Sir, – The problem for David McConnell (October 13th) and Seamus McKenna (October 14th) is their limitation of allowable evidence to that which can be repeated under laboratory conditions. Anything of a metaphysical or non-reproducible or subjective nature is simply not accepted as evidence. However, I am absolutely certain that both hold views on many questions which cannot be verified by scientific means, not because the technology has not been invented yet but because they are issues of a different type. – Yours, etc,
PATRICK DAVEY,
Shankill, Dublin 18.
A chara, – David McConnell writes with an eye-watering certitude that would make a pontiff blush “people made God, not vice versa”. He overlooks two realities shared by both believer and non-believer.
The atheist can no more categorically prove that God does not exist than can the theist prove the opposite. Were this not so, no sane person would believe other than what had been incontrovertibly proven. Further, both religion and science reach a point of faith in explaining existence. Science, with its rigorous methodology of cause and effect, responds to the question of how the material that caused the Big Bang originated with an answer that is tantamount to faith – it just was “there”. – Is mise,
LIAM BYRNE,
Nutley Road,
Dublin 4.
Sir, – David McConnell again exposes the contradictions of the allegedly “humanist” claim that “nothing exists beyond the empirical realm”. Admitting that humanists, like everyone else, recognise the “phenomena of truth and falsehood, good and evil”, he tries to limit these phenomena to the merely empirical. To say that “we decide for ourselves what is true or false, good or evil” is a trivialisation of these phenomena, as if truth and the good never imposed themselves with undeniable authority on our minds and consciences. “The daunting moral dilemmas we face in the modern world, especially in my own field of genetics” would not be daunting at all if one did not believe in non-empirical values such as human dignity and freedom. To say that we live in a world invented by humankind is to miss the powerful presence of things that humans clearly did not invent, beginning with being itself.
Prof McConnell’s complaints against historical Christianity – Giordano Bruno, Galileo, “a church which assures us that women are lesser creatures than men” – is that it failed to “distinguish truth and falsity, good and evil”. But in making that judgment he is again subscribing to the trans-empirical reality of truth and the good. Otherwise what is to prevent one from saying that people can “decide for themselves” whether the Earth goes round the sun or vice versa, and whether it’s acceptable to persecute freethinkers and discriminate against women? Let’s decide by rational argument, not by blind faith, he would say, but this again recognises the reality of reason, something that is clearly much more than a human invention or a merely empirical datum. – Yours, etc,
JOSEPH S O’LEARY,
Sophia University,
Tokyo.