Page 136 - The Intellectual Struggle Against Darwinism

134 THE INTELLECTUAL STRUGGLE AGAINST DARWINISM

vey indicating that secularism was on the rise in Western Europe.
France has strict curbs on public religious expressions and, ac-
cording to the poll, 19% of French are atheists. South Korea was
the only other nation surveyed with a high percentage of nonbe-

lievers. 46
These debates increased still further during the preparation
of the European Union's Constitution. Religious circles strongly
criticized the absence from this constitution of any expression of
religious belief, but their objections were definitively rejected. As
even a Vatican official noted: "If you look at modern-day Europe,
it's not a society based on Christianity." 47 An article titled "Is
Europe the New 'Dark Continent'?" in CBN said that "Europe be-
came a center of Christian civilization for more than 1,000 years,
but there are signs that Europe's Christian era has come to an
end." 48 George Weigel, author of The Cube and the Cathedral:
Europe, America and Politics without God and one of the direc-
tors of the Washington Ethics and Public Policy Center (or EPPC),
made this comment in an interview regarding the rise of atheism
in Europe:

European man has convinced himself that in order to be mod-
ern and free, he must be radically secular. That conviction has
had crucial, indeed lethal, consequences for European public
life and European culture. Indeed, that conviction and its pub-
lic consequences are at the root of Europe's contemporary cri-
sis of civilization morale. That crisis of civilization morale, in
turn, helps explain why European man is deliberately forget-
ting his history. 49
A survey conducted by the UN offers more evidence of the
rise of Darwinism and atheism in Europe. According to their
questionnaire, only 18% of Europeans believe that God created