Re: Dan Whelan’s Aug. 10 letter, “Evolution is a philosophy� and follow-up letters:
I, too, have engaged in this debate on many occasions, so I was not surprised by the responses. What is disheartening is the unwillingness of pro-evolutionists to recognize the true debate. As is typical, their letters attack the messenger and not the message, and for good reason: Evolution is a theory based 98 percent on surmise and 2 percent fact. The empirical evidence offers us fossils of species long extinct. We look at physiological makeup and see similarities between species. However, to make a connection between, we have to make surmises of quantitative proportions.
I challenge any evolutionist to write a list of facts in support of evolution and study them without theorizing the connections. It doesn’t leave much. You see, this debate is really about which set of surmises we want to believe: a set based on species evolving themselves, or a set that says God did it.
The real question, and one I always ask, is: Why don’t you want to believe in God?
And I think Richard Dawkins provides the answer. To paraphrase him: Evolution provides a vehicle by which an educated man doesn’t have to believe in a God.
— Chris Maguire, Oxnard
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