How Darwin caused atheism

I would agree with this metaphor as it relates to atheism as a socially acceptable (or tolerated) position. Since the beginning of the Enlightenment Western culture had steadily moved towards secularism resulting in secular, representative states like the US. The Church was losing power as a voice of reason with science playing a small but active role. The Deist movement of the time was atheism with a theistic hangover, for all intents and purposes. It was a bit like Intelligent Design. While ID is religion dressed in the clothes of science, Deism was atheism dressed in the clothes of religion.The Enlightenment marked the point when the reservoir behind the dam of Church dogma started to fill. If it weren't for the Age of Enlightenment would Darwin have even considered trying to disprove the prevailing dogma of the fixity of species? If it weren't for the preceding geologic revolution led by Lyell would Darwin have come up with his theory on the evolution of species? If Darwin were subject to the Inquisition would he have even dared to write down his ideas? Science and Reason pulled the drapes aside and exposed the Wizard of Oz, and there was no going back for many people.

If only they were skeptics. Skeptics can be convinced. Personally, I see myself as defending Reason from Superstition.

It would be impossible to get any good estimates from that time period to begin with. Atheism was not tolerated like it is today. You might as well try to estimate the prevalence of homosexuality in the early 1900's by citing polls where people openly admitted that they were gay.

While I completely agree with you, I think it is important to look at the historical context. 2,000 years ago there was no viable way to even look for an explanation for such things as the makeup of matter, the ancestry of species, etc. We live in an age now where the mysteries of nature are easily solved. We can go to Radio Shack, pick up a few parts, and construct experiments that would have stunned Newton.So what does one do when no explanation is even in sight? What if nature really did seem inexplicable in almost every way? What would you have believed in such a time?

Not at all. Darwin, and modern science for that matter, was a product of the Enlightenment. His grandfather Erasmus was a noted figure of the Enlightenment.

Then they are not skeptical. They are dogmatic. There is a huge difference between the two, at least in my view.

The reason that scientists tend to separate them is pragmatism. How life started and how life changed are different questions that require different answers, different models, and different mechanisms. Although this is easier to say in hindsight,the existence of life was never evidence of God. The claim that there is a creator God may have been more compelling without our current knowledge of biology, but it was never evidence.The metaphor I often picture is sight. If your knowledge is related to how far we can see then we could describe pre-historic humanity as a myopic man stumbling around in a fog. We couldn't see past the food in our hands. We began to wonder about the world beyond that fog. We started to believe that there were deities just out of reach producing the small things that came into view in our fog laden world. We believed that gods were creating rivers of water for us to consume as they magically appeared from the fog. As we gained more knowledge that fog began to clear to the point that we could see the horizon. We could see the mountains where the rivers came from. As it turns out, those deities were not just out of reach. They were nowhere to be found clear out to the horizon. Well, maybe they are just over the horizon, we thought. The ocean disappears just over the horizon, surely the gods are making this water for us. We gained more and more knowledge and found whole new territories across those oceans, but still no gods. Now we began to grow doubtful of our first impressions. Why did we propose that those gods existed in the first place with so little knowledge to go on? Are we on a fool's errand of our own making?Now the universe is open to our probing eyes with the horizon of our forefather's in our rear view mirror. We have come to a new horizon, the start of the universe itself. Are we really to believe that the gods lie just on the other side of this horizon?Edited by Taq, : No reason given.

The lines do get blurred a bit in between the first replicator and the last universal common ancestor. I will agree with you there. However, the question of how that first, simple replicator came about can not be answered through the mechanisms of mutation and selection. It had to be non-Darwinian by the very definition of how the first life came about (assuming abiogenesis for the moment).There is also a blurry line between a replicator and life. We often describe life in terms other than just replication. We also include active homeostasis and metabolism as characteristics that life has. The first replicators more than likely did not have all of these characteristics. In fact, there is debate within the abiogenesis community as to whether metabolism or replication came first (at least from my scant reading on the subject).So I will agree that abiogenesis and evolution do meet in a grey area. However, there are still questions in biology that need one or the other, but not both. That was the point I was trying to make. The best explanation in science is always the one that is testable, falsifiable, and is backed by evidence. This differs from a compelling belief where no tests can be done, no avenue of falsification, and no evidence to back it up. The important quality of a compelling belief is the emotions it produces.Occam's Razor also plays a part. The best explanation is usually the one that doesn't have to be strained to explain the evidence. I used to read a few physics forums here and there and read some discussions with skeptics of the Big Bang who argued for a non-inflating universe. The non-inflationists proposed theories that could only produce the observed cosmic microwave background if very specific conditions were met whereas the Big Bang model requires that the CMB be present. In this case the BB model is the best explanation because it requires the observations observed while in other models it is only one possible outcome of many. IOW, the best explanation has a round peg for the round hole while the lesser explanations require a hammer to get the square peg through. Punk eek never replaced gradualism. Both are viable mechanisms within the theory of evolution just as sexual selection and selection through predation are both viable mechanisms. The question is which mechanism is most prominent in each lineage.

As soon as you have an imperfect replicator that is changing randomly and is passing through a fitness filter you have an evolving replicator that is described through Darwinian mechanisms. Abiogenesis would describe the chemistry of how that first replicator came about which was then subject to Darwinian mechanisms.

What does the development of the human brain after birth have to do with the topic?

The same way all other non-replicating molecules are formed. Not at all. Nothing had passed through the filter, so there were no descendants. All had "failed" up until that first replicator, the first replicator that had descendants. There could have been many steps as there is with many chemical reactions outside of life. However, none of these steps included Darwinian mechanisms.

I think you made our point for us. Evolution is concerned with biodiversity, the production of different species. Evolution is not concerned with the origin of life.As a corollary, the germ theory of disease is concerned with the cause of infectious disease and it's spread, but is not concerned with where the first germs came from. Atomic theory is concerned with how atoms act and are constructed, but it is not concerned with where the first atoms came from. The theory of relativity is concerned with describing how gravity operates, but it is not concerned with where gravity came from to begin with. Need I go on?

Scientific theories don't have wants, needs, or concerns. They are funny that way.What the theory of evolution attempts to explain is why we see the biodiversity we see today, not how life first started. All scientific theories necessarily limit themselves to a subset of all phenomena. The subset that evolution focuses on is how life changes over time. That first cause, with respect to evolution, would be the first imperfect replication of an organism capable of evolving. It does NOT start with the first transition from non-living chemicals to an organism capable of reproducing. If they do, it will give us another opportunity to point out their ignorance of how science works and what the theory of evolution actually states.