Sir, - William Reville (Science Today, November 16th) is correct in pointing to the lack of intellectual tradition within fundamentalist culture and in his larger implicit claim that our interpretation of scientific fact should not be determined by religious or philosophical prejudice. Unfortunately, his article badly misrepresents the debate between creationists and evolutionists.
Firstly, creationism is not synonymous with fundamentalism. A creationist is simply someone who believes that life was created by a purposeful God rather that through an accumulation of blind, random mutations. Thus defined, creationism spans a broad spectrum from fundamentalists such as Kent Hovind to scientists and academics in mainstream universities. For example, the biochemist Michael Behe is certainly no fundamentalist but in his book Darwin's Black Box he articulates a highly sophisticated case for the necessity of a creator.
And Dr Reville's misrepresentation is not confined to a mere confusion of terms. The image of the debate with which he provides us is of philosophically disinterested scientists, committed solely to factual investigation, ranged against blinkered, biblical literalists. This is a caricature that is simply false, as most evolutionary scientists bring a predisposition towards materialist philosophy to their interpretation of the evidence.
In a revealing essay in the New York Review of Books in 1997, the Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin stated that "we [evolutionists] have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations." Simply put, it is the evolutionists' world view, and not the facts themselves, which excludes them from considering the possibility of intelligent design.
The almost religious zeal with which many scientists cling to the theory of evolution, despite profound factual difficulties such as those presented by the fossil record, would suggest that fundamentalism is not a problem unique to theists. - Yours, etc.,
Mark McCormick, Sandymount, Dublin 4.