The July letter is typicalof how faith and science are needlessly pitted against each other. The Bible describes the origin and development of life as a process initiated and sustained by God in language that is poetic, symbolic and consistent with the culture and scientific knowledge of the time and place it was written. Science describes it in terms of cause and effect material processes.

The Bible tries to tell us who did it and why; sciences tries to tell us how it was done. These are two entirely different sets of questions.

The debate about evolution does not serve to focus our attention on the limits of the scientific method, however. The evolution of all life from a single-celled organism is a reasonable theory based on the evidence that scientsts can gather. However, it does not have the empirical support of other majore scientific theories, such as quantum mechanics and special relativity. The proposed evolutionary mechanism, antural selection or acting on genetic variations and random mutatons, has not been empirically demonstrated as sufficient to drive the development of life from its most primitive form. Descriptions of how specific biological structures evolved often come across as storytelling rather than step-by-step scientific explanations. It may be that the scientific method cannot give us the complete answer to how life originated and developed, any more than it can give us a complete answer for the origin of the universe or the nature of existence.

The assertion that "Faith is a belief in something the person knows is false" is ludicrous. No sane person would believe in something he or she knows to be false.

The final assertion that "science attempts to reach the truth" is obviously true - but it shouldn't be ignored that science can only seek the truth about what can be observed and measured. Cosmologists and theoretical physicists already concede that there's more to our space-time universe than what can be directly measured and observed. That's why there's so much speculation aomng them about superstrings, hidden dimensions and parallel universes.

Likewise, perhaps it's time that evolutionary biologists and others admit that there may be more to the origin and development of life than can be explained through standard material mechanisms. Such an admission doesn't mean they have to seek supernatural explainations. It just means that they are open and honest with the public about the limitations of their knowledge.

Tony Giardinelli, Boerne, Texas . . .