At a dinner at my home over the weekend, a friend launched into a lengthy explanation of why, as a religious person, neither he nor anyone else should be bothered by any implications of “evolution.” When I pointed out that the word is multivalent (has a range of meanings, not just one), he brushed this aside and bulldozed onward with multiple quotes from cherrypicked religious sources.
The next day, I tried to gently urge him that, disagreements about “evolution” aside, there is a lot to be said in favor of concision. “There’s no such word,” he replied. “You mean ‘conciseness.’”*
It’s too bad our colleague John West wasn’t on hand that night: in a new podcast, he delivers one of the most concise summaries I’ve heard of why Darwinian evolution has toxic effects for culture. For one thing, it degrades any idea of human beings holding a unique status in nature, bearing God’s image. For another, as an unguided, purposeless process, it undercuts any idea that an intelligent creator planned or cared about the course of life’s history. But rather, finally, it teaches that the actual creator or sculptor of life is “mass death,” in the form of natural selection.
Dr. West explains further about each of these in turn, but the concision, or conciseness, as you please, is wonderful. This was on the Framework Leadership podcast with Kent Ingle. Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.
* Not to be pedantic myself, but both words, meaning the quality of being brief or terse, are found in a good dictionary.