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strophysicists are not philosophers, so Hawking can be excused for a logical slip. The writer of this article (“Is it rational to believe in God?” the Post, Dec. 22, p. 7 by Giovanni Serritella), however, cannot.

He is brazenly trying to imply that belief in a miraculous creation is on some kind of equal footing with a scientific evaluation of the universe’s beginnings.

And this is much more specious and dangerous. The logical end of a scientific appraisal of life is that later forms developed and arrived out of earlier ones. It is, therefore, more reasonable to believe that prior to the “big bang” there was a form that gave rise to it.

But this is too abstract to tackle, so let’s just set a man in a white beard in the sky instead. This is only “reasonable” in that it responds to the human mind’s need for closure on open-ended questions.

Richard Wesley
Jakarta