It is just as fair, or unfair, to blame those deaths on the general human practice of science, as it is to blame the atrocities committed by religious state power on the general human practice of religion. Frankly, I am appalled at the distorted and selective sense of history that seems common in the physics community. Millions of people died under the banner of a more scientific way to live and and OOPS, we forget. Because we're all upset at religion, because Galileo got put on celebrity house arrest by the Pope. Let's get over ourselves, please, and look at human history in a less hysterical and more balanced manner, one that doesn't inevitably lead us to a simplistic victimization scenario between science and religion.
Human history is a much more rich and complex story than that.
It is a useful exercise to dissect his letter and expose all the unstated assumptions and logical jumps. They understand that if they can force this choice, in our culture, science will lose. He says Darwin's evolution includes the origin of life. Students of faith ought not to come out of biology classes with the notion that there is no God. There are two assumptions here.