Philip Kitcher on Darwin

I think I put up a post saying, briefly, that Philip Kitcher’s Living with Darwin was a very good short book. Here is an extract answering a question that has often puzzled me – and, incidentally, suggesting why Dennett’s book will have come as news to many of his readers

There are good reasons why Darwin, not Wellhausen or Hume or Voltaire, is taken as the leader of the opposition to what is valuable and sacred.
For the enlightenment case is not widely appreciated, and most of the brilliant thinkers who have developed it are unread, if not unknown. More exactly, they tend to be unread and unknown in the United States. Adolescent students in European schools study some of the relevant figures, to a lesser extent in Britain, to a much greater extent in the countries of Western continental Europe. American defenders of super-naturalist or providentialist religions, some of them literalists about Genesis, others literalists about significantly fewer of the scriptures, are protected from the shock of biblical criticism, of sociological history of religions, of anthropological studies that show the diversity of religious ideas, of psychological evidence about religious experience, and of ethical reflections on the dangers of unreasoned decisions …
Darwin, however, is visible. He is in the schools, potentially corrupting the youth and leading them to spurn the precious gift of faith. He serves as the obvious symbol of a larger attack on supernaturalist religion, about which thoughtful Christians know, even if they are not aware of all its details. Their concern is justified, although they may think, wrongly, that the onslaught on their faith is contained and condensed in Darwinism. For the enlightenment case will not surface in the education of their children, at least not until they attend universities, and probably not in any systematic way, even then. To defend the faith the important step is to keep Darwin out of the classroom, or, failing that, to “balance” his corrosive influence.
Intelligent design-ers, like the scientific creationists before them, promise a way to do just that. They raise sufficient dust about “unsolvable problems” for Darwinian evolution to give concerned people the hope that there is a genuine alternative, friendlier to faith and acceptable with good conscience. When these advertisements are probed, as I have probed them in previous chapters, they are found to be thoroughly false. Overwhelming evidence favors the apparently menacing claims of Darwinism. Worse still, the threat to providentialist and super-naturalist religions, forms of religion that are firmly entrenched in many contemporary societies, turns out to be genuine.