Sir, – While David McConnell (October 13th) may, like Karl Popper, assert that "Mathematics, chess and music, poetry, plays and books of all kinds, symphonies and song, painting and philosophy, family, friendship and fellowship, ordinary conversations, scientific theories from relativity to plate tectonics to evolution by natural selection" are all inventions of mankind, as a member of the same species, I couldn't possibly take any credit for these marvellous "inventions" which add such pleasure and meaning to my life without any satisfactory explanation as to how they may aid my mere survival. His confession that humanists "believe" (his word) that "nothing exists beyond the empirical realm" merely demonstrates a mind that is closed a priori to considering the abundant evidence to the contrary. – Yours, etc,
ROGER S ANDERSON,
Coleraine,
Co Derry.
Sir, – Thanks to David McConnell for a comprehensive and thoughtful contribution to the debate on belief. While I applaud all of the points he makes, the most important for me is his assertion that it is not fair for those who believe in God to insist that this belief should intrude into the lives of those who do not.
This is at the core of the difficulties we have experienced here in Ireland for very many years. Non-believers can live with the religiously denominated holidays and the inclusion of religion in the language (nobody has any difficulty with naming certain days of the week after ancient Norse and Germanic gods, after all), but as long as we have religious discrimination in our state-run, taxpayer-funded schools and as long as reproductive medicine continues to be influenced by religious precepts that make no sense to those who simply cannot come to believe in any supernatural explanations for the phenomena that we see around us, we will continue, as a nation, to serve up injustice. – Yours, etc,
SEAMUS McKENNA,
Windy Arbour,
Dublin 14.