>thousand years ago could have understood - and believed - the immensity of
>the universe or even the numbers scientists use to describe it. There are
>other paradoxes with regard to the ultimate nature of the universe. If God
>never violates His Laws of Physics, then nothing supernatural ever happens,
>and we have no way of testing whether anything supernatural exists. If He
>does set aside the laws of physics now and then, He is acting illogically,
>and (a) we have no way to prove the illogical event happened or (b) that it
>was God and not Satan that did it. (I am sure that Catholic theologians
>have wrestled with these unanswerable questions and reached conclusive
>answers...) Ah, if people could only understand that faith is how you
>feel, not how you reason, about human relationships and the magnificence of
>the natural world.
>
>Anyhow, I always enjoy your letters pointing out what the Bible really says
>as opposed to what a lot of people who haven't read it think it says.
>
>Don Matteson
>