Tom Hula writes:

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Actually, I don't believe that the Earth was created a few thousand years ago.
We have a record that is just as convincing as the rings inside a tree.  But
your
responses are an example of the sort of thing I am talking about.  If I am
trying
to deduce what meaning my life has, there's no way to answer the question
with facts.  A lot can be said from a scientific point of view about how our
bodies
work and how they are programmed and even a lot about our behavior.  But my
desire to transcend these "facts" and discover who the Programmer is . . .
science isn't even concerned with the question.  Yet there is a faction that
would
like to take the discoveries of science and deduce that there is no God.
There
is nothing in the facts themselves to come to that conclusion, so it must be
something inside of us.  Possibly the very same thing that causes us to desire
transcendence in the first place.  Thus, it becomes a use of science to answer
a religious question.  Just as inappropriate as using the Bible as a
scientific
textbook, which it was never intended to be.

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I realize that most people would prefer to see this general subject dropped,
but I just wanted to say that Tom's response is intelligent and
well-thought-out -- and virtually identical to that that John Paul II wrote a
few years ago to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, entitled, "Truth Cannot
Contradict Truth." The full text is at:

      http://www.newadvent.org/docs/jp02tc.htm

Scientific endeavors have always prospered under the Western Church; the
conflict between science and religion is not nearly as great as people tend
nowadays to believe it to be (unless, of course, you happened to be Giordano
Bruno :-).

Wirt Atmar