Recently, I wrote on Evolution Weekend, an attempt to convince Christians, or anyway, people who go to church, that it is okay to be Darwinists.
I pointed out that discussions of evolution in school and in the popular press nearly always focus on teaching or defending Darwinism. In its present form, Darwinism looks like a project to market atheism at taxpayer expense. Someone wanted to know, well what about endosymbiosis, gene transfer or neoteny?
Sure, those are all plausible causes of evolution, sometimes discussed.
But I have never heard anyone famously say, as Dawkins said about Darwinism, that they make it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.
Why not? Because it’s not clear that these processes could not be guided. The mechanisms are proposed simply as mechanisms by which significant changes might take place, not as mechanisms that rule out guidance. It’s the latter point that drives the fanatical attachment to Darwinism that guided Darwin’s original atheist circle, which we now see in the new atheist movement, together with the sick-making adulation of Darwin.
And that, my dears, is the point to keep in mind. As C.S. Lewis came to see, the best reason for doubting Darwin is his defenders.