I'm no fan of Alister McGrath, but since Darwin is unfairly blamed - or unduly credited - with the rise of religious skepticism, McGrath does an honest work, setting the historical record back to a movement of which Darwin was a mere heir:

The roots of atheism, [Alister] McGrath suggests, lay paradoxically in that primal phenomenon of Western modernity, the Protestant Reformation.

The Reformers' efforts to purify the institutional church in order to make it more concordant with their vision of Jesus' authentic teachings generated a loss of trust in institutional religion in general.

Furthermore, McGrath argues that the Reformers, by focusing upon the Bible as the sole source of God's revelation, effectively desacralized both the natural world and the secular human world, which in the integralist medieval Catholic view had been equally saturated with God's sacred presence.

With the Reformation, "God became an absence in the world," writes McGrath.

(From a book review)

It's nice to hear someone within the evangelical camp come clean on something that's so blatantly obvious.

tags technorati : atheism darwin reformation