I will grant this to John Wilkins, in today's post he comes out and says it, well, he says it kind of back to front. He says that the real reason that Darwin is controversial is his use by atheists in denying the idea that God directs evolution.
No, the reason why Darwin was controversial is very, very simple. Darwin argued that complex designs could arise without a mind to guide it. In short, his controversial idea was natural selection (and sexual selection, but even that preceded Darwin). Almost from the day it was published, critics attacked the implication that the living world was not all that special, and that it lacked a Plan or Meaning. Theologians, moralists and even scientists objected to this, and while even most of the Catholic Church accepted common descent and modification of species, it was natural selection they hated.
All the supposed “controversies” of Darwinism (or that phantom, “neo-Darwinism”) are post hoc attacks based on the prior objection to the lack of a guiding hand in biology. Don’t like natural selection? Attack Darwin by calling him a racist or blaming him for the Holocaust. Say he is antiessentialist. Say he is anti-religion. No matter how much evidence one puts forward that these are deliberate lies manufactured by those who hate Darwin for natural selection, it won’t stop the prevarication industry.
There are a number of problems within those two paragraphs, the one I commented on was the assertion that Darwin wasn't an obvious racist when you can only say that if you haven't read him or, as another commentator answered me, you change the meaning of racism to pretend to make Darwin's flagrant racism go away, a form of special pleading. That is, to deny that you have to violate the most basic rules of intellectual discourse. I am quite certain that wouldn't be done for William Jennings Bryan on an atheist blog, nor should it.
The comment about the Holocaust is more justifiable, Darwin didn't know anything about Nazis, Hitler having been born well after he died. But there are the strongest of links from Darwin and natural selection to eugenics and Haeckel's monism and those do have a direct link to Naziism. You have to lie about the history of eugenics and that species of monism to deny that. Which is commonly done by Darwin's fans when you point those links out.
But Wilkins' main point also has problems. The holding that evolution is not designed or is designed isn't science, it is an ideological assertion in one case and a religious one in the other*. Science can come up with a description of physical evidence and generate analyses of that in scientific terms, it can't deal with whether or not what it describes and what it makes assertions about is designed.
The use of Darwin as an atheist oracle was asserted from shortly after On the Origin of Species was published, in books Darwin endorsed and cited as science. It has been the real reason that atheists have been so eager to assert an extravagantly over the top cult of Darwin, his greatness and goodness and uncanny predictive abilities, a phony Darwin separate from his own literary record, his letters, his citations and associations and against which any contradiction will not be brooked. Anyone who dares cite, fully, at length, with confirmatory citations from Darwin, himself..., anything to do with Darwin's racism, his sexism, the class interest that so clearly pollutes his scientific claim to fame, his endorsement of Galton's and Haeckel's eugenics, their racism, the depravity of Haeckel's monism.... will be shunned and cast out of the fellowship of educated people.
Any intellectual movement that requires lies to stand is an intellectual movement that will come to no good as it is up to no good. Any intellectual stand that disallows the introduction of evidence, while requiring words to mean something other than their common meanings, is also rotten to the core. Darwinism used to not deny the links to race "science", "racial hygiene", eugenics, class division and other things that Charles Darwin endorsed and asserted to be science. With the horrific history of the 20th century the social and intellectual milieu that made mentioning those things acceptable has changed. And with the post-war rehabilitation of Charles Darwin** you have to lie about the real Charles Darwin and suppress anything in his record that contradicts that phony, intellectually cleansed figurehead.
It being forbidden to mention that record - if you happen to do what most Darwinists don't do these days, read him and his citations and find out that he asserted things to be science which are either discredited as science or discredited by history - you risk becoming a pariah. For the most part, the only people who talk about that are the enemies of evolutionary science.
Well, brace yourselves, it isn't a violation of intellectual life to tell the truth about Darwin's record, there isn't any legitimate rule of logic or scholarship that prevents that, only enforced social convention. If anti-evolutionists support what they say about Charles Darwin to the normal standards of intellectual life then they are correct about that much of it. If they go overboard, distort or falsely ascribe things to him, as they often do, that is intellectually dishonest. But their fabrications and distortions are no more dishonest than those regularly practiced by the Darwin industry and fan club. Only the pro-Darwin side asserts they are all about evidence and intellectual honesty and the highest integrity. As anyone who has read Darwin, refusing to constantly make excuses for the purely rotten things he said, the frequent assertions that are not supported by data or evidence, etc, will know that PR image of the culture of atheism is largely a myth, as well.
Note: The series of posts I did on the topic of Darwin, eugenics and Haeckel are still in kind of rough form. I hope to revise them in the spring and post them in order on a dedicated blog. For now, here's my most recent linked index to them.
* I won't go into the interesting idea that it might be designed but not by a conscious designer because I haven't waded through the very complex, very technical arguments and can, therefore, have nothing valuable to say on the topic.
** Evolution in 2012 doesn't require Charles Darwin to be the great and powerful figure of the Darwin cult, it only requires the truth be told about him and his ideas be subjected to physical evidence and the common rules of reason and logic. Evolution's confirmation is far, far bigger than Darwin or natural selection, you don't need those in the face of an enormous mass of fossil and genetic evidence, though I doubt biologists indoctrinated in natural selection will give up that habit of thought for a number of generations.
As I said, John Wilkins was honest enough to admit the real need for Darwin and natural selection is in extra-scientific assertions of materialism and, ultimately, atheism. And that is the real reason for the phony, post-War Darwin and the cult that has grown up around that idol. That materialism and atheism seem to need to lie about him should become more of an issue among those of us who are interested in the integrity of science and intellectual discourse.
Update: Apparently John Wilkins has not read Darwin and he will not tolerate a dissenting view of him on his blog. I'm not surprised. It's been my experience that there is no group more disinclined to tolerate free thought than the "free thinkers" and no group of true believers more unaware of their being true believers than the "skeptics".
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