Letter: Metaphysics has place in argument

Wednesday, Jan. 4, 2006 | 8:44 a.m.

I was annoyed at what was either accidental muddle-headedness or intentional obfuscation in Paul Campos' Jan. 2 commentary regarding evolution. His argument was full of holes, but perhaps most telling is his comment that the government, via court decisions, is "requiring one particular form of metaphysical orthodoxy" over any other. Idiocy!

The courts have said that any metaphysics does not belong in public school science classes. Science does not take metaphysics into consideration at all -- whether Christian, Buddhist or ancient Greek. That's the whole point.

A reliance on what Campos derides as "naturalism," his pejorative label for the scientific method, is what separates metaphysics from science. It depends upon methods of observation and reason, not revelation and Scriptural exegesis.

I'm not saying God didn't create everything that exists. I'm saying -- with apologies to Thomas Aquinas -- that it cannot be proven through reason and science, at least not without accepting a metaphysical apriority as a given.

Gregory Grant

Las Vegas