The eyes of the LORD preserve knowledge, But He overthrows the words of the treacherous man. Proverbs 22:12.

I had several proof-texts to choose from once I settled on a title for this post, but this was by far the most apt.

First, I googled “Valtor.” I found Valtor the Great vs. the Universe, a fitting description of our Valtor’s point of view. I also found that Valtor III was site of an intelligence base in the Klingon/Romulan disputed area, but no Dr. Valtor. I then turned to our visitor logs. I found that Dr. Valtor hailed from an ISP located in Freedom, CA. She (as I figured out) had received an email message with a link to Dr. Vreeland’s critique. She was referred from her email account accessed through webmail.ucsc.edu. So I went and visited ucsc.edu. I found no one with either a first or last name “Valtor.” Then I was delighted to discover that I could search by user name. That is when I discovered Dr. Valtor’s true name, email address, phone number, and her personal web page from 2003 when she was a sophomore in the Theater Arts program. She was born and raised in Berkeley, California. She gave a list of her classes and community theater events that she was participating in.

Armed with her true name I went to dexonline.com and performed a residential search near Freedom, CA. I got one entry back with an address and phone number. I went to Google maps, entered her address, and then Google allowed me to get directions from there to Freedom, CA. I did that and lo and behold –It was a mere 2.1 miles from her house to Freedom! I knew I had the right person.

Upon a broader review of our visitor logs I found that on November 24^th Dr. Vreeland’s critique had received a visit from someone who had googled “Amy Coombs.” One hour later “Dr. Valtor” spewed her ignorance and bile at Theoblogian.org. I have on occasion googled my own name, and I am surprised at the number of hits we have gotten from someone (that wasn’t me) searching on my name. So we had Ms. Coombs Google her own name, find Dr. Vreeland’s critique, fire off an email to a friend of hers, that friend came over and gave Vreeland what-for... I had hoped for something a bit less junior-high. Shouldn’t I expect more from someone who took the class “Overview of the Universe?” Amy also emailed the link to several other people around the country for over the next few days we had numerous visitors from around the country jump directly into the June archive where Amy’s name is mentioned.

Really, we don’t mind getting a defense of Ms. Coombs review. What is sad, however, is that the defense was made by someone who doesn’t seem to have a grasp of the arguments. We welcome vigorous discussion. We would be delighted to have someone come in and critique the arguments of the book, to disagree with Dr. Vreeland’s assessment. The discussion could educate all of us, but I don’t have any hope for this. The anti-intelligence crowd does not understand that that it is the responsibility of philosophers and theologians to have these discussions, to discuss the import of science. Therefore they only claim that we have no place in this discussion. This demonstrates why we theologians need to discuss it.