The Evolving of Evolution into an Unconsidered Presupposition

Phillip E. Johnson, writing in Reason in the Balance:

The "platform of mechanism and materialism is now so firmly established in the world of higher education that it is very difficult for most professors even to imagine that the platform might be shaky. When a few years ago I began pressing in university circles the question whether evolutionary naturalism is true, I was met mainly with blank incomprehension. Ask a group of intellectuals whether new-Darwinism is really true, I learned, and you can hear the sound of minds snapping shut all around the room.
When I did get a reply, it usually was that 'evolution' is the best naturalistic theory and that naturalism is the philosophical basis of science and thus equivalent to rationality. Hence naturalism is 'the way we think today.' To ask modernists whether science is true is like asking them whether rationality is rational or truth is truthful. Science is, by modernist definition, our only truly objective way of knowing anything. 
Alfred North Whitehead was among the greatest of twentieth-century philosophers of science. In his classic work Science and the Modern World Whitehead wrote that to understand the philosophy of an age, the important thing to concentrate on is not the ideas that people are explicitly debating. More important by far are the presuppositions that practically everybody with any influence takes for granted, presuppositions that are rarely defended or even articulated because they seem so obviously true. These constitute the cultural definition of rationality, the beginning of reason. 
In the late twentieth century, the most important presuppositions in intellectual circles are that science has preeminent authority to describe reality and that science is based on naturalism--or methodological atheism, as it is sometimes called. This starting point necessarily implies, whether everyone understands the implication or not, that room for God exists only in the world of the imagination, or perhaps somewhere back in a 'Big Bang singularity' at the ultimate beginning of time. 
Belief in God may persist, particularly in people who have only a shallow understanding of science, but the believers can never have more than a tenuous standing in the world of the mind. Science can step forward at any time and employ its prestige to take control of any subject, even subjects inaccessible to empirical investigation like the ultimate beginning itself. Metaphysical statements by prominent scientists are accepted in the press and throughout public education as advances in scientific knowledge; contrary statements by theologians or religious leaders are dismissed as 'fundamentalism.' The naturalists hold the cultural power; theists in academic life have to accommodate as best they can."
Phillip E. Johnson in the chapter, The Beginning of Reason

"...evolution really is mistaken for explanation. It has the fatal quality of leaving on many minds the impression that they do understand it and everything else; just as many of them live under a sort of illusion that they have read the Origin of Species." G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man