BIBLE: Its purpose differs from science

I read Dale Hedman’s letter and would now like to ask him this: Yes, an apple seed will grow an apple tree. But it may not grow a Red Delicious, Granny Smith, or even a Gala Apple. Why is that? Because the people who bred any of the above apples for different eating characteristics selectively bred these apples for the kind of characteristics that they desired. And that was through hybridization (which creates a form of mutation), as well as grafting to root stock. It actually wouldn’t take much to read up on this, any horticultural magazine would do. That being said, to produce these diverse characteristics among apples would require the science of biology, which Mr. Hedman doesn’t seem to want to accept. Has he ever picked up a gardening catalog, where the requirements for specific types of sweet corn is that they must be kept isolated from any other variety of corn? Well, the same selective breeding process went into the development of this kind of corn. Further, for it to “breed true,” with the specific eating characteristics advertised, it requires genetic isolation. An applied use of Darwin’s theory in agriculture.

How about those cattle that obviously don’t bear kittens? Well now, I don’t believe that Mr. Darwin ever made such a claim. But his voyages of research did lead to a great many interesting discoveries in the animal kingdom. And the unearthing of the fossil record led to a great many more discoveries. All Mr. Hedman would need to do is visit any museum of natural history and discover that not only was there not just one kind of dinosaur as an example, there were many distinct types. Question is, how did this dinosaur diversity come about, if not through an evolutionary process? Back to the cattle … Does Mr. Hedman know how many breeds of cattle there are? Would he know why there is a diversity of the kinds of cattle, found throughout the world? As with the plant breeders, much the same concept was applied to animal husbandry. Nor would it be difficult to ascertain, as another example, how we could get Holsteins and Herefords from an immediate ancestor or ancestors that were neither. Selective breeding for the characteristics desired, including hybridization. The applied science of biology.

Finally, Mr. Hedman turns to the science he wants to reject, to tell us all about God’s creation. Unfortunately for him, it had to be well over a thousand years after the New Testament was written, before Sir Isaac Newton gave the world the theory of gravity. Precisely, the day he was sitting under a tree and watching the apple fall from it. It would also take quite a few thousand years, after the Old Testament was written, before people learned to make a telescope and observed that among the stars we see at night planets could also be found. It was from this new technology that advanced mankind’s power to observe that the theory of heliocentric orbit was presented to the world. Further, that our Earth is part of a solar system. What Mr. Hedman will not find is that any of this is discussed in the Bible. The Bible should be seen for only one purpose: To guide its believers along a moral path. What is used to morally guide people cannot be used to replace science.

JOAN E. HARMAN

Coeur d’Alene