There are several misconceptions in the current specious battle between "science" and "religion."

One is that faith contravenes reason, and requires believing in the unlikely or impossible, whereas "science" is infallible. Not so. Science is a practice, the practice of honest questioning. One may perfectly well have faith and practice honest questioning. One's intelligence may perfectly well incline one to feel there is more to existence than we can ever model. In fact, it is the usefulness of models that they omit elements of the whole. If they merely reproduced the whole, they would not be helpful. If the map of the territory was as big and massive as the territory, one could not use it as a guide. Science strikes me as guide, not total explanation.

Another misconception, related to the above observation, is that science can explain everything. As Giberson points out, assertions that the universe is completely explicable and basically simple are assertions of faith, not items of evidence. It may be so, but we cannot demonstrate that it is so.

When a scientist declares the state of things during the Big Bang,he or she is not declaring from personal knowledge, or even from laboratory evidence. The best indications we have of the state of the universe long ago are computer modelings which produce results roughly matching its current state.

But it is an item of physics that many possible states might have led to currently observable conditions--this is, indeed, the basis for the uncertainty principle.

The computer model is a best guess. But we have discovered in recent years that our theories have not accounted for 95% of the mass of the universe. Might it not be possible that our theories are well short of total understanding?

As for the claim, as one correspondent put it, that math is God and God is math (a claim which occurs frequently in various guises nowadays, and which is based on Galileo's often-quoted aphorism that the book of nature is written in mathematics): Mathematics is a human creation. Doesn't it strike anyone as hubris that we assert our creation is sufficient to describe all of existence?

It seems rather clear to me that the planets and stars are not doing gravitational calculus as they swing about each other. They are just doing what they do, and calculus is our method of modeling what they do.

One of course may assert that they do calculus, very rapidly, that the universe is a vast computer--but this is metaphor, not science, and perfectly circular thinking.

As for "chance?" What precisely is it? We assume it, but we have not successfully defined it. What we mean is that we do not understand the pattern. It is perfectly easy to deconstruct "chance" as a meaningful term, and do so with logic. The argument is a bit long for this letter, but a hint: What happens if a flipped coin is PERFECTLY balanced?

Why is it better to assume chance than to assume God?

There are quite a few of us who have training in careful thinking, who understand mathematics, who follow scientific argument, and who are weary of the hubris of certain declaimers. The law of hubris is far older than the law of action and reaction, but at least as inescapable. It is not really necessary for those of us who find your claims incredible to do a thing. If you exercise hubris, you WILL bring down your own house.

Have posted a copy of what is below on Pressthink as well:

Whoever was responsible, it is clear that the FBI now thinks the source of the anthrax was internal, not international. For me this raises a simple question about laboratories specializing in biological warfare research:

How many many people have died of anthrax in this country in the last fifty years as a result of natural exposure, and how many have died as a result of contamination from biowar labs?

What is the greater danger?

Since humans run the labs, are we not neglecting an important threat in ignoring the frailty of human nature?

Thanks for the good article. I am someone who might be described as an intellectual (novelist, poet, mathematician), but who loves sports and keeps in shape, so I appreciated the discussion of arete (can't do the diacriticals in this format). There is indeed something that athletics have in common with the other human excellences.

One additional complaint about tv coverage, which I make here only because there is no other forum: I was a distance runner in high school and college, and now I swim a lot. It has irritated me for years that I never get to watch the whole of any distance event--a mile run, a free-style kilometer swim, cross-country skiing. No doubt because of the lack of attention span that most viewers suffer from, such races are always cut away from to show yet another sprint or long jump. Nothing against such events, but there are those of us who love every aspect of say a 10k run, and are not just interested in how it turns out. Wish there was a way to make broadcasters pay attention, but I suppose we are in the minority.

Best American beer I ever had, bar none, was Alaskan Chinook. Name has been changed since, probably somebody figuring putting the name of a strong-smelling fish on a beer was not a good idea. Of course, it's a dark beer.