In Alastair Noble's letter (October 8), he states that intelligent design is a highly scientific position rather than Creationist dogma.

While it is true that intelligent design can be proposed as a scientific hypothesis (as it has been in various guises for longer than Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection), its key prediction of "irreducable complexity" has been scientifically tested and rejected on numerous occasions.

Every case of supposed irreducable complexity held up and championed by intelligent-design theorists has been found to be wrong when tested because in all cases a simpler, but still functional, stage through which it could have evolved can be identified.

For example, proponents of intelligent design (and other similar "theories") once looked to the human eye as a shining example of irreducable complexity in life that could not function in a simpler form, meaning it must have been designed by an intelligent designer rather than having evolved by natural selection. This was until scientists looked into the matter and identified a complete series of proto-eyes ranging from simple patches of light-sensitive cells to complete modern eyes, all of which would have been functional to the organism to which it was attached.

Rather than accept that their theory had been disproved, intelligent design theorists simply cast around for another possible example.

This pattern was repeated and repeated until now intelligent design has to rely on the minutae of biology, rather than the big structures formerly championed, and hold up features such as cell biochemistry and the structure of DNA (as mentioned by Alastair Noble).

However, these, too, have been investigated and all have been found to have simpler, but still functional, forms. Not one proposed example of irreducable complexity (the key prediction of intelligent design theory) has held up under scientific investigation.

Looking at this pattern, the truth behind intelligent design becomes clear. Any true scientific theory that had been so thoroughly tested and rejected on so many occasions should be cast aside and banished from science, but despite pretending to be scientists, the intelligent design community refuses to accept this.

In doing this, the community reveals the truth that intelligent design is not really a scientific theory at all, but a religeous belief dressed-up to masquerade as a science. What makes it non-science (or is that nonsense?) is that intelligent design theorists only want to propose their psuedo-theory and have no interest in it being scientifically tested and rejected if the evidence stacks up against it.

This critical testing of proposed theories is what science is really about and what we should be teaching our children in the class-rooms, rather than introducing them to a pseudo-theory long rejected by true scientists based on the enormous amount of evidence against it.

Dr Colin D MacLeod, 1 Froghall View, Aberdeen.

I would ask your atheistic contributors to the ongoing correspondence in your columns on the subject of the existence of a God to consider the following: Mankind is as much a part of the universe as are the stars, the galaxies, our planet Earth and everything on it. All of this, the totality of our environment, we are told, is the result of an evolutionary process. The many and various life forms by which we are surrounded and of which we are a part, have been moulded by the environment in which they have formed, lived and developed. Mankind possesses the quality of intelligence, a faculty which, therefore, must have evolved in response to the stimulus of his environment. There has to be, then, in our environment, a force in response to which mankind has developed the intelligence by which he can examine and begin to understand the universe in which he lives.

This intelligent creative force that has moulded us and everything else in our universe, men call God, and is interpreted by the different cultures of this world through their different religions.

All forms of metaphysical thought are an expression of a belief, and in its basic essence the above is what a theist believes The atheist, on the other hand, believes in a mindless universe composed of random and purposeless atoms that have appeared from nowhere. He believes in a humanity that is the chance by-product of random chemical processes. He believes in a humanity whose achievements in science and in the arts are also the accidental by-product of such processes. He believes that all moral and ethical values are based on nothing, have no eternal value and will all disappear one day in a puff of cosmic smoke. And he believes all this by the use of a mind which he claims to be the chance by-product of a mindless universe.

Joe Pieri, 11 Bishopsgate, Kenmure Drive, Bishopbriggs.

I read with interest the letter from Canon Kenyon Wright. I can remember in 1960 one of the first lectures in the Ordinary Astronomy class, given by Dr Archie Roy, on the history of the universe.

He presented the story of the Creation, which is based on the Babylonian Enuma Elish legend, as the scientific theory of the origin of the universe at the time.

John R S Lyth, 26 Gardenside Street, Uddingston.