Darwinism - why emotions get in the way of respectful dialogue

Christopher Booker, writing in last week's Sunday Telegraph, highlights some of the abuse he received for questioning the validity of Darwin's theory in an earlier article.

Christopher Booker - Why do people think Darwinism is a perfect creation 14/02/09.

He writes; "As an old hand at tangling with Darwinists, I was well aware that a howl of furious protests would greet my item last week describing their curious inability to recognise just how much of the story of evolution Darwin's theory cannot explain." For pointing this out he claims he was "...derided as "stupid", "idiotic" and "scientifically illiterate". Clearly I was unaware all these riddles had been solved by genetics and the decoding of the human genome."

"...as my colleague Dr James Le Fanu has lucidly set out in his admirable new book Why Us? How Science Rediscovered The Mystery Of Ourselves (Harper Press, £18.99), the unravelling of the genome has done nothing of the kind. When mice, men and chimpanzees all turn out to be made of almost identical genetic material, the unknown factor which determines why the same building blocks should give rise to such an astonishing variety of different life-forms leaves the Darwinian thesis as full of holes as ever. To believe that genetics have solved the riddle relies as much on a leap of faith as that Biblical Creationism which causes the more fanatical Darwinians to foam at the mouth. "

Perhaps for the non-Christian Darwinists there is an emotional battle within themselves that they feel the need to fight against. However, it is to be hoped that a respectful dialogue can be developed between Christians who disagree over the validity of Darwin's wider claims, but even here there sometimes seems to be an emotional attachment to Darwinism that clouds the ability to enter into a respectful exchange of views. Why is that I wonder?