Tom Bethell in Evolution News & Views on the uproars around Steve Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt:
The explicit materialism of the Darwinians is the mirror image of creationism. Creationists are easy for scientific materialists to rebut, because the materialists can say, “That is just your belief. We don’t have to accept that.” In a parallel way, we can say to the materialists: “That is just your belief. We don’t have to accept that. And it is the real basis of your evolutionism.”
In between the Creationists and the Materialists we encounter the scientific evidence that makes the materialist position increasingly improbable — the evidence that Stephen Meyer recently presented in Darwin’s Doubt: information theory, insufficiency of the fossil record, epigenetics, complexity of life at the molecular level, and so on.
Increasingly, it seems to me, the Darwinians are responding to this science by saying (in effect): “Bah! We won’t read that! It’s creationism in disguise.” They get graduate students like Nick Matzke, or incompetents like John Farrell (in National Review of all places), to do the work for them. All along the Darwinists have found that their materialism has allowed them to lie back and relax without really bothering to study the evidence.
And Darwin’s followers will go on doing that as long as they can. These days, there is no shortage of people who just want to know what they have to shout in order to have a job with benefits, in academe. That could prove the biggest obstacle to a no-nonsense evaluation in the long run.