Faith & Science

[Editor’s Note: Historian Richard Weikart is featured prominently in the just-released DVD, “What Hath Darwin Wrought?” exploring the painful history of Social Darwinism in Germany and America from the twentieth century to the present. To purchase a copy or find out more information about this documentary, visit www.whathathdarwinwrought.com.]

Michael Ruse recently criticized my work in From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, which examines the way that evolutionary ethics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries undermined Judeo-Christian views of ethics, especially the sanctity-of-life ethic. Ruse opposes my claim that evolutionary ethics as proposed by Darwin and other evolutionists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries exerted a powerful influence on Hitler’s ideology.

Given his own views on the evolution of ethics, I’m wondering what Ruse has to offer us to counter Hitler’s own ethics. Ruse has written on several occasions that ethics is “illusory” and an “illusion” that is biologically innate, helping us survive and reproduce. Ethics and morality, then, are nothing but the products of evolution, having no objective basis. (This is also Darwin’s own view). So what moral fulcrum does Ruse (or Darwin) have for pronouncing Hitler’s policies evil or wrong? Hitler claimed he was acting in harmony with his own instincts, which taught him to love his racial comrades and hate and destroy those of other races. As I explain in detail in Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress, Hitler thought he was advancing human evolution by destroying “inferior” races, and for him promoting evolution was the highest good. Ruse, as far as I can tell, can only respond by appealing to his own “illusions” to counter Hitler’s “illusions.” It seems to me that this is hardly the kind of argument a good philosopher should be making.

Tonight is Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, a wrenching time when we look back on our moral failures of the past year and ask God to accept our repentance as Avinu Malkeinu, our Father and our King. In this space we’ve sometimes considered the theological implications of accepting a Darwinian picture of how human beings came to be. By the lights of so-called theistic evolution, God may have hoped for something like human beings to emerge from the otherwise blind, purposeless process of Darwinian evolution, but to see him as our creator or designer goes too far. What is the moral meaning of such an idea?

One of the phrases in the Yom Kippur liturgy asks of God, “The soul is yours, and the body is your handiwork; take pity on your labor.” In the commentary on that verse by Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, the question is posed, “The Creator has mercy on his creation. This is one of the greatest foundations for any appeal for mercy, for how can he possibly continue to be angry at his creation? Even if we are unworthy of forgiveness on our own, God bestows mercy upon us as our Creator.”

Is it really a small thing to imagine that God is our creator only in the very limited sense that theistic evolutionists imagine? I don’t think so. Our claim on God’s unmerited forgiveness depends in large part on his having intended us, designed us, fashioned us — individually and as a race. Speaking personally, I as a father can’t remain cross with my kids even when they’ve really acted abominably not only because I love them and because they’re my kids, but because I share some of the responsibility for their being in existence in the first place. They represent, somehow, the fruit of my labor. How can I possibly keep being upset at them?

[Editor’s Note: Historian Richard Weikart is featured prominently in the just-released DVD, “What Hath Darwin Wrought?” exploring the painful history of Social Darwinism in Germany and America from the twentieth century to the present. To purchase a copy or find out more information about this documentary, visit www.whathathdarwinwrought.com.]

Pointing out Darwin’s anti-slavery sentiments has been a favorite tactic for many years by those wanting to deny Darwin’s racism. However, Adrian Desmond and James Moore raised this discussion to an entirely new level by claiming in their 2009 book, Darwin’s Sacred Cause, that abolitionism was the driving force behind Darwin embracing biological evolution. This is especially remarkable because Desmond and Moore stated in their earlier biography of Darwin:

“Social Darwinism” is often taken to be something extraneous, 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 human society. (xxi)

This is not the place to rehearse all the reasons why abolitionism was not likely as important in shaping Darwin’s evolutionary views as Desmond and Moore claim. Many reviewers have already critiqued their thesis, and most historians of science seem unconvinced by it.

However, in all the brouhaha over Darwin’s Sacred Cause, I have heard very little discussion of what seems to me one of the most remarkable parts of the book.

[Editor’s Note: Historian Richard Weikart is featured prominently in the just-released DVD, “What Hath Darwin Wrought?” exploring the painful history of Social Darwinism in Germany and America from the twentieth century to the present. To purchase a copy or find out more information about this documentary, visit www.whathathdarwinwrought.com.]

One of the biggest errors in Ruse’s recent op-ed piece in Huffington Post is his claim about Darwin’s racism. While admitting that Darwin upheld conventional Victorian racial views, Ruse still tries to distance Darwin from any connection to racial extermination. When discussing Darwin’s Descent of Man Ruse claims, “Darwin was explicit that when the races met and (as so often was the case) the non-Europeans suffered, it came not from intellectual and social superiority but because non-Europeans caught the strangers’ diseases and suffered and died.” Yes, Darwin did claim that disease was an important cause of racial extermination when Europeans encountered other races. However, Ruse conveniently forgot that Darwin also mentioned (on the same page of Descent of Man) other causes of racial extinction: “war, slaughter, cannibalism, slavery, and absorption.”

A new documentary for cable television, What Hath Darwin Wrought?, offers an excellent, meaty introduction to the moral consequences of Darwinism. Discovery fellows David Berlinski, John West, and Richard Weikart, interviewed by TV personality Todd Friel, are all lucid and informative, sketching the relevant history from Darwin to Galton to modern “scientific” racism, to American and German eugenics, Hitler, and the rise of a revived eugenics in our own time.
Many of these themes have been discussed in this space before, but one new thought occurred to me — something I hadn’t quite grasped before watching this film. (It can, by the way, be purchased on DVD at the website, and will be showing on cable this fall.)

I’ve sometimes wondered about the appropriateness of applying the word “eugenics” to modern practices of selective reproduction or euthanasia. True, some sickos even in the shadow of Nazi horrors along the same lines have argued for the application of old fashioned eugenics for the supposed benefit of the human race. James Watson, Nobel Prize-winner, is one. But for the most part, things like “selective abortion,” “embryo selection,” and “designer babies” — sickly familiar today — are motivated not by any thoughts about human beings as a whole but simply by the convenience or pleasure of individual parents or other family members. Ninety percent of pregnant women in the U.S. who learn they are carrying a Down syndrome baby choose to abort. But that is not because there’s some kind of sinister government program seeking to erase such people from the globe to advance evolutionary goals.

[Editor’s Note: Historian Richard Weikart is featured prominently in the just-released DVD, “What Hath Darwin Wrought?” exploring the painful history of Social Darwinism in Germany and America from the twentieth century to the present. To purchase a copy or find out more information about this documentary, visit www.whathathdarwinwrought.com.]

Earlier this summer, philosopher Michael Ruse wrote an op-ed at Huffington Post, where he claimed that my scholarship is “bad history.” He questioned the historical connections between Darwinism and Nazism that I demonstrated in my book, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany. He starts by mischaracterizing my position, claiming that I argue for a “direct line” from Darwin to Hitler. If he had read my book carefully–or the response to critics at my website–he would have found the following statements:

“Nazism was not predetermined in Darwinism or eugenics, not even in racist forms of eugenics.” (from the Introduction)

“It would be foolish to blame Darwinism for the Holocaust, as though Darwinism leads logically to the Holocaust. No, Darwinism by itself did not produce Hitler’s worldview, and many Darwinists drew quite different conclusions from Darwinism for ethics and social thought than did Hitler.” (from the Conclusion)

In the debates sparked recently by the New Atheist writers, bashers and defenders of faith have been united at least on one point: Ideas have consequences. The consequences of a particularly controversial idea — Darwinian evolution, a pillar of atheism — will be the subject of a provocative new documentary on cable TV.

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It will be interesting to see how this plays out. From The Catholic Register: Friday, Sept. 10, Father Robert Spitzer, president of the Magis Center of Reason and Faith and author of New Proofs for the Existence of God: Contributions of Contemporary Physics and Philosophy, will defend God’s existence against physicist Stephen Hawking’s belief that God isn’t the creator of the universe on CNN’s “Larry King Live.” Father Spitzer already refuted Hawking’s claim on the Magis Center website. Fr. Spitzer isn’t the only one to respond to Dr. Hawking, but the debate at 9pm EDT will be worth watching.

John Derbyshire at National Review was AWOL for a while but I’m glad to see he’s back in action, abusing us in his accustomed style. He is one of those Darwinists like PZ Myers who’s always at least an enjoyable read notwithstanding that part of the enjoyment lies in the way the actual content tends to boil down to something little above the level of “Mommy, you’re stupid! You’re stupid, Mommy!” (This is our three-year-old Saul’s current best shot at a counterargument when crossed.) Thus it’s a relief to find that on his vacation from Darwin advocacy, John has learned nothing.

On James Lee, briefly famous gunman and hostage-taker at the Discovery Channel headquarters, Derbyshire chides those who took a glance at Lee’s Darwin-heavy manifesto and pointed out the obvious. Writes John, “It ought to be a well-established principle that you can’t deduce anything at all from a lone act of insanity, but when you have an axe to grind, the temptation can be irresistible.”

Who deduced anything? Not me. Observe, quote, correlate, yes. Deduce, no.
Yet John writes:

David Klinghoffer at the Discovery Institute, a creationist think-tank, chimed in with the observation that James Lee seems to have believed in the preposterous and utterly discredited theories of Charles Darwin, along with fellow Darwinists Charles Manson, Mao Tse-tung, Joseph Stalin, Josef Mengele, and of course Adolf Hitler. That doesn’t quite compute. Wouldn’t a Darwinist wish for his species to be successful, not go extinct? But no doubt the Discovery Institute people can discover a response to that.

Huh? I don’t know what a hypothetical Darwinist “would wish for,” I only know what these monsters drew from Darwin’s notion of inevitable ongoing warfare between superior and inferior races by which the species advances, which they translated into their own terms.

Assurances that we have nothing to fear from Darwinism are a familiar species of evolutionary apologetics. We’re told that Darwinian thinking doesn’t threaten morality, religion, or belief in life’s having an ultimate meaning. On the contrary, it enhances all things good and fair. Karl Giberson’s recent column in the Huffington Post, “How Darwin Sustains My Baptist Search for Truth,” deserves to be pinned under glass and put up on a wall as a near-perfect specimen of the genre.

Anyone who’s honest with himself knows this is all propaganda and wishful thinking, but it refreshes us nevertheless to hear Darwinists themselves confess — even trumpet — the truth.

Darwinian scholars and journalists have been writing with what must seem, to their brethren, an alarming frankness. One occasion for the flurry of articles is the recent sensational book Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha, who present the picture of our evolutionary human ancestors as enjoying polyamory as their standard reproductive practice. Group sex was the rule for them, so there’s no reason to expect marital fidelity from us, their heirs.

On the Scientific American website, psychologist Jesse Bering throws out the whole structure of sexual right and wrong with one blog post:

There are of course many important caveats, but the basic logic is that, because human beings are not naturally monogamous but rather have been explicitly designed by natural selection to seek out “extra-pair copulatory partners” — having sex with someone other than your partner or spouse for the replicating sake of one’s mindless genes — then suppressing these deep mammalian instincts is futile and, worse, is an inevitable death knell for an otherwise honest and healthy relationship.

Dr. Bering concedes with some feeling that in evolutionary psychological terms, empathy for the jilted sexual partner also plays a role. But in general:

Right is irrelevant. There is only what works and what doesn’t work, within context, in biologically adaptive terms.

In the current issue of Philosophy Now, Joel Marks declares himself a born-again amoralist. He used to be a moral atheist, but now, having divested himself of earlier illusions, he chirpily goes for what he calls “hard atheism” and, “In fact, I have given up morality altogether!” On the science backing up his position, he comments: