How Darwin caused atheism

I guess the difference is that while you can imagine anthropomorphic reasons for earthquakes or lightning, there's no particular reason why anyone should except a general human tendency to be dumb; whereas adaptation does look superficially like the sort of thing a mind like our own might have thought up.

The adaptation of species to their environment does at least look as though an intelligence designed them to fit their environment; whereas although you can always imagine a thunder-god being responsible for the lightning, it doesn't particularly look as though it's intelligently directed --- lightning does not, for example, exclusively smite sinners, or we might begin to wonder if it was intelligently directed.So although it was always possible to proffer "goddidit" as an explanation for anything you didn't understand, only adaptation seemed to require such an explanation. In that case the supposition of an intelligent motivating force was not merely an argument from ignorance --- it was, at the very least, an argument from analogy.So although people did ascribe all sorts of natural phenomena to the gods, there was this one case --- adaptation --- where doing so was not completely arbitrary and stupid. And then along came Darwin and Wallace with a better explanation, and suddenly the only remotely good reason (from a scientific standpoint) for believing in an invisible anthropomorphic entity was without merit.

Your point is ... obscure.

As a matter of fact, I posted as though I didn't know something, namely what your point is.I still don't.

But how can this "filter" be "selective" if it is not acting on replicators?How would we make this concept meaningful? Would you say that salt crystals are cubic in habit because they have passed through a selective filter?

Well, there were ways. They weren't "very" good, but they were as good as goddidit, and indeed they were slightly better in that they explained how life was cruel and how life was inferior to a perfect design.Darwinism was superior in that it had predictive/explanatory power. It explained so much more than either theist or atheist explanations up to that point.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.