Recently, tech writer Virginia Heffernan confessed to being a creationist, saying, among other things:
Also, at heart, I am a creationist. There, I said it. At least you, dear readers, won’t now storm out of a restaurant like the last person I admitted that to. In New York City saying you’re a creationist is like confessing you think Ahmadinejad has a couple of good points. Maybe I’m the only creationist I know.
Well, that’s easy enough to fix. Lose the people who storm out of restaurants when someone civilly disagrees with them.
Joining the ID community will give you a chance to refine your ideas of origins, with access to facts that the storm troopers are too dense to know, or often ignore or suppress.
Hearteningly, Heffernan writes,
Cut to now. I still read and read and listen and listen. And I have never found a more compelling story of our origins than the ones that involve God. The evolutionary psychologists with their just-so stories for everything (“You use a portable Kindle charger because mothers in the primordial forest gathered ginseng”) have become more contradictory than Leviticus. Did you all see that ev-psych now says it’s women who are naturally not monogamous, in spite of the same folks telling us for decades that women are desperate to secure resources for their kids so they frantically sustain wedlock with a rich silverback who will keep them in cashmere?
Sigh. When a social science, made up entirely of observations and hypotheses, tells us first that men are polygamous and women homebodies, and then that men are monogamous and women gallivanters—and, what’s more builds far-fetched protocols of dating and courtship and marriage and divorce around these notions—maybe it’s time to retire the whole approach.
She’s right of course, but she’s not alone there either. Materialist atheist philosopher Jerry Fodor wrote What Darwin Got Wrong to counter that flood tide of bilge. Generally, some of the best slams come from agnostics. So, Heffernan, if you like a broad mix of companions, you’ll get along just fine with us.
Meanwhile, stupid remarks from Darwin’s PR team (oops, we meant the popular science press, if course, apologies, apologies) will likely be Heffernan’s lot, including this implied threat from Gawker:
We are not saying you’re a bad person, Virginia, but you should probably expect that, from now on, when people read your musings on, say, the future of internet communications, they might stop, in a moment of gathering doubt, and recall that you are a science-phobic angel-believing climate change skeptic, and that therefore your dedication to facts is somewhat in question.
If anyone dumps her on account of this controversy, we urge that readers help retire that source of information by little heeding it hereafter. Fortunately, there are plenty of reliable sources out there who can tolerate her suspicions of Darwin’s cult, and indeed share them.
Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose