Editor:

I realized after sending my prior letter that I had exceeded the 500 word limit by some 600 words!  (oops)

Please print the following rebuttal to Mrs. Rodriguez letter in place of my earlier message.

Thank you.

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[NOTE: Rather obviously, the above section was removed. ]

Editor:

Regarding Mrs. Rodriguez's April 6th letter:

Mrs. Rodriquez uses two quotes and makes several unfounded claims in her letter published April 6th.  Due to the space limitations of this format, I will limit my remarks here to the first point, and the twoquotes.  I have placed a full rebuttal on my website ( http://extra.newsguy.com/~wjhudson/evolve.html )

[ NOTE: The above paragraph was changed in the published version to "Mrs. Rodriguez's April 6 letter uses two quotes and makes several unfounded claims." ]

Mrs. Rodriguez states that 'Solid archeological data' supports a human history of only 6000 years.   She appears to be excluding a large portion of archeological data in order to make this claim.  For example: there are caves in France that have been inhabited almost continuously for 50,000 years.  The 'clovis points' found in North America are about
20,000 years old.  One can only arrive at a date of 6000 years by excluding a large quantity of 'solid archeological data'.

Mrs. Rodriguez misquotes Dr. Colin Patterson of the British Museum of Natural History as stating that "there is no real evidence of evolutionary transitions either among living or fossilized organisms".  This 'quote' was taken from a 1979 letter to a creationist critic of his 1978 book.  Anyone who has read either the letter or the book would  realize that Dr. Patterson does not doubt the existence of transitional fossils.  The full and accurate quote is on my website above.  [ NOTE: The last line of this paragraph was changed to "... on my website below." ]

Mrs. Rodriguez quotes Sir Frederick Hoyle as saying that the chances of  life evolving in our solar system is  "... as likely as a tornado sweeping through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747 jet from the materials therein." This quote is at least accurate.  However,  I believe that she is not familiar with Hoyle's arguments, because if she were, she would be much less willing to quote him.

Hoyle ( a long-time proponent of the 'Steady State' model of the universe ) believes that life did not evolve on Earth, but rather that life, in the form of bacterial spores, exists throught the universe as vast drifting dust-clouds, and that these spores were carried to Earth by a comet just before the cambrian explosion. (Evolution From Space, 1981) While I don't subscribe to Hoyle's viewpoint, I find his proposition much more likely than scientific creationism.

In addition, his calculations of the probability of life evolving on Earth have been thoroughly criticized, not just by 'evolutionists' but by plain old statisticians.

In order to make a good case for 'scientific creation', one should use good arguments.  Mrs. Rodriguez has merely repeated several old and flawed arguments from creationist literature, and this does not serve her case well.