If he was accurately quoted, geneticist Tom Ingebritsen thinks my atheistic worldview has biased me against considering supernaturalism and intelligent design as legitimate science. (See “Professors question Intelligent Design theory,” Oct. 10). He’s quite right, of course, but this bias developed only after critically assessing the long track records of accomplishment and failure registered by the advocates of theology, religion and prayer, all of which presume the real existence of things supernatural.

Having been born to a nominally Protestant family on Cleveland’s heavily Catholic West Side, I began life virtually intolerant of atheism and held to traditional beliefs in God, miracles and the Bible throughout high school. I first realized how na‹ve I had been when as a freshman at Baldwin Wallace College — a tiny Methodist school near Cleveland — I elected to fulfill the five-hour religion requirement by taking Dr. Knautz’s course on the synoptic Gospels.

I was astonished to learn that the Gospel writers had copied from one another and from other “worldly” sources, including the long lost “Q” document (Q for Quelle). Nothing was said about what (if anything) had come directly from God — as I had been raised to believe.

I did not bolt religion at that point, but I was impressed by how much could be learned through honest critical scholarship, as opposed to the rather thoughtless, faith-based approach I had previously been encouraged to cultivate and nurture.

I later came to realize that modern science owes virtually all its successes — which thoroughly dwarf those from theology, religion and prayer, by the way — to the same spirit of honest, critical inquiry. However, scientists focus their inquiries on nature and the testable kinds of phenomena they find in this world, whereas biblical scholars focus their efforts on words written in antiquity and on various claims made about faith-based, “other worldly” phenomena that cannot be tested.

Now, almost five decades after Dr. Knautz, more than four of which I have spent as a student, researcher and teacher in engineering and the physical sciences, I can honestly say this: I am convinced, largely on the basis of well-documented track records, that things supernatural have no reality status whatever, save in the rich imaginations of humans — especially those prone more to faith than to honest, critical scrutiny.

John W. Patterson

Professor Emeritus

Materials Science and Engineering