Differentiating Between Science and God

Margaret Wertheim’s article, “Why Science Can’t Show Us God” (Commentary, March 22), makes the argument that material science can say nothing about sin, grace or heaven and therefore cannot show us God.

I would look at this issue on the more basic level of the definitions of “science” and “God.” The American Heritage Dictionary defines God as “a being of supernatural powers or attributes” and science as “the observation, identification, description, experimental investigation and theoretical explanation of natural phenomena.”

Science is limited to natural phenomena and therefore cannot explain God, who is in the supernatural realm.

Maneck N. Bhujwala

Huntington Beach

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Wertheim writes that “by equating God with ‘the structure and function’ of the material world, Christians play a losing game.” The reason is not the failure of physics and its theories, but with the nature of the Christian “God.”

The Christian God, as well as the Jewish Yahweh and the Islamic Allah, exists only in the minds and imaginations of believers, supported by myths in their sacred writings and in their acting out of their beliefs.

The areas in which God can be shown to exist are in psychology and cultural anthropology.

Physicists such as Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking will continue to be misunderstood by theologians who snatch at meager straws to buoy up their wispy childhood indoctrinations.

As Hawking wrote in “A Brief History of Time,” “It is better not to use the word ‘god’ to describe what I believe because most people use the word to mean a being with whom one can have a personal relationship.”

Kenneth H. Bonnell

Los Angeles