A.N. Wilson and the Religious Nature of Darwinism
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer
February 3, 2018
https://evolutionnews.org/2018/02/a-...-of-darwinism/

Besides commenting here on A.N. Wilson’s new biography, Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker, biologist Jonathan Wells has also written about it for the Washington Times.

He elaborates on the religious nature of Darwin’s “one long argument.”

On February 12, followers of Charles Darwin around the world will reverently celebrate his birthday, which they have christened “Darwin Day.” Known to most Americans as Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, February 12 has become for some people the secular equivalent of Christmas.


Why would that be?

Darwin called “The Origin of Species” “one long argument,” and it was a theology-laden argument against creation by design. Many people have the mistaken impression that Darwin’s theory was accepted because he provided so much scientific evidence for it (he didn’t). Instead, his theory was accepted because it fit the increasingly secular spirit of the times.


It fits the spirit of our times no less well. Wells continues:

As Mr. Wilson puts it, “The whole of nature, arising from the primeval slime and evolving through its various animal forms from amoebas to the higher primates, was on a journey of improvement, moving onwards and upwards, from barnacles to shrimps, from fish to fowl, ..... to silk-hatted Members of Parliament and leaders of British industry. It was all happening without the interference or tiresome conscience-pricking of the Almighty. He, in fact, had been conveniently removed from the picture.”

More than a century later, Richard Dawkins famously wrote that “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”

Mr. Wilson points out that “no other major scientific discovery or breakthrough has ‘made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist’ — only Darwin’s. This will prompt some people to wonder whether Darwin’s distinctive twin doctrines — that evolution occurs gradually by means of natural selection, and that this process necessitates an everlasting struggle for existence — are not in fact scientific statements at all, but expressions of opinion. Metaphysical opinion at that.”

So Darwinian evolution is not so much a scientific theory as it is a secular creation myth. According to Mr. Wilson, “Darwinism, as is shown by the current state of debate, is resistant to argument because it is resistant to fact. .....