In his letter (Rejecting the science, September 28), Patrick Boyle writes, “The reason for the rejection of the Bible record lies in its ethical and moral implications. These are hostile to the arrogance of the so-called intellectuals. They foolishly imagine that the human mind is the measure of the universe - it’s not.”

READ MORE: Letter: Rejecting the science

This is a statement with which I agree. Intellectuals have a tendency to deny free will and conflate human language with instinct, when language is actually the antithesis of instinct. Unlike animals, humans have no automatic stereotyped instincts; we must constantly check our perceptions against reality. We use language to think. It doesn’t use us! To think about how things work, we must look for beginnings and ends; cause and effect. This type of thinking is the bedrock of the scientific method. An experiment is simply a ‘closed system’ method of proving an idea by disproving alternative explanations.

Patrick also writes, “nothing comes from nothing” - which happens to be the first law of thermodynamics: ‘Heat energy can neither be created nor destroyed’. But such is the “arrogance of so-called intellectuals”, as Patrick so accurately puts it, that they jump right out of their scientific, ‘closed system’ box, propose that the ‘open system’ of the universe must have a beginning and proceed to elaborate on how something can come from nothing! The human mind, dependant as it is on language to think, measure and identify, automatically makes a distinction between the known and the unknown. Even animals, constrained by the limits of their sensory world, distinguish the known from the unknown. The Abrahamic religions all state explicitly that the unknown exists. They call it ‘eternity’.

The French author Victor Hugo said: “England has two books, the Bible and Shakespeare. England made Shakespeare but the Bible made England.” The Classical Greek New Testament and the Hebrew Old Testament, were translated into Latin by St Jerome in the fourth century AD. After the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453, Greek philosophy and literature were carried to the West while mathematics and medicine went East. Both inspired the Renaissance, the rebirth of the Golden Age of Greek learning. The Dutch scholar, Erasmus, translated the New Testament back into the original Greek in the sixteenth century. From this literary infusion, the King James Bible emerged, profoundly enriching the English language in the process. As the Bible was frequently the only book available to citizens across the British Isles, whole sections were memorised by rote, its vocabulary absorbed - meaning often came later. This was the way classical vocabulary crept into and enriched English literature, the language of science and of the law. Unlike some European jurisdictions, English speakers refused inducements to purge their language of its classical roots and foreign borrowings and thereby preserved its history.

There is virtue in reminding our aspiring utopians, currently performing in Parliament, that they do not have all the answers and are not qualified to direct the lives of their fellow man.

Prof. Christine Wheeler McNulty

Oxhey