Alvin Plantinga's attack on Darwinian naturalism destructs through its own failings. But I do understand why he feels so strongly. He is defending his deeply held religious beliefs against what he clearly sees as another, rival, secular religion. And surely the comments we have seen from Edward O. Wilson alone should alert us to the fact that Plantinga's worries are not without foundation. Anyone who talks of replacing one “myth” with another has gone beyond the bounds of the purest science. Not that Wilson is the first evolutionist to try to make a metaphysics, a secular religion, from his science. He stands in a tradition which goes back to Charles Darwin and earlier. Indeed, one might say that this is evolution s oldest tradition. The very first evolutionists, men like Erasmus Darwin in England and Jean Baptiste de Lamarck in France, were open in their hope that evolution could substitute in some way for conventional religious beliefs.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Thomas Henry Huxley, Ernst Haeckel, and (above all) Herbert Spencer set out to make of evolution a Christianity-substitute: a new world picture that could challenge and replace the old religions, one far more suited to the new industrial, urban, capitalist age than were the systems of the past (Ruse 1996a). Although Darwinism today is much more than an ideology, more than a new religion of humanism or naturalism or whatever, the tradition of so regarding it has persisted down through this century, many years after the publication of the Origin.