Science and Protestantism: why is evolution a target?

Of course "God" is dead
Darwinian consequences make nonsense of ancient metaphysical certainties
...there's nothing new about xianity's entrenched resistance to a continuing de-deification of "nature" (wringing "God" out of the cosmic wash) -- the xian assualt on the intellect begins with Saul/Paul of Tarsus (fl 50-65CE) after he was laughed at by Epicurean and Stoic philosophers in the Agora of Athens (Acts17:18 NIV). Hostility continues through the book burnings of the 400's CE.
After 1,200 years of blackout, Copernicanism gets rejected even by the so-called reformer Luther, who calls the astronomer a fool. Galileo enjoys an afternoon viewing the instruments of torture before abjuring his errant ways and departing for house arrest. Darwin's theory of natural selection digs God's grave by killing off any metaphysics dependent upon 'Design' and 'Purpose'.
Even 151 years after publication of ‘On the origin of species’, liars on the xian right and slovenly jokers in philosophy imagine that Modern Evolutionary Theory will collapse by quoting some non-existent divinity or by uttering some gibberish about “survival of the fittest” being a circular argument.
Speciation via natural selection does not produce universally optimal individuals; it produces only locally better breeders. Even a slim advantage works. ‘Survival of the fittest’ — not Darwin’s phrase but Herbert Spencer’s — has never described evolutionary theory.
Steve Gould exposed the saboteurs years ago. His writings will convince all but the most obtuse and mendacious. They have not forgotten, nor forgiven, Darwin. Why so much irrational ire? —
Darwin’s master conceptual engine, natural selection, forever abolished from biological explanation the “teleological cause” of Aristotle and the "ideal forms" of Plato. Purpose and Design are dead.
As a youthful Darwin tartly remarked in a post-Beagle Notebook: “Plato says . . . that our 'necessary ideas' arise from the preexistence of the soul, [and] are not derivable from experience — read monkeys for preexistence.” [M Notebook (entry 128)]
• the Invisible Hand writes its own script
Complex systems do arise from simple events, including random events. There is no need for a 'god of economics' to design the microeconomic market of Adam Smith (‘The wealth of nations’ 1776) -- under specified mechanisms of random exchange, it forms itself.
What makes natural selection so uncomfortable? In operation, it has no goal and achieves no purpose. Speciation is a random trial-and-error process dependent upon differential reproductive success -- in a determinate ecological setting.
A designer for evolution is as superfluous as a designer for economics. And for exactly the same reason.
the anti_supernaturalist
The de-deification of western culture (including science) is our task for the next 100 years.

Hard to say without being familiar with their arguments. There may be political objections, since global warming implies the need for vast government regulation of industry and environment. But i just don't know.

I think that the comparison to climate change is an apt one. Climate change, as with Darwinian evolution, requires extrapolating from large and diverse sets of data across vast amounts of space and time. In a sense, they are both global theories of history. What I am not quite sure about, however, is how the moral question applies to the issue of climate science. It is certainly clear with regards to evolution.
On the other hand, I feel like John may be overstating his case when he says that these debates were less about truth than about moral values. The fundamentalists do believe that evolution is false - indeed, they insist that it is false not just because it is morally reprehensible and contradicts scripture, but also because it is not proper science. One of the most common catch phrases in the 1920s was that evolution is "science, falsely so-called." William Jennings Bryan stated, during his cross-examination at the Scopes trial, that he'd rather put his trust in the Rock of Ages than the Age of the Rocks. In other words, he making the claim that the kind of scientific methodology employed is so questionable that it must be taken on faith. Given the choice of faiths, for Bryan then, the choice was clear. He chooses Jesus.
John, of course, made this point when he talked about their Baconian conception of science. So it seemed rather odd to me that he then turned around and said it was a moral debate. I am inclined to say that the fundamentalists were strongly compelled by moral and religious concerns into disputing the truth of monad to man evolution by questioning the scientific and evidential basis of the theory.