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The Societal Consequences of DarwinismThe consequences of accepting Darwinian theory have been profound. Enormous moral and social damage has been wrought in classrooms and to society. The theory that led Darwin to discard the Bible and reject the existence of God has had a profound effect on millions of other people. It is no coincidence that Karl Marx, the father of communism, out of gratitude to Darwin, sent him Das Kapital, his principal book on communism. "Although developed in the crude English fashion," Marx wrote to his communist colleague Friedrich Engels, "this [Darwin's Origin of Species] is the book which in the field of natural history, provides the basis for our views." To another he wrote that Darwin's work "suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle" (Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place, 2002, p. 188). This evolutionary backing eventually helped establish the philosophical framework for the twin scourges of communism and atheism in Russia, China, Eastern Europe, Cambodia, North Korea and many other nations. "Genocide, of course," writes Phillip Johnson, "is merely a shocking name for the process of natural selection by which one gene pool replaces another. Darwin himself explained this in The Descent of Man, when he had to deal with the absence of 'missing links' between ape and human. Such gaps were to be expected, he wrote, in view of the extinctions that necessarily accompany evolution. "He coolly predicted that evolution would make the gaps wider in the future, because the most civilized (that is, European) humans would soon exterminate the rest of the human species and go on from there to kill off our nearest kin in the ape world. Modern Darwinists do not call attention to such passages, which make vivid how easily the picture of amoral nature inherent in evolutionary naturalism can be converted into a plan of action" (Reason in the Balance, 1995, p. 144). Later Adolf Hitler indeed applied the Darwinian concept of the "survival of the fittest" to the human race. During World War II the Nazis forcibly sterilized more than 2 million people and began systematically exterminating people whom Hitler considered to be inferior. The Nazis justified their atrocities by rationalizing that they were doing mankind a service with "genetic cleansing" to improve the races. As long as evolution—with its implications of amorality and the survival-of-the-fittest mentality among "superior" and "inferior" races —is accepted and believed, genocide, as sporadic ethnic cleansings in various parts of the globe show, will have a scientific justification, even though most believers in Darwinian theory would object to this conclusion. The Bible foretells that, before Jesus Christ's return, a worldwide commercial system will include the trading of "bodies and souls of men" (Revelation 18:9-13). Could this really happen? One only has to remember the Nazi holocaust. Hundreds of thousands were pressed into slave labor. Those too weak, ill, young or old to work faced a merciless death. Remember, such events happened barely a generation ago in what were considered to be the most advanced and enlightened nations. It could happen again, especially in a world in which so many have adopted a belief in moral relativism and a survival-of-the-fittest outlook. |
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