A few remarks for Mr. Duran.

First, evolution does not explain the massive changes of life forms that occurred through natural history. At a recent exhibition which glorified the work and influence of Charles Darwin at the Museum of Natural History, the curator himself admitted that the fossil record does not support Darwin’s theories of how evolution led to the development of life forms over time.

While evolution may indeed explain minor changes in species as they adapt, it does not explain how we got from a single-celled life form to a human being very well, or at all. (After all, even though the Galapagos finches differ from other finches, they are still finches!)

So, Mr. Duran, please don’t be so smug about evolution and its theoretical offshoots.

Personally, I am not a Creationist and as a Catholic, wouldn’t have a problem with evolution even if it were a rock-solid explanation of how we got from bacteria to homo-sapiens. But the problem is that scientific minds like those of Mr. Duran ignore their own rules of objectivity and afford evolution the kind of evangelical zeal and universality of the worst sort of wide-eyed, frothy-mouthed fundamentalist when the evidence simply isn’t there to support it.

Anyway, my second comment/question to Mr. Duran is this: exactly to which history books are you referring when you make the following claim: “Mary didn’t become a virgin until a committee at a conference thought it would appeal to the audience at large. Look it up in a history book”?

The Gospel of Luke, which provides the most detail about Mary, was written in the first century and approved officially and finally as part of the canon of the New Testament in the late 4th century. Even with all of the translations that have occurred over the centuries, this claim of Mary’s virginity has not been omitted from any bible that I know of. If it were a fact of history, don’t you think that would have occurred at some point?

Anyway, I am not aware of Dan Brown-like charges of churchmen inserting Mary’s virginity in order to “appeal to the audience at large.” In fact, virginity most certainly did NOT appeal to the audience in ancient times (or today, for that matter). Numerous women lost their lives in gruesome ways in the first three centuries because they refused to surrender their virginity for the sake of Christ. Were their killers part of this audience Mr. Duran is talking about?

If anything, Mr. Duran, you should have made a more intelligent argument by supposing that the gospel authors and editors really included Mary’s virginity in order to make her match with the prophecy in Isaiah about a virgin bearing a son.

While there’s no evidence to support this claim either, it at least has support amongst the many biblical scholars who disbelieve in the supernatural and who therefore come up with unsupported theories to explain away the supernatural claims in the Bible. They also claim to be “scientists” and look down their noses at us poor, misled believers in the Absolute.

Placing your absolute faith in science as the arbiter and basis of all truth is not only foolhardy, it’s dangerous. Thank God our founding fathers instead realized that the dignity and rights of mankind derived from a divine source, even if its existence couldn’t be proven by science.

Trey Hoffman
Peachtree City, Ga.

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