The Harmony of Darwinism and Hitler

Ben Stein has been receiving a lot of (predictable) criticism for his movie "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed."

Not only has he demonstrated that the evolution establishment is the quintessential "emperor with no clothes," Stein has dared to shed light on the logical implications of Darwinism.

Ideas have consequences. What we think tends to dictate what we do. And what we do produces results in harmony with those actions. And Expelled shows that the logical conclusions of Darwinism and the actions carried out by Adolf Hitler are in harmony.

The high priests of evolution have spun up their engines of apologetics with misdirected statements about this connection. Whether the misdirection is intentional propaganda, or simply the same feeble logic which guards the doctrines of evolution/naturalism/materialism, I'm not sure. But the end result is the same thing: a straw man.

They claim Stein's contention is that because of his harmony, evolution either doesn't exist (huh?), or that Stein is saying anyone who believes in evolution will do the kind of things Hitler did. Neither claim is made by the film.

I know there are some who attempt to harmonize evolution theory and the Bible and have thus come up with a form of "theistic evolution" where God created the world and used evolution as an engine of biological change. However, this relatively small group of evolutionists is irrelevant to most discussions of evolution because (a) the foundational doctrines of Christianity make it impossible to reconcile with evolution, and (b) the dominant thinking on evolution is not theistic in nature.

In examining the dominant, atheistic evolution/naturalism/materialism, the contention and conclusion is that there is no God and no intelligent designer. This means there is no transcendent, objective moral truth. This means there is no fixed, objective standard by which to judge right and wrong, and it also means there is no supernatural being to whom we are accountable--either in this life or an afterlife. Humans are simply highly evolved animals sharing a planet with less evolved animals.

Accepting these moral conclusions, which are only the logical extensions of the scientific doctrine of evolution/naturalism/materialism, human beings are free to establish their own code of morality. And if continuation of a species is the primary purpose of that species, and if weak genetic material in the gene pool undermines that continuation, it makes sense to rid the species of the weak, defective and inferior.

Darwin illustrates this out in his "The Descent of Man," published in 1871 after his 1859 "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life."

He points to animal husbandry as the logical model, and says human beings, in preserving the sick and weak among us, are acting in contradiction to the breeding wisdom displayed with livestock:

We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man itself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

Darwin does, in this passage, recognize that human "savages" do not act as "civilised men," but more in line with his evolutionary conclusions.

Despite this realization of the logical conclusions of his own theory, Darwin still couldn't bring himself to totally abandon this "sympathy" within our humanity, calling it "the noblest part of our nature." (He also seems to disregard the fact that hospitals, et. al. spring from a Christian worldview, so he owes the Christian worldview a debt for this "noblest part.")

Darwin also failed to acknowledge the disharmony between the implications of his theory, and this preservation of the weak. With no objective values as a standard, how can we determine that caring for the weak in our species is "noble?" In fact, it is illogical. Why preserve bad genetic material within our gene pool, when it puts survival of the species at risk? Why waste our resources on inferior individuals when those resources could be put to better use somewhere else? After all, we'd only be killing a weak animal, even if it is a highly evolved weak animal. It doesn't have an eternal soul, so when it's dead it won't know the difference. And with no God to be accountable to, what does it matter?

Hitler, Stalin and other disciples of Darwinism did not share Darwin's weakness of "sympathy," and instead carried his ideas forward to their logical conclusion.

Expelled looks at this logical "final solution" prescribed by Hitler, in visiting Dachau and Hadamar, where handicapped people and the Jews that Hitler considered "inferior" were exterminated.

We, with out traditional exposure to Christian values and a Christian worldview, look at what Hitler did as the height of evil. But Hitler was only carrying Darwin to it's logical conclusion. He believed he was doing a positive thing for the Aryan race. He thought he was making his people stronger, and making economic use of the country's resources.

Apostles of evolution are, understandably, upset at having this logical conclusion exposed without the rose-colored filter supplied by the "mainstream" media. They don't want the unsuspecting public to see this dark, sinister underbelly of evolution theory.

As much as the evolutionist hate Stein's exposure of this harmony between Darwinist thought and Hitlerian action, columnist Jack Cashill thinks Expelled "goes easy" on the link. Cashill also implicates Ernst Haeckel (he of the made-up drawings of embryos which supposedly showed a developmental link pointing to evolution) in this chain of thought between Darwin and Hitler.

In one of his few specific references to Haeckel, Hitler spoke of their shared opposition to Christianity. Both resented the faith because it competed with what Gasman calls "a holy conception of nature."

Haeckel had, in fact, inspired Hitler and Hitler's Germany with Darwin's cosmology, the story of the world as told by nature. For Haeckel and Hitler both, Gasman writes, "The great defect of modern Western society was that man was in constant violation of nature."

And as Cashill points out, Hitler wasn't the only one to apply Darwinian logic to practical solutions:

Other totalitarians have taken their cue from Darwin and his most influential fan, Karl Marx. Upon the publication of "On the Origin of Species," Marx wrote to collaborator, Friedrich Engels, "Although it is developed in the crude English style, this is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view."

All of this is completely independent to the question of whether evolution theory is true. It merely examines the moral and societal implications, if it is indeed true.

People are certainly free to believe what they want to with regard to the origins of the universe. But they should have the right to consider the question both unhindered by closed-minded propaganda, and undeluded about the implications of where those ideas might lead.

The 20th Century saw millions murdered at the behest of Darwinian conclusions. If we continue down the road of embracing this unproven and impossible theory, along with its logical companion of moral relativism, then we should be prepared for an even more hellish century in the 21st.