10/11/2008

Dear Pastor Paul,

Last night, with my candle burning and the rain falling outside, I reread your letters. I kept coming back to one paragraph in particular.  I have come to view that paragraph as the premise upon which your arguments are based.

You wrote, “the theory of evolution, which I believe to be poor science and a theory in crisis, is perhaps the most evil ideology thrust upon the world in the twentieth century.  As J Sidlow Baxter said, "those who believe we evolved from the primordial slime have destined themselves and those who believe them to re-evolve back into the slime from which they believe they came."

The thought strikes me suddenly this morning. I have just arrived in Gamboa, the perfect place to ponder your statement.  I am here with three people: two birders, one of whom is a biology teacher, and a trained Panamanian naturalist. Hard morning rains are keeping us from the jungle.  Instead, we are peering into backyards, scanning treetops for life.

Gamboa is a clean town on the banks of the canal.  Something about it reminds me of Hawaiian plantation villages; clean, bright and somewhat unnaturally uniform, with plenty of open space.  Gamboa was a canal town, built briskly in 1911 and filled to the brim until the canal’s completion in 1914.  Today, you can reach the town only by a single one lane bridge.

From Gamboa, you can see the container vessels moving along the canal.  It is an amazing sight.  But as you may remember, it came with a great cost of human life – 27,500 workers died building the canal.  The vast majority of these deaths, 22,000 of them, occurred during the earlier French efforts.  Horrible landslides killed some of these men.  But the real culprit was tropical disease; malaria and yellow fever were by far the worst of the many diseases men fell prey to.