A nice bit of anti-Creationist rant I just found [View All]

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?