Regarding "Shoot the messenger for printing bad letters" in the letters section last week: There's no reason to get angry at the Thousand Oaks Acorn. They're nice people, and the story they published, "Evolution versus creationism under the microscope again" (March 8), was wellwritten and no sides were taken.

As for a letter to the editor, that is someone's opinion. According to the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights, all people have freedom of speech.

If you disagree, that's fine; write about it, but don't get mad.

As for the debate over creationism and evolution, they both have several holes. According to the widely used but narrowly accepted wikipedia.org, evolution is (what happens when) species change to fit their environment.

No one really debates that because Darwin saw that firsthand with the finches. However, it doesn't explain well how the earth evolved from nothing.

In my opinion, it takes more faith to believe that the earth appeared out of nowhere, than to believe that there is something smarter out there.

Creationism gives a more detailed explanation of how the earth appeared, but it as well has holes. Most scholars agree that Moses wrote Genesis, but Moses thought the earth was flat. So did everyone until the 12th century. If you take the whole Bible at its word, God may have used some of the theories involved in evolution to create his earth.

Example: In 2 Peter 3:8b in the NIV translation, "With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day." So if it took one day to erode the hills and valleys and land with water, it could have been (literally) a thousand years.

Finally, as for teaching this in schools, when it comes to teaching evolution, they teach that in 10th-grade biology.

When they talk about homosexuality in the same class, they present both sides, nature- - genetics, versus nurture- - upbringing.

So, if you don't know how we got here for sure, why not just give kids the option?

What people don't know is they already know what they believe by the time you adults teach it to us. Jeremy Zeller Newbury Park