Ben Stein has been receiving a lot of (predictable) criticism for his movie "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed."
Not only has he demonstrated that the evolution establishment is the quintessential "emperor with no clothes," Stein has dared to shed light on the logical implications of Darwinism.
Ideas have consequences. What we think tends to dictate what we do. And what we do produces results in harmony with those actions. And Expelled shows that the logical conclusions of Darwinism and the actions carried out by Adolf Hitler are in harmony.
The high priests of evolution have spun up their engines of apologetics with misdirected statements about this connection. Whether the misdirection is intentional propaganda, or simply the same feeble logic which guards the doctrines of evolution/naturalism/materialism, I'm not sure. But the end result is the same thing: a straw man.
They claim Stein's contention is that because of his harmony, evolution either doesn't exist (huh?), or that Stein is saying anyone who believes in evolution will do the kind of things Hitler did. Neither claim is made by the film.
I know there are some who attempt to harmonize evolution theory and the Bible and have thus come up with a form of "theistic evolution" where God created the world and used evolution as an engine of biological change. However, this relatively small group of evolutionists is irrelevant to most discussions of evolution because (a) the foundational doctrines of Christianity make it impossible to reconcile with evolution, and (b) the dominant thinking on evolution is not theistic in nature.
In examining the dominant, atheistic evolution/naturalism/materialism, the contention and conclusion is that there is no God and no intelligent designer. This means there is no transcendent, objective moral truth. This means there is no fixed, objective standard by which to judge right and wrong, and it also means there is no supernatural being to whom we are accountable--either in this life or an afterlife. Humans are simply highly evolved animals sharing a planet with less evolved animals.
Accepting these moral conclusions, which are only the logical extensions of the scientific doctrine of evolution/naturalism/materialism, human beings are free to establish their own code of morality. And if continuation of a species is the primary purpose of that species, and if weak genetic material in the gene pool undermines that continuation, it makes sense to rid the species of the weak, defective and inferior.
Darwin illustrates this out in his "The Descent of Man," published in 1871 after his 1859 "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life."
He points to animal husbandry as the logical model, and says human beings, in preserving the sick and weak among us, are acting in contradiction to the breeding wisdom displayed with livestock:
We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. 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 itself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
Darwin does, in this passage, recognize that human "savages" do not act as "civilised men," but more in line with his evolutionary conclusions.
Despite this realization of the logical conclusions of his own theory, Darwin still couldn't bring himself to totally abandon this "sympathy" within our humanity, calling it "the noblest part of our nature." (He also seems to disregard the fact that hospitals, et. al. spring from a Christian worldview, so he owes the Christian worldview a debt for this "noblest part.")
Darwin also failed to acknowledge the disharmony between the implications of his theory, and this preservation of the weak. With no objective values as a standard, how can we determine that caring for the weak in our species is "noble?" In fact, it is illogical. Why preserve bad genetic material within our gene pool, when it puts survival of the species at risk? Why waste our resources on inferior individuals when those resources could be put to better use somewhere else? After all, we'd only be killing a weak animal, even if it is a highly evolved weak animal. It doesn't have an eternal soul, so when it's dead it won't know the difference. And with no God to be accountable to, what does it matter?
Hitler, Stalin and other disciples of Darwinism did not share Darwin's weakness of "sympathy," and instead carried his ideas forward to their logical conclusion.
Expelled looks at this logical "final solution" prescribed by Hitler, in visiting Dachau and Hadamar, where handicapped people and the Jews that Hitler considered "inferior" were exterminated.
We, with out traditional exposure to Christian values and a Christian worldview, look at what Hitler did as the height of evil. But Hitler was only carrying Darwin to it's logical conclusion. He believed he was doing a positive thing for the Aryan race. He thought he was making his people stronger, and making economic use of the country's resources.
Apostles of evolution are, understandably, upset at having this logical conclusion exposed without the rose-colored filter supplied by the "mainstream" media. They don't want the unsuspecting public to see this dark, sinister underbelly of evolution theory.
As much as the evolutionist hate Stein's exposure of this harmony between Darwinist thought and Hitlerian action, columnist Jack Cashill thinks Expelled "goes easy" on the link. Cashill also implicates Ernst Haeckel (he of the made-up drawings of embryos which supposedly showed a developmental link pointing to evolution) in this chain of thought between Darwin and Hitler.
In one of his few specific references to Haeckel, Hitler spoke of their shared opposition to Christianity. Both resented the faith because it competed with what Gasman calls "a holy conception of nature."
Haeckel had, in fact, inspired Hitler and Hitler's Germany with Darwin's cosmology, the story of the world as told by nature. For Haeckel and Hitler both, Gasman writes, "The great defect of modern Western society was that man was in constant violation of nature."
And as Cashill points out, Hitler wasn't the only one to apply Darwinian logic to practical solutions:
Other totalitarians have taken their cue from Darwin and his most influential fan, Karl Marx. Upon the publication of "On the Origin of Species," Marx wrote to collaborator, Friedrich Engels, "Although it is developed in the crude English style, this is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view."
All of this is completely independent to the question of whether evolution theory is true. It merely examines the moral and societal implications, if it is indeed true.
People are certainly free to believe what they want to with regard to the origins of the universe. But they should have the right to consider the question both unhindered by closed-minded propaganda, and undeluded about the implications of where those ideas might lead.
The 20th Century saw millions murdered at the behest of Darwinian conclusions. If we continue down the road of embracing this unproven and impossible theory, along with its logical companion of moral relativism, then we should be prepared for an even more hellish century in the 21st.
7 comments:
Hitler believed that the Jews were physically inferior because studies had shown that they suffered from numerous genetic diseases and conditions and that they were far more likely to be mentally ill, but that is not why the Jews were killed. At Auschwitz, the handicapped Jews were pulled out of the selection line for the gas chamber and used for medical research. A large barrack at Theresienstadt was set aside for mentally ill Jews; they were not sent to Auschwitz to be killed.
The handicapped and mentally ill Germans were not killed to stop them from breeding. They were too far gone to being having sex. The handicapped were killed to save millions of dollars that was being spent on their institutionalized care. The Germans who had some genetic condition, such as hereditary deafness, were sterilized, not killed.
The “Rhineland bastards,” who were the offspring of African soldiers and German girls, were sterilized, not killed. This was to prevent the German ethnic group from being eventually wiped out by interracial breeding.
The Jews were not rounded up and sent to concentration camps in 1942 in the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” because Hitler believed that they were genetically inferior, but because they were “Judeo-Bolsheviks” (Hitler’s term for Communists) and the enemies of Germany in wartime.
Anyone who confuses biological evolution with social darwinism is a complete idiot.
Anyone who denies the connection between biological evolution and social Darwinism is either a complete idiot or a complete liar.
Well if we're gonna play tit for tat may I remind you that anti-semitism is steeped in Christianity. Read 'On The Jews And Their Lies' (google it) by Martian Luther written 316 years before Darwin were he talks of burning synagogues, putting Jews in labour camps (sound familiar) and calls them devil feces eaters. Also the Catholic church colluded witht the Nazis and said 'prayers for Hitler.' Europe didn't need Darwin for racial intolerance it was already there. Anyway blaming Darwin for the holocaust is a bit extreme. No one blames Newton for Germans using the law of gravity to drop bombs.
There's no denying that some Christians have done bad things and advocated bad positions.
The difference is, anti-Semitism is inconsistent with the tenets of Christianity; nowhere in the Bible will you find hate based on race justified ("There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.") Christianity was founded by a Jew (Jesus) and was spread to the rest of the world by Jews (the apostles and early disciples).
Meanwhile the extermination of Jews and the handicapped and other "undesirable" groups is completely consistent with the tenets and logical ends of Darwinism. Strengthening the gene pool of a race is in perfect harmony with Darwinism, and eliminating the source of weak genetic strains is only logical within Darwinism.
The Christian anti-Semite has to go against the principles of his own belief system in order to hold those anti-Semitic beliefs, while the Darwinist need only pursue the logical flow of his belief system to arrive at Hitler's conclusions.
Saying that Hitler based his extermination of the Jews on Darwinism is absurd. It was virulent antisemitism, whose foundations were accepted by many Christians throughout Europe. Read Martin Luther for a treatise on why the houses and schools of Jews should be destroyed, not Charles Darwin! There is also the supreme irony in the fact that this movie is being promoted by the same people who promoted Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. Yet Mel Gibson launched into an anti-semitic tirade when arrested for drunk driving! Saying that Darwin is to blame makes as much sense as Tom DeLay's comment that the Columbine massacre was due to the fact that those students were taught that we evolved from apes.
One can make many such false arguments: e.g., Newtonian mechanics were used to justify the Soviet gulag. But the question is whether Newton's laws of motion are a useful description of reality, are they predictive, etc. The answer is yes. Similarly, vast amounts of data support the fact that evolution happened, and continues to happen today (consider viruses and bacteria that are continuously evolving). There are those who say that this is "micro-evolution", and that this does not lead to new species. But more than 99.9 percent of the species that existed on earth no longer exist today. Species are constantly disappearing, and we have a rich history showing the appearance of new species over the history of the earth.
This is odious historical revisionism linking Hitler to Darwin, through Eugenics.
1. Artificial selection is not natural selection
Genocide predates Darwin by millennia – the bible has passages where God mandates it.
2.Arguing to perceived consequences does not change the realty of evolution.
3. It is wrong to politicize one of humanities greatest tragedies. Hitler mentions ‘God’ a lot but Darwin never. Moreover, be believed in the fixity of species like creationists, banned ‘The origin of species’ from libraries and institutionalized prayer in schools. But I’m not blaming Christianity for him.
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