JOHN A. MURPHY,
Madam, - As a former UCC colleague of Dr William Reville and an admiring reader of his science column, I cannot help noticing his preoccupation with the relationship of science to religion as well as his obvious unease in trying to reconcile them.
This was evident once again in his article of February 13th on evolution, in which, having convincingly refuted the creationists, he hastens to add that "science has no brief . . .to deny the supernatural".
While his sense of Irish Catholic pietas does him credit, he must be aware that evolution poses large and (in my view) unanswerable questions for the religious teaching which he and I imbibed.
If an omniscient creator really exists, why in the name of God would he have bothered with a 3.8 billion years' time-plan when he could have produced the end result virtually overnight, as indeed the creationists claim?
As for the Bible, Dr Reville says science has identified those parts of the creationist testament which are not to be taken literally! But how does science decide that some parts rather than others require this kind of helpful illumination? The Flood? The parting of the Red Sea? The "miracle" of the loaves and fishes? - Yours, etc.,
JOHN A. MURPHY, Douglas Road, Cork.