by Bob Shepherd
Like other believers, I have perused Darwin and I never fail to be impressed by the seriousness of his effort (and his accomplishment). I do not detect a harsh or hostile attitude toward religion (as one finds for example in Tom Paine). Of course Darwin personally may have been an atheist. But in his biography, he was surrounded with Believing Christians, sedate Anglicans. In his personal life he was blameless. His wife's family were even connected with the evangelical Anglican movement opposing the slave trade.

Richard Dawkins says of Darwin's accomplishment, that "it is impossible to exaggerate the magnitude of the problem that Darwin and Wallace solved."

Obviously there were glitches, but Darwin frankly conceded those problems. For some two decades he honed and refined, doubting himself, soliciting criticism, second-guessing himself. Later generations in biology and genetics and other sciences have been able to fill in some of the questions Darwin (and his day) never filled in.

And still we are finding little problems. Darwin was sure that the inferior races would soon become extinct. Those were the days of British Empire's triumph -- throughout the world. Inferior races were to be found everywhere.

But white man's burden was the "spirit of the age" (ZEITGEIST), as Richard Dawkins points out. And even the greatest minds of the time were not exempt. Abraham Lincoln, born the same day as Darwin, adamantly stated (one famous speech) his unequivocal opposition to strict equality between blacks and whites.

Darwin actually said:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla. [Descent of Man, Chapter 6 ]

Darwin's Scientific Racism

Bob Shepherd
google-groups, May 16, 2006
George Mosse declares (page 72) Charles Darwin himself was no racist. Nevertheless he cannot deny that, in his own words, the most important and original English contribution to racist thought was made through Darwinism. Ideas like "natural selection" and "survival of the fittest" were eagerly adopted by racial theoreticians. The necessity of struggle seemed to be built into Darwinism, and it added a new scientific dimension to the combat between superior and inferior races. Darwin's own theory of survival and selection was complex, and depended upon environmentalism rather than upon heredity. But racism simplified Darwin, took 'good reliable facts' which he described, and applied them to the struggle for survival and selection of the fittest races.

Darwin sometimes wrote in a way that could be easily misinterpretated as encouraging racial ideas. [Which is why he took the cue from Spencer and in Descent of Man substituted the phrase 'survival of the fittest' in place of 'favoured races' which he had used throughout Origin of the Species.]

The production of healthy progeny became a racial obsession. Darwinism not only encouraged visions of race war; it also led in more immediate terms to the founding of racial eugenics. [From 'Toward the Final Solution' by George L. Mosse, 1978]

May 13, 2006
Allan Chase, who composed a magisterial volume running some 700 pages of closely packed and carefully documented research, exposed the racist USE of Darwinian theory, but nary was there a word of attack upon the fully sound and basic truth of Darwin himself, or the overall validity of evolution.

Rather, Chase zeroed in on many aspects of the racist USE of Darwinian theory (might makes right). He listed four major ways or cults that scientific racism has manifested in the days since Malthus and Darwin.

(1) Eugenics
(2) Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer, NOT Darwin
(3) Malthusianism
(4) Teutonism, later rechristened Nordicism

If we get right down to it, whatever "system" one develops, even religious or mythological or strictly literary ones, really claim nothing more. When something resonates, or helps us make sense of the world, or merely speads to us (at an inner interpretive level), we "second the emotion" -- so to speak.

While I certainly would respect the intelligible efforts of Fossil Lin, I might suggest the limitation of the critique of evolution is in the detail. Rather than hair-splitting, perhaps we should step back and check the overall framework, as it were.

There are actually traditions, some quite old, affirming a common "cousinhood" of humans with other forms of earth-life. We ought not be too hasty in dismissing non-European traditionalism. Actually, the "Christian" Bible originated, almost wholly, not in Europe but from Shemitic and Hamitic and Cushitic sources, and pre-sources. The Mosaic tapestry had roots in, yes, AFRICA. Not Europe.

Consider this statement found in the Bible ( I said in my heart concerning the estate of man, that God might reveal to them, that they are beasts. So little difference. They begin the same, they end the same. Composed of the same stuff, breathe the same air. Surely no difference. So that a man hath no preeminence above a beast. The only difference being (the son of) man's spirit (Adam's) goes upwards, while the beasts spirit goes downwards. Qoheleth, or Ecclesiastes.

Dixi in corde meo de filiis hominum,ut probaret eos deus, et ostenderet similes esse bestiis. Idcirco unus interitus est hominis et jumentorum, et æqua utriusque conditio. Sicut moritur homo, sic et illa moriuntur. Similiter spirant omnia, et nihil habet homo jumento amplius: cuncta subjacent vanitati, et omnia pergunt ad unum locum. De terra facta sunt, et in terram pariter revertuntur. Quis novit si spiritus filiorum Adam ascendat sursum, et si spiritus jumentorum descendat deorsum?

{Posted just for fun. My Latin intelligibility is not very advanced!!!}

Darwin is a giant. Not because he got every detail perfect. Rather, he never even pretended to have all the answers. But he has withstood (or his reputation actually stronger now than ever) the attacks of the thoughtless. Perhaps because (so to speak) he was asking the right questions.

But why are fundamentalists offended? Why do so of the Christian community feel so threatened or alarmed? I personally do not sense any disrespect intended to anyone's core values, or spiritual "treasures." At any rate, to each his own. Varied strokes for varied folks.

Here is a quote by a modern theologian, Frank Sheed, essentially calling for something of a truce between Christianity and Darwinian SCIENCE.

Sheed writes, "The Fathers and Doctors of the Church never thought of Genesis as giving a scientific blueprint of creation." Sheed goes on to quote from St. Augustine "De Genesi ad litteram" to the effect that Genesis is not to be taken litterally, but rather by the Spirit.

Bob Shepherd
Posted on google groups
Darwin was a product of his age. One can find white supremacists galore during that whole period, but Darwin himself, Victorian though he was, could hardly be classed with the crudest or the more virulent racists. He seemed to embrace the "White Man's Burden" view of British imperialism.

I admit that sometimes non-whites have objected to the idea that, as Darwin expressed in Descent of Man, the inferior races will soon be replaced by the superior ones. But remember, Darwin was hardly alone in his somewhat smug or condescending attitude toward colonial races. In those days even the IRISH were considered essentially tribal --- as Darwin himself alluded to (also in Descent of Man).

The Enlightenment was by and large a "whiteman" accomplishment. A corollary of this, the hostility between religion and science (might well be labeled an artificial development) within the Euro-centered "science" of that day and age.

Truth be told, the Genesis versus Darwin BATTLE raging for so long in some respects appears rather silly. Darwin studied religion for three years (Anglican). His physician-father was a nominally religious man. His wife Emily was staunchly religious.

But Darwin had a curiosity and an inquisitive nature that the world ought to praise -- and emulate. I sense no intention on his part to disrespect religion, or to belittle faith, or in any way to attack traditionalism. Rather, it was (sad to say) the other way around. Those doing the attacking were "Christians." Those who were apparently threatened by the views Darwin proposed (suggested) were religious people.

Here is a quote by a modern theologian, Frank Sheed, essentially calling for something of a truce between Christianity and Darwinian SCIENCE.

Sheed goes on to quote from St. Augustine "De Genesi ad litteram" to the effect that Genesis is not to be taken litterally, but rather by the Spirit. See St. John chapter 3. Things meant to be spiritually discerned. (We cannot see the wind, but we discern it by its effects.)

The modern world rightly gives the Genesis account its due place, but there are many beautiful and inspiring creation myths. Peruse some of the creation myths, origin accounts, of native peoples throughout the world. Some passed down by oral tradition. Or go to the sub- continent of India, whose scriptures in some instances are even older than our Western (Hebrew-recorded) ones.

"And the scientific Enlightenment, pursuing its decidedly nonreligious agenda, added its own twist to this legacy, especially in the figure of Charles Darwin (1809-1882). He applied his own idea of the survival of the fittest to racial, ethnic, and national groups of human beings. Like certain species of grass, some racial groups are destined to survive and thrive, while others, like less hardy grasses on the scorched savanna, are destined to wither and disappear. "At some future period not very distant as measured in centuries," Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man, "the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races."

The Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist, reflecting on this legacy of European colonialism, commented, "We want genocide to have begun and ended with Nazism." But it didn't. Hitler was less the beneficiary than the product of religious and racial assumptions that had their origins, perhaps, in the Jew-hating sermons of Saint John Chrysostom or Saint Ambrose, and certainly in the blood purity obsession of Torquemada. The line between these two phenomena carves the narrative arc that achieves its apogee with the 'Germanizing' of Darwin, especially in Nietzsche, at least as he was caricatured by the Nazis. Hitler's all-encompassing ideology of race was a "vulgarized version," in one scholar's phrase, of the social Darwinism that held sway in the imperial age among both intellectuals and the crowd. It was the dominant cultural and political idea of the day. 'The air he [Hitler] and all other Western people in his childhood breathed was soaked in the conviction that imperialism is a biologically necessary process, which, according to the laws of nature, leads to the inevitable destruction of the lower races. It was a conviction which had already cost millions of human lives before Hitler provided his highly personal application.' [p 476-477]

Edward Simon [a professor of biology at Purdue University and himself a Jew] has commented:

"I don't claim that Darwin and his theory of evolution brought on the holocaust; but I cannot deny that the theory of evolution, and the atheism that engendered it, led to the moral climate that made the holocaust possible."

["Another Side to the Evolution Problem," Jewish Press (Jan. 7, 1983). ]

Voltaire had claimed Negroes constituted an intermediate stage between whites (humans) and the anthropoid apes. Darwin predicted the imminent extinction of the inferior races. The eugenicists even proposed helping the extinction process along. Then Hitler actually did so -- attempting to wipe out an entire race, deemed in his Rassenbiologie to be inferior, Untermenschen in German.

"The End of Racism is a must read. It is powerful, searing, honest and definitive in its sweep as it chronicles and analyzes the history, taboos and myths that have shaped and shattered the American mosaic. A tour-de-force, this book uncovers the half-truths and outright lies disguised as black scholarship and civil rights policy, and earns for D'Souza his entitlement to scathing attacks from the racial fanatics and demagogues." (from a Review)

Paradox: a biblical vindication of atheism

Dogged persistence is the key to science

Zecharia Sitchin, Hebrew scholar & linguist

Teilhard de Chardin: a Christian Evolution

The persecution of Velikovsky by "Science"

Adolf Hitler's embrace of Darwinian racism

To believe or not to believe (Rahasya Poe)

Bill Nye, a bow-tied "science guy" (soapbox)

A Cambridge Anglican trained in theology

The Jesuit and the Skull - by Amir D. Aczel