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In response to Jesse Corn's column Monday: The argument in his column is worthless. The reason is that you created what is called a "straw man," an argument based upon a position that you attributed to those who are considering the option of succession of some states from the U.S. federal republic. This position that you created is not in any way the actual position of the people you are arguing with.
If you'll reread the U,S, Constitution, you may notice that the federal government has no power to be involved in education, health care and maybe 80 percent of all of the other projects that in which it is involved. Some of us conservatives would like to move the federal government back into the constitutional bottle that it was once in.
Our argument to do so would be based upon the notion of real, easily understood, written constitutional limitations of the federal government and the rights of the states to make laws for the benefit of governing their citizens.
Maybe you'd like to argue sometime in the future about federal and state responsibilities as written in the U.S. Constitution and how you'd like to see them implemented, while leaving your incendiary, gasoline-soaked straw man appropriately out of the argument.
Rick Frommer
Murrayville
Evolution backers dismiss creation; both require belief
I usually am able to ignore the fallacies of the arguments posed by certain columnists, but I find that I must respond to Joan King's column of May 5. In it, she stated, "Science makes observations, gathers facts, develops hypotheses, conducts test and draws conclusions. When other individuals deal with the same facts, perform the same tests and get the same results the hypothesis becomes a theory."
So far, so good. However, she makes a huge leap in logic, and I use the word "logic" very loosely here, when she goes on later in her column to assert, " Science ... links humanity together through the process of evolution."
Evolution is a very slippery word. Do we mean that small changes, such as occur within a species, happen over time, aka micro-evolution? (Something that virtually every Christian acknowledges happens; that is how we have different breeds of dogs, for example.) Or do we mean that a big bang was the force by which matter came of nothing and small changes over millions years led from simple life forms to complex life forms, aka macro-evolution?
The answer to this question is very important. While science has indeed been able, even in our lifetime, to witness small changes within a "kind," there is no science that actually demonstrates one "kind" of species becoming another.
And even if evolutionists are able to point to so-called "links" in the fossil record, they are unable to duplicate this change, the very thing Ms. King stated so well in the beginning of her column as being essential to science.
In other words, to call the belief in creation simply religion misses the fact that belief in macro-evolution is also religious in nature. There is no way to duplicate the beginnings of life on earth. One belief is not science simply because many people believe it.
In fact, a very famous scientist by the name of Francesco Redi turned the scientific community of his time on its ear by demonstrating that the beloved belief in spontaneous generation simply does not happen. And yet, the macro-evolutionist camp would have us believe that spontaneous generation is exactly what happened.
To make matters worse, the macro-evolutionist camp often uses bulllying tactics to hush those who would disagree and all in the name of "science." It takes much faith to believe all the assertions of macro-evolution.
Ms. King asserts that creation has no place in a science class room because it is religious in nature. If that is the case, then evolution has no place in the science classroom, either. The evidence is open to interpretation either way; many of the same "proofs" of evolution (and remember, these things cannot be duplicated, thus violating the very standard of science) are also used as "proofs" of creation.
So instead of saying that creation is incompatible with science because it is based on faith, why don't we acknowledge that macro-evolution is also based on faith. Is Ms. King afraid that students are unable to think critically about this issue, or is she afraid that students are indeed able to think critically, and when given full information, may believe differently than she does?
Andrea Dailey
Clarkesville