Affirming Evidence from Science
Darwinism is in decline. Oh yes, most in the professional sciences and even many lay people would not yet admit it. Belief in evolution has become a passport to admit people into the “camp” of respectability. To suggest that Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection may be flawed can cost you your job, and certainly raise eyebrows about your educational legitimacy. That is beginning to change. Why?
The First Reason for the Decline of Darwinism*
The Lehigh University biochemist, Michael Behe, (author of Darwin’s Black Box) realistically identifies the state of evolution today:
It may surprise people who get their information about the state of science from gee-whiz puff pieces in the mainstream media, but, although strong partisans still hold out, the eclipse of Darwinism in the scientific community is well-advanced. [Emphasis added.]
One reason for this change is the increasing scientific knowledge of the complexity of the living cell and biological systems. Dr. Behe expresses this well:
What scientists of earlier times took to be a primitive abacus has turned out to be a futuristic supercomputer. What biologists of Darwin’s day thought was a “simple little lump of albuminous combination of carbon” (the cell) – pretty much just a microscopic piece of Jell-O – has turned out to be a fully automated, nanoscale factory, sophisticated beyond human imagining.
In his new book, A Mousetrap for Darwin, Behe explains the cause of the devolution of Darwinism:
How could Darwin’s chunky mechanism – one tiny, random change at a time, each followed by a long, fitful, and uncertain period of natural selection, with no ability to anticipate future needs – account for the molecular marvels that modern biology had uncovered? Increasingly the answer became, it couldn’t. The more science advanced and the more elegance and complexity was uncovered, the more biologists drifted away from Darwinism.
For further confirmation that Dr. Behe is correct, visit the site DissentFromDarwin.org to see the names of over 1,200 mostly PhDs who question the efficacy of Darwinism.
A Second Reason for the Decline of Darwinism
In an article by Mark Looy, co-founder of the creationist ministry Answers in Genesis, he states: “In an effort to ‘cancel’ historical racists, culture has missed one of the most influential racists of all time.” He was talking about Charles Darwin, whose views became popularized as “survival of the fittest.” The subtitle of Darwin’s book, On the Origin of Species, when first published in 1859, was, “The preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.”
Adolf Hitler and his Nazi government had a non-Christian worldview. They believed that humans were animals with no special transcendent qualities (not created in the image of God). According to Looy, the Nazi position bluntly stated that
…religion is an organized lie [that] must be smashed… that Christianity makes no distinction of race or of color; it seeks to break down all racial barriers. In this respect the hand of Christianity is against that of Nature, for are not the races of mankind the evolutionary harvest which Nature has toiled through long ages to produce? May we not say, then, that Christianity is anti-evolutionary in its aim?
(Public domain)
The rest is history. Enter Social Darwinism (eugenics). The Nazis believed they were simply applying facts, proven by science, to produce a superior race of humans as part of their plan for a better world. Author Looy summarizes the consequence:
…a central policy of Hitler’s administration was the development and implementation of policies designed to protect the “superior race.” This required at the very least preventing the “inferior races” from mixing with those judged superior, in order to reduce contamination of the latter’s gene pool. The “superior race” belief…culminated in the “final solution,” the extermination of approximately six million Jews and four million other people who belonged to what German scientists judged as “inferior races.”
Entire books have been written on this subject and not all agree on the details. The famous late scientist of Harvard, Dr. Stephen J. Gould (a self-identified atheist), wrote, “Biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1859 [the date of Darwin’s Origin of the Species], but they increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory.”
On that point, most would agree.
The expunging of the Judeo-Christian doctrine of the divine origin of humans and replacing it with evolutionary Darwinism contributed to the acceptance of Social Darwinism, which in turn culminated in the tragedy of the holocaust and World War II. Ignoring this today can rightly be said to be a dereliction of duty by the “Cancel Culture.”
Source: “Should We Cancel Darwin?” Mark Looy. Answers Magazine, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Oct-Dec 2020): 35-37.
“Darwinism and the Nazi Race Holocaust” by Dr. Jerry Bergman. Journal of Creation. Vol. 13, No 2, (November 1999): 101-111.
* The material of “The First Reason” is taken from a book review in World Magazine 03.13.21, Vol. 36, No. 5, p. 26. The quotes are from Behe’s book.
