Assertion 6.4: The only reason anyone accepts evolution is because of a dogmatic prior commitment to atheism.
Analysis:
Anyone who spends a few minutes comparing evolutionist and creationist demographics will easily see that it is actually the creationist position that springs from prior dogmatism. While there are indeed evolutionists who have a prior commitment to atheism, there are far more evolutionists who have a prior commitment to theism. There has, in fact, been a strong tradition of orthodox religious believers accepting evolution since the time of Darwin, as philosopher and historian Michael Ruse points out:
There were people like John Henry Newman, the great convert to Catholicism (he ended as a cardinal), who were quite indifferent to science, who were prepared to give science what it claimed, and who then turned to other things. But there were also people who were interested in science and who positively welcomed Darwinism. Interestingly, these were often people of a more conservative or orthodox or high-church bent than otherwise. They were people who were interested in teleology and who saw in natural selection precisely the teleology-producing mechanism that they had been seeking. They were people (who, as I mentioned in the last chapter [of Ruse 2000], were often Calvinists) who took very seriously the fact of cruelty and struggle and pain that are our fate on earth and who saw in natural selection God's way of deciding between sheep and goats. And they were people who saw in the unbroken law of evolution, not deism, but God's constant interest in and sustaining of -- His immanence in -- the creation. (Ruse 2000:106)
In contrast, creationists who do not have a prior commitment to very conservative brands of religious belief are very few and far between. Even the much vaunted "intelligent design" movement, which tries to present itself as theologically neutral, is stacked almost entirely with fellows of the Discovery Institute, which blames all of civilization's ills on the rise of materialism and the failure of theism. Materialism supposedly undermines the idea of personal responsibility and underwrites utopian projects that inevitably result in "oppression and genocide" (Discovery Institute, n.d.). Theism, on the other hand, presumably "helped to support humanity's own sense of purpose and dignity as creatures made in the image of the Creator" (Discovery Institute n.d.), and has never undermined belief in personal responsibility (say, through the doctrine of predestination, or by causing people to fob off hard moral decisions onto their preachers' interpretations of ancient mythological writings), and certainly has never resulted in oppression or genocide (for instance, in the Crusades, the Inquisition, the slaughter of the Cathars, the pre-Hitler pogroms against the Jews, or the burning of "witches"). Since the Discovery Institute takes materialism to be undergirded by evolutionary theory, then out the window the evolutionary history of life must go, to be replaced with "a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions" (as quoted in Still 1999) so that the glorious and spotless history of Christian temporal power can once again be resumed, to the betterment of all.
Observe, incidentally, how the Discovery Institute stipulates -- by divine fiat, as it were -- that evolution cannot be "consonant with Christian and theistic convictions," and thus defines out of existence the millions of Christians and other theists who accept the evolutionary history of life. This reminds me of a debate I once saw between creationist Phillip E. Johnson and evolutionary biologist Michael Rose. At one point, Johnson likened Christian evolutionists to the defense of a football team, who would come out saying "There's no conflict between evolution and belief in God" in order to run interference for atheistic evolutionists (the offense), enabling them to score points against Christianity. Perhaps I misunderstood him, but this struck me as a tremendously patronizing, even slanderous, way to characterize Christian evolutionists, as though they were covert agents of atheism.
The stark contrast between the wide variety of religious believers and nonbelievers who accept evolution, on the one hand, and the almost invariably narrow fundamentalist persuasion of those who deny evolution, on the other, helps to explain why creationists direct so much acid towards theistic evolutionists, because as much as creationists try to present evolutionists as religious dogmatists, the demographics clearly indicate who the religious dogmatists really are.
References
Discovery Institute. n.d. Life after materialism? www.discovery.org/crsc/materialism.html. Spotted March 29, 2002.
M. Ruse. 2000. The Evolution Wars: A Guide to the Debates. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.
J. Still. 1999. Discovery Institute's "Wedge Project" circulates online. http://www.infidels.org/secular_web/feature/1999/wedge.html. Spotted March 29, 2002.