With my new book THE END OF CHRISTIANITY coming out shortly and with the publisher positioning it as a counterblast to the neo-atheist literature, I’m boning up on that literature as well as on the responses to it. Dinesh D’Souza’s response has much to commend it, but he drops the ball on evolution. Not only is his scholarship sloppy on this point (for instance, he fails to distinguish the younger C. S. Lewis, who largely had no problem with evolution, from the later C. S. Lewis, who did), but he justifies taking the side of evolution on the basis of an argumentum ad populum:
I am not a biologist, but what impresses me is that virtually every biologist in the world accepts the theory of evolution. While the debate goes on, it seems improbable that the small group fo intelligent design advocates is right and the entire community of biologists is wrong. Consider what two leading Christian biologists say about evolution. Kenneth Miller writes, “Evolution is as much a fact as anyting we know in science,” and Theodosius Dobzhansky famously said, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”
Unfortunately, much of the Christian intellectual world (from Christianity Today to the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities) is willing to sign off on evolution for just such reasons. It’s why we need to keep focusing on winning the younger generation.