Letters to the Editor: July-August 2023

Lex Canendi, Lex Credendi?

Kudos to Bob Sullivan for his guest column “A Failed Experiment” (May). It was one of the best I have read on the subject of liturgical music. When you “experiment” with something, and that experiment fails (as this one obviously has), then you don’t continue with the experiment except to your own chagrin.

Mr. Sullivan’s observation that “the most damaging shift was the change in lyrical focus from God to us, promoting a self-centered faith,” is exactly right. When your faith is primarily focused on yourself, such faith cannot sustain you in times of crisis, turmoil, or hardship. Such “faith” in a power no greater than yourself is not biblical faith at all.

The wise, self-aware person recognizes his own weaknesses, fallibilities, and limitations. For faith to soar to lofty heights, it must be centered in the lofty One: God who is our Anchor, Rock, and Refuge.

Johnny Brown

Flatwoods, Kentucky

I read Bob Sullivan’s guest column with great interest. I agree that some of the liturgical music we hear at Mass is theologically suspect. I am happy that “Sing a New Church” (1991) is no longer heard. That song essentially says the Church which Jesus founded needs to be scrapped and a new one formed “from [the] seed of what has been.” It is heretical.

Though “Lord of the Dance” (1963) is a catchy tune, it has sent shivers up my spine since I found out it was partly inspired by the Hindu god Shiva. Some of the more recent hymns, such as “Sing to the Mountains” (1975) and “Blest Be the Lord” (1976), are excellent liturgical songs.

I do disagree with Sullivan about folk music. One of my favorite songs growing up with the folk Mass was “Put Your Hand in the Hand” (1970). I still find myself singing it, and a couple friends who have heard me have asked who the “man from Galilee” is.

Michael Rotondo

Southington, Connecticut

Bob Sullivan states that “the music experiment of the 1960s has failed” and has not led to increased Mass attendance. He points out that it is unacceptable to sing hymns that do not reflect the Church’s teaching that the Eucharist is the Body and Blood of Christ. He notes some phrases in Marty Haugen’s “Gather Us In” that are not clear. I am pleased that Mr. Sullivan is shining a light on problematic hymns.

One hymn containing phrases that I find ridiculous is John Bell’s “The Summons.” Verse 3 has Christ asking, “Will you kiss the leper clean?” Verse 4 has Him asking, “Will you love the ‘you’ you hide if I but call your name?” Did Christ ever speak this way?

In 2020 the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued “Catholic Hymnody at the Service of the Church,” a document for evaluating the lyrics of hymns. The bishops gave examples of hymns that do not correctly reflect Church teaching on the Eucharist, including “God Is Here! As We His People,” “Let Us Break Bread Together on Our Knees,” “Now in This Banquet,” and “All Are Welcome.” I hope that diocesan offices of worship have communicated this document to parishes and that parish music directors are heeding its advice.

Diane Isabelle Reinke

Silver Spring, Maryland

I believe Bob Sullivan’s guest column captures the sentiments of many a Catholic sitting in the pews today. I, too, have wondered how the liturgical music of the 1960s and beyond has harmed belief in the true presence of our Eucharistic Lord and the majesty of God. “Failed Experiment” indeed.

The Masses offered in our diocese tend toward reverence and solemnity. A return to beauty within our parishes is evidenced by the renovation of sanctuaries, the reappearance of high altars, and the return of the tabernacle to its place of prominence. But even within such a setting, the dissonance of pedestrian “me-centered” liturgical pieces is striking. It’s like adding a kazoo section to an 80-piece symphony orchestra. As my teenage daughter would say, “Cringe!”

Changing this situation will be a heavy lift, but Mr. Sullivan clearly pinpoints that the lyrics of Christian worship music matter.

Travis Haberman

Ceresco, Nebraska

Bob Sullivan’s guest column is good, as far as it goes. He points out deficiencies in current popular music for Mass; he acknowledges Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and others as great composers of liturgical music; and he praises traditional hymns commonly sung. He does not mention, however, the normative music of the Roman rite, Gregorian chant, or classical polyphony.

Hymns are a substitute for proper chants, and their texts and music have no normative place in the liturgy. Their music is often good, and people sing them fairly well, but they do not fulfill the proper liturgical function that liturgical chants do. Gregorian introits have a style that is appropriate to a procession, and graduals are appropriate as meditation chants between readings.

William Mahrt

Stanford, California

Bob Sullivan’s excellent treatment of contemporary hymnody takes aim at the music that so many Catholics find in the “songbooks” available to them at Mass. Sullivan is on the right track, but I fear that his critique overlooks something important.

Sullivan is right about post-1960 liturgical music: most of it is dreadful. If a visitor to a parish were to read the lyrics of these songs, he would learn that Catholics look upon pride as the supreme and necessary virtue, and that the object of our worship is a great god called “We.”

Sullivan notes that ditties like these are rarely accompanied by the pipe organ, which, for the most part, has been replaced by pianos and guitars in the “spirit of Vatican II.” As is often the case, there is a wide disparity between the documents of Vatican II and the “spirit” that supposedly emerged from them. The conciliar “Instruction on Music in the Liturgy,” Musicam Sacram, for example, states that “the pipe organ is to be held in high esteem in the Latin Church…the sound of which can lift up men’s minds to God and higher things.” The ink was barely dry on this document when guitars were brought into churches. I’m sure the irony is not lost on Sullivan.

What is missing from Sullivan’s critique? Simply this: The modern stuff is, for the most part, not singable. Almost all the great old hymns were eminently singable. They were (and are) singable in the same way barroom ballads are singable. The guy on the next stool might not be able to read music, but if the tune is elegant (i.e., simple), he will have no qualms about belting it out. I don’t mean that the music should be vulgar. No, wait a minute! That’s exactly what I mean.

One final comment: When we complain about the sad state of liturgical music today, we need to avoid painting with too broad a brush. There are places where hymnals are used instead of songbooks, and the music is reverent and glorious. People in such places are lucky, and they should never take their happy situation for granted.

Deacon Gregory Sampson

Charlottesville, Virginia

Many thanks to Bob Sullivan for his guest column on liturgical music. I’m a co-director of Catholic music ministry in a federal prison. As such, our choir attempts to be all things to all men, and we try to incorporate different musical styles into our repertoire.

I am very aware, however, of the sometimes-lackluster catechetical formation of some of our congregants (we have 25-30 men at a typical Mass). When making my music selections, I have to be cognizant of the theological quality of certain hymns, avoiding ones that may lead to confusion or excising individual verses that don’t quite make sense.

I attended the extraordinary form of the Mass for years before my incarceration. Adapting to the ordinary form, and being involved in its inner workings, is a continual learning experience. God has given me the grace to discern (most of the time) what an appropriate hymn is for a certain time and place, and what’s just flat-out wrong. Before I was responsible for the music selections, I was uncomfortable with hymns that just made no sense (e.g., “We rise again from ashes to create ourselves anew”) or ones that sound, note for note, like commercial jingles or Disney songs. Thanks be to God that He has put me in a position to affect things, however slightly, from within.

Mr. Sullivan also touches on a point I have made in my own discussions. As much as I love traditional hymns, the fact that a song was written in the past half-century doesn’t automatically make it bad. Poor theology, lack of musical fundamentals, and, often, stilted translations of beautiful ancient texts all contribute to the low quality of a hymn. This is not a new phenomenon. See, for example, John Neale’s 19th-century translation of a text that tells of Israel’s being led with “unmoistened foot through the Red Sea waters.”

Every generation has bad music. It’s up to choir directors, music ministers, and hymnal editors to identify and eliminate those songs that distract from the essential elements of the liturgy and promote poor catechesis, and to encourage music that leads to effective worship, praise, and prayer.

Antonio DeGaetano

Federal Correctional Complex

Coleman, Florida

As a musicologist and church organist, I appreciated Bob Sullivan’s criticism of modern worship music. His quotation of the heavenly doxology recorded in Revelation 5:11-14 is a most fitting conclusion to his piece; the biblical passage does indeed suggest the transcendence that church music should have.

Many readers will be familiar with Handel’s magnificent setting of this text as the final chorus in Messiah. But few will be aware that as great as Handel’s chorus is — and as incredible as the claim may seem — Bach’s setting of the same text as the final chorus of his Cantata No. 21 soars to even greater heights.

And, writing as an Evangelical Protestant, I can’t resist pointing out that both Bach and Handel were staunch Lutherans!

John Harutunian

Newtonville, Massachusetts

It is with great joy that I bring to the attention of NOR readers a corpus of authentically Catholic hymnody, my collection known as Gate of Heaven. His Excellency Kevin D. Rhoades, ordinary of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, has graciously agreed to supply an imprimatur for the hymnal, the Melody Edition of which is to be published this summer, followed by the Accompaniment Edition in the fall.

The front page of my website, nicholasmaria.com, offers a sampling of several timely hymns: “Gate of Heaven,” the text of which is drawn from the Litany of Loreto; a triumphant “Jesus, the Lord of Life,” which reflects on the fetal life of Jesus; and a “Hymn to Saint Michael the Archangel.”

A stirring “Patroness (of our United States)” acknowledges that “Evil abounds in the land of the free, / May it force our America down on her knees….”

“Lead, Kindly Light” was requested by Fr. Vincent Giese, president of Our Sunday Visitor at the time, who founded the Friends of Cardinal Newman Association.

The “Hymn to Saint Joseph, Patron of the Universal Church,” lastly, is a virile, unsentimental review of Joseph’s role in salvation history.

Mary Oberle Hubley

Nicholas-Maria Publishers, 1131 Guilford St.

Huntington, IN 46750

Pius XII’s Tireless Defender

Thank you for Ronald J. Rychlak’s guest column “Fr. Peter Gumpel, R.I.P.” (April). It powerfully captures how a gifted man made his life a gift to Christ’s Church. Fr. Gumpel was, to be sure, indefatigable in his defense of Pope Pius XII against unfair attacks; even those of us who do not favor Pius’s canonization must admire Father’s work in that vein.

We should also give thanks for the German Jesuit’s contribution to the causes of American saints Kateri Tekakwitha and Katharine Drexel. No doubt, he has now enjoyed meeting these two great women.

Kevin Doyle

South Nyack, New York

Ronald J. Rychlak’s guest column on the late Fr. Peter Gumpel represents well this saintly and unassuming man’s remarkable life. Those of us who were privileged to work closely with Fr. Peter deeply miss him and look forward to the day of his own well-deserved canonization.

Gary L. Krupp, GCSG, OStJ

Pave the Way Foundation

Wantagh, New York

Thank you for Ronald J. Rychlak’s beautiful necrologue of Fr. Peter Gumpel, S.J. I agree with everything but two sentences: Peter was not sent to the Netherlands with forged documents. And although he was noble by birth and educated by a countess who was hired by his family to be his nanny, he was not a royal or an imperial highness but the scion of an extremely wealthy family of bankers who were also involved in kali mining.

According to his baptismal certificate at St. Elisabeth Church in Hanover, Germany, Peter was born on November 15, 1923, as Kurt Gumpel Jr., son of Kurt Sr. and Olga Gumpel. His father was a Jewish convert, his mother Catholic. The only change in his name was that of his Christian name from Kurt to Peter.

Peter went with his father into exile in Paris after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 but returned two years later when it was believed that Hitler had calmed down. Peter lived in Berlin and attended a Jesuit school until January 1939, when he was sent to Nijmegen, Holland, after the Nazi pogrom during which his mother tried to protect his house, a gift from his grandfather, from the rioters. She was arrested by the SS, only to be saved by a general who was a friend of the family.

Fr. Peter’s last published writing, by the way, was his foreword to my book The Pope and the Holocaust, published in the United States in July 2022, early enough that I was able to send him a copy before he passed away on October 12, 2022.

Dr. H.C. Michael Hesemann

Düsseldorf

Germany

RONALD J. RYCHLAK REPLIES:

I thank Kevin Doyle, Gary L. Krupp, and H.C. Michael Hesemann for their letters. They have all contributed in significant ways to the cause that was so important to Fr. Gumpel: understanding the work and the role of Pope Pius XII during the Second World War. Regarding Dr. Hesemann’s discussion of Fr. Gumpel’s lineage, I am well aware of written accounts similar to that. I relied on what Gumpel personally told me for an article I wrote for First Things (June 2002). Father reviewed that article in advance and thanked me for it, and it is in accord with what he told Kenneth L. Woodward, whose own tribute appeared in America (Oct. 18, 2022).

A Morally Offensive Gap?

The engaging conversation between Pieter Vree and Jason M. Morgan (“Terms of Service: A Discussion of Social-Media Subterfuge & Death-Dealing Democracy,” May) was worth reading for many reasons.

Morgan mentions a letter to the editor in response to my article “The Trials of Following One’s Conscience” (NOR, Jul.-Aug. 2013) in which the correspondent implied that I had committed a moral offense when I opted out of military service because I created a gap that somebody else would have to fill. This bizarre sentiment caught me off guard in 2013, but its “resurfacing” in Vree and Morgan’s dialogue got me thinking about those “other replacement bodies.” They were mostly men a little younger than I who had just graduated high school and who lived in my Cambridge neighborhood near Harvard Square, where I had gone to do alternate service (hospital employment) in lieu of military service.

These scared, mostly lost boys with no college prospects had received their draft notices and were preparing to travel to boot camp before going to Vietnam. I talked with many of them at the time, and they told me they had little time to prepare after getting their draft notices, 30 to 60 days in some cases. Through no fault of their own, perhaps, they knew nothing about Vietnam and its tainted political legacy. But most didn’t care. Most also didn’t think ahead to what war would be like when things go amok on the battlefield and somebody in charge tells them to shoot civilians — or even an old woman cowering in a corner because she’s suspected of harboring a bomb.

Still, compulsory military service in 1969 carried some of the noble patina of World War II. How can our government be wrong? If the government sees a threat, then it really must be a threat. Your only recourse is to do your duty — and serve. As Vree says in the dialogue, “In our democracy, wars can be launched by fiat, at the whim of our current leader…. What say do we the people have in all this? Not much…. The only option [for those opposed to war] is conscientious objection.”

Thom Nickels

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

A Person Is a Person & Nothing Else

The preborn child is persona non grata: small, vulnerable, and often inconvenient. Our 21st-century culture favors intelligent, productive, and strong human beings — and not too many of them.

Monica Migliorino Miller, in her article “It’s Time the Church Declared the Personhood of the Unborn” (May), lays the countercultural groundwork for recognizing people as persons at first sight. It takes a whole lot of “education” to deny what everyone knows by intuition: a person begins at conception and doesn’t stop being a person until death.

I couldn’t agree more that, as Dr. Miller quotes Dr. Seuss as saying, a “person’s a person no matter how small.” I’ve been saying this for years and have led pro-lifers in chanting the phrase in classrooms, on the streets, and in front of the New Jersey State Capitol.

Everyone who reads Dr. Miller’s article — and everyone should — needs to amplify this message if our culture is to recover its basic humanity. I hope more writers and educators pick this up and encourage this kind of necessary critical thinking. You don’t need to form a political party to hope and pray that this could be done.

Thank you, Dr. Miller, for writing this. And thank you, NOR, for giving her a platform.

Christopher Bell

Hoboken, New Jersey

I staunchly affirm Monica Migliorino Miller’s contention that the Church should declare the personhood of the unborn, and I applaud each and every one of her reasoned arguments in favor of that premise. However, there are people in this age of moral relativism who would be unconvinced by a declaration coming from an ecclesiastical source. I think we need to go further and declare abortion to be a crime against humanity. My argument, being mostly by way of example, goes as follows.

Once upon a time, around May 1731, there was a zygote in one of the fallopian tubes of George Washington’s mother. In retrospect, we know what his destiny was. At the time, and for several decades thereafter, it was shrouded in mystery. Had he been aborted, he wouldn’t have been there to lead the revolt of the 13 American colonies against the British crown. There were other good leaders at the time, but the situation demanded a great one. If Washington hadn’t been there, the rebellion most likely would have been put down, and the colonies would have remained colonies — probably much worse off than prior to their revolt.

Time marches on; World War I breaks out. The still-British colonies have not had the opportunity to become a powerful nation with the economic strength and industrial capacity to help Britain overpower the German onslaught. When Britain falls under German domination, what becomes of the 13 colonies? The entire world is never the same, all because of one woman’s “choice.”

One could argue that losing the American Revolutionary War was the best thing that ever happened to Britain. Yet Boris Johnson, British prime minister at the time Roe v. Wade was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, decried the Court’s decision. Go figure.

Pick out any other significant historical figure; see if the world would be a better place given his absence due to abortion: Aristotle, Hippocrates, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Beethoven, Albert Einstein, Galileo, Rosa Parks, Winston Churchill, and Leonardo da Vinci, among others.

The United States racked up over 60 million abortions in nearly a five-decade span. The odds are exceedingly good that at least one supremely important person who could have altered world history was destroyed. Whom are we missing? The researcher who by now would have discovered the cure for cancer? The statesman who by now would have negotiated a permanent peace in the Middle East? The chemical engineer who by now would have perfected a commercially viable process for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turning it into a useful product? We’ll never know who or what we missed; there’s no way (in this world) to find out. All we know for sure is something good that was destined to happen didn’t or won’t, and something terrible (war in Ukraine?) that was destined not to happen did or will.

So I repeat: abortion is a crime against humanity.

Some people cannot be convinced on a particular subject by any argument, logic, or evidence. Witness the continuing existence of the Flat Earth Society. Others can perchance be persuaded by some argument but not another. For those who, on the matter of abortion, might be unconvinced by the personhood argument, perhaps the crime-against-humanity argument might prevail.

Jim Rice

Arlington, Texas

MONICA MIGLIORINO MILLER REPLIES:

I thank Chris Bell and Jim Rice for their letters. Both present excellent insights on the issue of personhood for the unborn.

Bell is right that, with science on the side of the pro-life recognition of the personhood of the unborn, it actually takes effort for the other side to deny it!

However, many on the side of legalized killing of the unborn, knowing that the grubby biological facts are against them in terms of the humanity and personhood of the unborn, have gone past arguing the point. Years ago, as I relate in my book Abandoned: The Untold Story of the Abortion Wars, I learned the hard, shocking lesson that the humanity of the unborn ultimately doesn’t matter to the advocates of a “woman’s right to choose.” What matters and what trumps the humanity of the unborn is that women alone have a right to decide whether to continue or discontinue their pregnancies, free from coercion. They believe — yes, absurdly — that their very dignity depends on such power.

Even with the reversal of Roe, we know all too well that the battle is far from over, as what has yet to be reversed is the philosophy on which Roe was based. The philosophy of Roe — we could even say the anthropology of Roe — created the radically autonomous woman who declares that she is outside all moral and personal responsibilities to others and, willfully encased in her bubble-zone of isolation, has the right to cast the unborn from being-in-relation to her and to any others, even if the unborn were full-fledged persons!

Rice presents a good and helpful, if not also novel, argument that abortion be declared a “crime against humanity.” He argues that the slaughter of 60 million human beings since 1973 has robbed the human race of persons who could have made enormous contributions toward the advancement and betterment of the world.

I agree that the legalized slaughter of the unborn has cost humanity in general, and thus Rice can argue that such slaughter of the unborn is a “crime against humanity.” Of course, there are those who have advanced the opposite argument: that abortion actually spares society future criminals and the burden of having to care for handicapped person. But this contrary position only works if you believe that killing people solves problems.

While agreeing with Rice, I would add, and I anticipate Rice would concur, that abortion is a crime against humanity because it is indeed a crime against humanity, namely, against human beings — synonymous, of course, as I demonstrate in my article, with persons. Persons are offended, and persons are violated, in abortion, and that’s why abortion has the character of criminality. Abortion doesn’t just deprive the world of the great ones; it also deprives us of the waitress at Denny’s, the truck driver, the landscaper, those who would be fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters — their lives are equally valuable as those of the Beethovens and Churchills of the world.

Rice argues that few will be persuaded to the pro-life position simply because the Catholic Church makes a declaration that the unborn are persons and not merely human beings. He might be right. Nonetheless, if it is true that the unborn are real human persons, then the Church has a duty to say so! The Church must be the light in this present darkness, and such a definition would be a corrective to those who continue to treat the unborn as less than persons, including so-called Catholic politicians.

As I pointed out above, many advocates of legal abortion dismiss the humanity of the unborn as irrelevant. Pro-lifers, nonetheless, must insist on the truth — and indeed rub the noses of abortion advocates in the grubby biological facts, from which, ultimately, they will not be able to escape.

Dystopia Now

John Cussen’s short story “Dystopia 101” (May) subtly poses the question, “What happens if Big Brother becomes Big Papa?” Apart from the student’s epiphany that ends the story with a recognition of “dystopia now,” the narrative’s most productive irony occurs when a student “corrects” the professor by means of his electronic tablet: The title for St. Thomas More’s Utopia couldn’t be from Greek as the professor has just stated because “Wikipedia says the guy wrote the book in Latin.” Rather than setting the student straight, the prof, now on the spot, exclaims, “Wow! Look at that. I had forgotten that.” Ironically, More’s title is from Greek, and the student with his electronic device has just usurped authority, leading the rest of the class into error, imposing Latin on a Greek title.

The Pope, conversely, is imposing the vernacular Mass on Latin Mass-goers to the express dismay of two of the students’ family members. This is an interesting and significant chiasmus. As in a Shakespearean subplot, the low character is unwittingly carrying out actions that mirror those of, in this case, the Supreme Pontiff. The professor, who should know better, immediately surrenders to the student wielding the authority of Wikipedia on his device. The lay Church members in the story, by contrast, both question and protest the Pope’s cancelation of Latin Masses. When the laymen ask the professor’s opinion on these papal actions, his only response is, “Bit of a puzzle, isn’t it?”

The academic has led his students into a sudden and profound realization that they are living in a further-reaching dystopia than they had ever suspected. But he has also inadvertently made clear that it is not authority figures such as professors and popes who will extricate them from it. Any change must begin at the grass roots. To surrender conveniently to untruth is the corrosive counterpart to promoting it actively. These polarities are less likely to be resisted by those who hold more visible positions of power and are more likely to be subverted by those who hold that massively subtle and inconspicuous power of which Christ spoke when He said, “The meek shall inherit the earth.” This is why, in any dystopia, Big Brother is always looking for newer and better means of surveillance.

Paul Rovang

Edinboro, Pennsylvania

When I got the May issue of the NOR, instead of plowing through it from the beginning as I usually do, I skipped ahead and read “Dystopia 101.” It caught my interest as an occasional college instructor, a devotee of Thomas More, and a person who feels that Nineteen Eighty-Four was unnervingly prescient. I enjoyed the story thoroughly but feel compelled to comment that the first portion describing the classroom dialogue was eerily reminiscent of the Saturday Night Live parody of Jeopardy from a few years back, with John Cussen as the increasingly frustrated host. And the story was just as funny as the SNL skit. Well done!

David Stanczak

Bloomington, Illinois

JOHN CUSSEN REPLIES:

Thanks to both respondents to my Traditionis Custodes fiction. I appreciate their taking the time to read it and am heartened by the things they say about it. David Stanczak’s comments encourage me to believe that I’ve written an entertaining story, as well as one that has college-classroom veritas. I’ll take that encouragement.

Meanwhile, Paul Rovang’s discernments highlight an aspect of the fiction that I myself wouldn’t have thought of but that does indeed make sense. Yes, for sure, just as the learning in this imagined classroom really gets going when the students cop the prof’s authority, so, too, on the non-doctrinal question of the Latin Mass’s contemporary currency, Pope Francis’s relinquishing of some of his authority in favor of a vox populi style of leadership might have proved more efficacious than the course he and his ministerium actually chose.

In any event, Iacta alea est (“the die is cast”), as the Romans used to say, and, like the tempus that fugits, it non cum backibus. In short, we Catholics are where we are in these proceedings, and we need to make the best of it. That, as well as a sense that Francis might be right on this particular issue, if not on others, is my latest thinking on the matter.

The Perceived Tension Between Faith & Science

Regarding John Dyer’s letter (May) in which he accuses the NOR of reviewing books on “fringe science”: I read the same reviews but, unlike Dyer, found them to be balanced and fair. In the little collection of his homilies, In the Beginning: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (1990), Joseph Ratzinger plumbs the mystery of creation. Those who think deeply upon this mystery should read and reread this little gem frequently so as to remain balanced in thought. It would also behoove us all to read and reread chapters 38-41 of the Book of Job and remember that we are dealing with mysteries too great for our comprehension.

In my study of geological engineering, I have seen a long litany of hypotheses — and, yes, even theories — debunked, many of them stated so dogmatically that their authors should burn with embarrassment. Perhaps one of the greatest of these could be demonstrated by the expelling of Louis Agassiz from European academia for his observation that Europe was formed by glaciation instead of the great flood.

Whether we find ourselves coming down on one extreme or the other concerning the perceived tension between faith and science, we should be careful not to impute motives, assign intentions, or use interpretations that alter original meaning. It seems only to tear apart communion when we resort to ad hominem statements about those with whom we disagree. Indeed, the one who divides and scatters is hard at work in the sphere of educated people, but the antidote, Jesus Christ, to whom all creation points, brings us together in a communion of Love.

Timothy Presley

Skandia, Michigan

The discussion regarding intelligent design (ID) and Darwinian evolution may be helped by clarifying what science is and what it is not. Evolution — the development of one species from another — is a scientific theory that explains a multitude of observations of the natural world. What the scientific theory does not address, though, is the extreme improbability of a complex being such as a mammal evolving randomly in only 13.8 billion years. (To assemble a single protein chain of 100 specific amino acids out of the 21 available has a chance of about one in 1.667×10^132, for example. That is 1,667,000 with 126 more zeroes after it.) The theist looks at this improbability and sees the work of an intelligent Designer; the atheist looks at this improbability and speculates about a cyclic universe or an infinite number of universes. None of these explanations is science, however. They do not predict phenomena that can be reproduced in a laboratory or observed in the natural world. These explanations also are distinct from any theory of evolution. As such, it is not surprising that, as John Dyer says in his letter, “ID does not try to provide a mechanism for the origin of species.” Neither do cyclic or multiple-universe theories.

Muddying the matter is the completely unscientific use of evolutionary theory as an attempt to declare God unnecessary. This is not science; it is not even logical. Science begins its inquiries by assuming that natural phenomena have only natural causes. It cannot say anything about God because the supernatural is simply beyond its field of play. If Darwin, Huxley, and their companions had said, “We know God created the heavens, the earth, and us; we are simply filling in some details as to how He did it,” they would not have done any violence to their scientific theory, and they would have saved everybody a lot of trouble.

As such, the NOR is not reviewing “fringe science.” It is considering subjects that are close to science but are not science. They are important subjects, though, because they are being dressed up as science and are being used to try to lure people away from their faith. I encourage the NOR to keep it up.

John Fay

Freeport, Florida

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