DEAR EDITOR:

A respectable newspaper should certainly publish columnists and letters with a wide range of perspectives regarding politics, science, religion, and any other topic of interest. But publishing columns by a hypocritical and dishonest preacher, one who presses hard for governmental endorsement of the Ten Commandments, but who himself ignores the one about bearing false witness, should be avoided out of editorial self respect and respect for the honesty and decency of your religious readers.

The Sept. 13 column by the Rev. Dr. Nelson Price ("Creationism increasingly proving to be good science") was not just misguided or misleading, not just based on a different philosophy or worldview from my own, and not just poorly argued. It was all of those things, but, far worse, it was thoroughly, fundamentally dishonest. Price uses arguments and out-of-context quotations to support points that are the precise opposite of the ones the authors he cites - Richard Dawkins, Richard Lewontin, Albert Einstein, etc. - intended and forcefully argued. And Price had every reason to know this, because the claims he sets forth have been around for many years and these false representations related to the claims have been around for that long and have been repeatedly, publicly, and comprehensively refuted.

The so-called creation-evolution debate is not about pitting all religious ideas against all science, but the "debate" is not one within the institutions of science at all. It is an attack by religious advocates, representing only a minority of religious perspectives, on the very core of the scientific enterprise. I know that this is only an assertion on my part and it is certainly not true just because I say it is. But even a superficial survey of leading scientists of all sorts will reveal overwhelming evidence of its truth.

Ed Buckner
President,
American Atheists