Evolution should not be put in the same class as religion

Editor,

Dennis Kinzler's letter to the Daily Lobo on Wednesday contains at its core a fallacy of equivocation so brutal that it is necessary to draw attention to it. In fact, his letter contains so many logical errors that, perhaps, it would be better to address them individually.

The first and most serious error he commits is the fallacy of equivocation. A second-semester freshman could recognize the defect in his logic when he asks, "If religion has no place in our academic community, then why does evolution?"

Equivocation is the fallacy of putting a thing or idea where it doesn't belong, and that is what Kinzler commits in his letter when he asserts that evolution, an established scientific theory, belongs to the same class as religion. This is a fallacy because it ignores the essential differences between a scientific discipline such as biology and a system of belief such as Christianity or Islam. Science aims to explicate the world through the careful and systematic study of nature. Religion aims to explain both the natural and the supernatural world with myths in place of theories and miracles in place of evidence. One can be tested - the other cannot. They are essentially different, and there is no logical argument one can conceive of which justifies placing evolutionary biology alongside religion.

The second essential difference between religion and scientific theory is that the theory will be retired if it is proven to be insufficient to describe the natural world.

Kinzler commits another grievous error when he asserts that Darwinian evolution simply cannot be true because it came about relatively recently and there was no previous reference point for it. This is analogous to arguing that we should doubt that the Earth really does revolve around the sun because it took Galileo until the 1400s to figure it out, or that we shouldn't really have personal computers or iPods, because 30 years ago, they were unheard of. As for why it took the scientific community a while to accept his theories, it would go back to what I mentioned earlier - science has to establish hypotheses through the careful gathering of evidence. Surely, Kinzler wouldn't expect the scientific community to follow blindly an untested hypothesis.

Finally, it is Kinzler's third to last paragraph that I find most disheartening. He asserts that humanity can do just fine using the sciences merely for health care and technology, and that these things can be achieved without such frivolous sciences as geology and evolutionary biology. Aside from begging the question how does he know that there are no practical benefits wrought from these sciences, his point reminds me of the attitude the late Carl Sagan cautioned against -- that science only has purpose or beauty in its ability to reap practical benefits for certain people.

Kinzler is fine with medical science and technology but shirks away from science for its own sake. The science he seeks is not one in which knowledge is the ultimate prize, but personal gain.

Katherine E Klimt

UNM student