Editor:

Marvin Mueller in his 8/28/96 guest column seeks to defend his atheism and evade the scientific deficiencies in the evolution hypothesis I have raised by referring to these issues as "battered and tattered," "flat earth," and "a sequence of non sequiturs." Moreover, he (with Graham Mark' assistance) claims to have "demolished" them in Monitor guest columns in the spring of 1995. My take on that exchange in the Monitor was that the atheist side tucked their tails and fled to the woods.

This time Mr. Mueller argues that while a few individual threads in the evolution tapestry may be weak, the tapestry as a whole -- the Big Picture he calls it -- is beautifully coherent and strong. He asserts the deficiencies I point out are but minor details that can be ignored. But how can accounting for the source of the genetic language not be one of the most foremost elements of the Big Picture? And how could biogenesis -- that giant leap from non-living chemicals to a self-reproducing organism -- be an insignificant detail in this Big Picture tapestry?

And what about the essential mechanism underlying macroevolution? If such a mechanism really exists, should it not occupy a prominent place in the Picture? And what about the fossil record? Is it really only an insignificant thread that can be ignored? Is this also true for the large-scale aspects of the geological record? No, on the contrary, all these issues are essential features in the Big Picture explanation for our world.

The reality of the situation is that Mr. Mueller, and atheists in general, simply cannot provide answers for these basic deficiencies in the evolution story. That is why I conclude evolution is no more than an intellectually fraudulent atheist creation myth. If Mr. Mueller believes he has a scientific answer to just one of the above Big Picture issues, I urge him to present it in the Monitor in a careful reasoned manner. If he does not have answers, he should at least have the integrity to admit it.

Much of Mr. Mueller's recent column was devoted to contending that science excludes the supernatural. But it is atheism, not science, that excludes the supernatural. It is not that "science and the supernatural cannot coexist in the same explanatory framework," but rather it is atheism and the supernatural that shun coexistence. Indeed equating science with atheism is a clever forensic trick that has fooled many people, but it won't (or at least ought not be able to) fly in Los Alamos.

It is noteworthy that science "based on the synergy of the theoretical and the empirical" (to use Mr. Mueller's words) arose not in classical Greece, not in China, not in Arabia, but in Christian Europe. A significant fraction of the founders of the modern scientific enterprise were earnest Christians. These include Galileo, Kepler, Pascal, Newton, Joule, Faraday, Maxwell, and Kelvin. Indeed, the metric units for force, energy, pressure, temperature, electrical capacitance, and magnetic flux are all named after Bible believing Christians. Mr. Mueller's assertion that those who take the Bible seriously are "deranged" not only is an insult to sincere Christians and Jewish people, but it reveals a superficial understanding of the history of science.

In closing let me again affirm that exempting the evolution hypothesis from critique in our educational institutions is not consistent with the principle of open inquiry and development of critical thinking skills to which these institution should be committed.

John Baumgardner