Nov/Dec 1999

ARTICLE TOOLS

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I'm sorry to be writing a "negative" note, but I was struck by the photograph in the article "John Donne Meets The Runaway Bunny" [September/October]—it incorrectly identifies Walter Charles as Dr. Jason Posner.

The male figure in the photograph is indeed Walter Charles, but he played Harvey Kelekian in Wit, and he is definitely not Vivian Bearing's former student (he is 50 years old, as is Bearing). Jason Posner was played by Alec Phoenix (not shown in the photograph), and he is Bearing's former student. The man in the photograph is not 28 years old!

And now a minor thing—Wit played "off Broadway," not "on Broadway," as the reviewer writes. It played at Union Square Theatre. I wish the reviewer had seen it there: it brought tears to the eyes of many in the audience, and no one was ashamed.

In the September/October issue [Letters, "Young-Earth Creationism"] Paul Nelson and John Mark Reynolds take me to task for endorsing the methodology accepted by the great majority of scientists in the world today—methodological naturalism. But what is the nature of the "theistic science" with which we are urged to replace it?

In brief, "theistic science" asks scientists to reintroduce God's activity as at least a partial explanatory force in science. But is there one Christian view of when and in what manner God intervenes in the natural world? There's the rub. In my view, "theistic science" is a completely unworkable view for the simple reason that it is impossible, on purely empirical grounds, for Christians or people of any other faith to know where and in what manner God is acting within the natural realm. That is not to say that God does not act in the natural world (indeed, we take it as ...