They always come out on Thursday…

Letter: Cartoon on evolution misses fact

The cartoon on the April 19 Opinion page featuring a science teacher contrasting evolution and creationism merits comment. The implied message is that those who believe we are the result of a long series of random unsupervised events are intelligent thinking people, while those who believe we are here through the deliberate act of a being outside of space and time are naive primitive thinkers.

However, this message misses the fact that the more we study the universe, the more evidence we find for a creator. One of the more stunning discoveries was announced 20 years ago this month — that measurements from the cosmic background explorer (COBE) confirmed the Big Bang creation event, the beginning of the universe indicated by Albert Einstein’s equations of general relativity. The COBE project leader declared, “It’s like looking at God.” [sigh…]

Turning our focus from the cosmos to the cell, the more we discover about the incredible code of life programmed into our DNA, the more difficult it is to explain how simple molecules could have arranged themselves into the proteins which build our cells or into the DNA molecules which contain the detailed code to assemble proteins.

Evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala estimated the probability of intelligent species arising from single-celled organisms at -10^1 million (or 999,999 zeros between the decimal point and the “1”). Calculations by others yield even smaller probabilities. The more we learn about the details of life, the closer these probabilities come to zero. This should give us all plenty of food for thought.

BARRIE WINN

Greenville

Besides courage, apparently we need better cartoonists.