Readers React: Science and religion: Why is it so important to reconcile the two?

To the editor: Whether Auxiliary Bishop of Los Angeles Robert Barron makes a case against “scientism” by invoking the possibility that “there might be a dimension of reality knowable in a nonscientific … rational manner” is a subject not worth serious attention. (“The myth of the eternal war between science and religion,” Op-Ed, Nov. 12)

He wants to dispel what he terms “the myth of the eternal warfare of science and religion” by naming famous founding scientists who were “pious” Christians. But it ought to be pointed out that our entire history is beyond his grasp.

Barron and his religion are simply parochial and provincial, native to the West — west of Persia and India, not to mention China.

Even the Pascal whom Barron cites was of two minds on God, and he notoriously wagered the odds were 50-50 for or against such a belief, leaving it to an afterlife (if there is one) to settle the question.

In any case, there were many gods before “God” and moral codes expressed in the DNA of living things, even in Jurassic giants before the great wipeout that left only the little mammalian vermin from which it seems we have descended.

Jascha Kessler, Santa Monica

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To the editor: Barron is partly right.

Science attempts to answer the question “How?” Religion attempts to answer “Why, and by whom?”

Both rabid atheists and fundamentalist believers are missing half of the matter.

Different religions have come up with different answers for why and even have made feeble attempts to answer how. Atheists may be doing a good job of addressing the how of things, but they miss entirely the why.

Science has clearly answered many of the questions of how, with explanations like evolution and studies in physics, chemistry and biology. Religion

is more ephemeral because its answers cannot be proved by the scientific method. It is a matter of belief.

Until both sides of the equation are addressed, people will have serious difficulty understanding the world we live in.

Paul Moser III, Studio City

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