Life logic - Letters

Washington Monthly, Nov, 2001 by David J. Zimny

How did a review as full of illogic and irrelevance as Gregg Easterbrook's ("We're All Darwinians Now," September 2001) slip past your editorial vigilance? Easterbrook argued that religion and evolution are coming to a modus vivendi as scientists realize that some questions haven't yet been explained in Darwinian terms.

Easterbrook assumes that the longer some phenomenon remains unexplained by science, the higher the probability that it will never be explained. This is simply fallacious. The continued absence of a phenomenon establishes nothing about the probability of its eventual existence.

Logical errors aside, however, the question Easterbrook spends so much time pondering doesn't need an entire article to answer, much less an entire book by a professor of philosophy. It can be answered in a few sentences. Of course a Darwinian can be a Christian, since there is nothing in the Christian faith that demands a belief in the "intelligent design" of life forms. Easterbrook says it himself: "[W]hy shouldn't God employ compounds with natural properties?" Why indeed? Why shouldn't God go further, and limit Her effort of creation to the instant of the Big Bang, thereafter leaving the universe free to follow its natural, not supernatural, course? In this case, there is no conflict between Darwin and Christianity, unless all Christians are required to accept every word of the Bible as the literal truth. I doubt that Easterbrook would go that far.

DAVID J. ZIMNY
Oakland, Calif.

Gregg Easterbrook replies:

Mr. Zimny employs the common cheap-shot technique of attributing to me something I did not say, then objecting to his own invention. My review never says that "the longer some phenomenon remains unexplained by science, the higher the probability that it will never be explained" or expresses any similar sentiment. Rather, I said that "until such time" as a wholly natural origin of life may be found, "higher influences cannot be dismissed." I hope Mr. Zimny's letter is not an example of the evolution of discourse!