Peter M. J. HessNCSE's Director of Religious Community Outreach Peter M. J. Hess contributed a guest column, entitled "West of Eden," to the Washington Post's on-line "On Faith" feature (June 16, 2009). "Too often, debates over the public perception of evolution are dominated by the fringes, by fundamentalist Christians and others who reject basic science due to their literal reading of the Bible and by ardent atheists who reject religion because they've embraced metaphysical naturalism — that nature is all that exists," Hess writes. "Evolution can certainly be compatible with religious faith. Because the evidence for evolution is so overwhelming, we must consider it to be a truth about the natural world — the world which we as people of faith believe was created by God, and the world made understandable by the reason and natural senses given to us by God. Denying science is a profoundly unsound theological position."