I sometimes think that Darwinism has become a religion.
One reason to be grateful for a generation of scientists from China, given they are loathe to grant "authority" to a western white man (Darwin).
It has, or rather it has become the creation-myth for atheistic secular humanism.
Whatever the merits and demerits of the neo-Darwinian synthesis as science (and it has both), the polemical defense of the neo-Darwinian synthesis is now largely carried out by shrill atheists like Dawkins and leftist know-nothings with legged-fish Darwin decorations on their car trunks in parody of the Christian IXTHUS, who thus, unwittingly, make a 19th century biologist into an Antichrist.
The virulent defense of Darwinism has no parallel for other scientific theories--some of which have been attacked by religious figures (witness the Latin church's assault on the early heliocentric theory; Bp. Berkeley's attack on the calculus as used by the freethinker Edumund Halley--which oddly, was spot on, including at its core a rigorous proof of the absuridity of fluxions or infinitesimals)--precisely because other scientific theories have not come to fulfill mythic functions for a significant portion of the population.
Of course, the both the defense of Darwinism as a bulwark for atheism, by Dawkins and his ilk, and the assault on it as the same, have at their core the falacious belief that if a phenomenon is, in our best model, described in terms of a random process, it is void of intent. (The atheistic Darwinist uses this to reason Darwinism implies atheism, while the devout creationist uses this to reason, God implies the falsity of Darwinism.)
The belief is falacious as the case of futures markets shows: our best model, for futures pricing, the Black-Scholes Options Pricing Formula, is a stochastic differential equation, but no one believes that futures markets 'arose by chance', or that their dynamics is not, in fact, the result of actions by purposeful actors (traders).
re·li·gion: a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith
It has.