Creationist Textbooks Compete for Selection

Re “Vote in Texas Is One for the Science Books,” Nov. 7: Hooray for the Texas Board of Education! Creationists deserve no consideration in the printing of textbooks. It’s very simple. Evolution is true. Creation is false. Giving creationists any consideration in the printing of textbooks would degrade education. Fortunately, the Texas Board of Education has rebuffed this creationist attempt to undermine the teaching of evolution.

Josh Rivetz

Northridge

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Your Nov. 6 article on the controversy in Texas over teaching evolution sounded more like the scientific community is being defensive over any challenge to Darwin’s theory. It didn’t offer any of the scientists’ responses to the problems of rapid creation of life during the Cambrian explosion or the severe gaps in the record of evolution. Calling evolution a “young field” is disingenuous, since it’s been around for about 150 years. The defenders of evolution seem to be more into name-calling and criticism of the other side (“Intelligent Design”) than should be necessary for a firmly entrenched concept.

The idea that any theory of life’s development that proposes a process other than evolution (such as “interference” by God) is automatically rejected as the influence of religious “extremists” means rejection of one of the possibilities to explain our existence. Doesn’t sound much like “science” to me.

Curt Feese

Covina

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If you accept God as the author both of the physical universe around us and of some subset of religious writings (e.g., the Bible), then what possible reason could you have for preferring the transcribed writings of the deity over the empirical reality of the universe around us?

Fundamentalists torture logic to convince themselves that clear evidence for the facts of evolution is somehow a test by God of their faith in his inerrant writings (the inerrancy of which should at least be suspect, since they were transcribed by mortal men, if not written by them), and these religious writings are clearly subject to a great many differing interpretations (which has given rise to the hateful term “heretic”). But since fundamentalists of every stripe would have their say, which of several hundred inerrant and conflicting divine revelations shall the state use in evaluating science?

Carey Allen

Long Beach