Letter writer Jay Aldrich asks why empirical methods can’t be used to follow the truth. This is pseudoscience, claiming to be scientific but is actually metaphysical.
Many theories are empirical, but not necessarily scientific.
On the other hand, if “empirical” is meant to mean provable or disprovable by experience, observation or experiment, then the idea of intelligent design is anything but empirical.
He goes on to say that Christians like him are open to, among other things, the supernatural. He offers mysticism as an alternative to scientific theory. Scientists do not claim that “if you can’t use empirical methods, then something doesn’t exist.”
Empirical theories can be non-scientific and scientists don’t make such claims. Nor do they make claims that “extend beyond science.”
Scientists do not engage in suppression of reality or dictate where any argument begins. Scientific discovery is an open-ended procedure and is questioned by scientists at every turn.
That “there is no creator” is not a position of the scientific community, which is indifferent to the idea. The scientific family includes people of all persuasions. Whether there is or isn’t has no influence on the body of evidence that indicates that all life evolved from the primeval soup.
Finally, Aldrich throws out that popular misunderstanding of the second law of thermodynamics. This has to do with the entropy, or disorder, of the universe. The argument would apply to a universe of constant volume, but ours is an expanding universe. The second law of thermodynamics is no more violated by evolution than it is violated by the growth of a baby.
