We’ve never seen anything like this before. The response in the local newspaper to the news we wrote about in Drooling School Board Chairwoman has been amazing. That was about Susie Kern, chairwoman of the school board of Brainerd, Minnesota, who couldn’t figure out why the schools were teaching evolution. Susie’s friends and supporters are driving our letter count ever closer to 1,000.
Today’s letter-to-the-editor is in the Brainerd Dispatch of Brainerd, Minnesota. It’s titled Evolution vs. creation — a bit generic, perhaps, but it’s accurate.
Because the letter writer isn’t a politician, preacher, or other public figure, we won’t embarrass or promote him by using his full name. We think he works for the Brainerd Post Office, but that doesn’t qualify for full name treatment. His first name appears as Len. We assume it’s actually Leonard, so we’ll call him Lenny. Excerpts from his letter will be enhanced with our Curmudgeonly commentary, some bold font for emphasis, and occasional Curmudgeonly interjections that look [like this]. Here we go!
They [evolution and creationism, presumably] are both belief systems used to interpret evidence. Evolution starts with the presumption that the earth is millions of years old. The god of evolution is time and chance.
BWAHAHAHAHAHA! Evolution doesn’t start with that “presumption.” The age of the earth is a conclusion of both geology and astronomy, and it gives us a timeline for the fossil and other evidence discovered by biologists. Multiple lines of evidence developed independently all converge on the same conclusion for the age of the Earth.
Lenny is off to a great start! Then he says:
Creation starts with an eternal God who created the universe 6,000 years ago.
He’s right about that. Creationism does indeed begin with that presumption. Now, having declared everyone’s presumptions, he tells us:
Creationist and evolutionist have the same evidence. Based on science the facts fit into the creation model better.
BWAHAHAHAHAHA! He continues:
Dinosaurs are used as evidence for millions of years.
Well, their fossils are certainly millions of years old. We assume Lenny doesn’t agree, so let’s see what he says about dinosaurs:
They were killed off mostly during the great flood of Noah.
BWAHAHAHAHAHA! Let’s read on:
If there was a worldwide flood we would find creatures buried in rock layers all over the earth, which is what we find.
Actually, if there were such a flood we would find zillions of creatures — dinosaurs and bunny rabbits — all buried in one geological layer — a recent layer — all over the Earth. Unfortunately for creationists, that layer doesn’t exist. Lenny’s not doing very well, but let’s give him a chance. Here’s another excerpt:
Historical science is about the past. It uses assumptions and data that cannot be tested or repeated. Observational science is about current data that is testable and repeatable.
BWAHAHAHAHAHA! That’s something he probably read at ol’ Hambo’s website. We’ve written about it several times, originally in Creationism and Science.
For the conclusion of his letter, Lenny resorts to an old creationist cliché:
I personally believe it takes far greater faith to be an atheist than to believe in a creator God.
Based on all the letters we’ve seen in the Brainerd Dispatch, Susie Kern has a lot of supporters and she’ll probably get re-elected. That’s bad news for the kids in Brainerd schools, but it’s good news for our humble blog.
Copyright © 2019. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.
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The Sensuous Curmudgeon 
This letter could of been written by Hambo himself.
“Creation starts with an eternal God who created the universe 6,000 years ago.”
Lenny agrees that the IDiots from Seattle don’t do creacrap …..
In a review of evangelical Ben Howe’s book “The Immoral Majority: Why Evangelicals Chose Political Power Over Christian Values”, former Bush assistant John Gardner writes:
“As Howe notes, “Trump evangelicals are very fond of binary choices”, many of which are in essence “false dilemmas” in which a supposed “greater moral consideration takes precedence”. This “whataboutism” was key. ”
Creationism is not restricted to the ICR/AiG Quasi-Christian version and not is true even if naturalistic evolution were false. It would be a miracle if it were true and no amount of scientific investigation would support it.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/28/the-immoral-majority-review-trump-evangelicals
@Michael Fugate
Creationism does not offer an alternative to evolutionary biology. Evolution at least attempts to explain some phenomena of the world of life, phenomena which are of no interest to the Bible. Creatinism, Intelligent Design and any denial of evolution do not attempt to explain phenomena like the nested hierarchy of taxonomy.
Lenny, bring me a rabbit fossil from the pre-Cambrian strata. Then I’ll think maybe there are some things about evolution that may need to be modified.
A lion giving birth to a rat (without human intervention) will also do.
TomS, tell that to the anti-evolution crowd.
A posy of clunkers. It’s not just that Len has no evidence for Biblical creation, and has dismissed all evidence for evolution and deep time; it’s that he hasn’t a clue what evidence is.
Nor has he any conceptual framework in which to consider evidence, and, worse, he has no mental place to put such a framework. He thinks atheism is the same as faith, when it’s exactly the opposite. But even to use the verb-participle “thinks” in the last sentence is to do Len’s mental processes unjustified credit. Len doesn’t think, if the word implies the application of observation and logic to reality. He regurgitates what he has swallowed. And he spews it out whole, without the slightest attempt at digestion. Len hasn’t made any attempt to check what he’s been told, for if he had, the lies he has absorbed would have instantly become apparent. I think it likely that it simply cannot occur to him to make any such check. He believes what he’s been told because he’s been told it.
But what strikes me above all about Len’s output is its transparently false attempts at competence. He has a sixteenth century understanding of geology. Fossils are found in rocks, right? That’s all you know, and all you need to know. It cannot occur to Len that people who have absorbed the last three centuries’ of work and who study the rocks and what is found in them might know more than that. Still further beyond Len’s mental horizon is the notion that what they know, and that he doesn’t know, might matter.
That is to say, it is not merely that Len’s mental world is tightly restricted by ignorance and prejudice. It is not even that Len is not aware of the restrictions. It is that he has bounded himself in a nutshell and thinks himself the king of infinite space. He is not merely ignorant, and not merely ignorant of his ignorance. No, more: not only is he not aware of it, he cannot become aware of it. The barriers that have been installed around his mind – with his acquiescence – are invisible to him, and all the more perfect for that.
I confess that I feel profoundly uneasy and inadequate in the face of something like that. I don’t know what is to be done. All I can plead is that I know I don’t know. But I seem to end up saying that about a lot of things.
Creationists like Len are so ignorant of science that they do not know what they do not know. They are a blank canvas for professional creationists like Hambo to fill with any nonsense that they wish. People like Len has no idea what real scientists actually know and what they had to accomplish to learn it. so called creation scientists like Jason Lisle and Georgia Purdham and other pet scientists at AIG and ICR managed to get a degree but they have never made a contribution to real science. As soon as they got what they believed to be a credential that would give them credibility they instantly went into the creationism profession.
Learned Lenny has this to say on the demise of the dinosaurs:
“They were killed off mostly during the great flood of Noah.”
Except for all the ones taken aboard the Ark, and later domesticated for use as rickshaw pullers; or as zippy vespas for romantic Israelites — a la Peck and Hepburn in ‘Roman Holiday’ — to hoon around on in ye olde Bible times, while taking in the amazing sights: the Tower of Babel chief among them. Good times were had by all — which basically meant more sin — making a mockery of the reason for the Flood in the first place.
Lenny is a big fan of Bill and Ken’s ‘Dinosaurs of Eden.’ His wife reads it to the kids before bedtime. Lenny dutifully sorts the leftover mail from work, secretly listening from the next room, every precious word forming perfectly on his silent lips.
Lenny says,
“Creation starts with an eternal God who created the universe 6,000 years ago.
…
If there was a worldwide flood we would find creatures buried in rock layers all over the earth, which is what we find.”
It is true that we find “creatures buried in rock layers all over the earth”, but not everywhere all over the earth, and as The Curmudgeon points out, creatures of all kinds would be found in one very shallow layer. But that’s not the only problem with Lenny’s reasoning. If all of these critters died within the last 6,000 years, they wouldn’t be fossilized yet. Fossilization takes a L O N G, L O N G time.
@Michael Fugate
“Anything is possible” does not tell a difference between what happens to be the case and an imagination. Design is not enough to bring something into being.
As creacrappers manage to be wrong in so many ways it’s easy to overlook one clunker or another.
“Historical science is about the past. It uses assumptions and data that cannot be tested or repeated.”
Read: evolution theory is not falsifiable. Still creacrappers like Len put almost all their effort in arguing that it has been falsified indeed.
@FrankB
Yet another inconsistency.