Clare Wuellner, Ph.D.

Executive Director

Center for Inquiry Austin

TeachThemScience.org

512-565-0297

cwuellner@centerforinquiry.net

1502 Palo Duro Rd.

Austin, TX 78757

I would like to address the following to Board members Agosto, Allen, Berlange, Craig, Hardy, Knight, Miller, and Nuñez: The other seven have sunk too deeply into the world of confirmation bias to be reached.

Please visit TeachThemScience.org and learn everything you can about why the “strengths and weaknesses” language matters and why all the alleged “weaknesses” are not founded.

Please listen to the scientists and experts who comprise the MAJORITY opinion: anything less than a 21st-Century science education is not legitimate science.

Please remember:

• Science has brought us good things.
• Those good things done in science were done by scientists using the scientific method.
• The scientific method is the best means we have for answering questions. Using it, society has jumped further forward in its understanding of everything in the past 200 years than society moved forward in all previous time.
• Evolution and other Theories hail from the scientific method.
• Scientists are not the plotting, conniving, god-hating lot that opponents to good science have made them out to be.
• Scientists want to find out the truth, just like the rest of us.
• Scientific truth and religious truth are different things.
• Make no mistake, the language game being played here is about religion.
• You will find language like “strengths and weaknesses” nowhere else but in books that also push creationism or Intelligent Design.

A Religious Controversy

We are watching a religious controversy play out within our public school system. A small group of vocal anti-evolutionists disagree and want schools teaching their particular religious view of science.

Evolution is solid, established science— The controversy is over whether evolution is compatible with faith. Anti-evolutionists say that you can't accept evolution and be religious. The very existence of The Clergy Letter Project proves this wrong. Over 12,000 ministers around the country teach their congregations that evolution and religion get along just fine, that faith is not the fragile thing that anti-evolutionists make it out to be. Thousands of religious leaders agree with scientists that evolution is solid science.

Evolution went through the ringer in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and it only came out stronger. Texas is arguing over whether to teach established science in public schools

Please remember that the Constitution calls for separation of church and state.

• There are enough people who are saying that the “strengths and weaknesses” language is religious that someone somewhere sometime will bring a lawsuit.
• The lawsuit will cost the taxpayers a lot of money.
• Do we really want that?

Thank you for your time and support of education for our children.