“I realized I had been conned,” he said. “I felt there was something dishonest about the huge claims made by Darwinism compared with the negligible evidence to support the thesis.”
He was so alarmed by this conclusion that he felt impelled to write a book as a sort of warning call to humanity: “Beware! You have been fooled!” …
Jonathan Witt, “In a New Book, Longtime Agnostic Dumps Darwin” at Evolution News and Science Today (August 2, 2021)
The author is U Durham humanities prof Neil Thomas and the book is Taking Leave of Darwin (Discovery Institute, 2021)
Critics of intelligent design will have a hard time maligning Thomas as a “creationist in a cheap tuxedo.” He isn’t religious and is a longtime member of the British Rationalist Association, a group known for religious skepticism.
The book traces the evolution debate across millennia, with Darwin and Darwinism emphasized as a crucial pivot point in the story. The author details key objections raised early on against Darwin’s theory and shows that those objections have been explained away, but never really rebutted.
Jonathan Witt, “In a New Book, Longtime Agnostic Dumps Darwin” at Evolution News and Science Today (August 2, 2021)
It’s not clear to me, (yer news hack,) why an atheist or agnostic must be a Darwinist anyway. Design in nature can be understood in a variety of ways, theistic or non-theistic. It is there but it doesn’t come with a label.
Darwinism has certainly been used to promote atheism (cf Richard Dawkins) but that does not force everyone who doubts or disbelieves in conventional religions to be a Darwinist. Design in nature is easy for many traditions other than Darwinism to account for but that in itself is not a recommendation of one tradition over another.
Anyway, the book has some interesting and thoughtful endorsements.