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In reply to Ronald Mayes (Letters, June 19) can he answer the following questions?
How did life start on planet Earth? If he says life was seeded from some other planet in the universe, how did it start there?
Scientists from all over the world attended a conference on origins and none could agree. Scientists have been able to create simple building blocks (amino acids) in the laboratories, but cannot create a "simple" cell. Information is needed for that "simple cell" to exist and reproduce and is coded for in the DNA (or RNA) in the nucleus.
Even allowing that simple cells could be formed from amino acids, how did they create DNA? Or was DNA fashioned beforehand? DNA is too fragile to live outside a cell nucleus so in a watery environment we have been told existed, it will quickly break down.
Assuming simple cells have been created, how was sex formed? Then if they were formed, how did they find each other? If cells were separated by just a few metres, they couldn't connect. And they would have had to evolve at exactly the same time and in the same place to function.
Then if man has been created by evolution, where did his moral sense come from? These answers can only come from a design and thus a designer.
Science is about questioning the natural world, not accepting theories as facts. We can only know the answers because we accept that our world is predictable and knowable.
PAULINE INWOOD
Rotorua
Underlying ideas
Ronald Mayes writes coherently but in my view fails to address the pertinent issues.
His assertion that science has outmoded religion is too shallow and therefore inadequate.
The basis for what we call science is the comprehensibility of the universe.
In other words, does the universe make sense, or, is it predictable? Westerners would answer "yes", while many in the east would say "no". They say "no" because their religions have many demi-gods that squabble, causing the universe to be unpredictable (see the Iliad, Ulysses, Bhagavad Gita, etc).
We, on the other hand, say the universe is predictable because our religion, Christianity, has one all powerful God who is unchanging by nature, who loves us and created us precisely to inhabit this universe. Ergo, the universe has certain unchanging, infinite qualities, because its creator does. Christianity also says that we can interfere with and tame the universe. Science needs most of these Christian ideas to be true beforehand, so it can then do experiments.
Absent Christianity, science can't exist, because there is no basis to assert that the universe is sensible.
Big bang "theory" shows what happens when atheists try to do science without those underlying Christian ideas: "nothing exploded, then expanded, then produced everything we see, from nothing". Yeah.
GJ PHILIP
Rotorua
Historical account
Your correspondent David Preest (Letters, June 20) presents nine points regarding the age of the earth and calls them facts. Unfortunately they are not. They are opinions cherry-picked from various online sites purporting to be factual.
The thing to remember with online information is that pseudo science will invariably use scientific language to sound authentic.
Your correspondent's final paragraph is also misleading in my view: whatever else the Bible may be, a reliable account of history it is not.
MIKE BYRNE
Rotorua