The answer is clear. For the defenders of Darwinism, no less than for its critics, religion is the issue. Just as some people oppose the theory of evolution because they believe it to be anti-religious, many others support it for the very same reason. This is why we have Darwinism but not Keplerism; we encounter Darwinists but no one describes himself as an Einsteinian. Darwinism has become an ideology.
The well-organized movement to promote Darwinism and exclude alternatives is part of a larger educational project in today’s public schools. I’ll let the champions of this projectdescribe it in their own words. “Faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate,” writes Richard Dawkins. “Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.” While Dawkins recognizes that many people believe that God is speaking to them or that He answers prayers, he points out that “many inhabitants of lunatic asylums have an unshakeable inner faith that they are Napoleon… but this is no reason for the rest of us to believe them.”
Columnist Christopher Hitchens, an ardent Darwinist, writes, “How can we ever know how many children had their psychological and physical lives irreparably maimed by the compulsory inculcation of faith?” Religion, he charges, has “always hoped to practice upon the unformed and undefended minds of the young.” He wistfully concludes, “If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.”
If religion is so bad, what should be done about it? It should be eradicated. According to Sam Harris, belief in Christianity is like belief in slavery. “I would be the first to admit that the prospects for eradicating religion in our time do not seem good. Still the same could have been said about efforts to abolish slavery at the end of the eighteenth century.”
