by Theodore Dalrymple (September 2015)
When I was a boy I used to collect wild birds’ eggs, but I think I always knew that I had no serious purpose in doing so and that the passion would not last. I had not the patience of a real ornithologist; rather I was beguiled by the joys of the chase, the beauty of the eggs and pleasures of possession. Luckily I never took the eggs of any but the commonest birds, so that my contribution to the decline of bird populations was very minor. I suppose that for every hundred boys who go bird-nesting, only one becomes a true nature-lover. more>>>
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One Response
You write: It is curious that even the most convinced evolutionists find it difficult to eviscerate their language of intention, design and moral assessment. They claim that this language is a kind of shorthand, and that it would be tedious to translate such language into a purely naturalistic one…in fact they not only speak, but think in this shorthand…Evolution does this, Evolution does that—when, of course, the whole point of the concept is to explain how we became what we are without resort to design, Evolution’s or anything or anybody else’s. I appreciate your honest reflections on this variation of the personification of ‘Nature’. Maybe the only difference between these circumlocutions and G-d is that no-one is answerable to a circumlocution.