John Calvert on origins of life
John Calvert on origins of life
This is about John Calvert’s Aug. 19 column extolling “clear thinking” and disparaging “inflammatory rhetoric” as he prepares to discuss two hypotheses for the origin of life (As I See It, “Instruction needs ‘clear thinking,’ not rhetoric”).

Here’s an example of Calvert’s “clear thinking.” He says that material causes alone won’t readily explain, say, the genetic code. We must therefore logically infer its origin from an intelligent cause, by observing the results: a working genetic code.

His next paragraph, however, warns us that we really should not “construct subjective historical narratives about unobservable events not amenable to experimental confirmation.”

OK for Intelligent Design people to do this, but not scientists?

Clear thinking?

Then there are Calvert’s words on materialistic theories of origins: “chance,” “controversial,” “circumstantial evidence,” “imagined random mutations,” “lots of imagination,” “support religious views such as atheism, humanism, scientism, Buddhism, Taoism, etc.”

This rhetoric may not be inflammatory, but this chemist believes it’s unnecessarily derogatory.

R.W. Shortridge
Prairie Village

Posted by Letters Editor on August 22, 2006 at 10:30 PM in Education, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Religion | Permalink | Comments (2) August 02, 2006