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Feedback archive → Feedback 2004
Anti-creationist slanders are back-to-front:
the evolutionary basis for racism, eugenics and Nazism
15 October 2004
people like you are dangerous. the lies you spread are dangerous. they are leading
right back into the Dark Ages, complete with slavery and the persecution of seekers
of knowledge. creationism is a poor excuse to start spreading racist lies such as:
there must be a reason for god to have created different races and hence each race
is of “different value”. living in germany and being well aware of european
history and knowing that the u.s. (a great nation, based on the ideas of enlightment)
exist only because certain individuals have dared to explore and topple quaint thinking
i am particularly shocked to see a lot of people in America following this folly.
but i guess with a chimp for a president who also believes in creationism, the decline
of american ideas and values is no wonder…
Christian Kindt
Germany
people like you are dangerous. the lies you spread are dangerous. they are leading
right back into the Dark Ages,
Actually, it was the church that led us out of the ‘dark ages’.
Christian organizations were the centers of learning, preserving and copying ancient
manuscripts. In fact, they even fostered a real industrial revolution, including
inventions of water and wind power, labour-saving heavy ploughs, and ingenious architectural
devices such as the flying buttress. This is well documented in Carroll and Shiflett,
Christianity on Trial: Arguments Against Anti-Religious Bigotry, ch. 3,
Encounter Books, 2001.
complete with slavery
Very interesting. Yet the church had always opposed slavery, but it simply
was ignored. It was no accident that the leaders of the abolitionist movement were
evangelicals like William Wilberforce (1759–1833). He tirelessly fought for
50 years against slavery in Britain, basing his opposition on biblical morality.
Wilberforce realized that the Dominion Mandate of
Genesis 1:28 did not extend to fellow humans. He also understood
that
1 Tim. 1:10 lists ‘slave traders’ (ανδραποδιστής
andrapodistēs) with murderers, adulterers, perverts, liars and other
evil people. Paul also encouraged Philemon to free his escaped slave Onesimus (Philemon
16), and ordered masters to treat their slaves in the ‘same way’
as they were treated, and not to threaten them (Eph.
6:9). Such practice would see the end of slavery.
Wilberforce in turn had been influenced by the preaching of John Newton (1725–1807),
who wrote the famous hymn Amazing Grace. Newton had been a slave trader
himself before his conversion to Christ. After conversion he first insisted that
slaves were treated humanely, then came to see that since the slaves were also created
in the image of God, the slave trade was wrong regardless. He left the trade, became
friends with the great evangelists George Whitfield and the Wesleys, became a minister,
and testified to King George III about the atrocities of the slave trade.
Conversely, the pro-slavery forces came out with such gems as, ‘Humanity is
a private feeling, not a public principle to act upon’ (Earl of Abingdon)
and ‘Things have come to a pretty pass when religion is allowed to invade
public life’ (Lord Melbourne). It is also notable that pagan philosophers
such as Aristotle regarded some people as ‘natural slaves’, and ‘Enlightenment’
philosophers hostile to Christianity such as Hume and Voltaire believed in inferiority
of dark-skinned people.
But society hasn’t learnt from this folly—when pro-lifers speak out
for the millions of unborn babies butchered in their mothers’ wombs every
year, much the same fallacious arguments are raised about ‘religion invading
public life’ (never mind the humanist religion
that has already invaded it!). Instead, abortion, like owning a slave, is portrayed
as a ‘choice’ that must be protected, and the fact that another human
being is involved is conveniently ignored. For more information, see
Q&A: Human Life—Abortion and Euthanasia.
and the persecution of seekers of knowledge.
Once again, it was the Christian worldview that led to the start of modern science,
while it was ‘stillborn’ in other cultures. Many historians, representing
a wide range of religious convictions ranging from Christianity to atheism, point
out that the historical basis of modern science depended on the assumption that
the universe was made by a rational Creator. An orderly universe makes perfect sense
only if it were made by an orderly Creator (cf.
1 Corinthians 14:33).
But if atheism or polytheism is true, then there is no way to deduce from these
belief systems that the universe is (or should be) orderly. Genesis 1:28 gives us
permission to investigate creation, unlike say animism or pantheism which teach
that the creation itself is divine. And since God is sovereign, He was free to create
as He pleased. So where the Bible is silent, the only way to find out how His creation
works is to experiment, rather than to rely on man-made philosophies, as the ancient
Greeks did. Greek philosophy actually impeded the development of science until it
was jettisoned with the reestablishment of the Bible’s authority in the 1500s
(with the Reformation). NB, the mistake of the church with Galileo was to erroneously
tie the Bible to the geocentric cosmology of Ptolemy, ardently defended by the Aristotelian
scientific establishment—see Q&A: Galileo.
The founders of major fields of modern science were Christians (by conviction, not
nominally), for example, Newton, Pascal, Faraday, Pasteur and Kelvin. See
Q&A: Creation scientists.
creationism is a poor excuse to start spreading racist lies such as: there must
be a reason for god to have created different races and hence each race is of “different
value”.
Here you are so back to front it would be hilarious if it were not so serious. You
cannot have looked at anything we have said about ‘races’.
Rather, we believe that God created only one race—the human race
from ‘one man’ or ‘one blood’ (Acts
17:26). After Babel, the separation of different clans according to language
allowed different physical (so-called racial) characteristics to be fixed in the
population. But the Bible says nothing about superiority based on skin color, which
makes as much sense as superiority based on eye color, or height, or the length
of a person’s fingers! There is no excuse for your slanders because we have
made this clear in Q&A: Racism.
It was the Darwinists who taught racial superiority and eugenics. This is well documented
in a recent book by
Richard Weikart, called From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary
Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, Palgrave
Macmillan, NY. Dr. Weikart is professor of modern European history at California
State University, Stanislaus, and lived in Germany over five years, including one
year on a Fulbright Fellowship, so is in a good position to know. He showed that
a long line of Darwinists in Germany had attacked the Judeo-Christian ethic of sanctity
of life and replaced it with moral relativism (so popular among liberals today),
except for the ‘absolute’ of the primacy of evolutionary fitness. And
these thinkers had long advocated applying Darwinian evolution to humanity, with
the horrifying results of eugenics (first proposed by Darwin’s cousin Francis
Galton), euthanasia, infanticide, abortion and racial extermination.
Certainly, even Hitler’s evolutionary contemporaries in Allied countries thought
he was applying evolution to Germany. E.g. Sir Arthur Keith, who wrote,
‘The German Führer, as I have consistently maintained, is an evolutionist;
he has consciously sought to make the practice of Germany conform to the theory
of evolution’ (Evolution and Ethics, Putnam, NY, USA, p. 230, 1947).
And the Nuremberg trials documented the fanatically anti-Christian nature of Nazism
(see The Holocaust and evolution) as well as the
Nazi plan to eliminate Christianity.
In the USA, there were also frightful eugenics movements in the first few decades
of the 20th century. This is documented by Edwin Black’s book, War Against
the Weak (2003). These even resulted in 60,000 Americans being coercively
sterilized. See The lies of Lynchburg and
Eugenics in Vermont.
Racist and eugenics policies were even being taught in textbooks. In 1925, the ACLU
defended Scopes’ right to teach from an evolutionary biology text, Hunter’s
Civic Biology. This taught that ‘the lowest savages’ were closer
to the highest ape than the ape was to the lowest monkey:
‘Although anatomically there is a greater difference between the lowest type
of monkey and the highest type of ape than there is between the highest type of
ape and the lowest savage, yet there is an immense mental gap between monkey and
man.’ (p.195)
And had this to say about ‘races’:
‘*The Races of Man.*—At the present time there exist upon the earth
five races or varieties of man, each very different from the others in instincts,
social customs, and, to an extent, in structure. These are the Ethiopian or negro
type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific;
the American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China,
Japan and the eskimos; and finally, the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented
by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America’ (p.195).
Hunter also advocated eugenics:
‘… if such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off
to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the
remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways of
preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate
race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting
with success in this country’ (pp. 263–5).
living in germany and being well aware of european history
Obviously not well enough. Hitler rose to power because people had largely abandoned
the authority of the Bible (so-called ‘higher criticism’ was invented
in Germany long before). Rather, they adopted ‘Enlightenment’ thinking
where ‘man is the measure of all things’. Man can then craft his own
destiny; the super-race. This then left the people open to gullibly believing Hitler’s
heaping of blame on scapegoats (Jews, Gypsies, etc.) for impeding the development
of the master-race.
and knowing that the u.s. (a great nation, based on the ideas of enlightment)
No, based on the notion that ‘all men are created equal’—not
‘evolved’ equal. The U.S. was not founded on enlightenment
philosophy. You must read the Declaration of Independence some time. You
might like to look at the bloody history of the French revolution and later the
Communist world to see the outworking of the very misnamed ‘Enlightenment’.
In fact, the Enlightenment-spawned Reign of Terror in France had the great founding
father of chemistry, Antoine Lavoisier, executed, saying, ‘The Republic has
no need for scientists.’
exist only because certain individuals have dared to explore and topple quaint thinking
Yes, such as those Christians who replaced ideas of man having dominion over other
men, and instead realized that they were under the Law of God who had created all
men equal and would hold us accountable for how we treated one another.
i am particularly shocked to see a lot of people in America following this folly.
but i guess with a chimp for a president who also believes in creationism, the decline
of american ideas and values is no wonder…
Rather, if President Bush believes in biblical creation, then there might be some
restoration of the same ideas after a long decline into destructive liberalism in
the media, educational institutions and activist courts. It is the decline of the
Christian influence in America that lies behind the decline of the good ideas and
values that gave birth to this great nation.
Christian Kindt
Germany
Jonathan Sarfati, Ph.D.
CMI–Australia
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