Twilight of the Enlightenment?

There is something silly in the strategy of religious groups in their attempts to make criticism of Darwinian a critique of the Enlightenment. The idea of aTwilight of the Enlightenment shows the 'postmodern' strategy at work, visible in Philip Johnson's Reason in Balance and Dembski's Intelligent Design (the book). The question of the Enlightenement and Darwinian theory are not the same, and we can thank the postmodern left for having laid the groundwork for this kind of anti-secularist sophistry.
What is the Enlightenment? It is a lot more than questions of evolution, and in fact the onset of Darwinism does not correspond to the birth of the idea of evolution in the earlier generation where figures like Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck produced the inchoate but seminal insights.
Part of the blame has to lie with scientists who are glad to equate the Enlightenment with a narrow scientism which appeared later in the nineteenth century. The period of the Enlightenment is part of the rise of modernit as a whole, and the idea of evolution is only a part of this broader development.

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