Guest Post by Morbo
Among TV preachers, D. James Kennedy stands out for his vociferous opposition to evolution. Kennedy’s Coral Ridge Ministries produces a torrent of anti-evolution books, pamphlets and DVDs. Kennedy is a rather dour Calvinist who really hates the theory of evolution.
I’ve seen some of the anti-evolution stuff Kennedy’s ministry puts out. It’s marked by the usual slipshod reasoning and bad science that is common among the Darwin bashers.
Now Kennedy has reached a new low: He is arguing that Darwin was responsible for the Holocaust.
A new Coral Ridge DVD, “Darwin’s Deadly Legacy,” aired on stations around the country last month. According to an article in The Washington Post, the so-called documentary and accompanying book “describe the Nazis’ embrace of eugenics and social Darwinism, their attempt to build a master race and to justify racism, slavery and even murder as survival of the fittest.”
John Aman, a Kennedy spokesman, told The Post:
“Darwinism is a philosophy, it’s a worldview, and one of the key things in it is that evolution advances by death, so death is a good thing. Hitler thought he was doing civilization a favor by eliminating lives that were not worth living. We of course think that is an egregious moral tragedy and a consequence of the worldview that was initiated by Darwin and popularized by his followers.”
Where to begin?
First of all, Social Darwinism was a late 19th century attempt by free-market business leaders to employ what they thought were Darwin’s views to justify the predatory capitalism of the period. It had nothing to do with real Darwinism. In fact, I’d venture that the business leaders who made the argument had no idea what Darwin really believed.
Secondly, evolution does not advance “by death.” Obviously, a successful species must reproduce and survive to pass along its genes. From an evolutionary perspective, death is not a good thing. If it were, the dinosaurs would still be riding high.
Finally, our current understanding of Darwinian evolution does not support Hitler’s ideas; it debunks them. Hitler believed some races were better than others. He despised Jews. He despised blacks. He believed in an innate superiority of certain white people living in certain nations.
Evolution tells us that “race,” in the sense Hitler and his followers used that term, is a myth. There is no “German race” because Germany is a political construct created by people in modern times to describe individuals who just happen to occupy a certain patch of land.
In fact, there is only one race: the human race. We’re all related because we share a common ancestry. We are free to hate one another on the basis of skin color, national origin or religion, but to do so makes no sense because we’re all brothers.
Many anthropologists these days argue for southern Africa as the cradle of humanity — a view that must make racists shudder. (Imagine all those klansmen in their white robes who, if they went back far enough, would discover that their ancestor was a small, brown Australopithecine.) Others contend for Asia. I am not aware of any who maintain that tall, blond Germans sprang magically from the soil of Europe endowed (by God?) with the right and power to lord it over others and systematically wipe out their perceived enemies by the mere proclaiming of themselves as a “master race.”
Hitler may have believed such nonsense. Charles Darwin certainly did not.