The presenter of a BBC television natural history programme invited us to weep with her over the diminishing number of snow leopards: “There are probably no more than 4000 left.” Of course their demise is very largely “our fault.”

But the basic premise of that BBC programme – and indeed of the whole series of which it was a part, of David Attenborough passim  and of the entire natural history department of the BBC – is the doctrine of evolution which, as we all know, involves natural selection and the survival of the fittest. Specifically, evolution has no room for sentiment. Human beings are not a special creation but entirely a part of the natural order.

It’s not so much the atheism of this view which I detest – though I do detest it –  as the inconsistency amounting to self-contradiction.

If, by their actions, human beings – a few of whom are said to be homo sapiens – reduce the population of snow leopards, then their reducing the number of snow leopards also is part of the natural order.

Evolution knows nothing of ethics.

So that presenter cannot legitimately introduce an ethical proposition, as she did, without stepping outside the doctrine of evolution. But this is precisely what she is not permitted to do – because she holds that doctrine exclusively and absolutely.

Evolutionists believe there is no God and there is no teleology. It has no use for the concepts of praise and blame. So it is senseless to say that the demise of the snow leopard is “our fault” – or anybody’s fault.

Incidentally, the disjunction between evolution and ethics also extends to a similar disjunction between evolution and aesthetics: that is we cannot say that the snow leopard  is beautiful without employing criteria which derive from outside the dogma of evolution.

It is impossible to combine natural selection with cuddly snow leopard cubs. But it doesn’t stop our contemporary Darwinists from going “Ooh!” and “Aah!”