That seems to be true. My evolution ping list has over 370 people on it. I doubt that there are more than 2 or maybe 3 dozen on the creationism lists. They never disclose figures.
or Darwin's theory of natural selection in particular...
Well, that's not saying much. Even the Discovery Institute accepts natural selection, and most of the creationists accept what they call "micro evolution." But they go through the wildest anti-scientific gyrations to draw the line there and reject all evidence that would take them farther.
What they have is a problem with the likes of leftists such as Eugenie Scott, Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, who either either bluntly and honestly or subtly and sneakily push the "Blind Watchmaker thesis" and see Darwin's theory of natural selection as a "universal acid".
Are they leftists? Could be. I really don't know. However, the theory of evolution is one thing, and the extraneous views of a few scientists are another. One can always find scientists (or clergymen) who say odd things. Einstein was a socialist. But we overlook that when we deal with his scientific work, and we don't claim that all physicists are socialists.
I mean, Thomas Sowell makes the point that one Hayek's unplanned order need not be extended into a metaphysics to be accepted as economics.
I'm not familiar with Sowell's essay on that. But I agree, it doesn't need to be extended there. Yet, it happens to work out in biology quite nicely.
It's true that many of the Founders were rationalist Deists, but they believed the argument from design to be an aid to science ...
Darwin published his work three generations after the time of the Founders. We have no idea what they would have thought of his work. I doubt that men like Franklin and Jefferson would have rejected it. But we just don't know, do we?
And as for Bertrand Russell and his "firm foundation of unyielding despair," I'm not familiar with it, but he has (or had) his opinions, you have yours, I have mine, etc. Not particularly relevant to anything we're discussing here, really.
Sure, they're leftists--- just listen to them on Bush; they aren't criticizing him from the right. I think they use natural selection as a way to attack religion more so than to educate people. I mean, the NCSE doesn't do anything to actually teach science other than go on about ID--- it's not like what you do where you have general science threads as well and promote biological discoveries apart from this issue or whatever you might call it. It seems to me that the leftism of Dennett, Dawkins and Scott tends to envelop their Darwinism-- animating the anims of Dawkins and Dennett against religion, for instance.
Why I think statements like Russell's are interesting and relevant comes in part from what Dennett has this to say in Darwin's Dangerous Idea:
Universal acid is a liquid so corrosive that it will eat through anything! The problem is: what do you keep it in? It dissolves glass bottles and stainless-steel canisters as readily as paper bags. What would happen if you some how came upon or created a dollop of universal acid? Would the whole planet eventually be destroyed? What would it leave in its wake? After everything had been transformed by its encounter with universal acid, what would the world look like? Little did I realize that in a few years I would encounter an idea -- Darwin's idea -- bearing an unmistakable likeness to universal acid: it eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.
Darwin's idea had been born as an answer to questions in biology, but it threatened to leak out, offering answers -- welcome or not -- to question in cosmology (going in one direction) and psychology (going in the other direction). If redesign could be a mindless, algorithmic process of evolution, why couldn't that whole process itself be the product of evolution, and so forth, all the way down? And if mindless evolution could account for the breathtakingly clever artifacts of the biosphere, how could the products of our own "real" minds be exempt from an evolutionary explanation? Darwin's idea thus also threatened to spread all the way up, dissolving the illusion of our own authorship, our own divine spark of creativity and understanding.
That's an interesting interpretation of Darwin's idea. As far as I know, Dennett is not thought of as a nut or on the fringe. The idea that our conscious identity is a mere epiphenomenon, that our "divine spark" is an illusion, is a serious implication to draw from Darwin, thuse the title of his book. Conservative notions about there being a knowable objective morality are pretty much in smoke according to it.
Darwin had his own version of his theory as acid. He's less certain of it melting through the concept of God than Dennett, but he also seems to be drawn to a deeper skepticism than Dennett's own. If Darwin intuition about not trusting an evolved monkey's mind is correct, it would seem our our intuitions are not trustable. If so, our moral intuitions are not trustable, either, and we are in the same place as with Dennett:
You would not probably expect any one fully to agree with you on so many abstruse subjects; and there are some points in your book which I cannot digest. The chief one is that the existence of so-called natural laws implies purpose. I cannot see this. Not to mention that many expect that the several great laws will some day be found to follow inevitably from some one single law, yet taking the laws as we now know them, and look at the moon, where the law of gravitation-and no doubt of the conservation of energy-of the atomic theory, etc. etc., hold good, and I cannot see that there is then necessarily any purpose. Would there be purpose if the lowest organisms alone, destitute of consciousness existed in the moon? But I have had no practice in abstract reasoning, and I may be all astray. Nevertheless you have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the Universe is not the result of chance.* But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?
Sorry if I got too far off topic, though--- this is just my second day posting, and I'll try to be more focused in the future. Thanks for the civilzed conversation--- see you!