This is Ian. Isn't he a cutie?

You've heard a fair bit about him already, in passing, and I'm not going to go into any special detail here. He's not about to be pinned down like that.

But for the record, he's seen here in the jungles of Borneo -- as am I in the pic below (looking rather the worse for wear, some hours into our ascent of Mount Kinabalu). Not at all our natural habitat, but somewhere we both felt a strong desire to be.

Ian is fascinated by natural history and evolution. Like me, he's an ardent scientific rationalist -- a position founded on reason, but also profoundly æsthetic. And I don't mean that in a relativist, eye-of-the-beholder, pick-any-belief-system-that-appeals-to-you way.

I mean that evolution is beautiful and the narcissistic fantasies of religion are ugly. I mean that the appeal to a creator is a profound and hateful denial of the fabulous, monstrous, wonderful complexity of the natural world. I mean that the so-called Argument from Design is brutish, blinkered philistinism of the most odious kind.

Few people, even rank homophobes (of course, the two often go hand in hand), piss me off as much as creationists, those intellectually-bankrupt sophists whose witless teleological bleating about watches in the woods demonstrates only that they've spent far too much of their hidebound, mediated lives looking at watches -- and not nearly enough in the woods.

And so, Borneo. Woods without a watchmaker, writ large. A place where, despite omnivorous capitalism having swallowed unimaginably vast tracts of forest and vomited monocultural agribusiness in its place (all too sensible in a developing economy; it's easy to be disdainful of this from the lofty perspective of the rich west, where every vestige of nature has already been brutally subjugated, but if we want others to preserve what we could not we surely have to make it viable for them, and I really can't see that ever happening) -- despite that, there is still jungle, there is still biodiversity, there is still the literally awesome spectacle of evolution run riot, profligate, prodigal, prodigious -- and unsentimental, uncaring, brutal. There is still the terrifying, boundless appetite of life to exist, to find any and every last niche and colonize it, to devour everything, to remake the world.

How can anyone look at that and be so small-minded as to think it is all about them? Their pitiful anthropocentric gods, their flimsy scriptures, their empty heads?

Chesterton (IIRC, and I probably don't) tells a story in which a young man is beguiled by solipsism and cannot be argued out of it -- there is, after all, no possible intellectual argument against solipsism, since those arguments are outside it, and it defines everything outside as delusion -- until his antagonist beats him senseless, and lashes him to a tree to face the elements, and in effect rubs his nose in reality until he has to admit that, "real" or not, reality is pretty fucking convincing.

Well creationism is just a bigger, more dangerous solipsism, and every time I hear some god-bothering nitwit advancing puff like Intelligent Design I want to beat them senseless, and lash them to a tree in Borneo, and then point to one after another astonishingly-specific and unique organism within their little square metre and scream in their faces "Is this in your fucking Bible? Is this? Is this?"

INTELLIGENT DESIGN MY ARSE.

Alas, I know even that argument would fall on deaf ears. And, after all, Chesterton was a god-botherer himself.
Posted by matt at August 27, 2003 02:47 AM