Somebody Please, Shoot Me

Hat tip to Luke O' Dell for unearthing this piece of thoughtless drivel in the Sydney Morning Herald. which features an extract from Tom Frame's* new book, Evolution in the Antipodes, in which he opines:

"The problem I face is weariness with science-based dialogue partners like Richard Dawkins. It surprises me he is not chided for his innate scientific conservatism and metaphysical complacency. He won't take his depiction of Darwinism to logical conclusions. A dedicated Darwinian would welcome imperialism, genocide, mass deportation, ethnic cleansing, eugenics, euthanasia, forced sterilisations and infanticide. Publicly, he advocates none of them."

The problem with Tom's argument is that it's meaningless, emotive, irrelevant bullshit that has absolutely no place in intelligent discourse. You might also ask, as I did, what the hell a cleric is doing writing about evolution a subject he clearly and profoundly fails to understand?

I'm a dedicated Darwinian - and just like Luke and Professor Dawkins - I don't advocate, support or condone any of those things. He witters on in the same tone:

"Crudely naturalistic science leaves no room for poetic truth, refuses to honour any spiritual element in physical things and cannot accept the existence of a human soul."

Poppycock. I am both an atheist and a Darwinian; but I acheived both those things at separate points in my life; Darwin had nothing to do with me finally deciding that Yahweh of the Bible was a human construct which I had done long before I studied biology at that level.

Surely, this can't get any worse... can it?

"Evolution might account for the story of life's beginnings and progress, but it cannot explain its origin nor cast any light on its destiny"

Evolution (indeed Darwin) never attempted to explain abiogenesis - we still don't know how life actually started and there is room, for those who want to, to insert [god] here. As for life's direction and ultimate end, it doesn't try to explain that either. Astrophysics does that.

"All that Dawkins can offer is a revival of old-fashioned secular humanism, whose hopes and aspirations are summarised in John Lennon's insipid 1971 composition Imagine."

That's Professor Dawkins to you, fuckwit and besides, what the hell is so wrong with Imagine's lyrics?

Jeeeeeezus! I'm going to back bed, somebody wake me up when it's time to die.

*Professor of Theology at Charles Sturt University