One
of the foremost opponents of all attacks on evolutionary science has been Niles Eldredge, retired from
the American Museum of Natural History. One of his many books was The Triumph of Evolution and the Failure of
Creationism (the last phrase was printed backwards on the cover, spine, and
title page). When Eldredge wrote this book, he was pretty angry at the
creationists.
In
recent decades, I’ve stopped getting upset about what the creationists do. You
cannot stop them from making false claims, and profiting from the support of
millions of people whom they have duped. They are part of the conservative
movement which now controls America, and they are not going to step back from
the power and money that comes with it. They know they are lying, and it does
no good to point out their errors to them, or to the people who willingly
believe them.
Instead,
what I do is to use creationism as an opportunity to teach science, and to do
so by the use of humor. I have now published two articles in Skeptical Inquirer magazine entitled
“Creationist Funhouse,” episodes one and two (readable by subscribers only).
More are on the way.
Eldredge
allowed himself to be optimistic toward the end of his book, which was
published in 2000. He wrote, “The tired old creationism debate—mired as it so
thoroughly is in the nineteenth century—simply has not prepared us for the kind
of positive interaction between science and religion that I see as eminently
possible as we enter the new Millennium and grapple with tough environmental
issues.” As Eldredge and the rest of us now know only too well, religion and
science are further apart than ever, because “religion” now often means
unquestioning devotion to Donald Trump, and there is less hope than ever for
environmental problems to be solved, once again because of unquestioning
devotion to Donald Trump. Eldredge’s millennial optimism was a good try, but
reality has proven worse than we could have imagined back in 2000.
This
essay also appeared in my science blog.
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