Madam, - Your Editorial of August 5th on the teaching of evolution in schools gave the impression that all evangelical Christians believe in "young earth" creationism.
This is not true. All evangelicals believe in creation, but many evangelicals who firmly believe the Bible is the infallible word of God have no problem with the idea that God could have used evolution as the mechanism by which he created.
Christians believe that God is present everywhere and that he directs the course of history; if this is true of the lives of individuals and nations, it must also be true of the interactions of atoms and molecules at the lowest level.
The Christian believes that ultimately everything is designed and that in many cases science enables us to understand the mechanisms used. But using God to explain the gaps in our knowledge and believing that scientific explanations preclude a personal creator are both fallacies: God is bigger than both our knowledge and our ignorance.
The really significant distinction is not between those who accept evolution and those who insist on believing in six-day creation, but between those who believe God created the universe from nothing (Genesis 1:1) and those who hold that matter simply came into existence of its own accord.
It is unfortunate that both Christians and atheists often allow the noise and fury of the "evolution wars" to drown out this far more important debate. - Yours, etc,
Dr STEPHEN CHILDS, Rathmines Road Lower, Dublin 6.