I once wrote a column pointing out that intelligent atheists had often converted to Christianity, and cited the case of C.S. Lewis. At least one of my readers wasn't impressed. Noting that Lewis had been fond of mythology since childhood, the reader dismissed the century's most prominent Christian apologist on the grounds that Lewis "was never a convinced and committed atheist."

I've always remembered that letter because it so perfectly illustrates the mentality of a certain type of nonbeliever. His unbelief doesn't stem from science or reason, as he'd like you (and himself) to think. At bottom, he simply refuses to believe. He's close-minded and proud of it.

You can find a similar attitude among evolutionists. Theirs is, as biochemist Michael Denton has called it, a theory in crisis, running into more problems all the time. Others have laid out the many scientific flaws of evolution. (See "Crumbling Icons" and "Was Darwin Right After All?"). What interests me at the moment is the reaction of evolutionists themselves.

If they were simply humble, open-minded inquirers as they claim, you'd think at some point they'd admit that their previous explanation might not hold water after all. Instead they've clung to it all the more determinedly. They've taken to insisting that we no longer speak of the "theory of evolution" but rather the "fact of evolution." They say decidedly unscientific and irrational things like "even if it has problems it's the best explanation we've got" — as if admission of their own ignorance, much less God's guidance in creation, were out of the question. You'd think evolution was a religion itself.

And so it has always been, argues biophysicist Cornelius G. Hunter in his fascinating new book, Darwin's God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil. Backed by extensive quotation, Hunter contends that Charles Darwin and his heirs, far from being disinterested scientific observers, came to their views based on their assumptions about God. They looked at the world, decided it should have been designed better, and concluded that God simply wouldn't have done it that way. Hunter writes:

Darwin was concerned, for example, that tons of pollen go to waste every year, that some species are ill-adapted for their environments, that ants make slaves of other ants, and that parasites feed off their victims. He tried to make sense of what seemed to be the evil side of nature. "What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful blundering, low and horribly cruel works of nature," he concluded a letter to a friend.

How could divine creation be reconciled with such evils? It was questions like these that, for Darwin, seemed to confirm that life is formed by blind natural forces. He was motivated toward evolution not by direct evidence in favor of his new theory but by problems with the common notion of divine creation. Creation, it seemed, does not always reflect the goodness of God, so Darwin advocated a naturalistic explanation to describe how creation came about.

That naturalism colored all his perspectives. Take homologies, common traits between different species; e.g., lizards, bats, and humans all have five digits. "Before Darwin," Hunter writes, "homologies were interpreted as a sort of divine template revealing the Creator's unity of design." (I think of God as an artist Who has certain stylistic signatures He's pleased to imprint on His work.) But "according to Darwin, homologies are leftovers of descent with modification." There's nothing logically inferior about the former view, given a God who can do what He wills; it just didn't fit Darwin's worldview. So he needed to find an alternative — descent from a common ancestor — that rendered God unnecessary.

Not that Darwin was precisely an atheist. One of the most interesting aspects of Hunter's book is his exploration of Darwin's concept of God — a concept shared by many people of his time and in the centuries leading up to it. By Darwin's time influential people (including leading Victorian thinkers dominant in his native England) thought God was supposed to be utterly comprehensible to human reason, and invariably benevolent in His dealings with man. "God's goodness and wisdom were thought to be manifest in creation," Hunter summarizes, "but not his providence, judgment, or use of evil."

This was not even remotely like the God revealed in the Bible. Indeed, all of Scripture shows God actively guiding history, in ways often mysterious to men, especially in their own lifetimes. Scripture also tells of how all creation, not just mankind, has been corrupted, leading to the world Darwin found so inefficient and cruel. Had Darwin been steeped in a biblical worldview, maybe he would have found these realities easier to accept. But the God he'd heard about would never have created the world he saw in nature; this God had to be distant from it all. No wonder so many of Darwin's successors have stepped into outright atheism; if God hasn't done anything since the dawn of time, why believe in Him at all?

Yet as Hunter notes, "It is perhaps one of the great ironies in modern religious thought that one can profess to be an agnostic, skeptic or even atheist regarding belief in God yet still hold strong opinions about God. Evolution may breed skepticism, but its adherents have continued to make religious proclamations. And those proclamations are really no different from those made by Darwin and his fellow Victorians." For example,

for [science philosopher] Michael Ruse God cannot be reconciled with the facts of biogeography, so we must turn to evolution. He argues, "Given an all-wise God, just why is it that different [life] forms appear in similar climate, whereas the same forms appear in different climates? It is all pointless without evolution." According to [geneticist] Edward Dodson and [geologist] Peter Dodson, if God had created the species, then they should be distributed evenly about the globe. They write, "Had all species been created in the places where they now exist, then amphibian and terrestrial mammals should be as frequent on oceanic islands as on comparable continental areas. Certainly terrestrial mammals should have been created on these islands as frequently as were bats." It is remarkable how often evolutionists feel free to dictate what God should and shouldn't do.

The sheer arrogance of it all may be striking to the Christian reader — or for that matter to anyone who, in the words of a priest in the movie Rudy, knows at least two things: "There is a God, and I'm not Him." But we shouldn't find such arrogance completely surprising. Adam and Eve, after all, thought Satan's promise of godlike knowledge — and hence godlike stature — to be an irresistible temptation. In this sense, all of us really do reflect the traits passed on by common ancestors, pride foremost among them. Evolutionists just dress theirs up in scientific garb.

But in the end evolution is not pure science, and Hunter's purpose is less to argue against evolution (though he does do so) than to show that evolution rests on metaphysical assumptions. "An unspoken, unscientific position underlies evolution, and until this is understood public debate will continue to be more confusing than enlightening," Hunter concludes. "We need to understand these things because, ultimately, evolution is not about the scientific details. Ultimately, evolution is about God."