From Alfred Zarb
Baulkham Hills, New South Wales
Peter Rowland’s insistence that science and religion must always be at odds
is highly presumptive and totally breaches his insistence on the supreme value
of “perpetual doubt”. The only sensible hypothesis is that science and religion
are not in conflict, since science cannot prove or disprove the existence of
God, while religion cannot prove or disprove any scientific theory or tenet.
Similarly, his equating of faith and certainty is fundamentally flawed, so
that his condemnation of faith is completely meaningless and his rejection of
certainty undermines his assertion of the necessity for perpetual doubt. In any
case, faith, of necessity and by its very nature, requires an underlying element
of doubt, otherwise it ceases to be faith and becomes mere superstition.
History does repeat itself and there is nothing really completely new to this
world, given that those scientists who still persist in banishing God (whether a
personal God or even a “supra-universal fairy”) are merely repeating the errors
of those religious believers who sought to reject science.
Advertisement
For my part, I think it is more plausible and far more useful to accept that
truth and thought are unitary, subsuming all disciplines of knowledge, so that
branches of study, observation and reflection become no more than a different
aspects, at different levels, of the one ultimate universality. Was this search
for universal explanation not the driving force behind the ambition of Einstein
and Feynman, as well as Acquinas for that matter?
This correspondence is now closed—Ed
