Faith In Nature

Reprint of a "Letter to the Editor" in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on November 14, 2005

Faith In Nature

Believers in evolution-cum-naturalism are having a hard time of it recently.Desperate times require desperate measures. The article "The resistance race" (Nov. 6), on intra-species adaptation to adverse environments, e.g., resistance to chemicals and drugs, was inexplicably prefaced by a dictionary definition of evolution. The story focused on organisms that adapt to attempts to eradicate them; but a virus resistant to a drug is still a virus, a cockroach resistant to an insecticide is still a cockroach, pigweed resistant to Roundup is still pigweed.Observable, even testable, variation within a species - a legitimate subject for scientific investigation - is unrelated to the belief that, given time and favorable conditions, one species evolves into another, and, even more fabulous, that living organisms arise from inorganic matter. The latter is not verifiable by observation or experimentation in a controlled laboratory setting. Neither fills the requirements for a theory, nor is either science.The underlying philosophy of evolutionary beliefs is the insistence that nature is all there is. It must require a great deal of faith to believe that the world of wonders around us is but a fortuitous marriage of energy and matter over eons, and then still be left with the question of the origin of energy and matter.

David O. Berger Olivette

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