Life logic.

• Author: Zimny, David J.
• Position: Letters

How did a review as full of illogic and irrelevance as Gregg Easterbrook's ("We're All Darwinians Now," September 2001) slip past your editorial vigilance? Easterbrook argued that religion and evolution are coming to a modus vivendi as scientists realize that some questions haven't yet been explained in Darwinian terms.

Easterbrook assumes that the longer some phenomenon remains unexplained by science, the higher the probability that it will never be explained. This is simply fallacious. The continued absence of a phenomenon establishes nothing about the probability of its eventual existence.

Logical errors aside, however, the question Easterbrook spends so much time pondering doesn't need an entire article to answer, much less an entire book by a professor of philosophy. It can be answered in a few sentences. Of course a Darwinian can be a Christian, since there is nothing in the Christian faith that demands a belief in the "intelligent design" of life forms. Easterbrook says it himself: "[W]hy shouldn't God employ compounds with natural properties?" Why indeed? Why shouldn't God go further, and limit Her effort of creation...