To the editor:

Richard Cole, in his June 6 column, offers a fine defense of free inquiry and keeping political-religious agendas out of biological science. But he’s mistaken if he claims that religion and science are ultimately compatible, non-competing ways of knowing, or that evolution opponents are wrong to fear science’s implications for their theology.

To suggest that there is, or may be, a non-material, non-scientific realm, where religious “methods” of truth-testing are valid, is to beg the question before us. Religionists claim certain knowledge of such a realm, and of many details regarding it. To such claims any rational human says “prove it.” That is the basis of the scientific method – the expectation that claims be subject to proof, or at least not wildly inconsistent with the already proved, before we are justified in accepting them. Religionists never offer anything that might allow their claims to be tested in objective, accountable ways convincing to those not already convinced. Such readiness to be shown wrong is not their game.

Ultimately, the notion of believing something just because you want to believe it stands in the way of social order, tolerance and human progress. Our understanding of our condition in the universe has increased exactly to the extent that scientific standards for knowledge have supplanted religious ones. The “traditional” cries of the Kansas education board are the howls of a dying, desperate beast, directed at its slayer.

Bruce S. Springsteen,

Lawrence