The proposition that atheism should be instituted as official policy of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, as advocated by R. N. Rogers in his 1/10/97 letter, is a moral outrage. It represents an assault on the plain First Amendment guarantee of freedom of religious expression and is an insult to the large number of earnest theists who are loyal employees of the Laboratory. Moreover, Mr. Rogers' attack on a creationist understanding of reality is an insult to a significant fraction of the founders of modern science who themselves were ardent creationists -- a group that includes Kepler, Pascal, Newton, Faraday, Linneaus, Pasteur, Maxwell, Kelvin, and Rayleigh. Indeed, I want to commend our director, Sig Hecker, for his good judgment and courage in standing against the sort of atheist intimidation Rogers conveys in his letter.

I believe it is time to expose the widely used atheist tactic of equating atheism with science and then invoking the term 'science' when what is really meant is 'atheism'. The scientific method is emphatically not inconsistent with the understanding of reality that has God as the self-existent entity and all else owing its existence to Him. In fact, a strong case can be made that modern science itself arose precisely and uniquely out of just such an understanding of reality -- specifically, that a rational God had designed the world, and that man, endowed with reason by his Creator, could discover the design principles the Creator Himself had employed. Are not atheists deceiving themselves and others in denying this connection between theism and the origin of modern science and the scientific method?

I suspect Mr. Rogers, by disparaging creationism, is actually having difficulty dealing with the reality that science (here used it its correct sense) has falsified evolution. While in Darwin's day science could not even guess at the mechanisms behind vision, immunity, or even heredity, during the last fifty years science has succeeded in unveiling the incredibly complex biochemical machinery that forms the basis of life at the molecular level and is rapidly unraveling the minute details of how these processes work. One consequence of this new knowledge is that what an origins theory now must explain has increased far beyond what evolutionists ever imagined would be required.

In a recent book entitled Darwin's Black Box, Michael Behe, a biochemistry professor at Lehigh University, shows this astounding complexity at the molecular level has led to 'an eerie and complete silence' as to how sophisticated molecular machines could arise by some evolutionary process. He points out that in its entire 25 year history the Journal of Molecular Evolution has not published a even single paper offering an explanatory model for how a complex biochemical system might have arisen in a gradual step-by-step Darwinian fashion. Behe defines a concept he calls irreducible complexity and presents a case for why Darwinian evolution can never account for complexity at the molecular level in living organisms.

To air these issues in an open and proper scientific manner, let me encourage Mr. Rogers, as a Laboratory fellow, to organize a symposium on the topic of the origin of biological complexity that includes professional scientists who are also committed creationists. Such a symposium in my opinion would be of great educational value and interest to Laboratory employees and to the Los Alamos community at large.

John Baumgardner