I am aware of only one other scientist who has ever received such veneration bordering on worship as Charles Darwin—Isaac Newton. Edmund Halley's "Ode to Newton" well represents the Newtonamania of the late 17th and entire 18th century, with its flowery paean to Newton's "heaven-born mind" that "Unlocked the hidden treasuries of Truth." It ends with the famous, solemn assurance that "Nearer the gods no mortal may approach." Almost, but not quite, a god.
No scientific theory has ever been more fruitful than the one outlined by Newton in his Principia. No theory seemed more absolutely unassailable. Yet, brilliant as it was, nature was far more obscure, playful, and mysterious. Newton and Newtonianism gave way to the genius of Albert Einstein. Of course, Einstein enjoyed significant celebrity, but nothing on the level of the kind of veneration lavished on Newton.
There is, I think, an interesting reason for this difference. Newton seemed to solve the riddles of the universe in a way accessible to most people who were moderately competent in the mathematics of the day. If you knew Euclidean geometry, and got on well enough in the new calculus, you experienced the thrill of rooting about in the "hidden treasuries of Truth" with Newton, and as a consequence felt that you too were a mortal creeping up close to the gods. But few have any hope of wrangling with the mathematics upon which Einstein built his view of the universe. All most of us can do is nod from afar.
And that brings us to Charles Darwin. The thing that makes Darwin's theory so attractive is its simplicity. It never gets more complicated, as a theory, than the terse outline Darwin offered in his Origin of Species:
"As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form."
That's it. You don't even need to know any mathematics. Yet this tiny seed of an idea explains everything about the extraordinary complexity of living nature, from the beauty of a rose and the profound intricacy of its photosynthetic structures, to the moral and intellectual capacities of the lucky ape, homo sapiens.
Everything, without remainder. That is what makes Darwinism so attractive to atheists. You don't need God to explain how we got here. Random variations in the clay are molded by natural selection, the potter. Chance and death can do the job of creation, a job previously thought to be so daunting that it required a deity.
And that is why atheists love Darwin, love him to the point of veneration as a secular saint, a man who, like a kind of bearded patriarchal Moses figure, led us bravely out of the slavery of superstition and ignorance, and into a new godless land of infinite promise. Darwinism makes such a popular anti-religion precisely because (in the words of Richard Dawkins), it is "a remarkably simple theory, childishly so…in comparison with almost all physics and mathematics."
This same Richard Dawkins also famously stated that "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." It's so simple not to believe now that Darwin's come along. The grand feeling of omniscience once experienced by followers of Newton is now had much cheaper—no need even to have mastered geometry and calculus. Nothing haunts the mind that perhaps, just perhaps, nature might be much more complicated, much more astoundingly strange and wonderful, stretching the very limits of the human intellect to the breaking point. Nothing at all. Darwinism explains everything about biology.
Stepping back from all this, and taking a kind of long philosophical view, shouldn't we be a bit skeptical of such claims, of such an easy intellectual victory for atheism? Think about it. Dawkins admits the almost insane simplicity of Darwinism in explaining all the intricate details of biology—a childishly simple theory when compared to those in physics and mathematics, say, in comparison to the kind of mathematics that undergirds Einstein's physics.
So you see the problem? How could the smallest architecture of the universe, the stuff out of which the whole immense web of endless biological creatures are spun, be so nearly impenetrably difficult to grasp, and yet the biological creatures themselves be understood so easily?
Doesn't that seem, well, upside down? If the details of the non-living substructure investigated by physicists boggle our minds, wouldn't we expect that the vast living intricacy built upon it would be far, far more difficult to understand?
If we might put it another way, looking at the history of science, we see in the last three centuries physics moving intellectually from Newton to Einstein, from relative simplicity to the dizzying complexity of relativity. How could biology move during the very same period in the opposite direction, toward childish simplicity?
The answer is that it didn't. The merest peak into a current biological textbook makes one gasp in wonder at the details of biology revealed over the past century. Here, in the details, one has moved from something like Newton to something like Einstein. But the problem is that the details—the intricate ingredients of biology, so to speak—are understood according to the Darwinian recipe. No matter how complex it looks, don't worry, it's ultimately got a childishly simple explanation—random variation and natural selection. No need for God.
I use the culinary metaphor for a very good reason, because the whole thing reminds me of the morality tale, "Stone Soup," where hungry soldiers come into a town, and trick the villagers into preparing them a feast by making them think they can cook soup fit for a king with only a stone and some water. The villagers want to believe such an amazing thing, and they go about helping them, prodded by the soldiers into adding a host of other ingredients: beef, celery, carrots, milk, barley, peas, potatoes, salt, pepper, garlic, and so on. As the soldiers leave after the feast, the amazed villagers remark, "Such good soup—and with only a stone!"
Darwinism is like stone soup. "Such biological complexity—and with only random variation and natural selection!" the village atheists declare. That's why atheists love Darwin.
 
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