Madam, - Please ask Prof William Reville to stop cluttering your regular Science Today page and his otherwise excellent columns with: (a) religion; (b) his personal objections to Prof Richard Dawkins; (c) on particularly bad days, both.
Prof Reville wasted an opportunity on March 3rd. He should have been offering us insights on new science - the page is after all called "Science Today". Instead he repeated his by now familiar complaints about Prof Dawkins's unforgiving, anti-religious rhetoric (my adjectives not Prof Reville's, and I am a Dawkins fan). Prof Reville then offered a dip into the history and philosophy of science which was neither objective nor up to date. He observed that Einstein (who was deeply religious) had echoed a sentiment of Newton (who was deeply religious) that religion and science go hand in hand. Prof Reville invited us to infer that great scientists must be religious.
He declined to mention the overall historical context. Religion was a much greater part of daily life, the prevailing mindset and the social and political fabric in the 17th century. Newton (1642-1727) and Kepler (1571-1630), who laid the foundations of modern astronomy, both lived in a time when to be without a religion was inconceivable. The question was not whether religion but rather which religion. The luxury of atheism did not exist so it is not surprising that religion plays a fundamental part in the reasoning of thinkers of that time.
Einstein was born in 1879 and wrote articles on religion and science in the 1930s and 1940s. On this topic he was not an objective or modern thinker by today's standards. "I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound [ religious] faith," he observed at a New York conference in 1941. It is surprising, therefore, that Einstein cited Newton in support of his own assertions.
Ironically, Prof Reville appears to be as blinkered by religion as Prof Dawkins is by rationalism. Has it not occurred to Prof Reville that this particular column does nothing to further the cause of science today; or that the atheist and agnostic scientists he mentions might be offended by his confident but unscientific assertion that they are not qualified to "do work of the highest quality"?
All one can deduce scientifically from his column is that one deeply religious scientist is likely to quote another in support of his assertions. This is not arresting scientific news.
As Prof Reville himself notes, "the scientific method cannot adjudicate on the God question". On that basis perhaps religion, faith and philosophy, interesting as they are, could be kept out of the Science Today slot in the future.
Science is poorly enough served in the media generally without wasting space in one of the few quality slots it has on personal rows over religion. - Yours, etc.,
PHILIP SMITH, Frascati Park, Blackrock, Co Dublin.