Someone sent me the web address of an article at the Answers In Genesis site by Jerry Bergman, titled, "Darwinism and the Nazi race Holocaust," and I composed a reply:
BERGMAN (author of "Darwinism and the Nazi race Holocaust" and the Answers in Genesis website): Hitler's government relied heavily upon Darwinism, especially the elaborations by Spencer and Haeckel.
ED: Note the admission, "...especially the elaborations of Spencer and Haeckel." It's the "elaborations" of others, rightly or wrongly that most influenced Hitler, this becomes even clearer below, concerning various "Nazi scientists" listed below and their prejudicial modes of thinking that preceded their eugenics theories concerning "the Jews."
BERGMAN: The Nazis relied heavily upon the work of Hans F.K. Günther, professor of 'racial science' at the University of Jena
ED: Note the admission, "relied heavily upon the work of Hans F. K. Günther," whose "work" consisted of "proving" the "inferiority of the Jews." Why "the Jews" you ask? Because Günther and many other Germans "knew" that the "Jews" were inferior long before Günther ever did his first "racial science" experiment (sic). In fact, many Germans believed that "Jews" were inferior for CENTURIES, because the Bible and Martin Luther told them so. So really, what DOES the Holocaust come down to? Günther's "racial science," a Jew-hating pseudoscience, based firmly on centuries of Jew-baiting and Jew-hating under the Christian cross.
BERGMAN: Poliakov notes that many intellectuals in the early 1900s accepted telegony, the idea that 'bad blood' would contaminate a race line forever, or that 'bad blood drives out good' , just as bad money displaces good money. Only extermination would permanently eliminate inferior genetic lines, and thereby further evolution. . Darwin even compiled a long list of cases where he concluded bad blood polluted a whole gene line, causing it to bear impure progeny forever.
ED: This idea of "telegony" does not necessarily warrant "extermination" in the sense of killing people, just sterilization. I also wonder whether Darwin ever mentioned the words "bad blood" and spoke about it "polluting" a whole gene line. He probably did collect examples in which a pedigreed dog or pigeon was bred with a wild type and the children of that offspring no longer bore pedigreed offspring. But so what? Does that mean build ovens and kill Jews, homosexuals, Poles, and Gypsies? Darwin did invent a theory of inheritance that involved gemmules carried in the blood that carried physically inherited information, but it was disproven long ago. Nobody believes Darwin's theory of inheritance any more.
BERGMAN: Hitler believed that Blacks were "monstrosities halfway between man and ape"
ED: More of Günther's "racial science" at work? Bergman does not say. But the prejudiced idea of Black's being mere savages goes back BEFORE Darwin's day. The Europeans at that time looked down upon the Blacks in Africa and Indians in the Americas for not advancing technologically as fast as they had. The Europeans had guns and steel. The Blacks still had only spears. It proves nothing of course, except that races that develop technology tend to regard the less technologically advanced races with derision, and probably underestimate their capabilities. (Imagine how advanced beings in passing UFOs feel about everyone on our planet?) As for Blacks having a "mundane genetic character" that made them prone to being enslaved, see the "Biblical views" of the president of the Institute of Creation Research in America, found at the very end of this e-mail.
BERGMAN: Relatively few scientific studies exist which directly deal with Darwinism and Nazism
ED: Those wouldn't be "scientific" studies, those would be historical studies.
BERGMAN: . and many evolutionists avoid the subject because evolution is inescapably selectionist.
ED: The word "selectionist" by itself means nothing. Bergman is just straining like the devil to connect everything the involves "Hitlerian, Güntherian, genocidal" selection with Darwin's theory of "natural selection" - a theory that in the biological realm, even some creationists accede to, especially the ones who admit that microevolution occurs.
BERGMAN: One of the best reviews of Darwinism and Nazism documents clearly that Nazism felt confident that their programs of extermination was firmly based on evolution science.
ED: Just because someone is "confident" their beliefs are "based" on something does not mean it is. It merely tells us how "confident" that person was in their belief that it was. So believing one's views are "based on science" doesn't make it so. What was Nazi "racial science" really based on? Perhaps centuries of prejudiced racism? It was also based on "science" prior to the human genome project discovery that all human beings are, genomically-speaking, almost "identical twins" and that the notion of "races" is obsolete. But scientists knew that even BEFORE the human genome project which merely reinforced what they had already discovered via other types of experiments. Speaking of being "based on science," there are still Christian groups who espouse racism and who believe their views are "based on science, or at least on what they claimed was common sense," as did the Christian whites in South Africa, as did Christian slaveholders in the South of the U.S. (As I've pointed out, South Africa was a heavily Protestant Christian nation, that gave more money for missions per capita than even America, and that was during the time of their practice of apartheid, when it was also illegal to teach evolution in schools, nor did they allow the broadcast of any of Sagan's COSMOS programs that dealt with evolution. So, creationism and Christianity in South Africa went hand in hand with apartheid.) And speaking of the idea of "things being firmly based upon" other things, what about all the crazy ideas that one Christian group or another affirms are "firmly based" on the 'Bible," and which another Christian group rejects, though both claim "the Bible" is the "basis" for all their beliefs? And the fact that such disputes have ended in excommunications, riots, murders and wars? Based on the Bible, Early American Puritans were convinced that if the native Americans would not convert, then they should be destroyed like the Canaanites, without mercy, man, woman and child. Need some quotations on that? I've got references. Might make a nice article at the Answers in Genesis site, "Christianity, the Bible, and the Native American Holocaust."
BERGMAN: An assessment by Youngson concluded that the application of Darwinism to society, called eugenics, produced one of the most tragic scientific blunders of all time: "The culmination of this darker side of eugenics was, of course, Adolf Hitler's attempt to produce a 'master race' by encouraging mating between pure 'Aryans' and by the murder of six million people whom he claimed to have inferior genes. It is hardly fair to Galton to blame him for the Holocaust or even for his failure to anticipate the consequences of his advocacy of the matter. But he was certainly the principal architect of eugenics, and Hitler was certainly obsessed with the idea. So, in terms of its consequences, this must qualify as one of the greatest scientific blunders of all time."
ED: Taken from a book titled Scientific Blunders; A Brief History of How Wrong Scientists Can Sometimes Be. No doubt the authors of a book about "science's" greatest blunders are going to play up the "science" aspect behind such blunders and ignore the centuries of religious intolerance and cultural egotism that preceded such blunders. Not to mention the charismatic ideologue, Hitler, and his ideological mass movement that carried out the exterminations proposed by their "leader." I'd say; the Holocaust was a typical case of an alpha male leading his pack of gorillas. And that perhaps a lot of Christians today are being "primed" by their ideology which teaches them to bow down to a holy book or leader, to bow down to the next charismatic leader who comes along and is able to feign both "Christianity" and "science" in the name of some obviously prejudicially based plan which he assures us will "save the world," and thereby wreck it.
Speaking of pseudoscience that is not based on Darwinism, but on a prominent creationist's reading of the Bible check out the following:
HENRY MORRIS OF THE INSTITUTE FOR CREATION RESEARCH, AND THE QUESTION OF "genetic CHARACTER."
From Henry M. Morris, The Genesis Record: A Scientific and Devotional Commentary on the Book of Beginnings, Creation-Life Publishes, San Diego, 1976, I quote this passage: "Sometimes the Hamites, especially the Negroes, have even become actual slaves to the others. Possessed of a genetic character concerned mainly with mundane, practical matters, they have often eventually been displaced by the intellectual and philosophical acumen of the Japhethites and the religious zeal of the Semites." There is no scientific evidence for any "genetic character" basis for a disposition to "the mundane" (nor for a "genetic character" for a disposition to "philosophy or religion") in certain peoples, and no biblical basis for assuming that a general distinction of this kind is genetic either. The notion of a genetic disposition to the mundane in certain populations is an utter fabrication. But it suits Morris' view of the Biblically prophetic curse of one of Noah's three sons, which he sees as thereby being fulfilled because he has interpreted it as being fulfilled, via his fallacy of a "genetic character toward the mundane" for an entire group of people.
ENDNOTE: Morris is careful to avoid the word "race," but instead speaks of "genetic character": "Note that these three streams of nations are not three 'races.' Though some have thought of the Semites, Japhethites, and Hamites as three races (say, the dusky, the white, and the black races or the Mongoloid, Caucasian, and Negroid), this is not what the Bible teaches, nor is it what modern anthropology and human genetics teach. There are dusky and black people found among all three groups of nations. The Bible does not use the word 'race' nor does it acknowledge such a concept. The modern concept of 'race' is based on evolutionary thinking. To the evolutionist, a race is a subspecies in the process of evolving into a new species, and this idea is the basis of modern racism . "
This passage by Morris again demonstrates no knowledge of modern anthropology and genetics which are integral to modern evolution, and which teach that the notion of "race" has indeed become vacuous. But not because the Bible told them so.
