Cathy Young has a worthwhile post up on the subject of Charles Darwin and religion:
My statement that “Darwin was a Christian” oversimplified the complex reality of Darwin’s views, and should have been more nuanced. However, the notion that Darwin developed his ‘theory of natural selection as a way to “work out his issues with God” is preposterous, if only because he developed his theory more than a decade before he developed his “issues.” It also says a great deal about the mindset of ID proponents, who treats scientific inquiry as essentially driven by ideology.
Incidentally, that is what makes ID a fundamentally non-scientific enterprise: not that it is driven by religion, but that it is driven by ideology. That is, its proponents question evolutionary theory not because they dissatisfied with the scientific/factual evidence for it, but because they don’t like its conclusions. To be sure, they look for and claim to find scientific and factual holes in the theory, but the main (or only) reason they start looking is that they don’t want it to be true. It makes no difference whether a critique of Darwinian theory is motivated by defense of religion or, say, by concern that biological Darwinism easily lends itself to apologetics for social inequality. In both cases, the motivation is ideological, not scientific.
An interesting read (Cathy always is), but what makes it more interesting is that the post builds upon a column of Cathy’s that was printed in the Boston Globe. I find what Cathy has done here to be the model of what I would love to see from all journalists and columnists- blogs in which they can expand upon their printed columns that may leave things out due to editorial selection or space considerations. Likewise, blogs provide a great forum for the authors to respond to feedback as well as offering readers an opportunity for some ‘one on one’ with media figures.