If only Richard Dawkins had to debate Chesterton

Oh, if only G.K. Chesterton could debate Richard Dawkins and the like. Here's what he'd say:

(from Orthodoxy)
. . . it is perhaps desirable,
though dull, to run rapidly through the chief modern fashions of thought
which have this effect of stopping thought itself.  Materialism
and the view of everything as a personal illusion have some such effect;
for if the mind is mechanical, thought cannot be very exciting,
and if the cosmos is unreal, there is nothing to think about.
But in these cases the effect is indirect and doubtful.  In some cases
it is direct and clear; notably in the case of what is generally
called evolution.

 Evolution is a good example of that modern intelligence which,
if it destroys anything, destroys itself.  Evolution is either
an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things
came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it is an attack
upon thought itself.  If evolution destroys anything, it does
not destroy religion but rationalism.  If evolution simply
means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly
into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the
most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things
slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were
outside time.  But if it means anything more, it means that
there is no such thing as an ape to change, and no such thing as
a man for him to change into.  It means that there is no such
thing as a thing.  At best, there is only one thing, and that
is a flux of everything and anything.  This is an attack not
upon the faith, but upon the mind; you cannot think if there are
no things to think about.  You cannot think if you are not
separate from the subject of thought.  Descartes said, "I think;
therefore I am."  The philosophic evolutionist reverses and
negatives the epigram.  He says, "I am not; therefore I
cannot think."

In the few sentences in bold, Chesterton shows us why evolutionism as a philosophy is flawed at its base. Because evolution as such can only describe the development of biological life on earth, nothing more. It cannot serve as the base for an entire thorough going materialistic-atheistic metaphysic as the pop atheists Richard Dawkins and others desperately want it too. They are stirring up controversy needlessly, and doing a great disservice to science itself in the process.
Interestingly, Newman on his discourse On The University had argued for the importance of Theology as an object of study in higher education. For if this discipline is absent then other subjects would attempt to take Theology's place.
A case in point is the creeping scientism we have just described in pop atheism of the Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris mold. Yet these errors are signs of a larger problem in Western thought as explained by Benedict XVI at Regensburg when no one was listening. Reason as pure utilitarianism and detached from Faith can be dangerous. Just as Faith divorced from Reason may engender the use of violence in the name of religious compulsion or conversion.
It is a harsh truth but the Biblical Literalist is more prescient at what is at stake in human affairs than the holder of a University degree who is guilty of scientism. For while a Young Earth cosmology is not plausible, this position is in fact a response to a more legitimate concern, that of Western scientific materialism and reductionsim rendering life empty and meaningless.