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WESTERN
Atheism in Christianity
Protestantism and Science ...
For Darwin, and his predecessor in formulating the evolutionary theory, Lamarck,
were interpreted, not only to deny the story of Creation in the first chapters of
Genesis, but to rule out any theory of creation whatever. At the same time, some
of the philosophic successors of Hegel had transformed his spiritual monism into
materialism, and they loudly welcomed the support of the theory of evolution.
Ludwig Büchner and Ernst Haeckel, particularly, sprang forward as champions
of a mechanistc materialism which left no room for God. (Feuerbach had
concluded thirty years earlier, in 1841: "Anthropology is the secret of
theology. God is man worshipping himself. The Trinity is the human family
deified." 41) And in England, Thomas Huxley and
Herbert Spencer increased the sense of outrage among the conservatives by
rejecting the doctrine of an impassible gulf between man and the beasts and
arguing instead for the theory that man has emerged by slow evolution from the
anthropoid apes. 41
-- Alfred Weber, History of philosophy, translated by Frank
Thilly from 6th French edition (Chas. Scribner's Sons: NY 1896) p 562, quoting
Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity 1841, in footnote 1.- John B. Noss,
Man's religions (Macmillan: NY 1956) p 675
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