From G.K. Chesterton's defense of Christianity in The Everlasting Man, on contemporary critics of the faith (written in 1925):

They will suddenly turn round and revile the Church for not having prevented the War, which they themselves did not want to prevent; and which nobody had ever professed to be able to prevent, except some of that very school of progressive and cosmopolitan sceptics who are the chief enemies of the Church. It was the anti-clerical and agnostic world that was always prophesying the advent of universal peace; it is that world that was, or should have been, abashed and confounded by the advent of universal war. As for the general view that the Church was discredited by the War -- they might as well say that the Ark was discredited by the Flood. When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do.

The notion of Christianity as defender of the status quo is one that always makes me laugh, whether invoked by a critic or a would-be supporter; to my mind, it's about the furthest thing possible from conservatism. I think that with Christianity comes an understanding (not an acceptance, though) of human fallibility, and so wars and other man-made tragedies are not surprising, which is of course what G.K. was getting at. This doesn't mean they shouldn't be rooted out and stopped, it's simply an acknowledgement of the types of obstacles which stand in the way of doing so.

It is, of course, very easy to argue from a hard theism to the preservation of the status quo -- whatever is, is right, because otherwise God wouldn't let it be that way. But it is equally easy to reach the same conclusion from hard atheism -- given the rules of natural selection we can conclude that whatever is, is fittest. Both of these arguments fail, however, and for the same reason: they assume that their subject matter deals only with fixed states and never with processes or changes, while in truth Christianity and evolution are both entirely about ongoing change.

And I admire Russell's mathematical and philosophic work, but at times he reminds me of the rest of the Chesterton quote I posted:

But these people have got into an intermediate state, have fallen into an intervening valley from which they can see neither the heights beyond nor the heights behind. They cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy. They cannot be Christians and they cannot leave off being anti-Christians. Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism. They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith.

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Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something like a Confucian. The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgments; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard.

And for what it's worth, the Twentieth was, if anything, really the century of secularism trying desperately to match religion in both stature and body count.

For the sort of argument I'm describing, one's norms really don't matter; the argument runs something like this: "Evolution leads to the triumph of the fittest. Therefore the people who are on top (of society, of whatever) are the fittest. Therefore they deserve to be on top, and the status quo should be preserved." Regardless of the terms in which one measures success, those who come out ahead in that category are described as the "fittest" and the rest of the argument runs as normal.

And it doesn't hold water mainly because it assumes that "fittest" is a static description, when in fact it is not.

Also, when an organism evolves there never has to be a "good reason"; look at the panda's thumb for an example of this.

Of course the assumption is wrong. But it's still been made time and time again. My point was simply to show that hard atheism using evolution as a crutch is just as easily bent to defense of the status quo (though usually it's obscured slightly in the guise of laissez-faire capitalism).