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"Words of Truth" |
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05 Dec 2004 08:18:01 PM |
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DARWIN AT NUREMBERG |
DARWIN AT NUREMBERG
PART I
The Darwin Papers
James Foard
I don't claim that Darwin and his theory of evolution brought on the
holocaust; but I cannot deny that the theory of evolution, and the
atheism it engendered, led to the moral climate that made a holocaust
possible"
Jewish scholar Edward Simon (1)
Now we must look into one of the darker, more ominous sides to
Darwin's theory. We are going to investigate how our world-view
affects our lives and see whether Darwin's world-view contributed to
the genocidal Nazi holocaust of the 20th century. Indeed, there are
certain very serious issues that need to be answered here. Do our
ideas of our origin and destiny have significance for our everyday
lives, and the lives of others around us? Does it affect the criterion
we use by which we place value on human life and conduct? How do we
define man? Is he merely the product of natural selection and of the
society he lives in and hence merely a subject of the secular state,
or is he a moral and spiritual being as well as a rational and
physical being who answers to a higher set of laws and standards?
There are some momentous historic reasons why we should seek answers
to the questions just posed. Do ideas of our origin and destiny take
the form of actions that have moral and/or spiritual consequences to
them, and if so, what has been the result of applying Darwinian
theories in the world politic: how has the theory of evolution
affected human life and culture; by what set of principles should
people and nations be governed, and thus ultimately we must ask
ourselves what is the purpose of human government and social
institutions, whose set of laws and morals should we obey, and what
should be the standard of accountability for the common citizen and
for those in public office?
Mention was made in the earlier chapters of the notion of racial
superiority implicit in Darwin's concept of evolution through natural
selection. Did Darwin consider some races of man to be sub-species,
not as equals created in the image of God, and did these evolutionary
ideas make their way into the manner that nations conducted their
social policies during the latter part of the nineteenth and well into
the twentieth centuries?
From his own journal in Chapter One we have read where Darwin regarded
the Indians of South America as little better than beasts that should
be slaughtered to make way for better grazing land for cattle. Did
writings in his Origin and in his Descent of Man contain these same
ideas, ideas that some took and applied to human populations, ideas
that Hitler and Stalin carried out, or is this simply an unwarranted
criticism of his work? Is it unfair to suggest that the death camps at
Auschwitz and the entire culture of death that spawned them were
merely the next horrible and logical step in the application of his
theory?
Often when it is pointed out by Darwin's critics that there is a
historical link between Darwin's writings and the holocaust of the
Nazis, apologists for Darwin will object that this was a perversion of
his original idea, and that there is nothing in what he wrote that
would imply or advocate a racist ideology. Is this indeed the truth or
was there really a connection between what Darwin wrote and what
Hitler carried out on a massive scale in Nazi Germany? In order to
find out the truth of the matter, let us look at what Darwin actually
had to say on the subject.
It may surprise some people to find out the dark truth about Darwin,
but the fact remains nevertheless that he did indeed propose in his
second major work, The Descent of Man, that certain races of human
beings were actually sub-species, that a race war among mankind's
different races, with the extermination of one race and the survival
of another, would bring beneficial results in evolutionary terms, and
he did explicitly state that black people were intermediate on the
evolutionary ladder between apes and white people. He also wrote that
it was his hope that in the near future blacks, aborigines, and the
African gorillas would become extinct, thus enhancing the evolutionary
potential of the Caucasian race.
Darwin began the very first chapter of his Descent of Man by posing
this interesting question:
"He who wishes to decide whether man is the modified descendant of
some pre-existing form, would probably first enquire whether man
varies, however slightly, in bodily structure and in mental faculties;
and if so, whether the variations are transmitted to his offspring in
accordance with the laws which prevail with the lower animals."
Thus Darwin is asking whether the same law or laws that govern the
evolution of what he refers to as the lower animals also govern in the
affairs of man as well.
What law could he be referring to? To find this out, we must go back
to his Origin of Species, where in the final paragraph of his chapter
on Instinct, he wrote: "Finally, it may not be a logical deduction,
but to my imagination it is far more satisfactory to look at such
instincts as the young cuckoo ejecting its foster-brothers, ants
making slaves, the larvae of ichneumonidae feeding within the live
bodies of caterpillars, not as specially endowed or created instincts,
but as small consequences of one general law leading to the
advancement of all organic beings--namely, multiply, vary, let the
strongest live and the weakest die."
Thus Darwin is asking at the beginning of his Descent if this law of
his leading to the advancement of all organic beings, "multiply, vary,
let the strongest live and the weakest die," also applies to the race
of humankind as well.
He goes on to ask in his Descent if the races of man actually differ
enough to be divided up into what he later refers to as sub-species of
man: "It might also naturally be enquired whether man, like so many
other animals, has given rise to varieties and sub-races, differing
but slightly from each other, or to races differing so much that they
must be classed as doubtful species?"
Finally, again all on the very first page of his Descent of Man, for
any reader to see, he poses the genocidal question as to whether or
not a race war might produce "beneficial" results for mankind, with
one race of man surviving and another race being exterminated:
"The enquirer would next come to the important point, whether man
tends to increase at so rapid a rate, as to lead to occasional severe
struggles for existence; and consequently to beneficial variations,
whether in body or mind, being preserved, and injurious ones
eliminated. Do the races or species of men, whichever term may be
applied, encroach on and replace one another, so that some finally
become extinct?"
To even pose such a question should naturally revolt any intelligent
and moral person in a civilized society, however Darwin not only posed
these questions at the beginning of his Descent of Man, we also find
out that his own answer to all three questions, again on the very
first page of his Descent of Man was YES!
"We shall see that all these questions, as indeed is obvious in
respect to most of them, must be answered in the affirmative, in the
same manner as with the lower animals."
Thus Darwin said that his "general law leading to the advancement of
all organic beings . . . let the strongest live and the weakest die"
also applied to the various races of man, and he saw "beneficial"
results coming from a race war between the different races, or what he
called later on in the same chapter the "sub-species" of man, with one
race surviving and one race being exterminated!
Further on in his Descent, Darwin elaborates on this theme describing
his dream of a future for mankind when the black races of man, as well
as the mountain gorilla of Africa, will hopefully become extinct, thus
enhancing the chances for the evolutionary advancement of the more
"civilized" races of man: "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. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor
Schaaffhausen has remarked, 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 civilised state, as we may hope, even
than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now
between the negro or Australian and the gorilla." (Descent of Man,
Chapter Six: On the Affinities and Geneology of Man, On the Birthplace
and Antiquity of Man)
Darwin proposed in quite horrifying and explicit language that black
Africans and Australian aborigines occupied a sub-species position
between white Europeans and baboons! He not only stated this as his
belief, but proposed that in the near future "as we may hope"
according to his evolutionary theory, these "sub-races" of man will
eventually be exterminated in a struggle for survival, along with the
endangered mountain gorilla of Africa!
This type of statement makes the term "ethnic cleansing" seem mild by
comparison.
Certain evolutionists, in attempting to excuse Darwin, have made the
claim that Darwin was merely an impartial observer of the natural
processes, and that he was only noting the historical fact that
extinctions have and are occurring. This type of reasoning completely
misses the point.
There is a vast difference between observing that there are endangered
species, such as the gray whale, the mountain gorilla, etc., and
encouraging the extinction of those species, which Darwin did! He was
anything but impartial. And it should be noted that he made those
predictions according to his theory, and said that they would be
"beneficial" to evolution, and he applied the “beneficial”
results of extinction, as can be clearly seen by anyone with a
reasonable degree of intelligence from the above quotes, to the
different races of man as well! To blur the line between observation
and advocating would be like saying that Hitler was a social scientist
who was concerned that the Jews were an endangered ethnic group!
This was Darwin's "final solution" to the race problem years before
the Nazi's had their bloody hand in it. (In light of this, I think it
seems a great disservice to our distinguished sixteenth President,
Abraham Lincoln, that the most notorious modern adulator of Darwin's
theory, evolutionist Steven Jay Gould, wrote this kind of fawning
praise for Darwin in a noted scientific journal: "I have long
considered Abraham Lincoln to be Charles Darwin's American
soul-mate-for they were born on the same day of February 12, 1809."
(Steven Jay Gould, On A Toothed Bird's Place In Nature, This View Of
Life, Natural History, February 1996, pp.23.-Note: Since writing this,
Steven Jay Gould, life-long enemy of Christ, who learned Marxism at
his father's knee, went to his eternal reward on May 20, 2002)
When I brought up Darwin's endorsement of racial genocide to some
evolutionists whose opposition to creationism bordered on fanaticism
on the CNN Web discussion board (03/13-15/01) under the evolution
topic, I was accused of taking Darwin out of context and of
paraphrasing Darwin even after providing the quotes that anyone with
enough energy, intellect and interest could easily look up for
themselves, but the icing on the cake came when the evolutionist
moderator of the discussion board accused me of spamming when quoting
myself; for using my own written material in the debate, material
which is freely distributed for anyone to read, I was censored. Also
the traditional evolutionist's argument was made that Darwin was
merely expressing the prevalent view common to the intellectual
climate of his day, and an evolutionist by the name of Brennan
attempted to excuse Darwin by claiming that when Darwin was using the
term "sub-species" to refer to the various races of man, this term in
the English language did not mean the same as it does today.
For one thing, for anyone to make the excuse that Darwin was merely
reflecting the contemporary attitude of his day completely ignores the
fact that Darwin's Descent was published some fifty years after the
great Christian, Wilberforce, lobbied successfully to outlaw slavery
in England; ten years after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation; and
seven years after the end of the American Civil War. Also, there were
some very prominent blacks at that time in England and America who had
attained financial prosperity and achieved notable educational success
and who would not have appreciated Darwin’s designation of their
status.
As noted already, to use this type of historical revisionism to excuse
Darwin one might just as well say that what Hitler was saying about
the Jews in Germany during the Third Reich was not so bad because,
well after all, it was being said all over Germany back then.
Regarding Brennan’s contention that species and sub-species did
not meant the same thing back then as it does now, let it be said that
Darwin was not using medieval English. The Linnean binomial system of
scientific classification had been in use for well over a hundred
years when Darwin published his Descent of Man and African blacks were
definitely classified within the genus and species Homo sapiens, i.e.
human beings, and Darwin was surely aware of this. The word
“species” meant the same thing then as it does now, and
when Darwin called certain races of man "sub-species", that is exactly
what he meant, in all of it's xenophobia and racism.
Let it never be said that Darwin was overflowing with the milk of
human kindness in his evolutionary theory when applying it to mankind.
Could anything more horrible be imagined from the writings of Adolf
Hitler than what Darwin plainly stated in the above quote.
Darwin was a zealous advocate of the extinction of species (see
Chapter Fourteen of The Darwin Papers) and of the extermination of
certain races of man, and were he alive today he would be beating the
drum to the clubbing of the baby harp seals in Alaska. He was no mere
impartial observer of nature. And he left his stamp on the National
Socialist and Marxist totalitarian dictatorships that led to the
deaths of millions of people in the twentienth century in the name of
evolutionary "social progress".
Some defenders of Darwin have noted that he followed the fashionable
trend among the wealthy elite in England during the American Civil war
in writing against slavery in his correspondences. This is indeed
true, for Darwin did not want to make slaves of the blacks and
aborigines, he preferred the much more deadly, efficient and brutal
solution to the race problem. After all, Hitler did not want to make
slaves of the Jews, he wanted to exterminate them. And it should be
born in mind that Darwin’s ideas on the eventual extermination
of the black races were written years after slavery had already ended,
thus if there was any shift in his attitude or opinion concerning
black-white relations, it was from a moderate position to an extreme
position of advocacy of ethnic cleansing.
I am continually amazed at how evolutionists and liberals (I have yet
to meet a liberal who is not an evolutionist; evolutionism is the
underlying creed of liberalism) will go to any extreme to defend
Darwin whenever any type of criticism of him or his theory is put
forth. They will literally bend over backwards to excuse him of any
fault in his person or argument, and yet these same defenders of
Darwin, “straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel”, will
jump to join in with any attack on or imagined fault of great men of
principle, faith, courage and vision such as Washington, Jefferson and
Columbus.
To return to our subject, regarding Darwin’s viewpoint of
certain races of man as subspecies, he wrote in Chapter Seven of his
Descent: "It is not my intention here to describe the several
so-called races of men; but I am about to enquire what is the value of
the differences between them under a classificatory point of view, and
how they have originated."
After quoting various opinions on both sides of the issue, Darwin gave
us his opinion on the subject: "Some naturalists have lately employed
the term "sub-species" to designate forms which possess many of the
characteristics of true species, but which hardly deserve so high a
rank. Now if we reflect on the weighty arguments above given, for
raising the races of man to the dignity of species, and the
insuperable difficulties on the other side in defining them, it seems
that the term "sub-species" might here be used with propriety. But
from long habit the term "race" will perhaps always be employed. The
choice of terms is only so far important in that it is desirable to
use, as far as possible, the same terms for the same degrees of
difference."(Descent, Chapter 7, p.347, Benton Edition)
Darwin often referred to the different races of mankind as
sub-species:
"In a series of forms graduating insensibly from some ape-like
creature to man as he now exists, it would be impossible to fix on any
definite point when the term "man" ought to be used. But this is a
matter of very little importance. So again, it is almost a matter of
indifference whether the so-called races of man are thus designated,
or are ranked as species or sub-species; but the latter term appears
the more appropriate." (Descent, Chapter Seven: On the Races of Man:
Sub-species)
Thus Darwin restated his view that the various races of man were of
different species, again calling some races "sub-species," even
proposing that certain races had differing mental capabilities: "The
races differ also in constitution, in acclimatization and in liability
to certain diseases. Their mental characteristics are likewise very
distinct; chiefly as it would appear in their emotional, but partly in
their intellectual faculties." (Descent, Chapter Seven: On the Races
of Man, pp.343)
Darwin not only had a racially biased view of the non-Aryan races, he
even held other Europeans who were not of English descent with
contempt. Here is his opinion of the Irish, taken from his Descent of
Man:
"A most important obstacle in civilised countries to an increase in
the number of men of a superior class has been strongly insisted on by
Mr. Greg and Mr. Galton, namely, the fact that the very poor and
reckless, who are often degraded by vice, almost invariably marry
early, whilst the careful and frugal, who are generally otherwise
virtuous, marry late in life, so that they may be able to support
themselves and their children in comfort. . .Those who marry early
produce within a given period not only a greater number of
generations, but, as shewn by Dr. Duncan they produce many more
children. Thus the reckless, degraded, and often vicious members of
society, tend to increase at a quicker rate than the provident and
generally virtuous members. Or as Mr. Greg puts the case: 'The
careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman multiplies like
rabbits..."(Descent, Chapter Five: On the Development of the
Intellectual and Moral Faculties During Primeval and Civilised Times:
Natural selection as affecting civilised nations.)
Darwin quoted Greg here in referring to his Irish neighbors as
degraded members of society.
He also wrote that the western nations of Europe owed none of their
"superiority" to Greek ancestry: "The western nations of Europe, who
now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors, and stand
at the summit of civilisation, owe little or none of their superiority
to direct inheritance from the old Greeks", to whom he referred in a
quote from Greg as "'corrupt to the very core.'" (Descent, ibid.)
Darwin shared with us his evolutionary viewpoint on what happens to
more primitive cultures when encountering more "advanced" (i.e.
European) cultures in Chapter Seven of the Descent, On the Races of
Man: On the Extinction of the Races of Man: "The partial or complete
extinction of many races of man is historically known . . . Extinction
follows chiefly from the competition of tribe with tribe, and race
with race . . .the contest is soon settled by war, slaughter,
cannibalism, slavery, and absorption . . .When civilized nations come
into contact with barbarians the struggle is short, except where a
deadly climate gives its aid to the native race."
Darwin also stated that the wealthy nations would eventually replace
the less privileged races in the struggle for life, and it is apparent
that he believed this to be a good thing:
"But the inheritance of property by itself is very far from an evil;
for without the accumulation of capital the arts could not progress;
and it is chiefly through their power that the civilised races have
extended, and are now everywhere extending their range, so as to take
the place of the lower races."(Ibid)
This very concept of the strong ruling over the weak by brute force
was precisely what Hitler advocated in the Tenth chapter of Mein
Kampf:
"Man must realize that a fundamental law of necessity reigns
throughout the whole realm of Nature and that his existence is subject
to the law of eternal struggle and strife . . .where the strong are
always the masters of the weak and where those subject to such laws
must obey them or be destroyed,"echoing Darwin's idea of a struggle
for existence, survival of the fittest, and his "one general law
leading to the advancement of all organic beings . . . let the
strongest live and the weakest die."
Darwin's idea of a battle for survival sounds eerily like the speech
that Hitler gave in Munich on April 13, 1923, where he stated:
" So the strength which each people possesses decides the day. ALWAYS
BEFORE GOD AND THE WORLD THE STRONGER HAS THE RIGHT TO CARRY THROUGH
WHAT HE WILLS. History proves: He who has not the strength - him the
'right in itself' profits not a whit. A world court without a world
police would be a joke. And from what nations of the present League of
Nations would then this force be recruited? Perhaps from the ranks of
the old German Army? THE WHOLE WORLD OF NATURE IS A MIGHTY STRUGGLE
BETWEEN STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS - AN ETERNAL VICTORY OF THE STRONG OVER
THE WEAK. There would be nothing but decay in the whole of Nature if
this were not so. States which should offend against the elementary
law would fall into decay. You need not seek for long to find an
example of such mortal decay: you can see it in the Reich of
today...."
It should be remembered that the subtitle to Darwin's Origin of
Species was The Preservation of favored Races in the Struggle For
Life, which we now see he applied to the races of man as well. What we
are beginning to see is a chapter largely neglected by historians, a
chapter that chronicles one of the darkest pictures of human history;
the attempted extermination of entire races of human beings based on
the evolutionary concept that some races are more advanced than others
and that according to Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest and a
struggle for survival there should be open competition between the
different races of man for dominance on this planet.
There is an amazing similarity between what Darwin wrote and what the
Nazis were expounding during the reign of Adolf Hitler. The Nuremberg
Law passed by the Nazis in Germany in 1933 was specified as a "Law for
the Protection of Hereditary Health: The Attempt to Improve the German
Aryan Breed."
Article I Section 1 of the Nuremberg Law stated: "Anyone who suffers
from an inheritable disease may be surgically sterilized if, in the
judgement of medical science, it could be expected that his
descendants will suffer from serious inherited mental or physical
defects."
Article I Section 2 stated: "Anyone who suffers from one of the
following is to be regarded as inheritable diseased within the meaning
of this law:"
Congenital feeble-mindedness
Schizophrenia
Manic-depression
Congenital epilepsy
Inheritable St. Vitus dance (Huntington's Chorea)
Hereditary blindness
Hereditary deafness
Serious inheritable malformations
Article II Section 1 of the Nuremberg Law states:
"Anyone who requests sterilization is entitled to it. If he be
incapacitated or under a guardian because of low state of mental
health or not yet 18 years of age, his legal guardian is empowered to
make the request. In other cases of limited capacity the request must
receive the approval of the legal representative. If a person be of
age and has a nurse, the latter's consent is required."
These laws sound as though they could have been taken directly from
the conclusion to Darwin's Descent of Man, where Darwin wrote that
only those deemed physically fit should have children, and that those
deemed physically or mentally inferior should not breed:
"Man scans with scrupulous care the character and pedigree of his
horses, cattle, and dogs before he matches them; but when he comes to
his own marriage he rarely, or never, takes any such care. . .Yet he
might by selection do something not only for the bodily constitution
and frame of his offspring, but for their intellectual and moral
qualities. Both sexes ought to refrain from marriage if they are in
any marked degree inferior in body or mind; but such hopes are Utopian
and will never be even partially realised until the laws of
inheritance are thoroughly known. Everyone does good service, who aids
towards this end. When the principles of breeding and inheritance are
better understood, we shall not hear ignorant members of our
legislature rejecting with scorn a plan for ascertaining whether or
not consanguineous marriages are injurious to man. . . .The
advancement of the welfare of mankind is a most intricate problem: all
ought to refrain from marriage who cannot avoid abject poverty for
their children; for poverty is not only a great evil, but tends to its
own increase by leading to recklessness in marriage. On the other
hand, as Mr. Galton has remarked, if the prudent avoid marriage,
whilst the reckless marry, the inferior members tend to supplant the
better members of society. Man, like every other animal, has no doubt
advanced to his present high condition through a struggle for
existence consequent on his rapid multiplication; and if he is to
advance still higher, it is to be feared that he must remain subject
to a severe struggle. Otherwise he would sink into indolence, and the
more gifted men would not be more successful in the battle of life
than the less gifted. Hence our natural rate of increase, though
leading to many and obvious evils, must not be greatly diminished by
any means. There should be open competition for all men; and the most
able should not be prevented by laws or customs from succeeding best
and rearing the largest number of offspring. (Darwin, Descent of Man,
Conclusion)
Darwin even advocated that the poor, the sick, the lame and the
socially disadvantaged should be discouraged from producing offspring,
and in fact suggested that vaccinations against disease, aid to help
the poor, and asylums and hospital care for the sick were wrongly
directed and would lead to the degeneration of our species! "I have
hitherto only considered the advancement of man from a semi-human
condition to that of the modern savage. But some remarks on the action
of natural selection on civilized nations may be worth adding . . .
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those
that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. 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 himself, hardly any
one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed. . . .The
surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he
knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were
intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a
contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil. We must
therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and
propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in
steady action, namely that the weaker and inferior members of society
do not marry so freely as the sound; and this check might be
indefinitely increased by the weak in body or mind refraining from
marriage, though this is more to be hoped for than expected " (Descent
of Man, Chapter Five, On the Development of the Intellectual and Moral
Faculties during Primeval and Civilized Times: Natural Selection as
affecting Civilized Nations.)
It was precisely this evolutionary ideology that led to the
sterilization, torture and murder of millions of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs
and children of mixed racial heritage and to the Nazi concentration
camps of Dachau, Ravensbruck, Treblinka and Auschwitz in the years
just prior to and during the era of the Third Reich in Germany. The
Sterilization Law eventually led to the legalization of euthanasia in
Germany in 1939, which in turn led to the murder of millions of
"undesirables". Hitler's ideas were rooted firmly in Darwin's theory
of evolution and eugenics. This was not borderline lunatic science but
was in the vanguard of respectable genetics in what was one of the
most progressive scientific and technological societies of its day.(2)
The similarity between Darwin's writings and Hitler's is scandalous,
yet even more scandalous is the fact that this has not been pointed
out before among most scholars on evolution and Darwin. Some
Christians, in a myopic attempt to bring Darwin within the fold of the
Church, have made the patronizing claim that Darwin himself was a
Christian during much of his life, or that he had a death bed
repentance and conversion from his evolutionary views to more
conventional Christian beliefs. One might as well boast that Hitler or
Stalin were Christians in that case. As far as Darwin's own feelings
for religion and his objectivity towards the Biblical account of
creation, after his abandoned candidacy for Holy Orders he said of the
Old testament that "from its manifestly false history of the
earth...and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful
tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the
Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian."
Of his view of the New Testament of Jesus Christ, he could not see how
"anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so, the plain
language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe,
and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best
friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable
doctrine."" (The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, Edited by Nora
Barlow, W.W. Norton and Co., New York, London, 1958.)
Here we have Darwin's views on Christianity, and it appears that those
were the views he was brought up around as well, so there was no
gradual conversion, as he sometimes claimed, depending on whom he was
trying to convince, from Christian beliefs to evolution. He did state
categorically, nonetheless, that by the time he was forty years old he
had totally given up on Christianity, (Desmond and Moore, pp. 658),
saying to one correspondent "I am sorry to have to inform you that I
do not believe in the Bible as a divine revelation, & therefore not in
Jesus Christ as the Son of God." (Ibid, pp. 635). He also wrote that
he did not believe that there ever has been any Revelation. (Ibid, pp.
635)
He further wrote in his Autobiography that his belief in evolution was
incompatible with the belief in the immortality of the human soul,
stating that if the soul were immortal, and if this life were not the
all in all, then evolution would be meaningless: "Believing as I do
that man in the distant future [through evolutionary development] will
be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable
thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete
annihilation [referring to the Christian belief that this world will
be consumed someday, but that there shall be a new heavens and earth
afterward] after such long-continued slow progress. To those who fully
admit the immortality of the human soul, the destruction of our world
will not appear so dreadful". (Autobiography of Charles Darwin and
Selected Letters, Edited by Francis Darwin, 1892)
Here Darwin was criticizing the Christian belief in the immortality of
the human soul, stating that those who adhere to this belief, along
with the belief that there would be an after-life in a better world
after this one, and that this present world will come to an end
someday, thus that this present life was not the end result of
existence, were in direct contradiction to his hope that evolutionary
development would go on and on forever in this life.
Hitler, whom we have seen also emphasized the struggle for existence
as a mainstay of his belief system, also repudiated Christianity in
his private conversations. In fact we find out that Hitler's hatred of
Christianity and the Jews was tied in with his attempt to apply
Darwinian theories of a master race on a worldwide scale. He said on
October, 10, 1941: "Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a
protest against nature. Taken to its logical conclusion, Christianity
would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure."(From
Hitler's Secret Conversations, October 10, 1941)
Hitler was not referring to the Natural Law spoken of in the
Declaration of Independence, which acknowledged that all men were
created equal, but he was referring to the law of "survival of the
fittest," found in Darwin's writings, and from which he gained much of
his fuel for his propaganda campaign.
Having read of Darwin's views on religion in the first chapter, should
it seem like much of a surprise that Karl Marx, the author of the
Communist Manifesto desired to dedicate his book to Darwin? Even
though Darwin declined the offer, Marx, who stated that religion is
the "opiate of the people,"wrote to his friend Engels: "Darwin's book
is very important and serves me as a basis in natural science for the
class struggle." (3)
University of Columbia historian Jacques Barzun wrote, "The path from
Darwin to Marx to Wagner is an unbroken circle, and our world of
action lies within it as in an iron wring." (4)
Jonathan Miller wrote, "Like Freud and Marx, Darwin exploited the
monotonous security of a happy marriage to work undisturbed at a
revolutionary theory. Under the cover of respectable matrimony, all
three men succeeded in hatching ideas which did much to undermine the
world upon which traditional family life was based."(5)
Darwin stated that one reason that he did not accept the idea of the
Judeo-Christian God was because of so much suffering in the world. It
has still to be estimated how many millions of people died under the
cruel blow of the hammer and sickle during the seventy year reign of
atheistic Communism in the Soviet Union, the reign of Mao Tse Tung in
China, and the communist regime of Pol Pot in Cambodia, but the high
estimates in the twentieth century alone suggest that more than 100
million people have been slaughtered in the name of Communism, over 50
million in the Soviet Union, and more recently three million in
Southeast Asia under the regime of Pol Pot, the mad dictator
responsible for the "Killing Fields."
Barzun wrote, "Darwin did not invent the Machiavellian image that the
world is the playground of the lion and the fox, but thousands
discovered that he had transformed political science . . . War became
the symbol, the image, the inducement, the reason, and the language of
all human beings on the planet. No one who has not waded through some
sizable part of the literature of the period 1870-1914 has any
conception of the extent to which it is one long call for blood . . .
" (6)
Ralph Ross, Professor of Philosophy and Humanities and Chairman of the
Humanities Program at the University of Minnesota has written: "We can
probably guess what Hitler means if we see how Christianity as 'the
systematic cultivation of the human failure' is 'a rebellion against
natural law' if natural law includes human equality, justice, and
liberty, as eighteenth-century thinkers conceived it. But if
"Christianity" here means chiefly . . . moral precepts like Love your
neighbor, The meek shall inherit the earth, and If you are slapped on
one cheek, turn the other, then it is, "a protest against nature" if
nature is thought of as opposed to these. 'Nature red in fang and
claw,' the battle ground of the struggle for survival, dog eat dog!
Nature is thus conceived as the survival of the fittest. That would be
opposed to the Christianity of the Gospels. And surely Hitler, from
what the world knows of him, worshiped strength and abhorred weakness.
Failures, in his mind, would be the weak . . .Then natural law would
be Darwinism: the survival of the fittest (7)
Unfortunately Ross, as many apologists for Darwin have done, made the
mistaken claim that Darwin was not talking about human society in his
writings, but only about animal species, thus absconding Darwin from
any responsibility for the horrors we have seen perpetuated on the
human race during the twentieth century, but we have seen that this is
anything but the truth. Darwin was clearly referring to human society
as well as animals when applying his law of survival of the fittest.
Adrian Desmond and James Moore, in their epic 808 page work Darwin,
write: “‘Social Darwinism’ is often taken to be
something extraneous (to Darwin’s theory), an ugly concretion
added to the pure Darwinian corpus after the event, tarnishing
Darwin’s image. But his notebooks make plain that competition,
free trade, imperialism, racial extermination, and sexual inequality
were written into the equation from the start -‘Darwinism’
was always intended to explain society.” (8)
Thus Darwin suggested as perfectly consistent with his theory the
odious “final solution” to the race problem, a solution as
simple and barbaric as anything uttered by Goebbels or Hitler during
the period of Nazi domination, written in Darwin’s Descent
before either of them were born.
The Britannica said of Darwin: "He had no historical or political
sense whatever, as may be seen in what he wrote to the Austrian
explorer Karl von Scherzer (December 26, 1869): 'What a foolish idea
seems to prevail in Germany on the connection between Socialism and
Evolution through Natural Selection."(9)
In other words, it was foolish on Darwin's part not to see the obvious
connection between belief in natural selection and Socialism, the
mixture that produced the bitter fruit of National Socialism later on
in the next century with the frightening concept of a "master race"
and "inferior races" and the idea of eliminating those "unfit to
breed"; applying the horrific scientific implications of Darwinian
natural selection to human populations.
Jewish scholar Edward Simon wrote: “I don’t claim that
Darwin and his theory of evolution brought on the holocaust; but I
cannot deny that the theory of evolution, and the atheism it
engendered, led to the moral climate that made a holocaust
possible.”(10)
According to Alan Bullock, the basis of Hitler’s beliefs was
Social Darwinism.(11)
Echoing Darwin’s law of a struggle for survival and “let
the strongest live and the weakest die”, Hitler wrote:
"“Man has become great through struggle . . .Whatever goal man
has reached is due to his originality plus his brutality . . .All life
is bound up in three thesis: struggle is the father of all things,
virtue lies in the blood, leadership is primary and
decisive.”(12)
Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf his theory of struggle, nearly identical to
Darwin’s ideas on the struggle for existence and survival of the
fittest: “He who wants to live must fight, and he who does not
want to fight in this world where eternal struggle is the law of life
has no right to exist.”(13)
Is it any wonder that Hitler, the philosophic step-child of Charles
Darwin, persecuted Christians in Germany under the Third Reich. He
jailed hundreds of Protestant ministers and shut down many Catholic
monasteries in Germany. Is it surprising then in light of
Hitler’s evolutionary beliefs that he could say “The
heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of
Christianity.”? (Hitler’s Secret Conversations, July 11,
1941.) And in calling Christianity “the invention of the
Jew” we find out at least one reason for his horrible gassing
and burning six million of the fellow countrymen of the Lord. (Ibid,
pp. 131)
There is generally a history to the growth of an idea. The philosophy
of the superiority of the Aryan race did not spring up overnight when
Adolph Hitler seized control of the government in Germany in 1932,
although most historians when writing about this period of history
have grossly oversimplified the reasons behind his rise to power and
of the Nazi movement in general, making it appear as though he was
just one isolated, foaming at the mouth racist madman with a group of
like-minded thugs who assumed the reigns of power in Germany because
he promised the people jobs and a return to tradition, and since the
German economy was in a terrible depression the people voted him in.
This is often portrayed as merely an issue of German nationalism,
which to a certain degree it was, yet seldom mentioned is the fact
that the inhuman policies of exterminating "inferior races," Jews and
other non-Aryan peoples, was not just some private idea of Hitler's
own concoction, nor did it originate from the band of socialists who
supported him. That terrible experiment conducted on innocent human
beings by Germany during the Third Reich to "improve the breeding
stock" of humanity did not spring up out of an intellectual void. The
idea of the superiority of the Aryan race had been around for quite a
few years before Hitler's rise to power in Germany. Josiah Strong,
Herbert Spencer, and the notorious Earnst Haeckel all enthusiastically
promoted this concept and claimed that the idea was intrinsically tied
in with Darwin's ideas of natural selection. The German people, indeed
the intellectual elite the world over had been actively lapping up
these ideas ever since the publication of the Origin of Species and
later of his Descent of Man.
Now we have traced these ideas back to Darwin himself, we have seen
what Darwin had to say on this issue in his second major work. Darwin
held that some races were more "evolved" than others, which led to the
idea of a "master race" and "inferior races", along with the prospect
of "improving" our breeding stock through elimination of those unfit
to breed.
The connection between Darwin and Hitler and Stalin runs like an iron
thread through this dark period in history, and Darwin's conclusions
regarding this issue must be taken at their full weight of seriousness
in evaluating the man and his work, for since we have now seen that he
did come to the conclusion that the extinction of certain races of
mankind would be beneficial in the evolutionary scheme of things, and
put this odious concept into his major writings, then we should have a
new referendum on this man, it would be time for a reassessment of the
applicability of the theories of Charles Darwin to human species, lest
we wander down that same slippery slope again
But what was the precise chain of intellectual events that led from
Darwin to the Holocaust?
Who were the men involved in this transmission of genocidal ideas that
fueled Adolf Hitler's idea of a master race? And who was the man
related to Darwin and whom Darwin made frequent reference to in his
Descent of Man who developed the ghoulish pseudo-science of eugenics,
which the Nazis used to sterilize hundreds of thousands of people
during the Third Reich?
We will attempt to answer some of these questions in the next issue of
The Darwin Papers.
1. Taken from a quotation by Edward Simon, (Another Side to the
Evolution Problem, Jewish Press, Jan. 7,1983, pp.248), also from Henry
Morris's excellent book, History of Modern Creationism, Master Book
Publishers, 1984, pp. 49.
2. Art Caplan, “What's Morally Wrong With Eugenics”,
University of Pennsylvania,
Bioethics.net, The Moral Implications of Science, Medicine and
Research, 7/10/2000,
Http:health/upenn.edu/~bioethics/library/papers/art/EugenicsNotreDame.html
3. Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought,
1860-1915, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944),
pp.31.
4. Barzun Darwin, Marx, and Wagner, Little, Brown and Company, 1941,
pp.17-18.
5. Jonathan Miller, Darwin For Beginners, Pantheon Books, Random
House, New York, 1982, pp.83.
6. Barzun, pp.100.
7. Ralph Ross, John Berryman, and Allen Tate, The Art of Reading, pp.
128, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, New York, 1966.
(8)Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin, Warner Books, 1991.
(9)Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol.16, pp.1029, Darwin, (1986)
(10)Taken from a quotation by Edward Simon, (Another Side to the
Evolution Problem, Jewish Press, Jan. 7,1983, pp.248), from Henry
Morris’s excellent book, History of Modern Creationism, Master
Book Publishers, 1984, pp. 49.
(11)Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin, Alfred A. Knopf, 1992, p. 11
(12)Speech at Chemnitz, April 2, 1938
(13)Mein Kampf, Murphy trans. P. 242
http://www.thedarwinpapers.com/oldsite/number12/Darwinpapers12HTML.htm
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| User: "* US *" |
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| Title: Re: DARWIN AT NUREMBERG |
13 Jun 2005 02:30:52 PM |
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On Mon, 13 Jun 2005 13:05:38 -0500, "Glenn \(Christ-Hating Fascist\)"
<christianmystic@ev1.net> wrote:
Well done !
That's how the bushworshipper likes his meal of
dead Iraqi babies' flesh.
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| User: "Mark" |
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| Title: Re: DARWIN AT NUREMBERG |
13 Jun 2005 01:16:48 PM |
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X-No-Archive: Yes
How is it that when I hear people talking of original sin I think of
self-flagellation, sackcloth/ashes, monks tying ropes around their private
parts. Ouch!
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| User: "William" |
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| Title: Re: DARWIN AT NUREMBERG |
05 Jun 2005 04:20:40 AM |
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On Thu, 2 Jun 2005 16:55:16 -0500, "Glenn \(Christian Mystic\)"
<christianmystic@ev1.net> wrote:
Sad really, even they know that much of scripture is metaphoric, symbolic,
parabolic, and etc. Many Christians, like myself, see no loss of faith in
admitting that just maybe more of the Bible, like the creation stories
(there are two three, depending on how you read the first two chapters of
the Bible), might just be meant to be taken in a way other than literal,
than what they had been taught.
I have no problem accepting the evidence of evolution as valid, as it does
nothing in dampening my faith.
But I do think you are correct about Creationalists, they are trying to hang
on as if their entire faith depends on science being wrong !
The problem is that the creationists see the full implications of
regarding the creation account and other Genesis stories as not being
literally true. It goes further than just Genesis. The Gospel writers
and Paul take Adam to be the first man and a real historical figure.
Jesus took the flood story to be literally true.
William
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| User: "Glenn \Christian Mystic" |
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| Title: Re: DARWIN AT NUREMBERG |
08 Jun 2005 08:06:45 AM |
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"William" <tielige@mail.clara.fl.com> wrote in message
news:iug5a1h9sfve87nj5vminjvgcn4g8dbcrl@4ax.com...
On Thu, 2 Jun 2005 16:55:16 -0500, "Glenn \(Christian Mystic\)"
<christianmystic@ev1.net> wrote:
Sad really, even they know that much of scripture is metaphoric, symbolic,
parabolic, and etc. Many Christians, like myself, see no loss of faith in
admitting that just maybe more of the Bible, like the creation stories
(there are two three, depending on how you read the first two chapters of
the Bible), might just be meant to be taken in a way other than literal,
than what they had been taught.
I have no problem accepting the evidence of evolution as valid, as it does
nothing in dampening my faith.
But I do think you are correct about Creationalists, they are trying to
hang
on as if their entire faith depends on science being wrong !
The problem is that the creationists see the full implications of
regarding the creation account and other Genesis stories as not being
literally true. It goes further than just Genesis. The Gospel writers
and Paul take Adam to be the first man and a real historical figure.
Jesus took the flood story to be literally true.
That or they continued using it as a parabolic tool. As for Jesus taking the
flood story to be literally true, I doubt it, see Matt.13:34 & Mark 4:34 (as
Christ was the Word of God, such is like saying, the Word of God does not
say anything except in parables)
William
Glenn (Christian Mystic)
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| User: "George Peatty" |
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| Title: Re: DARWIN AT NUREMBERG |
05 Jun 2005 11:07:01 AM |
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On Sun, 05 Jun 2005 10:20:40 +0100, William <tielige@mail.clara.fl.com>
wrote:
The problem is that the creationists see the full implications of
regarding the creation account and other Genesis stories as not being
literally true. It goes further than just Genesis. The Gospel writers
and Paul take Adam to be the first man and a real historical figure.
Jesus took the flood story to be literally true.
There are over 300 explicit references to creation in the Bible; another 200
(and probably a lot more) where God is declared to be the owner/operator of
the universe. Every writer of the New Testament makes reference to it,
though not in every book. A reference to the creation appears in every
section of the Old Testament. There are more references to creation in the
Psalms than there are in Genesis (by verse).
First things are important, and besides the obvious of being the first act
of God in the universe, creation is the first element of our faith (Heb 11:
2), the first basis of praise to the Almighty (Rev 4:7) and the first
statement of the Bible (Gen 1:1).
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| User: "Glenn \Christian Mystic" |
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| Title: Re: DARWIN AT NUREMBERG |
08 Jun 2005 08:14:03 AM |
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"George Peatty" <pttyg47-1230@copper.net> wrote in message
news:se86a11c99f4s1odgdhiasbijjndge2lem@4ax.com...
On Sun, 05 Jun 2005 10:20:40 +0100, William <tielige@mail.clara.fl.com>
wrote:
The problem is that the creationists see the full implications of
regarding the creation account and other Genesis stories as not being
literally true. It goes further than just Genesis. The Gospel writers
and Paul take Adam to be the first man and a real historical figure.
Jesus took the flood story to be literally true.
There are over 300 explicit references to creation in the Bible; another
200
(and probably a lot more) where God is declared to be the owner/operator
of
the universe. Every writer of the New Testament makes reference to it,
though not in every book. A reference to the creation appears in every
section of the Old Testament. There are more references to creation in
the
Psalms than there are in Genesis (by verse).
First things are important, and besides the obvious of being the first act
of God in the universe, creation is the first element of our faith (Heb
11:
2), the first basis of praise to the Almighty (Rev 4:7) and the first
statement of the Bible (Gen 1:1).
Accepting evolution as how God had literally created does not deny the fact
that God created it all.
There is a dif between rejecting something OR not taking it literally, I
have not rejected the idea that God created, I just don't take the creation
stories literally
If I did, I would have to reject the entire Bible, Literalism drove me into
atheism for some six years, until the Holy Spirit impressed on me that there
was *another way* to understand the scriptures, and I came back to theism as
a Christian Mystic
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: DARWIN AT NUREMBERG |
19 Dec 2004 05:33:32 PM |
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EKurtz99 wrote:
<farchy@u.washington.edu> wrote, to Pastor Dave:
Anyone can look up the thread and see that I started out quite
polite,
trying to correct your gross mistakes.
This is true. You showed almost saintly forebearance, I thought.
I eventually snapped; I shouldn't have.
You've been consistently
insulting and slanderous from the start. Yes, I eventually got
frustrated with your lies and your unwillingness to listen.
snip
I would absolutely *love* it if some creationist spoke up to
present
the theory of creation. The tired, old, long-since refuted whines
that
creationists have been repeating to themselves for the past century
of
course don't count as a theory of creation. I don't *care* what
you
think of evolution; I'm interested in the alternative explanation
creationists claim to have. So far, no one has presented one.
Nor will they, since it is not their intent. Your mistake here is not
a
failure of argument, but of misinterpretation of your adversary's
motive.
Pastor Dave is not trying to find the truth about origins; he is
trying to
defend his faith against the doubts that arise from ToE. Once you
recognize
this, then his behavior and that of almost all Creationists becomes
understandable. They are not here to argue, since the process of
reason
cannot be controlled, and may lead where they do not want to go; they
are
here to destroy ToE, or to pretend to themselves that they have
destroyed
it.. They are here to quieten the inner voice that says "all you
believe is
nonsense".
Oh I'm aware of that. My continuing effort is Quixotic, I know, but
Usenet is a better hobby than crack (more addicting, but slightly more
socially acceptable). Creationists don't care about evolution, as
such. If they did, they would actually study the theory and the
evidence at least enough to try to make reasonable arguments. If they
really wanted to overturn the work, they would know that repeating the
same long-debunked claims was not going to do it. No, theirs is a
crusade to gain political hegemony, only. They only use evolution as a
"wedge issue" because fewer people laugh at them than when they
complain about physics. They want to build a Christian theocracy,
since they are generally people who have strong faith and no critical
thinking skills, and those attributes are rewarded in theocratic states
and not valued in science. They want to have the respect that Western
society has increasingly granted to science on the basis of its
achievements, but they don't want to do the work required to earn that
respect.
Of course in addition to flawed science and faulty logic, they also
have serious theological problems. They claim that God created the
world, so in theological reasoning, the investigation of the world
*should be* considered one of the most important ways to understand the
will of God (as it was for the "natural philosophers" of the 16th-19th
centuries). But they have elevated the book of Genesis, or rather,
their own personal interpretations of that book, to the status of
idols. As a friend of mine once said, "they don't worship God, they
worship a book about God." That's one of the reasons why the
mainstream churches all consider creationism a fringe cult. But like
all cultists, they are convinced that they, and they alone, posess "The
Truth" (tm) and any disagreement with them is heresy, by definition.
It would be almost pathetic, if they didn't currently have the ear of
many members of the US government.
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| User: "Pastor Dave" |
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| Title: Re: DARWIN AT NUREMBERG |
20 Dec 2004 08:29:35 AM |
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On Sun, 19 Dec 2004 13:21:16 -0500, while scaling the
Mt. Everest, "EKurtz99" <EKurtz99@TwilightZone.com>
pontificated:
Pastor Dave is not trying to find the truth about origins; he is trying
to defend his faith against the doubts that arise from ToE.
No doubts arise. I have studied the concept carefully
for years. It has nothing to offer.
These days even most creationists acknowledge that microevolution has
been upheld by tests in the laboratory (as in studies of cells, plants
and fruit flies) and in the field (as in Grant's studies of evolving beak
shapes among Galápagos finches). Natural selection and other mechanisms--
such as chromosomal changes, symbiosis and hybridization--can drive
profound changes in populations over time.
The historical nature of macroevolutionary study involves inference from
fossils and DNA rather than direct observation. Yet in the historical
sciences (which include astronomy, geology and archaeology, as well as
evolutionary biology), hypotheses can still be tested by checking whether
they accord with physical evidence and whether they lead to verifiable
predictions about future discoveries. For instance, evolution implies
that between the earliest-known ancestors of humans (roughly five million
years old) and the appearance of anatomically modern humans (about
100,000 years ago), one should find a succession of hominid creatures
with features progressively less apelike and more modern, which is indeed
what the fossil record shows. But one should not--and does not--find
modern human fossils embedded in strata from the Jurassic period (144
million years ago). Evolutionary biology routinely makes predictions far
more refined and precise than this, and researchers test them constantly.
Evolution could be disproved in other ways, too. If we could document the
spontaneous generation of just one complex life-form from inanimate
matter, then at least a few creatures seen in the fossil record might
have originated this way. If superintelligent aliens appeared and claimed
credit for creating life on earth (or even particular species), the
purely evolutionary explanation would be cast in doubt. But no one has
yet produced such evidence.
It should be noted that the idea of falsifiability as the defining
characteristic of science originated with philosopher Karl Popper in the
1930s. More recent elaborations on his thinking have expanded the
narrowest interpretation of his principle precisely because it would
eliminate too many branches of clearly scientific endeavor.
--
Pastor Dave Raymond
"I have more understanding than all my teachers:
for thy testimonies are my meditation." - Psalm 119:99
/
o{}xxxxx[]::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::>
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"And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of
the Spirit, which is the word of God:" - Ephesians 6:17
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| User: "Pastor Dave" |
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| Title: Re: DARWIN AT NUREMBERG |
19 Dec 2004 01:38:59 PM |
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On Sun, 19 Dec 2004 13:21:16 -0500, while scaling the
Mt. Everest, "EKurtz99" <EKurtz99@TwilightZone.com>
pontificated:
Pastor Dave is not trying to find the truth about origins; he is trying to
defend his faith against the doubts that arise from ToE.
No doubts arise. I have studied the concept carefully
for years. It has nothing to offer.
--
Pastor Dave Raymond
"I have more understanding than all my teachers:
for thy testimonies are my meditation." - Psalm 119:99
/
o{}xxxxx[]::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::>
\
"And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of
the Spirit, which is the word of God:" - Ephesians 6:17
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: DARWIN AT NUREMBERG |
19 Dec 2004 03:13:12 PM |
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Pastor Dave wrote:
On Sun, 19 Dec 2004 13:21:16 -0500, while scaling the
Mt. Everest, "EKurtz99" <EKurtz99@TwilightZone.com>
pontificated:
Pastor Dave is not trying to find the truth about origins; he is
trying to
defend his faith against the doubts that arise from ToE.
No doubts arise. I have studied the concept carefully
for years.
And yet you missed the bit about errors in DNA replication. Odd, that,
since it's a basic point. What particular books and/or journals did
you read? What classes did you take on the subject? Because either
your study was not particularly in-depth or your teachers were
incompetent.
I should add that reading creationist tracts *about* evolution is *not*
equivalent to studying evolution, any more than reading Islamic
fundamentalist critiques of the US is a valid alternative to studying
US history.
It has nothing to offer.
If you deliberately avoid learning, as you have done here, it is not
the fault of the theory or evidence that you remain unconvinced.
Evolution has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt. Your doubt
appears to be entirely unreasonable however, and is therefore immune to
any evidence. If I had a time machine and let you watch the process,
you would still deny it. Your denial of the evidence is based, not on
the evidence itself, but on your personal interpretation of Genesis.
You have elevated your own personal interpretation of Genesis to an
idol and demanded that this interpretation must not be questioned. You
don't want evolution to be true, so you distort the obvious evidence to
fit your preconceived notions. In the process, you lie about and
slander honest scientists. This is not appropriate behaviour for *any*
human being, and it certainly is against everything suposedly espoused
by the Christian faith. I advise you to talk to someone who knows
about and understands the tenets of Christianity, and ask them if
bearing false witness and worshiping idols is acceptable behaviour. I
suspect they will tell you it is not.
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| User: "Pastor Dave" |
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| Title: Re: DARWIN AT NUREMBERG |
20 Dec 2004 09:24:58 AM |
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On 19 Dec 2004 13:13:12 -0800, while scaling the Mt.
Everest, pontificated:
Pastor Dave wrote:
On Sun, 19 Dec 2004 13:21:16 -0500, while scaling the
Mt. Everest, "EKurtz99" <EKurtz99@TwilightZone.com>
pontificated:
Pastor Dave is not trying to find the truth about origins; he is
trying to
defend his faith against the doubts that arise from ToE.
No doubts arise. I have studied the concept carefully
for years.
And yet you missed the bit about errors in DNA replication.
Wow, replicating existing code means that man evolved
from a single celled organism? Gosh, golly, gee.
--
Pastor Dave Raymond
"I have more understanding than all my teachers:
for thy testimonies are my meditation." - Psalm 119:99
/
o{}xxxxx[]::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::>
\
"And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of
the Spirit, which is the word of God:" - Ephesians 6:17
.
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| User: "Pastor Dave" |
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| Title: Re: DARWIN AT NUREMBERG |
20 Dec 2004 09:26:41 AM |
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On 19 Dec 2004 13:13:12 -0800, while scaling the Mt.
Everest, pontificated:
It has nothing to offer.
If you deliberately avoid learning,
You mean, "If you don't want to believe as I do, then
you are intentionally avoiding learning".
I.e., If you don't believe it, then you're dumb.
I.e., If people don't agree with me, then I'll insult
them and claim that they aren't smart enough to get it
and that's why they don't believe it.
I.e., If don't agree, then try to ridicule them and
make them feel too intimidated to continue.
--
Pastor Dave Raymond
"I have more understanding than all my teachers:
for thy testimonies are my meditation." - Psalm 119:99
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"And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of
the Spirit, which is the word of God:" - Ephesians 6:17
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: DARWIN AT NUREMBERG |
20 Dec 2004 01:28:40 PM |
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Pastor Dave wrote:
On 19 Dec 2004 13:13:12 -0800, while scaling the Mt.
Everest, pontificated:
It has nothing to offer.
If you deliberately avoid learning,
You mean, "If you don't want to believe as I do, then
you are intentionally avoiding learning".
I.e., If you don't believe it, then you're dumb.
I.e., If people don't agree with me, then I'll insult
them and claim that they aren't smart enough to get it
and that's why they don't believe it.
I.e., If don't agree, then try to ridicule them and
make them feel too intimidated to continue.
I urge you, and anyone else reading, to look up thread and try to
determine to whom those descriptions best apply.
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: DARWIN AT NUREMBERG |
19 Dec 2004 05:34:28 PM |
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Pastor Dave wrote:
On Sun, 19 Dec 2004 13:21:16 -0500, while scaling the
Mt. Everest, "EKurtz99" <EKurtz99@TwilightZone.com>
pontificated:
Pastor Dave is not trying to find the truth about origins; he is
trying to
defend his faith against the doubts that arise from ToE.
No doubts arise. I have studied the concept carefully
for years. It has nothing to offer.
How long you have studied is less important than how much you did or
did not learn. Have you earned any credentials from your study? Any
degrees, or college credits from an accredited university or college?
Any grades from classes taken at an accredited educational institution?
Can you give an example of a piece of evidence used by evolutionary
scientists as support for the theory, and discuss the characteristics
that evidence would be expected to have if evolution were true? Can
you give specific examples of characteristics that piece of evidence
should have but doesn't, or should not have, but does?
There are many people who can truthfully answer "Yes" to all of the
above questions, and who do not share your assessment of what the
material has to offer. And many of them believe the universe to have
been created by God. They just don't think that the imagination of
19th century fundamentalist theologians, and their extrabiblical
commentaries, mark the limits of how good a design the creator could
have come up with. Science would seem to indicate that the Creator's
design is, in fact, every bit as self-maintaining, self-optimizing, and
self-improving as Darwin's theories suggest. Why not praise God for
proving Himself so ingenious?
Mark Nutter
manutter51@alethian.org
http://www.alethian.org/ -- Information about Alethea, the God who
rewards open-minded study of the real world, and about Alethian faith
and practice.
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| User: "Pastor Dave" |
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| Title: Re: DARWIN AT NUREMBERG |
19 Dec 2004 01:38:18 PM |
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On 19 Dec 2004 09:48:50 -0800, while scaling the Mt.
Everest, pontificated:
Pastor Dave wrote:
On 18 Dec 2004 20:55:19 -0800, while scaling the Mt.
Everest, pontificated:
Pastor Dave wrote:
On 16 Dec 2004 21:57:22 -0800, while scaling the Mt.
Everest, pontificated:
Yes, that's all very uninteresting, but since you have already
admitted
that you can not tell the difference between a larder full of
food
and
a larder full of feces, why should anyone care about your
uninformed
opinions?
And that's the best they've got, when faced with the
fact that what they believe cannot be proved.
When faced with a slow student that can not or will not accept the
evidence presented by his own eyes, some teachers, myself among
them,
write that student off as a lost cause and concentrate on the
students
who have *not* explicitly stated that they refuse to learn anything
at
all. Perhaps I should be more patient, but when someone claims to
not
think there is any important difference between food and poo,
there's
really only so much I can hope to accomplish. I'll continue
offering
my knowledge to the students who are *not* chewing on the books, and
hope that your parents face the facts and put you on the short bus
next
quarter.
I.e., when you can't pull the wool over their eyes,
insult them, call them dumb, claim they're in denial
and whatever other insults you can think,
Anyone can look up the thread and see that I started out quite polite,
trying to correct your gross mistakes. You've been consistently
insulting and slanderous from the start. Yes, I eventually got
frustrated with your lies and your unwillingness to listen.
to try to
belittle them and make them feel to intimidated to
speak up.
I would absolutely *love* it if some creationist spoke up to present
the theory of creation. The tired, old, long-since refuted whines that
creationists have been repeating to themselves for the past century of
course don't count as a theory of creation. I don't *care* what you
think of evolution; I'm interested in the alternative explanation
creationists claim to have. So far, no one has presented one.
When they can't present the proof folks,
Who are you talking to? The only people debating you seem to be the
scientists and the teachers whose efforts you are slandering. Everyone
else got bored with your bloviating long ago. So who are these
mysterious "folks" you're addressing?
this is what
they resort to and the proof of this isn't in my claim,
but in the words quoted above.
There is no "proof" in your claims, nor is there anything else. You
have made blustering noises, but have presented absolutely nothing.
What have you got? What is *your* explanation for the diversity and
patterns of life? Evolution makes sense to me, if you've got something
better, present it. In other words, put up or shut up, your whining
isn't impressing anyone but yourself.
Thank you for proving my point.
--
Pastor Dave Raymond
"I have more understanding than all my teachers:
for thy testimonies are my meditation." - Psalm 119:99
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o{}xxxxx[]::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::>
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"And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of
the Spirit, which is the word of God:" - Ephesians 6:17
.
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: DARWIN AT NUREMBERG |
19 Dec 2004 04:04:10 PM |
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Was your point that there is no theory of creationism?
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| User: "Pastor Dave" |
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| Title: Re: DARWIN AT NUREMBERG |
20 Dec 2004 08:29:55 AM |
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On 19 Dec 2004 09:48:50 -0800, while scaling the Mt.
Everest, pontificated:
Pastor Dave wrote:
On 18 Dec 2004 20:55:19 -0800, while scaling the Mt.
Everest, pontificated:
Pastor Dave wrote:
On 16 Dec 2004 21:57:22 -0800, while scaling the Mt.
Everest, pontificated:
Yes, that's all very uninteresting, but since you have already
admitted
that you can not tell the difference between a larder full of
food
and
a larder full of feces, why should anyone care about your
uninformed
opinions?
And that's the best they've got, when faced with the
fact that what they believe cannot be proved.
When faced with a slow student that can not or will not accept the
evidence presented by his own eyes, some teachers, myself among
them,
write that student off as a lost cause and concentrate on the
students
who have *not* explicitly stated that they refuse to learn anything
at
all. Perhaps I should be more patient, but when someone claims to
not
think there is any important difference between food and poo,
there's
really only so much I can hope to accomplish. I'll continue
offering
my knowledge to the students who are *not* chewing on the books, and
hope that your parents face the facts and put you on the short bus
next
quarter.
I.e., when you can't pull the wool over their eyes,
insult them, call them dumb, claim they're in denial
and whatever other insults you can think,
Anyone can look up the thread and see that I started out quite polite,
trying to correct your gross mistakes. You've been consistently
insulting and slanderous from the start. Yes, I eventually got
frustrated with your lies and your unwillingness to listen.
to try to
belittle them and make them feel to intimidated to
speak up.
I would absolutely *love* it if some creationist spoke up to present
the theory of creation. The tired, old, long-since refuted whines that
creationists have been repeating to themselves for the past century of
course don't count as a theory of creation. I don't *care* what you
think of evolution; I'm interested in the alternative explanation
creationists claim to have. So far, no one has presented one.
When they can't present the proof folks,
Who are you talking to? The only people debating you seem to be the
scientists and the teachers whose efforts you are slandering. Everyone
else got bored with your bloviating long ago. So who are these
mysterious "folks" you're addressing?
this is what
they resort to and the proof of this isn't in my claim,
but in the words quoted above.
There is no "proof" in your claims, nor is there anything else. You
have made blustering noises, but have presented absolutely nothing.
What have you got? What is *your* explanation for the diversity and
patterns of life? Evolution makes sense to me, if you've got something
better, present it. In other words, put up or shut up, your whining
isn't impressing anyone but yourself.
These days even most creationists acknowledge that microevolution has
been upheld by tests in the laboratory (as in studies of cells, plants
and fruit flies) and in the field (as in Grant's studies of evolving beak
shapes among Galápagos finches). Natural selection and other mechanisms--
such as chromosomal changes, symbiosis and hybridization--can drive
profound changes in populations over time.
The historical nature of macroevolutionary study involves inference from
fossils and DNA rather than direct observation. Yet in the historical
sciences (which include astronomy, geology and archaeology, as well as
evolutionary biology), hypotheses can still be tested by checking whether
they accord with physical evidence and whether they lead to verifiable
predictions about future discoveries. For instance, evolution implies
that between the earliest-known ancestors of humans (roughly five million
years old) and the appearance of anatomically modern humans (about
100,000 years ago), one should find a succession of hominid creatures
with features progressively less apelike and more modern, which is indeed
what the fossil record shows. But one should not--and does not--find
modern human fossils embedded in strata from the Jurassic period (144
million years ago). Evolutionary biology routinely makes predictions far
more refined and precise than this, and researchers test them constantly.
Evolution could be disproved in other ways, too. If we could document the
spontaneous generation of just one complex life-form from inanimate
matter, then at least a few creatures seen in the fossil record might
have originated this way. If superintelligent aliens appeared and claimed
credit for creating life on earth (or even particular species), the
purely evolutionary explanation would be cast in doubt. But no one has
yet produced such evidence.
It should be noted that the idea of falsifiability as the defining
characteristic of science originated with philosopher Karl Popper in the
1930s. More recent elaborations on his thinking have expanded the
narrowest interpretation of his principle precisely because it would
eliminate too many branches of clearly scientific endeavor.
--
Pastor Dave Raymond
"I have more understanding than all my teachers:
for thy testimonies are my meditation." - Psalm 119:99
/
o{}xxxxx[]::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::>
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"And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of
the Spirit, which is the word of God:" - Ephesians 6:17
.
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| User: "Elroy Willis" |
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| Title: Re: DARWIN AT NUREMBERG |
20 Dec 2004 08:41:39 AM |
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Pastor Dave wrote in alt.atheism
If we could document the spontaneous generation of just one
complex life-form from inanimate matter, then at least a few creatures
seen in the fossil record might have originated this way.
How complex?
--
Elroy Willis
www.elroysemporium.com
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| User: "Pastor Dave" |
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| Title: Re: DARWIN AT NUREMBERG |
17 Dec 2004 11:58:43 AM |
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On 16 Dec 2004 21:57:22 -0800, while scaling the Mt.
Everest, pontificated:
Yes, that's all very uninteresting, but since you have already admitted
that you can not tell the difference between a larder full of food and
a larder full of feces, why should anyone care about your uninformed
opinions?
And that's the best they've got, when faced with the
fact that what they believe cannot be proved.
When presenting their arguments to any except the converted, these people
are too canny to advocate anything that too strongly resembles the
Biblical account of Genesis as their "theory." Instead, their beliefs
masquerade under such aliases "Scientific Creationism", "Creation
Science" or "Intelligent Design Theory". Any time someone claims to have
a theory that will overturn what the "establishment" is teaching in the
schools, you have reasonable cause to be skeptical. The use of any of the
terms quoted above should be considered a red flag.
Since "Creation Science" is not science, Creationists cannot use
scientific arguments to support their cases. By "scientific argument", I
mean an argument in favor of creationism based on the evidence.
Scientific theories win acceptance because the bulk of the evidence
provides support for them, and because no evidence proves the theories to
be false. Creationist ideas are backed up by isolated bits of data which
were usually refuted not too long after they were published. By citing an
article published in some scientific journal, the Creationist hopes to
convince the public that there may be something of substance to his
claims.
The majority of Creationist arguments are intended to discredit evolution
in various ways. Since they can't make a case for creationism, they
attempt to dismantle the case for evolution. This fallacious argument
assumes that there are only two possible explanations of creation and
evolution.
Here is a sampling of the techniques used in Creationist arguments. You
will often see a large number of these techniques used in one
presentation. A really gifted Creationist can often combine two or three
of these techniques in a single paragraph.
1) INTERPRET ANY UNCERTAINTY ANYWHERE IN SCIENCE AS IMPLYING TOTAL
UNCERTAINTY EVERYWHERE IN SCIENCE.
Science is by nature tentative. Anything on the cutting edge is going to
have considerable uncertainty attached to it. Anything science is certain
about now will be found to have had considerable uncertainty attached to
it at some point in history. As soon as any evidence of any uncertainty
is found, present it and claim that scientists therefore don't know what
they are talking about.
2) TRUMPET ANY MISTAKES MADE BY ANY SCIENTIST, AND IGNORE THE FACT THAT
THESE MISTAKES ARE CORRECTED.
Most people in your audience will not be well versed in the history of
science. You can flood an audience with accounts of mistakes in science,
and accounts of things scientists thought that are now known not to be
true. With enough such accounts, you can build a superficially compelling
picture of "Science Always Getting It Wrong". Even experts in the history
of science will not be able to directly address all the examples you
bring up. Anything left unaddressed can be waved in front of the audience
as "not refuted". You can then use the fact that something has been left
unrefuted to claim that everything has been left unrefuted.
3) SHIFT THE BURDEN OF PROOF TO YOUR CRITICS ANY WAY YOU CAN.
Remember, your position is indefensible. The only way you can present
anything like a compelling argument is to make your opponents look
ignorant. Force them to prove everything they say. If they refuse to
accept the burden of proof, force them to prove they don't have to prove
what they say.
4) ANY FACTS OR EXPLANATIONS NOT IMMEDIATELY AT HAND MAY BE REGARDED AS
NONEXISTENT.
If a critic makes a statement about science and doesn't present all the
evidence to prove it from the fundamental level on up, you can seize upon
any missing step and declare the entire statement as "unproven" or "a
wild guess". If a critic manages to refute any of your statements, ignore
the refutation. As soon as the refutation is no longer being actively
presented, re-assert your claim. After all, the refutation's not right
out there any more.
5) BURY YOUR OPPONENT IN QUOTES.
Nobody is an expert in everything. The more quotes you pull up, the
greater the chance that your opponents will not have the knowledge or
data to refute at least one of them. You can then emphasize the quotes
not dealt with and announce that "science has no response to them". (Note
that this will not work unless you have managed to shed the burden of
proof, as advised in step 2.)
6) USE "CAFETERIA SCIENCE"
If you look around diligently enough, some scientist somewhere will say
something that will bolster your case. Even at the rate of one oddball
case in a million, you can accumulate literally thousands of quotes if
you mine a long enough time period. In true cafeteria style, you can
seize upon these quotes and ignore the science that refutes these quotes.
7) FIND AN INSTANCE OF A SCIENTIST BEHAVING BADLY, AND USE IT TO MAKE THE
CLAIM THAT ALL SCIENTISTS WILL DO THE SAME.
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