I grew up in and around the small city of Orillia, Ontario. It is a charming place, and was both the hometown of Gordon Lightfoot and the summer home of Stephen Leacock, in the latter case serving as the inspiration for his Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town.

My parents (both since re-married) still live in the area, and I try to get home when I can as a good son should. They also make sure that I am kept up to date with local news of interest, which mostly means stories about the hospital administration’s shenanigans (my mother is a nurse and her husband is an MD, both recently retired and glad of it) and the amazing community project for Zambia that my father and stepmother are hard at work planning.

In addition, my mother enjoys sending me things like the following letter, which appeared in one of the local newspapers. This is, I think, the third rant by a creationist that I have seen in print from this or the smaller paper. A previous one claimed that no one had ever considered the evolution of plants, and thus that creationism must be accurate. I have many botanist colleagues who would be surprised to learn of this omission. In light of the recent poll results that show only 51% of Ontarians accept evolution, I think it is informative. This, by the way, is a lower total than for the USA as a whole, which I find disconcerting. To be fair, the results would probably depend heavily on which part of the province they sampled. Rural areas and small towns differ considerably from the larger cities in various socio-political attitudes. Frankly, I don’t have the time or energy to correct the factual errors and logical fallacies in this latest letter, so I will just post it for your enjoyment (original source).

Evolutionists have their heads in the sand
Orillia Packet & Times
Editorial – Wednesday, May 23, 2007 @ 09:00

Letter to the editor:

Re: M. Brown’s letter “Atheism; a sensible alternative to some”

Atheism: the belief that there is no God. Mr. Albert Einstein, the great theoretical physicist, upon having been asked how much he knew about what there is to be known, said he thought he might know about one hundredth of one per cent without doubt. Most of us know less than he did. All of which leads one to wonder how a person can come to conclude that “there is no God, no creator, no higher intelligence,” when we realize how little we know about anything in general, and origins and beginnings in particular.Atheism does not seem very sensible.

To deny evolution, Mr. Brown writes, is like putting one’s head in the sand, and to dismiss it because we still have apes, is ignorant. Well, where is the evidence for the theory? Where are all the in-between transitional life forms that Mr. Darwin and his followers were sure to be found in the fossil record? After all the digging and searching of the last 150 years, out of hundreds of thousands of fossil discoveries, there is not one clear-cut sample, when there should have been thousands. Dr. Colin Patterson, an evolutionist who was senior paleontologist at the prestigious British Museum of National History and a world-renowned fossil expert, wrote the following about his book entitled “Evolution:” “I fully agree with comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. I will lay it on the line; there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.”

Surely, this leads open, honest minds to conclude that the theory of evolution and all the resulting evo-babble is unproven, unsubstantiated, without evidence and just plain wrong. As a matter of fact, the earliest fossil record shows that plants and animals appeared suddenly and fully formed, much as we see them today, in complete agreement with the Biblical record. So who, in reality, is putting their head in the sand and ignoring the evidence?

All of which makes one wonder, why evolution is still being taught in our schools, and creation ignored. Why do we so readily allow our children to be misled?

P. Visser

The old saying is not quite accurate: you can go home again, just try not to read the letters to the editor in the local newspaper.