Science isn’t about the person, its about the theory and the evidence. Of course the people matter as they are the ones doing all the work, but at the end of the day our understanding of the universe and the natural world does not rely upon one person being right or wrong, but upon the evidence we find to support specific conclusions. The theory itself might be changed, by the original author or by many in the scientific community, to more closely agree with the data. This is a basic tenant of science. We judge the resulting product based on the evidence, not whether it conveniently falls into a religious or political ideology.
Image if Einstein decided to retract general relativity in the late 1920s, with no reason or evidence justifying this action. Imagine he simply decided that he no longer supported the idea. Surely that would have caused a great stir in the scientific world and particularly in the world of theoretical physics. However, the scientific community, in the end, would not have abandoned general relativity without proof it was wrong. They would have stood by the theory, since in the 1920s there was already a lot of proof that it was very right. We don’t need Einstein to agree that the theory is sound; we need evidence to agree that the idea is sound.
Similarly with evolution, Darwin doesn’t really matter other than the fact he first proposed it. What matters is not what aspects of his original theory are right or wrong, though the vast majority of Darwin’s original theory has survived the test of time and more than one revolution in biology. What Darwin said or did doesn’t change reality. The theory, backed with evidence, changes our perceptions. And that evidence is overwhelming in the cases of General Relativity and Evolution. An attack on Darwin, or Einstein, is just an attack on a person, not on all the evidence supporting their theories.
A belief in evolution is not a faith. Its based on the fact that evolution has been proven true by multiple, separate lines of evidence. Evolution, for all intents and purposes, is a scientific fact. It doesn’t matter what attacks might be made on the great man. Those attacks, or anything Darwin said or did, does not change the physical reality that all organisms have evolved to their current states via natural selection.
