Jonathan Sarfati, creation.com
Evolutionary theory leads to racism and genocide
Darwin’s ideas have been invoked as justification for all sorts of policies, including some very unpleasant ones. But evolutionary theory is a descriptive science. It cannot tell us what is right and wrong.
Rather than attack evolution directly, some try to tar it by association. The claim is often made that the theory of evolution leads inevitably to eugenics and to atrocities like those perpetrated by Hitler. These claims are irrelevant to the reality of evolution and are also largely untrue.
Let’s start with Darwin himself, who is often accused of being a racist and a eugenicist. Yet Darwin went very much against the ideas of his time by dismissing some of the perceived differences between races. For instance: ‘…this fact can only be accounted for by the various races having similar inventive or mental powers.‘
The following passage is often quoted by those who accuse him of supporting eugenics: ‘It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.’
Darwinism and Eugenics
It’s not surprising that Darwin is accused of supporting eugenics. His first cousin, Francis Galton, was the one who coined the term! And Galton justified it by Darwin’s evolutionism.
And in 1912, Darwin’s son Leonard gave the presidential address at the First International Congress of Eugenics, a landmark gathering in London of racial biologists from Germany, the United States.
The next few paragraphs are often left out:
Left out by whom? Not by CMI, that’s for sure.
‘…If we were to intentionally neglect the weak and the helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with overwhelming present evil. Hence we must bear without complaining the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind…’
Yet as we show in Darwin was indeed a Social Darwinist , anti-creationist Peter Quinn pointed out:
‘Sounding more like Colonel Blimp than Lieutenant Columbo, Darwin envisions a far grimmer future for races or sub-species less fit than the Anglo-Saxon. ‘At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world,’ he predicts. ‘At the same time the anthropological apes … will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state … even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of now between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla.’‘
Eugenical Christians
There is no doubt that some of those who supported eugenics cited Darwin’s theory of evolution as inspiration or justification, but then evolution has been invoked to support all kinds of notions and schemes, from communism to capitalism.
Biology tells us what is, not what ought to be. It is descriptive, not prescriptive or normative. It can inform our decisions by telling us what the likely outcome of different actions will be, but not which of these outcomes are ethical or desirable.
As we have said. But then what does an evolutionist use instead?
In retrospect, it is clear that many of the eugenic policies implemented in the early 20th century were based as much if not more on racial and social prejudices than on any understanding of genetics and evolution. Some may have used evolutionary theory as an excuse, but that does not make it the cause.
Yet eugenics was founded by leading evolutionists, who used evolutionary ideas to justify it. It flourished strongly in America, as documented by Edwin Black in his book War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (see review).
The shocking results of the eugenics program included laws against so-called mixed-race marriages in 27 states, human breeding programs, forced sterilization of over 60,000 US citizens and even euthanasia. Eugenics was even allowed by the Supreme Court, which had once declared slaves to be non-persons and now denies humanity to unborn babies.
Ideas and funding from American eugenicists also inspired German eugenics research, which culminated in Josef Mengele’s horrific experiments on inmates at the Nazi extermination camp Auschwitz.
The American Eugenics Society began in 1922 and lasted as long as 1994. Famous evolutionist scientist Theodosius Dobzhansky was its chairman of the board in 1956, and also included ardent evolutionist scientists J.B.S. Haldane and Richard Lewontin as members.
Eugenics was also promoted by the evolutionary textbook involved in the Scopes Trial, Hunter’s A Civic Biology—see A Civic Biology and eugenics. This book also promoted white supremacist ideas:
‘At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the others in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent, in structure. These are the Ethiopian or negro type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific; the American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.’
What’s more, many of the most enthusiastic promoters of the eugenics movement in the US, which led to policies such as compulsory sterilisation, were evangelical Christians. As Mary Teats explained in her book The Way of God in Marriage: ‘The great and rapidly increasing army of idiots, insane, imbeciles, blind, deaf-mutes, epileptics, paralytics, the murderers, thieves, drunkards and moral perverts are very poor material with which to ‘subdue the world’, and usher in the glad day when ‘all shall know the Lord’.’
Despite the atheopathic mendacity of New Scientist, it was the liberal (pro-evolution, Bible-disbelieving) churches that supported eugenics, while the evangelical ones opposed it. Christine Rosen documented this in her book Preaching Genetics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement.2 She writes that eugenicists:
‘included Protestants of nearly every denomination, Jews and Catholics, and they overwhelmingly represented the liberal wings of their respective faiths. … They were the ministers, priests, and rabbis who were inspired by the developments of modern science and accepted much of the new historical criticism of the Bible. … Supporters ranged from high-ranking clerics to small-town ministers in the Methodist, Unitarian, Congregational, Protestant Episcopal, Baptist and Presbyterian churches.’3
‘In eugenics, these men found a faith stronger than their Christianity, fulfilling Francis Galton’s hopes of replacing religion with eugenics.’4
‘Looking back one might expect to find a little more hesitation from religious leaders before they offered their support to a movement that … replaced God with science as the shaper of the human race.’5
In contrast, she documents:
‘Those who clung stubbornly to tradition, to doctrine, and to biblical infallibility opposed eugenics and became, for a time, the objects of derision for their rejection of this most modern science.’6
See also a detailed review of Rosen’s book.
Christian anti-semitism?
As for the Holocaust, the murder of able-bodied and able-minded people solely on the basis of their religion can hardly be called eugenics. It is incredible to blame Darwin while overlooking the role of Christianity in fostering anti-Semitism over the centuries.
Whatever fostered anti-Semitism was not Christianity, considering that Jesus and all His disciples and all NT authors (including Luke) were Jewish. And just consider Romans 9–11, for example, written by the Apostle Paul (himself a Jew).
While CMI is not Catholic, I find that the book The Myth of Hitler’s Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis by Rabbi David Dalin7 provides incontrovertible proof of pro-Semitism in the Roman Catholic Church, and that Pope Pius XII (1876–1958), saved far more Jews than Oskar Schindler—Jewish historian Pinchas Lapide argued that Pius ‘was instrumental in saving at least 700,000, but probably as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands’, compared to the 1200 on ‘Schindler’s List’. One reviewstates:
Read More
https://creation.com/new-scientist-rebuttal-demonstrating-the-nazi-dependance-on-darwinism
This required more than one reading to pick up the train of thought.
First of all, I don’t believe in evolution, for two reasons: because I believe what God said, and because evolution isn’t and never was established as fact but only as a metaphysical rumor.
Those who believe in evolution do so because its the only alternative to believing what God said. To them, it had to be natural processes at work, not the work of an Almighty God. They’re wrong, that’s the blind being led by the blind.
All thoughtful people nowadays should know that evolution can’t work as advertised, that it isn’t a natural assertion but a wish upon a star, a dream that can’t come true, like a Grimm’s Fairy Tale, based on hopes and dreams: not real ones, false ones.
Evolution is just another subversion wrought by the Devil to divert mankind away from God and salvation because nowhere it does meet, and can never satisfy, the requirements of the Scientific Method to Observe, Measure, Predict, and Control. For example, every prediction based upon it has been false: because it’s unnatural and can’t happen that way.