Einstein’s theory of relativity is not responsible for the evil use of nuclear weapons. After all, the theory of relativity is science, not social policy. But Einstein did not stop there. He wrote President Roosevelt in 1939 encouraging him to develop nuclear weapons. Einstein took responsibility for the consequences of that letter, calling it “the greatest mistake” of his life.

Darwin’s theory of evolution is not responsible for Hitler’s dystopia. It too is science and not social policy. But Darwin did not stop there. He wrote Descent of Man partly to encourage eugenic policies. It is reasonable to hold him responsible for the role these policies played in the eugenic atrocities of the early 20th century.

Some want to indemnify Darwin’s racial hygiene doctrine, contending there is no direct linkage between it and the acts of its adherents. Darwin himself would adamantly reject this diminution of the causal power of an idea. After all, he fully anticipated the cultural shockwaves that would emit from another one of his simple but “elegant” theories he called “natural selection”. No, to determine the role of Darwin’s eugenic beliefs we must take his suggestions seriously and examine their impact on our history. Dr. Benjamin Wiker has done just that.

The folks at Scientific American are steamed at Ben Stein: (see links):

Ben Stein's Expelled: No Integrity Displayed

Six Things in Expelled That Ben Stein Doesn't Want You to Know...

Stein’s controversial movie Expelled links Charles Darwin to Adolf Hitler, the ultimate scientific hero to the ultimate manifestation of human evil. “A shameful antievolution film tries to blame Darwin for the Holocaust,” shouts John Rennie’s headline. Rennie then declares that its “heavy-handed linkage of modern biology to the Holocaust demands a response for the sake of simple human decency.”
           
The problem is, that the link is quite real. In fact, undeniable. One doesn’t need to see the film to make that link. Simply read Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
           
Darwin’s Descent of Man applies the evolutionary arguments of his more famous Origin of Species to human beings. In it, Darwin argues that those characteristics we might think to be specifically human—physical strength and health, morality, and intelligence—were actually achieved by natural selection. From this, he infers two related eugenic conclusions.

First, if the desirable results of strength, health, morality, and intelligence are caused by natural selection, then we can improve them by artificial selection. We can breed better human beings, even rise above the human to the superhuman.  Since human beings have been raised above the other animals by the struggle to survive, they may be raised even higher, transcending human nature to something—who knows?—as much above men as men are now above the apes. This strange hope rests in Darwin’s very rejection of the belief that man is defined by God, for “the fact of his having thus risen” by evolution to where he is, “instead of having been aboriginally placed there” by God, “may give him hopes for a still higher destiny in the distant future.”

Second, if good breeding gives us better results, pushing us up the evolutionary slope, then bad or indiscriminate breeding drags us back down. “If…various checks…do not prevent the reckless, the vicious and otherwise inferior members of society from increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of men,” Darwin groaned, “the nation will retrograde, as has occurred too often in the history of the world. We must remember that progress is no invariable rule.”

Now to Hitler. The first, most important thing to understand is that the link between Darwin and Hitler was not immediate. That is, nobody is making the case that Hitler had Darwin’s eugenic masterpiece The Descent of Man in one hand while he penned Mein Kampf in the other. Darwin’s eugenic ideas were spread all over Europe and America, until they were common intellectual coin by Hitler’s time. That makes the linkage all the stronger, because we are not talking about one crazed man misreading Darwin but at least two generations of leading scientists and intellectuals drawing the same eugenic conclusions from evolutionary theory as Darwin himself drew.

A second point. We misunderstand Hitler’s evil if we reduce it to anti-Semitism. Hitler’s anti-Semitism had, of course, multiple causes, including his own warped character. That having been said, Nazism was at heart a racial, that is, a biological political program based up evolutionary theory. It was “applied biology,” in the words of deputy party leader of the Nazis, Rudolph Hess, and done for the sake of a perceived greater good, racial purity, that is, for the sake of a race purified of physical and mental defects, imperfections, and racial inferiority.

The greater good. We need to remember that, even though we rightly consider it the apogee of wickedness, the Nazi regime did not purport to do evil. In a monstrous illustration of the adage about good intentions leading to hell, it claimed to be scientific and progressive, to do what hard reason demanded for the ultimate benefit of the human race. Its superhuman acts of inhumanity were carried out for the sake of humanity.

Hitler had enormous sympathy for the downtrodden he witnessed as a young man in Vienna. “The Vienna manual labourers lived in surroundings of appalling misery. I shudder even to-day when I think of the woeful dens in which people dwelt, the night shelters and the slums, and all the tenebrous spectacles of ordure, loathsome filth and wickedness.” 

He believed that the social problems he witnessed in Vienna needed a radical, even ruthless solution if true change were to be effected. As he says with breathtaking concision, “the sentimental attitude would be the wrong one to adopt.”

“Even in those days I already saw that there was a two-fold method by which alone it would be possible to bring about an amelioration of these conditions. This method is: first, to create better fundamental conditions of social development by establishing a profound feeling for social responsibilities among the public; second, to combine this feeling for social responsibilities with a ruthless determination to prune away all excrescences which are incapable of being improved.”

The proposed ruthlessness of his solution was in direct imitation of nature conceived according to Darwinism. “Just as Nature concentrates its greatest attention, not to the maintenance of what already exists but on the selective breeding of offspring in order to carry on the species, so in human life also it is less a matter of artificially improving the existing generation—which, owing to human characteristics, is impossible in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred—and more a matter of securing from the very start a better road for future development.”

How do we secure a better road for future development? By ensuring that only the best of the best race, the Aryan race, breed, and pruning away all the unfit and racially inferior. That isn’t just a theory; it’s eugenic Darwinism as a political program. As Hitler made clear, “the State is looked upon only as a means to an end and this end is the conservation of the racial characteristics of mankind.” Jews have to be pruned away, but also Gypsies, Slavs, the retarded, handicapped, and any one else that is biologically unfit.

That’s Darwinism in action. Does that mean that Darwin would have approved? No. Does that mean that Darwin’s theory provided the framework for Hitler’s eugenic program? Yes.

May 16 Release Date for Prince Caspian

“The return to Narnia is about what happens when people lose faith, when you have Aslan in your rear view mirror and not in your windshield,” says Christopher Markus, one of the screenwriters for The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. As the army of evil king Miraz surrounds the Narnians, each character wonders where the Great Lion Aslan is. The sour dwarf Nikabrik reaches the point of despair and attempts to lead the young king Caspian and the High King Peter away from faith in Aslan.

Peter (William Moseley) and Caspian (Ben Barnes) act out of their own egos and thirst for revenge, with disastrous consequences. Only when they reconcile themselves to fighting for Aslan’s truth and justice, even if they die without glimpsing His face, do they begin to see Him.

Keeping this theme was important to the director Andrew Adamson and to co-director Douglas Gresham. The movie is based on the book by Gresham’s stepfather, C.S. Lewis, often called Jack. Although they jumbled the timeline, updated some characters, pumped up the action, and expanded some storylines, they kept the heart of the story as their first principle. Gresham says, “The message is of vital importance: No matter how far away we stray away, there’s always just one way back”

A great theme deserves a great movie. Creating one required rewrites of scripts, sword fighting choreography, shooting in two continents, thousands of extras, spectacular sets, and intensive costuming and makeup. While humans filmed massive battle scenes, technicians created a host of CGI characters, including Aslan himself, brave Reepicheep the mouse, and loyal Trufflehunter the badger. These details interwove with intense, academic conversations about “what Jack would think.” As creative director of Lewis’s estate, Gresham works to safeguard his stepfather’s legacy. When Adamson wanted to allow Susan (Anna Popplewell) and Lucy (Georgie Henley) a larger role in the battles, he discussed it with Gresham in a conversation resembling a literary master’s thesis. Adamson argued that Lewis’s female characters grow stronger as the book series progresses, coinciding with Lewis’s real life marriage to Joy Davidman, Gresham’s mother. Gresham agrees: “[The] experience of my mother’s determination and personality, I think changed Jack’s ideas towards women.”

They got it right, says Gresham, down to the Lion himself, “Aslan in this movie has all those characteristics which were so difficult to attempt last time. We’ve taken the technology that we’ve pioneered in some respects, but we’ve pushed out again. So, this huge Aslan, you get this great character who is not only a great lion and beautiful to look at, but he’s warm and he’s welcoming, and just a tad bit forbidding, all at the same time. He’s not a tame lion. It’s all there now.”

William Moseley, the actor who plays High King Peter, says his character’s failure to see Aslan has a broader meaning. “When you talk about seeing, I think it’s more believing. You believe, and then you see. People say, ‘If God’s there, why can’t I see him?’ Susan and Peter say ‘why can’t I see him?’ Well, because you’re not believing.”

Hitler's Religion of Race

It is often argued that Hitler was really, at heart, religious, and hence that Christianity and not Darwinism was responsible for Nazi atrocities. But this all-too-often touted view is not based on a very close reading of Hitler. What we find is that his religion is really a kind Spiritualized Darwinism. How so? Hitler argued that the Nazi Party would be victorious in its “gigantic struggle…only if it succeeded from the very outset in awakening a sacrosanct conviction in the hearts of its followers,” and this would take not “a new electoral slogan…but …an entirely new Weltanschauung…”

This new worldview, or as he very exactly calls it, “political faith,” will be a union of Darwin and Nietzsche, based on a kind of folk religion, that is, a religion of the racially-defined folk (volk), a worship of the Germanic race as alone capable of eliminating the weak and bringing the übermensch into existence in accordance with the cruelties of Nature.

In Hitler’s words, which all too clearly portend the atrocities to come when the Nazis gained power,

"the völkisch concept of the world recognizes that the primordial racial elements are of the greatest significance for mankind. In principle, the State is looked upon only as a means to an end and this end is the conservation of the racial characteristics of mankind.

Therefore on the völkisch principle we cannot admit that one race is equal to another. By recognizing that they are different, the völkisch concept separates mankind into races of superior and inferior quality. On the basis of this recognition it feels bound, in conformity with the eternal Will that dominates the universe, to postulate the victory of the better and stronger and the subordination of the inferior and weaker. And so it pays homage to the truth that the principle underlying all Nature’s operations is the aristocratic principle and it believes that this law holds good even down to the last individual organism….

The völkisch belief holds that humanity must have its ideals, because ideals are a necessary condition of human existence itself. But, on the other hand, it denies that an ethical ideal has the right to prevail if it endangers the existence of a race that is the standard-bearer of a higher ethical ideal. For in a world which would be composed of mongrels and negroids all ideals of human beauty and nobility and all hopes of an idealized future for our humanity would be lost for ever. On this planet of ours human culture and civilization are indissolubly bound up with the presence of the Aryan. If he should be exterminated or subjugated, then the dark shroud of a new barbarian era would enfold the earth….

Hence the folk concept of the world is in profound accord with Nature’s will; because it restores the free play of the forces which will lead the race through stages of sustained reciprocal education towards a higher type, until finally the best portion of mankind will possess the earth and will be free to work in every domain all over the world and even reach spheres that lie outside the earth."

While it was Darwin who provided the evolutionary framework for eugenics, it was his cousin Francis Galton who coined the term “eugenics,” the “science of improving stock.” In Galton’s case, of course, he wasn’t concerned about farm animals but human beings.

Galton’s dream—one that would capture generations of eugenicists after him—was “to produce a highly-gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations.” Since all human traits were hereditary, we could, and should, breed for Hereditary Genius (the name of his great contribution to the burgeoning eugenics literature after Darwin).

Galton was concerned with more than breeding for high-IQ. Like Darwin himself, he saw every human trait as hereditary—intellectual, physical, and moral. Certain folks were dragging humanity back down the evolutionary slope, and ruining human civilization for the rest of us, such as those of “Bohemian habits” and the “gipsy.”

Galton suggested setting up a kind of pedigree data bank, so that remarkable and desirable traits could be tracked and those of “really good breed” could breed more, and “become a power.” And the inferiors? Well, they should be treated “with all kindness” as long as they complied with forced celibacy. But if they rebelled, “such persons would be considered as enemies to the State, and to have forfeited all claims to kindness.”

Life Without Limbs

Nick Vujicic was born 25 years ago with no limbs. Though he suffered episodes of social bullying and depression in the face of his limitations he was sustained by a loving Christian family and a growing belief that he was greatly loved of God and called to live a life of purpose.

Nick now has 2 college degrees, and operates an international motivational speaking ministry based in Southern California.

How differently might Nick's story have been had it been viewed through the lens of Peter Singer's utilitarian calculus or the musings of H.G. Wells and fellow eugenic advocates who make up their own criteria for what makes for a life worth living?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USUvzKDroqM

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