Message from Professor Hubert Yockey

(Board of Advisors)


Professor Hubert P. Yockey: Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and a renowned pioneer of information theory. He is editor of Symposium on Information Theory and Biology. He is author of several celebrated critiques of the "primordial soup " account of the origin of life in The Journal of Theoretical Biology.

Science, religion and literature are all legitimate paths to truth. Literature and religion have belief systems which are different, and in a sense opposite from those of science. The truth in literature lies outside the methods of science. The poet says: "the bird of time has but a little way to flutter and the bird is on the wing." The scientist says: "Time is not a bird and the wing is an appendage on the bird, not the other way around."

Scientific beliefs are never absolute. Doubt is a virtue in science and many theories, thought to have been well established, were replaced because tiny discrepancies led to the unraveling of the whole structure of the theory. Faith, on the other hand, plays a central role in religion. The conflict between literature and religion, on one hand, and science on the other, would be resolved if proponents of both realized this difference in belief systems. The new journal, Truth, can play a useful role in establishing a dialogue. We may be surprised how many scientists are really talking religion and how many theologians are talking science.