The Only Way out Guide for Truth Seekers

THE ONLY WAY OUT 21
back on faith. In a letter he sent to J. D. Hooker on 17, June
1868, Darwin nostalgically wrote:
"I am glad you were at the Messiah: it is the one thing that I
should like to hear again, but I daresay I should find my soul
too dried up to appreciate it, as in old days; and then I should
feel very flat, for it is a horrid bore to feel, as I constantly do,
that I am a withered leaf for every subject except science. It
sometimes makes me hate science" (1) .
Many atheistic evolutionists insist that religion is an
evolutionary product and therefore, one may justifiably
conclude, just as natural (and legitimate) an evolutionary
entity as human beings themselves. In some occasions, such
evolutionists would emphasize that religion has, pragmatically
speaking, evolved to fulfil key social needs and, consequently,
has heavily determined the formation of history (for example,
the role of Protestantism in creating capitalism or the role of
Islam in liberating the Arabs from ignorance and drawing their
attention to the importance of thinking and discovery) .
But such evolutionists contradict themselves when they
equally depict religion as an aberration, an abnormality, a
harmful redundancy, a detrimental epiphenomenon that has to
be eradicated, stifled, or at least pushed to the furthest margins
of human life. This is like asserting that carnivores have
naturally evolved but must be exterminated for their being
predators (i.e. killing other organisms and feeding on them)
despite the catastrophic repercussions their extinction would
bring upon wildlife's ecosystem. The more striking
contradiction is their claim that present-day myths and
superstitions are natural concomitants of modern man's
evolving consciousness yet they miserably fail to explain why
myth and superstition should then be treated as unnatural (2) .
(1) Selected Letters of Charles Darwin: 1860-1870, edited by Frederick
Burkhardt, Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 198.
(2)
Dawkins and his advocates fear naturalistic (adaptationist)
explanations of religion because, by seeking a natural basis for religion,