I want to thank Dr. Patterson for his reply to my Oct. 23 letter and for correcting my misrepresentation. I don’t believe, however, that I missed the main points of his lecture. He is absolutely right in saying that “all the God-based paradigms . have one by one been overthrown and supplanted by vastly superior atheistic ones.” By atheistic I take it to mean that religious faith cannot explain the workings of the physical cosmos. This is the domain that is eminently served by the method of science, the only method – and therefore “vastly superior” to any other attempted means – for investigating the workings of nature. No reference to God is required in employment of the scientific method.

If this is what Dr. Patterson means by describing the work of science as completely atheistic, I agree. But I think common usage of “atheistic” usually implies that a person does not believe in God. This is where semantic confusion may arise.

We agree that scientific research does not preclude faith in God on the part of the scientist. It is one thing, therefore, to say that scientific explanation is atheistic; it is quite another thing to maintain that God does not exist. The latter can’t be substantiated by science.

While religion and theology explain nothing in the realm of pure science, it is not true that they explain nothing at all unless one adopts the reductionist view that all human experience and knowledge belong only to an empirical realm that is amenable to the scientific method. Such a position is a highly debatable one.

Vernon H. Naffier

Religion instructor

Grand View College