firstly it was well known amongst museum staff the reason why the passage was covered up and it was NOt due to bad grammar.

secondly Mr Houston states in a letter to the Chronicle and Echo newspaper that he complained about the five words

“The biblical view of Evolution”

I would like to state that these five words were not the ones covered up. What was covered up directly related to how Darwin came upon the theory of evolution.

I would also like to state that i have since resigned over this issue from the museum as I feel so strongly about it.

Gary Arthur

It’s just that in the furore a mountain was made out of a – not quite a molehill, more of a mound, or at most a hillock. Because whatever this case was about (and it appears now to be about several things), it was not about a creationist trying to suppress education about evolution.

Thanks for pointing it the name mistake! Bit of a brainstorm there, I’m afraid.

The Chapman family are not at all embarrassed by this. Our starting point was the suspicion that creationists might be behind the cover up at the museum, and we were correct. At the time we were reacting to a single event, we were not looking to “pick a battle”, as we didn’t know then that we were in a war.

The museum has been embarrassed. Their stated reason for the three-year cover-up was the bad grammar of the text that they produced in the first place and not wishing to offend anyone. However, they have now uncovered the panel and ordered a replacement, and somehow the people of Northampton are not swooning in horror at the sight of a misplaced apostrophe and a couple of badly phrased sentences. While they are badly phrased, any reasonable person of any persuasion would know what they were meant to mean. In an email from the museum, I was also told that the “nonsensical” phrase “a Genesis view of evolution” would be replaced by, wait for it, it’s a good one, “a biblical view of geological stratification”, so they still can’t get it right. I have had to reply that if this wording is on the new panel I will just have to say that I am deeply offended and ask for it to be covered up.

Mr Lewis Houston (a pity Monitor couldn’t get his name right in the posting) is evidently embarrassed. Having given us his name in his letter to the local paper, a little bit of internet searching came up with him as leading the Northants Creation Group. He says in his posting to Mediawatchwatch that for two years NCG has been taken forward by others, but as recently as 1st September his name, address, email address and phone number were listed on the Eden.co.uk website, a Christian resource, as the contact for NCG. Last night, 4 September, his details are still there but have been blanked out and are now only available to subscribers. However, the telephone number is still the same and the length of the blanks coincides with the previous details exactly. I would dare to suggest that Mr Lewis is being economic with the truth again.

Why is he trying to disappear into the shadows? Could it be that in his involvement with the multi-denominational Faithworks Northampton there are good Christians that would not be too happy if they knew that their Secretary was a Creationist, with the expressed aim of providing speakers for schools?

It has all been very educational, after all, we had never heard of MediaWatchWatch, and as long as you don’t jump the gun and believe everything you read in the papers, you are doing a good job and thanks for the coverage.

Andy and Pat Chapman

The fact that people turned out is certainly encouraging. The fact that they turned out for a false alarm is just a little bit embarrassing.

You seem to be ceeding the fact that only a Creationist can tell us the correct interpretation of genesis. There are in fact many different forms of creationist and several would vehemently disagree with Lewis’s assertion.

Furthermore I think that the vast majority of Christians, who view genesis as a beautiful and allegorical myth would have no problems at all with the original plaque. They would not claim to hold the one and only true meaning of the text and would in fact gladly admit it can be interpreted in different ways.

Then again, unlike Lewis they don’t feel the need to deny the vast majority of modern science just to preserve their “one true interpretation” of the text.

Just a subtle point. But an important one.

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Even if we ignore my point and grant a “creationist false alarm” I find it wonderfully encouraging that so many of the great British public were happy to stand up and be counted and to show that they do care about truth.

This surely is a piece of good news, both for science and mainstream (I.e. Non-fundamentalist) religion.

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For clarities sake, I am a member of the BCSE committee- thanks for the plug