Several books published recently by committed atheists…Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell), Christopher Hitchens (God is not Great) and Sam Harris (The End of Faith)…have nothing good to say about Christianity. They have no tolerance for Christian believers or their beliefs but what is new and perhaps a bit disturbing is their growing militancy against such belief.

Richard Dawkins, who holds the Simonyi Professorship at Oxford University Museum of Natural History, is certainly the best known and most outspoken of the four and exerts great influence throughout Europe. Where, following publication of On the Origin of Species, Thomas Huxley became known as Darwin’s Bulldog because of his relentless advocacy for his theory, today Dawkins is being called Darwin’s Rottweiler. An evaluation of Huxley and Dawkins and their times suggests that in Dawkins case the metaphor is okay, but there may be a problem with the breed. Is there a Rottweiler in Dawkins?

The writings of Dawkins and his ideological brothers hold true to the central dogma of their faith: Darwin got it right, materialism is true, and Creators exist only in mythology and in the hearts and minds of the ignorant and superstitious. The work of The Enlightenment must be finished. Mankind must once and for all be set free from the superstitions of the pre-scientific age. Having cleansed society (where have we heard that before?) of these superstitions, the world will then be ready to usher in the long-awaited utopian age, free from the rule of God. Hallelujah!

Early in the twentieth century the prevailing view of Western intellectuals was that by the end of the twentieth century, all phenomena in nature…including life…would be explained scientifically in terms of material causes and there would no longer be any basis for belief in a Creator. This process was called "reductionism", i.e., reducing nature to its fundamental parts thereby exposing the underlying material causes behind all phenomena. With God out of the picture and scientific materialism as the reigning worldview, utopia would become reality in the twenty-first century. But, here in the first decade of the twenty-first century, when we look up and down the streets of America, utopia is nowhere in sight. Something went terribly wrong.

The reductionist program, instead of exorcising God from nature, found signs of intelligence lurking in every nook and cranny of the universe. We found out that the universe had a beginning and that the laws of physics have the unmistakable appearance of being fine-tuned for life. The properties of the Solar System and the complex interaction of physical and chemical processes that produce Earth’s life-sustaining biosphere are so improbable that even mainstream materialistic scientists are speculating that our planet may in fact be one-of-a-kind in the entire universe. Finally, spectacular discoveries in biology have revealed design-like features down in the fundamental machinery of life that present staggering challenges to a strictly Darwinian account of origins. Like it or not, there is a growing body of evidence to support the most profound hypothesis to ever emerge from science:

The unifying principle of all reality, the single grand idea that makes sense of everything we know about the cosmos and life, is design and the central focus of that design is mankind.

So much for the Copernican Principle.

The paucity of evidence supporting his theory was problematic for Darwin but it had little adverse effect on Huxley’s promotion of Darwinism as a secular religion. Huxley actually exploited this paucity of evidence in that it provided a blanket-of-ignorance from which he could make his arguments. While you could not prove Darwin was right, neither could you prove that he was wrong. Given the blanket-of-ignorance, the appeal of natural selection as an almost self-evident truth, and the influence of Enlightenment thinking, it was not a difficult sell.

Thus Huxley went about the business of selling Darwinism - a secular religion - in the name of science. For the average Englishman, Darwin’s Bulldog was very convincing. Darwinism was eventually accepted throughout Europe but in America it was rougher going. Too many Americans saw it for the secular religion that it was.

Jerry Coyne, Professor of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, inadvertently provides an insightful answer to this question. In his review in the journal "Nature" of David Mindell’s book The Evolving World: Evolution in Every-day Life, Coyne echoes Huxley’s view about Darwinism in his criticism of Mindell for going overboard on "selling Darwin".

Huxley, in his day, took advantage of the blanket-of-ignorance to convincingly sell a secular religion in the name of science. Today, because of scientific discovery, Dawkins has no blanket-of-ignorance but stands exposed in the harsh light of damning evidence peddling undisguised atheism in the name of science.