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ENV Accused of Spanking Darwinist Lady


Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Faye Flam thinks Evolution News & Views has “spanked” her (“I Get Spanked by Creationists for Accepting Reality and being a ‘Darwinist’“). Ms. Flam, if we had in fact spanked you, you would know it. So what’s she referring to?
Faye FlamRichard Weikart’s article yesterday taking issue with Ms. Flam’s previous column on Hitler and Darwinism. Professor Weikart argues — unarguably, we’d say — that a consistent stance of Darwinian materialism leaves no room for positing an objective moral or spiritual order that would give a coherent rationale for condemning evil or viewing life as having objective meaning or purpose. Faye Flam offers no answer to this other than an assertion that “we endow life with meaning and purpose.” In other words, life has meaning and some acts are right or wrong because we say so. You might well wonder how an adult could find that convincing.
Beyond that, she complains about the label “Darwinist.”

Why is it that to [sic] creationists label everyone who accepts current biology as a “Darwinist”? It’s as if scientific knowelged [sic] equates to some kind of political ideology. We don’t call physicists “Einsteinists” or astronomers “Hubbleites.”

That last sentence is true, Faye Flam, but it is because there’s no controversy about Einstein’s science (or not until recently) or Hubble’s. There is no party of Einsein or Hubble, but the same can’t be said of Darwin and his theory. Count on a journalist, like this one who hasn’t even mastered the difference between creationism and intelligent design, to be unaware of that fact.
UPDATE: Regarding the Darwinist complaint about being called “Darwinists,” see here and here for how often they themselves use just these terms — “Darwinist,” “Darwinism” and so on — to describe who they are and what they believe.
Which just makes sense: Only Darwinists put a Darwin fish on their car. No one ever puts an Einstein or Hubble fish on his car. Darwinism is much more like Freudianism, Marxism, or phrenology than it is like Newtonian or Einsteinian physics, or Hubble’s evidence of a cosmic expansion.