Sir:
Peter Catsimpiris’s comparison of Christianity with science was somewhat offensive and contained a variety of logical fallacies. Straight to the point: he dismissed Islam and Mormonism for being founded in “secret” and claimed that Christianity’s birth, on the other hand, was the paragon of openness, with historically verifiable evidence. Discounting the fact that significant portions of Christian doctrine were determined centrally and several centuries after the fact by the Church (Council of Nicaea, anyone?), it seems that the only evidence for Catsimpiris’s assertion that Jesus’s “miracles” were publicly witnessed and accepted is the Bible itself. How novel, to use Christianity’s holy book to prove its own veracity. Catsimpiris goes on to contend that Jesus’s existence as a miracle-worker is enough to “falsify” atheism; again, the Bible here is his only evidence that these miracles occurred. Oddly, Catsimpiris goes on to quote Mark 9:1, in which Jesus claims that he will come again before some of his audience has died, as if this most demonstrable of Biblical inaccuracies actually supported his point.
Science is a body of accepted, reproducible knowledge. It does not require blind faith in its tenants to be accepted; anyone who disagrees with a scientific law can test it out for himself and see its truth and applicability. Religion, on the other hand, has no such base. It is “proven” by the text that establishes it. God himself, the greatest of all uncaused causes, since he never manifests himself in any discernible way (unlike the color purple, I might add), depends for his existence upon the faith of his followers in the absence of any evidence that’s not two millennia old. Contrary to Catsimpiris’s claim, saints are not comparable to scientists, and the “experiment” of spending one’s life as a devout Christian seems suspect. Perhaps Christians should spend several decades as an atheist before they self-righteously condemn the latter’s “baseless reverence for ‘science.’”
Sincerely,
