images and meanings

Allāhu Akbar? Yeah, Sure: Random Thoughts On 'The Problem Of Evil'

2013-01-25T23:58:00.000Z

'Saharan Children' © Gary Hill 1992

I. The Problem Of Evil

I took the photograph above in a small village in the Algerian Sahara in February 1992. A sandstorm has just abated and people were coming out of their houses to get on with their daily routine. The children rushed out to play and to see if they could get any coins, pens or chocolate from the foreign guys with the cameras.

The country was then in the early stages of a civil war pitting a military-backed government against Islamic militia. Between 150,000 and 200,000 people are estimated to have died in the following decade. Although civilian deaths were attributed to both sides, the Armed Islamic Group or GIA were particularly brutal and, on a number of occasions, would massacre the entire population of villages, men, women and children who they suspected of voting against the Islamic opposition party on the grounds that:

“There is no democracy because the only source of power is Allah through the Koran, and not the people. If the people vote against the law of God, this is nothing other than blasphemy. In this case, it is necessary to kill the non-believers for the good reason that they wish to substitute their authority for that of God”.

Spoken by one of their leaders. While slaughtering they were reported to have shouted the Takbir “Allāhu Akbar”, or in English, “God is Great”.

I can't even remember the name of the village where I captured this image so I have no idea how the adults of this village might have voted. Nowadays, when I look at this photograph I wonder what these beautiful children are doing today. If anything. And the Epicurean Paradox from Ancient Greece comes to mind. This states;

An all-knowing i.e., omniscient God would surely know that there was evil in the world.

An all-good i.e., omnibenevolent God would surely wish to prevent evil from existing in the world. An all-powerful i.e., omnipotent God could surely prevent such evil from occurring.

However, there is evil in the world.
Therefore, a God that is all powerful, all knowing and all loving, does not exist.

Here Epicurus considers two of the three prongs of classical monotheism, omnipotence and omnibenevolence. The third, omniscience, is also widely accepted by monotheists as a characteristic of God and so I assume it also. Definitions of evil are necessarily subjective, however. I will assume a moral-neutral approach. By evil I refer to all forms of physical and/or psychological suffering that is unwanted by the sufferer and is caused by natural phenomena and/or the actions of other beings.

II. The Problem Of The Inadequacy And Indifference Of Theodicy

The Epicurean Paradox is a logical argument and it's internal logic appears to be sound. Because the fourth premise is undeniably true, at least one of the first three must therefore be false which, in turn, makes the conclusion logically true. It is as if, as Shakespeare wrote "......to the gods we are as flies to wanton boys". Certainly, this is the way in which humans have traditionally behaved toward other species, from using animals for food and sport to deliberately eradicating whole strains of bacteria and viruses. Perhaps God perceives us in much the same way.

Traditionally, there have been a number of theological ripostes to the Epicurean Paradox, but essentially there are two ways that a theist might deal with it. The first is to find fault with one or more of the premises. This is difficult. The argument appears to be insurmountable from any logical perspective. The second way is to identify specific circumstances in which God might allow evil to occur. Some contemporary theologians have advocated defences to the 'problem of evil' based on our having 'free-will' and the Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga's defence is by far considered the most erudite. It is an attempt to identify the circumstances in which God would allow evil to exist. Briefly, his argument states:

Creatures who have free-will cannot logically be causally determined not to do evil

If God has created creatures possessing free-will, he must therefore create creatures capable of performing evil acts
There actually exist creatures capable of performing evil acts
Therefore God cannot guarantee there will no evil in the world
A world containing creatures with free-will, although they may perform evil acts is nevertheless more valuable to God than a world containing creatures with no free-will at all
God therefore had good reason to create a world containing creatures who possess free-will
Thus God cannot guarantee a world devoid of evil acts

Relying solely on logical arguments, whether as statement or rebuttal is inherently problematic when dealing with real-world issues. Logical deduction gives us no information other than that already contained within the supporting premises. Logic alone cannot provide this information, it must come from elsewhere else. In the case of theology, if you begin, say, with presuppositions of the existence and characteristics of God (which you necessarily must), then not surprisingly your logically deduced conclusion will tend to agree with your series of premises. Thus it is entirely possible to start with false premises, proceed via valid inference, and reach a true conclusion. The premises used may, for example, be perfectly sound in a conceptual and grammatical sense but be wholly unjustified. For example:

All fish live in the ocean
Tuna are fish
Therefore tuna live in the ocean

The first premise is empirical nonsense though the conclusion is true. In other words logic, no matter how sound, does not necessarily map onto the physical world. Any series of logical statements, even though coherent in themselves, can be disproved with (near) certainty if there is an observed discrepancy between any of the premises and empirical data, as in the example above. Similarly, Plantinga's 'free-will defence' appears to be logically robust. However, numerous (and growing) discrepancies between the premises, people's real-life experiences and empirical data can be observed (or at the very least suspected). Therefore, as a solution to the Epicurean Paradox and the 'problem of evil', I find Plantinga's 'free-will' defence unconvincing in a number of ways, most of which are unrelated to the actual logic. Discussion of some obvious refutations, and some related general issues pertaining to the 'problem of evil' follows.

Note immediately that Plantinga's argument that God, logically, could not create a world with free creatures who never choose evil is directly contradicted by a central tenet of both Christianity and Islam. That is, the supposed existence of Heaven or Paradise, both of which are postulated to be communities of beings possessing free-will in which evil does not and cannot occur. Another problem in the premises is that the concept of free-will is open to be defined in any way one chooses, there being no universally accepted definition of free-will. A common theist definition is 'the ability to have chosen differently had the same set of circumstances repeated itself'. This, however, seems to me to be inadequate for the purposes of examination. What sort of evidence might we show that a person could have acted differently in the past? My preferred definition would be 'the ability to make a decision at a particular time that is free of coercion of any kind'. No matter which definition is accepted, however, it is widely agreed that any being acting in accordance with free-will is accountable for their actions.

Plantinga appears also to be making a number of unjustified value judgements. First, the ubiquity and power of free-will in human beings is simply taken for granted. Second, there is the assumption that God considers the presence of free-will to be at least equal to, and likely more important than, the absence of evil. Certainly God is portrayed as protecting free-will at an enormous cost to ourselves, i.e., an indefinite quantity of evil acts. Yet if a prima facie case can be made for the inherent 'goodness' of free-will that would sanction it's use, can we not also make a prima facie case that evil is inherently unwanted, a state of affairs in which the permitting of it's existence could never morally be sanctioned. Such judgements seem to me to be theological 'just-so' stories. Plantinga is not offering anywhere near an air-tight case, he is merely describing what he sees as God's primary reason for allowing evil to exist. This is no more than God's 'get out of jail free card'. Why God might consider free-will to be so paramount remains unclear. On what basis is this premise made? Perhaps God simply favours free-will because he himself has been characterised by humans as having free-will?

The free-will defence can only realistically deal with 'moral evil' i.e., evil perpetrated directly by the conscious actions of human beings. What of the evil wrought by natural disasters or other natural processes such as disease and the inevitable physical and cognitive decline involved in aging? None of these can reasonably be causally related to free-will. Inevitably, of course, there are a number of well-established (though decidedly unsophisticated) attempts to deal with the moral status of natural disasters and disease. A particularly simplistic argument suggests a God who, by allowing evil to exist, is paradoxically being kind to us in an attempt to warn of the existence of hell. The fundamentalist Christian author Ray Comfort, not surprisingly, uses this one. Another argument, one which I personally find particularly repugnant, is offered by the Christian theologian, Richard Swinburne. He denies that human happiness is the greatest goal we can strive for and views natural disasters and other evils as opportunities for people to better themselves and to "experience the grace of God". Or to it put another way, evil is an obstacle course with Heaven at the finish line. He goes on:

"It is only the existence of those really serious situations that enable us to take the first step toward holiness..........by their availability to suffer.......it was a good for the victim that they were allowed to be agents who provided the opportunity for other humans to make choices for good or ill."

And this:

"......it is good that God should allow men to suffer to a limited extent for a short finite period for the sake of the greater goods which that makes possible - that is, the opportunity of the free choice between good and evil, and the opportunity to show patience, courage and compassion."

It is commonplace for atheists to be told that our philosophical armoury relies too heavily on 'straw man' arguments, aimed at a lay persons overly simplistic and anthropomorphic view of God. Apparently we make only "the occasional perfunctory gesture to ‘sophisticated’ religious believers" as the literary critic Terry Eagleton puts it. Well, according to the Evangelical Leadership University, Swinburne is "perhaps the most significant proponent of argumentative theism today". Is Swinburne really a good example of the modern 'sophisticated' theology that atheists are often accused of ignoring? I, for one, do not think he is.

In the time it takes to read this essay, several hundred children will have died of starvation through no fault of their own or through their own free-will. Is Swinburne seriously telling us that using these poor children in the role of 'middle-man' for others to "experience the grace of God" is the act of an omnibenevolent deity? Why would God purport to give humans free-will then consistently and callously favour the free-will of some people over the free-will of others? And where on earth does Swinburne get the idea that suffering is only ever "to a limited extent for a short finite period"? This is no more than a form of theological social Darwinism in which the lucky, wealthy and/or influential are given carte blanche, nay a duty, to benefit from the misfortunes of others less able to exercise their own free will to prevent suffering.

Modifying Swinburne's "grace of God" argument to suggest that suffering aids the victim is also encountered. In this view God, in his omniscience, has allowed suffering to occur because the end result benefits the victim in some way we are not yet aware of. The theologian William Lane Craig, for example, has claimed that intense suffering leads us to God - and this is something God very much wants. While this may go some way in explaining the suffering of adults, perhaps resulting directly from poor choices they might have made, it is clearly an immoral stance in the case of those who lack autonomy, such as young children and the cognitively impaired. Animals are incapable of having knowledge of God, and are said to be devoid of souls, so in this view their suffering is purely instrumental. Any human who caused or allowed such a person (or animal) to suffer would rightly be considered depraved or to exhibit psychopathology. Indeed, cruelty to animals is one of the primary indicators of psychopathy in children.

Neither does the co-argument that an individual's suffering offers us a chance to intervene have any merit. If the suffering really is for someone's benefit, why would we feel any obligation to intervene? Some people may feel they have no obligation to intervene for political reasons. But this question has added poignancy when considered in terms of belief in God. While many theists assume that, according to the will of God, goodness and suffering continue after death, atheists hold no such belief. From a naturalistic viewpoint, we consider that all the goodness and suffering experienced during life ends permanently at death. Thus, it is surely the atheist, ignoring God's alleged will, who has the greatest moral incentive to alleviate suffering in the present. Why then would a theist not do as God himself does and leave a suffering person to their God-ordained fate at death? Perhaps it is because they know inherently that behaving like God does, no matter the reason, is wrong. For even if the theist believes that God has some reason for making an innocent person suffer during their lifetime it does not follow that they are justified in not intervening ourselves.

Swinburne-like thinking also ignores the fact that we don't need natural disasters and disease to make us better people or bring us closer to God. If it were so, regions of the world that suffered a higher degree of natural disasters and disease would be expected to produce a higher percentage of more saintly people. They don't. The argument is patently wrong. Worse still is the sense of arrogant selfishness inherent in these arguments. They are mere pontification from those who are not shy of telling us that they are indeed experiencing the "grace of God" while living lives of comparative luxury and safety. They show a shameful disregard to the reality of the many individuals who experience evil and hardship at far higher levels than they themselves do.

'Burden' © Gary Hill 1992

A further theological argument goes like this:

"God created a perfect world but we corrupted it with sin and that sin is what leads to natural disasters and disease"

The fundamental problem with this argument is obvious. It is contrary to our scientific understanding of natural laws. There is no known or even vaguely likely mechanism that would have human immorality effect a change in natural laws such that it would produce a natural disaster. Similar suggestions are that God, as an omnipotent being, simply uses what we would describe as evil for his own ends, such as to punish sinners or to test an individual's faith. An example of this thinking would be Islamic theologians blaming the eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland in 2010 on European women wearing immodest clothing or Pat Robertson blaming Hurricane Katrina on homosexuality. This level of analysis is puerile, for it clearly does not even begin to address the random targeting nature of natural disasters and disease nor the suffering of those not old enough or intelligent enough to understand such a predicament.

And what of animal suffering? What possible purpose does this serve? At the end of a recent episode of 'Life', a BBC TV series on natural history, one of the camera crew remarked that he was considering giving up wildlife photography because he found the degree of suffering experienced by animals in the wild to be emotionally harrowing. The body of the caterpillar of the 'cabbage white' moth, for example, is used by the braconid wasp to lay it's eggs. When the wasp larvae hatch they consume some of the caterpillars internal organs before forcing their way out through the body wall. Often the caterpillar does not die until after the larvae have left. This kind of suffering predates humans by hundreds of millions of years and, according to fundamentalist Christian views, has been explicitly designed by God to happen this way. Little wonder that animal suffering is a subject that is conspicuously absent from Christian theology. Indeed, I am aware of only one book that addresses the question at all, 'Nature Red In Tooth And Claw: Theism and The Problem Of Animal Suffering' by Michael J Murray. A complete refutation of the Epicurean Paradox surely needs to address this aspect of life.

One way around all this would be to deny that natural disasters and disease result from either the actions of God or natural laws and return to the notion held for millennia that they are caused by demonic entities. Again, not a sophisticated theological view and again, what empirical evidence is there? In any case, natural disasters occurred on this planet from the outset (and at a far higher rate), billions of years before any species evolved enough to even think about acting immorally.

Even if one accepts the 'free-will defence' what reasons might an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God have for including such naturally occurring evils in the world from the outset? After all, we are told in Genesis 1:31 that "God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good." He could have, for example, created a world without tectonic plates liable to cause earthquakes and tsunamis or without deadly or permanently maiming pathogens. Such an approach is not logically impossible in either Christianity or Islam. As mentioned, the Christian Heaven and the Islamic Paradise are supposed to be void of both moral and natural evil and yet contain beings with total free-will, so why not create such a place from the outset? Why invent a cruel game we all have to play whether we want to or not?

On the other hand, natural disasters and disease could be the result of an impoverished design. Perhaps the creator of the universe is not intelligent enough or powerful enough to create a universe without natural disasters or disease, in which case God would not be omnipotent, but the 'problem of evil' would become understandable. I am thinking here in terms of a being who, although subject to the laws of physics as we are, has nonetheless learned how to harness their power for his own ends. Such a being would not strictly be a God, but might be indistinguishable from a God from our perspective. As far as moral evil goes, Philosopher David Lewis has suggested, not entirely tongue-in-cheek, that God might be just unlucky. Because of the logical clash between free-will and evil he was forced to choose one or the other. He therefore gambled that his gift of free-will would bring out the best in us. It didn't and he lost. This notion of course removes both his omnipotence and his omniscience. Thus, God may not intervene to change the state of things lest, as Leibnitz has suggested "it demeans God's craftsmanship". It might also be possible that God did not design the universe but subcontracted the job to a non-omnipotent ally. Or it may be a first-draft running it's course to see how the project goes, i.e., beta-testing. Both of these notions, originating from David Hume, would suggest however that God has an impoverished level of compassion and/or interest in our welfare. If so, the 'problem of evil' would at least become more understandable.

If God had designed a universe where natural disasters and disease did not occur he could have left the degree of evil experienced by humans entirely up to us. Instead, we find ourselves living in a universe in which evil events can occur to us entirely at random, without any warning or apparent justification and not even the most innocent of us are spared. The philosopher David Kyle Johnson sums up God's attitude toward us using the following analogy:

"If I had embedded dog killing machines - that readily activate and kill any dog within reach - into the design of my house, I could hardly be said to be a loving master of my dogs.....Yet this is the kind of thing that is embedded in the design of our universe."

While another philosopher, Steven Law, sums up the Christian viewpoint as someone who:

"......wanders into a concentration camp, notes the stoves designed to provide meals and warmth and the mattresses designed for sleeping on, and concludes that not only was this camp designed by an intelligence with some interest in sustaining human life, it actually “points towards” a wonderfully loving and benevolent designer."

Theists who do not accept that we were designed by God fare no better when it comes to the 'problem of evil'. Evolution by natural selection might result in organisms of great beauty but the underlying mechanisms are both wasteful and cruel. 99% of all the species that have ever existed on this planet have now disappeared and their extinction events were never pretty. The trial and error, building on what is available methods of natural selection does not result in species which are optimal for the environment they find themselves in but just good enough to survive in large enough numbers. Every species has anatomical features that constitute below-par engineering. Take the human male for example. The urethra travels through the prostate gland. This gland is very prone to infection and, in later years, to enlargement. An enlarged prostate hinders the passage of urine through the urethra. What designer would place a collapsible tube carrying a liquid under pressure through a region that renders it liable to constriction and blockage? It would be far more efficient to shift the urethra just a few millimetres and have it travel around the prostate. The same argument could be pitched at the genetic bases for Alzheimer's disease, or schizophrenia. But of course, natural selection does not, has no way of caring. This observation, that God and natural selection have show similarities, both operating in an environment of their own creation that is replete with evil and suffering, was made over a century ago. For example, in what was then an influential paper, ‘Eugenics and the Church’ published in ‘The Eugenics Review’ in 1909, the Anglican priest Rev. J.H.F. Piele, a firm believer in theistic evolution, nevertheless described natural selection as:

“crude and wasteful, carried out at the cost of an amount of suffering which neither our instinct nor our reason will tolerate if we can prevent it.”

To the believer in theistic evolution God surely bears just as much responsibility for the enormity of suffering caused by natural selection as he does for the enormity of suffering caused by natural disasters and disease. Leaving design and evolutionary shortcomings aside, and returning to the notion that God will not act to prevent evil in the world so as to preserve our free-will, we can see that this is an inconsistent stance within the Christian tradition.

Our actions are distinct from our thoughts or intentions. Sometimes even in complete opposition. If a persons actions are impeded in some way, it does not necessarily follow that their free-will to act has been compromised. Thus, God could prevent at least some acts of evil (perhaps the most heinous) without interfering with a persons free-will. The intervention needs only to be selective, need not violate any natural laws. God could have, for example, made the nuclear bomb that destroyed Hiroshima on August 6th 1945 malfunction. Then again, perhaps he does intervene. As it was, three days later the bomb intended to destroy the Japanese city of Kokura had to be diverted to Nagasaki because of thick cloud cover over the intended target. Perhaps God preferred Kokura to Nagasaki and had some clouds sweep over the region? When the bomb did detonate over Nagasaki it was 3 km off target, sparing some areas of the city from destruction. Perhaps God gently nudged the bomb as it dropped because he liked those areas of the city more than the others. The point I am making here is that we have no information other than to accept that these goal-altering events were random and natural. So, there is no way we can ever be sure if God intervened or not, by pushing some clouds or nudging a bomb. But even if you cannot accept that God acts in such mysterious ways, surely an omnibenevolent God would at least intervene in cases such as I have discussed in Algeria, i.e., when atrocities occur explicitly in his name? Apparently, no. At the very least, then, the 'free-will defence' is a poor public relations exercise for either the God of the Bible or the Koran.

On the other hand, we are led to believe, within the Christian tradition, that God readily interferes with human decisions, by blatantly disregarding a persons free-will, whenever he sees fit. A prime example of this is his instructing Mary to bear Jesus without having had any prior discussion with her. Or allowing Jonah to be swallowed by a whale, or when "The Lord hardened the heart of Pharoah" (Exodus 14:8). If God can 'harden' the hearts of Pharoahs cannot he also 'soften' the hearts of evildoers?

Perhaps God acts more as a team manager and is disinclined to operate at the individual level. The 'free-will defence' certainly seems to suggest that God has designed with the group (or species) in mind, with relatively little care and attention paid to individual members. The centrality of free-will as an explanation for evil is meaningless unless free-will is shared out equally among all people. However, not everyone has the same ability to exercise free will. Some people have inherently low IQs, or poor reasoning skills due to specific physiological conditions, for example. It is obvious that a subsistence farmer in sub-Saharan Africa, whose crops have failed and whose land is being stolen by a rebel army, has much less opportunity to exercise free-will than a high-salaried executive director in a developed nation. The lives of some human beings are far more likely to be subject to the free-will of others than to exercise free-will themselves. Natural disasters alone act to diminish an individuals opportunities to exercise free-will. Thus,iIf a person was suffering evil, here, now, in reality, I wonder what value they would realistically place on their possessing free-will compared to the cessation of their suffering? Wouldn't a benevolent God happily remove their free-will if they offered to willingly surrender it in return for a life without suffering?

In any case, our free-will is demonstrably not as robust as Plantinga's argument assumes. It is attenuated at all times. To truly have free-will a person would need to be aware of all the factors that have in the past, or are currently, or could potentially, determine their thoughts and actions. In other words, any free-will we might exhibit will always be a mere portion of the magnitude of free-will theoretically available to us were we ourselves omniscient. Following from this, if our free-will is necessarily attenuated due to an impoverishment of inputs, how can our actions be judged in any fair way? In legal settings, juries and judges have no qualms in convicting offenders with only a perfunctory nod to the possibility that the ultimate cause of their behaviour may lie outside the offender. The balance between understanding why an evil act has taken place and the need to prevent further such acts is a seemingly intractable problem. We are in no doubt, however, that we should place a positive moral value on an offenders God-given freedom to commit acts of evil. In contrast to us fallible humans, however, God is supposed to be omniscient. Thus the concept of the eternal punishment of an immortal soul, for the sins of a material person exercising their free-will is both illogical and cruel. A person's soul is claimed by theists to exist wholly independently of all material influences including physiology and environment. Yet at least some of our behavioural proclivities can be demonstrated to come from our genes and evolutionary heritage. As the philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris notes, criminal action can be due to:

"bad genes, bad parents, bad ideas and bad luck......[each of us] could have been dealt a different hand in life......it seems immoral not to recognise just how much luck is involved in morality itself."

And even if a fully-fledged free-will was made available to us by God, would we really have the complete freedom to decide what is evil and what is not and to, for example, demonstrate to a supposedly omnipotent and omniscient God that he is or has been mistaken? If not, then can we really claim that we possess free-will? According to Genesis 2-3 Adam had free-will. Yet, when he and Eve chose to exercise their free-will in a manner displeasing to God it is noticeable that there were no natural consequences. Instead, the only consequences were those of a spiteful and vengeful omnipotent being. Sam Harris states the case succinctly, "A puppet is free so long as he loves his strings".

'Dark Night Of The Soul' © Gary Hill 2008

Furthermore, traditional theological notions of free-will are simply not standing up to recent findings in the field of neuroscience. Experimental evidence shows that specific patterns of neural firing, the so-called 'readiness potential' reliably occurs before an individual becomes conscious of their decisions. This suggests that we do not truly initiate our intentions to act, though we are sometimes able to inhibit neural activity once it has already commenced. It appears, then, that our perception of having free-will and its role in human choice, requires a radical reconceptualisation with serious consequences for traditional theological and philosophical arguments surrounding morality. As a result, the term 'illusory free-will' is becoming commonplace in the scientific literature.

Another physiologically based argument against the theological importance of free-will to humans can be made with reference to the fact that we are simply unable to exercise any free-will whatsoever for about a third of our lives, being unable to function for more than a few days without the unconsciousness of sleep. It would appear that God not only favours free-will over the absence of evil when he is restricted by logic, but that he further favours a need for sleep over the presence of free-will even when logic does not constrain him. In an apparent prophetic rebuttal to Plantinga's 'free-will defence, however, Augustine pointed out that nocturnal erections and emissions are evidence of evil in the world and a sin against God precisely because they occur in the absence of free-will.

For all their theological reliance on the importance of free-will, however, Christians appear to be masters of selective reasoning. If a plane crashes with a total loss of life, for example, natural explanations such as inclement weather or pilot error are readily and quite reasonably accepted. Nowhere in Christendom will you find the opinion that God must have taken his eye off the ball or simply couldn't bother himself to intervene on that day at that time. However it only takes a single survivor of the crash (especially a child) and that event is readily recruited as evidence of God having been alert to the situation and intervening due, obviously, to his inherent goodness toward us. This built-in 'cognitive dissonance', to which we are all susceptible in one form or another, surely interferes with our ability to exercise free-will in matters Godly. It is no less than an acquired cognitive bias toward a deity we feel has some control over us. Why then, would God give us the psychological attribute of free-will, then hamper it with the inclusion of another psychological attribute which adversely affects it?

We surely cannot escape the possibility that the 'problem of evil' points just as feasibly to a evil, psychopathological God, i.e., he may be omnipotent but he has no particular desire to be omnibenevolent. Or perhaps has a need to create evil. To a very large extent, whatever notions can be proposed as a solution to the 'problem of evil' can be reversed to offer a rationale for an evil God. . Goodness and beauty may be tolerated by such a God to provide us with contrast, things which we desire but never fully attain as we grow older and become diseased. The lavish and comfortable lifestyles of the minority likewise. We may have free-will because an omniscient, malevolent God knew fine well what the result would be on our tiny speck of dust in an ordinary solar system in an inconsequential galaxy amongst a hundred billion others. We might even be his entertainment.

Certainly the hands-off approach we might attribute to God has no analogue in normal human morality. People incapable of showing any empathy are, of course, considered to be sociopaths. It is worth mentioning also that the 'problem of evil' is one that seems peculiar to a monotheistic view of God. In polytheistic religions the gods tend to be variable in terms of their attitude to mortals. Some gods may be good, others evil and even others comical. Thus the seeming logical incompatibility between the various characteristics of and demands made of God could equally be explained by multiple, uncooperative gods each of which has sovereignty over different elements of the universe. A single omnimalevolent God would appear to the more parsimonious conclusion, however.

Judaic monotheism is believed by some scholars to have developed for essentially political reasons (in the broadest sense of the term; unlike the ancient Greeks who developed the notion of polytheism on the basis of purely philosophical musings), that is, to encourage adherence to the authority of the Israelite tribes, the notion being that a single god, Yahweh, cared for that tribal group exclusively and to deny this would incur his wrath. This monotheistic authority was underlined by the listing of the Hebrews of specific elements in the six days of creation, all of which represented gods of neighbouring polytheistic cultures. On day one the gods of darkness and light are dispelled ("And the evening and the morning where the first day" according to Genesis 1:5; note that the Hebrews have adopted an astronomical custom from the Babylonians, i.e., measuring each new day starting from sunset, rather than sunrise; note also the scientific inaccuracy that light was created before the sun), on day two, those of sky and sea. Day three sees the gods of earth and plants removed, while on day four the gods of the sun, moon and stars are dealt with (note again the obvious scientific inaccuracy of creating plant life before the sun was formed - it was commonplace in Bronze and Iron Age societies to not include plants under the rubric of living things - note as well the conceptual inaccuracy of days, mornings and evenings existing before the sun was formed). The gods of the animals are dispatched on day five and, of course, on day six a human being is created in the image of the one God. Similarly, the first commandment given to Moses, supposedly by Yahweh, is to have no other gods. Remnants of polytheism can be found in other parts of the Bible, most notably in Psalm 82 where Yahweh holds council with the other gods, letting them know that they are subordinate to him, "he gives judgement among the gods.........you are gods".

The irony for the monotheist is that if a caring God is perceived as either performing evil acts or allowing such acts to exist, no matter how extenuating the circumstances, they are left with two choices (i) either we are wrong to consider natural disasters and disease to be evil in the same way as the immoral acts of humans can be or (ii) they can decide that God is not omnipotent and does not have the power to control the laws of nature that we know to be responsible for natural disasters. Any reasonable person would surely consider the former choice to be immoral. If it were not so why would we even bother to prevent and ameliorate the effects of natural disasters? We do so because there is a universal recognition and appreciation that natural disasters and disease bring evil into our lives. However, the latter choice will always be unpalatable to theists. This is despite the fact that our own moral intuition tells us that the less limited in action an agent is, the fewer justifications we should allow them to able to use to excuse their causing, or allowing suffering to occur. Any abdication of control, which is what the 'free-will defence' suggests is, in effect, a simultaneous abdication of responsibility on the part of God.

Theists therefore face a continual dilemma if they are to preserve belief in both an omnipotent and an omnibenevolent God. Accordingly, some Christian and Islamic theologians have attempted to redefine acts of evil performed by humans as justified, according to the notion of divine 'permission'. Any act perceived to be performed on God's instruction, or to otherwise enjoy God's favour, regardless of the effect it has on people, cannot be considered evil. In the case of the Algerian GIA, for example, many Islamic theologians would not define their actions as evil at all but in accordance with the will of Allah. As they do in the case of Sharia law.

There are certainly similarities in the Christian tradition. Their reasoning is based on the historical permission given by God to act in genocidal ways: In the Judaic and Christian traditions this is evidenced by, for example, the God of the Old Testament instructing the Israelites to commit genocide:

"Thus says the Lord of hosts........Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.’” (1 Samuel 15:1-3)

Bear in mind that Samuel is presented in the Old Testament as being an ideal prophet in the same league as Moses. If any of the Bible should be accepted as literal truth it is surely this passage, a point made by any number of evangelical Christians including the Rev. John Allister, curate at Macclesfield, England who reasons like a true despot:

"......of course it is true that God can command what he wants. And of course it is true that we all deserve the same fate as the Amalekites because of our sin".

In Deuteronomy 20: 16-18 God similarly commanded the Israelites not to "leave alive anything that breathes… completely destroy them"." In Joshua 6:21 we find God saying to Joshua, "Now I am delivering Jericho and its king into your hands", allowing the Jewish soldiers to massacre everything in the town: "men and women, young and old, even the oxen and sheep and donkeys". A little later in Joshua 8:2 God reiterates his bloodlust "You are to do with Ai and its king as you did with Jericho", which results in "the number of those who fell that day, men and women together, was twelve thousand, all people of Ai ... All to a man had fallen by the edge of the sword", according to Joshua 8:24-25.

The common reason given for God having given such commands is that the victims were wicked and sinful people (including apparently, babies, infants and children). This argument can be reasonably challenged in any number of ways, however. One might ask why, for example, an omniscient God would wait several centuries until the behaviour of a particular group of humans became so bad they had to be massacred en masse. Why not mitigate the act by sending a little natural disaster earlier when there were comparatively fewer? One might also suspect that the reputation of the victims would not stand up to rigorous scrutiny. History is, after all, written by the victors.

So noted Christian apologist William Lane Craig is not alone when he says he has no qualms at all about God commanding this sort of behaviour. His opinion that "God has the moral right to issue such commands.....He wronged no one in doing so" would be in accordance, though obviously not communion, with the convoluted theological logic that informs the Islamic Jihad. Although more liberal Christian theologians are reluctant to go as far as the likes of Allister and Craig, genocide-excusers are in plentiful enough company within the monotheistic traditions. There is no shortage of theologians who claim, for example, that the Holocaust was a necessary part of God's divine plan (or even worse, claim that God was as much a victim as the prisoners themselves: "People sometimes ask me where was God in Auschwitz? I believe that was there Himself, violated and blasphemed", as Rabbi Hugo Gryn writes in his autobiography).

Views such as Allister and Craig's seems to me to be a particularly dangerous path to take. One of the principal criticisms of atheism made by Christian apologists, one constantly championed by Craig, is that atheists have no compass by which to guide their moral views. Yet here are Christians admitting, in effect, that they too have no objective standard for evil other than whatever they perceive as God deciding at some time and place. God has the capability to kill (obviously) yet humans are commanded by God not to kill. But what of those acting as his proxies? Believers have a duty to accept, support and even deliver any act of evil if it can be justified by their faith in the moral authority of God for he "can command what he wants" simply because "has the moral right to issue such commands." In other words, evil can be morally justifiable, and Christians are forever unable to take a firm, absolute and uncompromising stand against it.

Is it really the Christian way to forever place edict before empathy? If it is, then a finer example of moral relativism I have yet to encounter. Doesn't all genocide result from people submitting to a charismatic higher authority that requires them to set aside their moral values and empathy. Surely, if your theology is telling you that you need to find excuses for genocide you are barking up the wrong moral tree. It is particularly interesting to compare the reactions of Christians and neo-Nazis to the evil perpetrated in their name. Neo-Nazis tend toward a denial of evil, or at least of the magnitude of evil perpetrated on victims, most obviously in holocaust denial. Christian apologists, however, tend to argue the opposite; not only that evil is justified but it is something to be celebrated as a part of God's will. One could argue from this that it is the neo-Nazis who are showing the greater degree of guilt and regret.

Apparently a whole sense of morality as well as the theological leg work done to address the 'problem of evil' can all be swept aside by theologians when it suits. A perceived lack of relativity in the magnitudes of evil (when labelled as sins) emanating from some Christian and Islamic perspectives is a further concern. In this view all sins are equal before God. There is simply no difference between the acts of murdering someone and committing adultery, for example. But such absolutism is surely a form of evil in itself. What of an individual who as the result of the atrocities perpetrated on her by others acting on their free-will, commits the sin of suicide to escape their suffering? Are they really equally sinful?

III. The Deeper Problem Of The Underlying Assumption

Some 'sophisticated' Christian apologists have been known to take one step further than attempting a theodicy, however. They simply maintain that they have no obligation to respond to the challenge that theism faces due to the 'problem of evil'. Their reasoning is that because their belief in God is founded on the 'sensus divinatatus' (or sensus deitatus), the knowledge of God each person is claimed to possess, there is simply no case to answer. God will have his reasons. William Lane Craig maintains that God obviously has his reasons for allowing evil to exist, but these reasons necessarily remain a mystery most of the time. The 'sensus divinatatus' can be recruited to defend any aspect of faith that is questioned. This is essentially Plantinga's fall back when confronted with the lack of evidence for the existence of God:

"Belief in God is seldom accepted on the basis of the teleological argument, or indeed any argument or propositional evidence at all."

As well as his fall-back position when dealing with evidence that the Gospels might not be as historically accurate as many Christian apologists might claim. Although he agrees that the evidence for their historical veracity is weak, he nevertheless claims that he can be sure of their truth because he has received such knowledge from the 'sensus divinitatus'. As he says:

"Suppose Christian and theistic belief has a good deal of warrant for me by way of faith.....then the fact that theism is evidentially challenged doesn't give me a defeater and doesn't bring it about that my theistic belief is irrational."

Recognising that one lacks sufficient evidence for the existence of God is, of course, the raison d'être of having faith in the first place. Any theist claiming to have sufficient evidence for the existence of God would have no need to invoke faith. Why add such an unnecessary and poorly defined variable? Relying on phenomenological states of mind to convince others of your belief surely negates the purpose of apologetics. Furthermore, there are demonstrable cases where having faith that God exists can produce evil in it's own right. Consider, for example, parents who pray for a sick child to be healed instead of seeking medical attention.

Although Plantinga considers the 'sensus divinitatus' to be an inherent component within the human psyche he does posit the notion that, for some people, this sense has malfunctioned due to sin. Outside of religious belief, of course, we are not so naïve as to so easily interpret our perceptions as emanating from or pointing toward a supernatural source. Rather, we normally attempt to interpret our perceptions and experiences through a combination of our accumulated knowledge of the workings of the natural world anchored in our ability to think rationally. This is not to deny that people have experiences that can be labelled 'spiritual'. The fact that the 'sensus divinitatus', or religious experience of any kind for that matter, differs so profoundly from religion to religion and even from person to person within the same religion, however, suggests that it is no more than a culturally mediated subjective interpretation of some physiological state of the brain (this argument is no better represented than by two of the top-selling books on the New York Times paperback bestseller list for 2012. One was written by a neurosurgeon who also happens to be a born-again Christian while the other was dictated by a 4-year old boy. Both had 'died' and gone to Heaven only to be brought back to life. Not surprisingly, their purported experiences of the afterlife have very little in common and many of their claims are outright contradictory).

Nevertheless, for those who do put stock in the supernatural basis for such things, the philosophical consequences are profound. Adherents to this way of thinking are effectively denying that evidence could ever call into question the basis for their theism. Their belief in God simply immunises them against any further philosophical inquiry. For the rest of us it is surely not credible to dismiss every challenge to faith by playing the 'mystery card'; merely invoking the notion that you know you are right because it has been revealed to you by God that you are right. It is as if some ideas are considered so sacred (a "belief in belief" as philosopher Daniel Dennett puts it) that critical thought must be continually sacrificed on the altar of faith.

Islamic (and a minority Christian) theology takes a slightly different approach to Christianity's attempt to circle their wagons around God, most notably in the Ash 'arite philosophy of 'occasionalism'. This simply states that, when it comes to God, concepts such as necessity, logic or explanation break down. God's will is absolute. It is completely free and cannot be bound up in reason. I am wasting my time thinking on these things. Swinburne, writing in his paper 'The Justification of Theism' (2004), agrees almost entirely with the Islamic formulation except for one important point:

"He is a person of infinite power, knowledge and freedom; a person to whose power, knowledge and freedom there are no limits except those of logic."

So whereas Christian theologians generally accept that God's omnipotence must be subject to the constraints of logic (e.g., God could not create a being that was simultaneously alive and dead) the Ash 'arite view deny even this. As such we humans have no intellectual basis (or any lawful right) to even be considering the 'problem of evil'.

Taking all this into account, the primary problem for all attempts at theodicy is, as I see it, less the 'problem of evil' itself and more the underlying ubiquity of assumption. As the physicist Sean Carroll puts it:

"It is certainly conceivable that the ultimate explanation is to be found in God; but a compelling argument to that effect would consist of a demonstration that God provides a better explanation (for whatever reason) than a purely materialist picture, not an a-priori insistence that a purely materialist picture is unsatisfying"

In other words, don't presuppose. All theologians such as Plantinga are really doing is discussing the characteristics of Bertrand Russell's unfairly-maligned teapot. Is the teapot white or blue? Is it made of porcelain or metal? Is it's surface smooth or crinkled? They then offer logical defences for why a blue, porcelain and crinkled teapot is not only possible but can be a perfectly moral teapot too. But Plantinga's style of theology goes one step further not only by their endless discussion but by anthropomorphising the teapot as a being like us who prefers one thing over another and feels emotions just like we do. The pro-science Catholic theologian John Haught expresses this style of reasoning particularly well in his book 'Deeper Than Darwin', published in 2003:

"Nature's contingencies and evolution's randomness are not indicative of divine impotence. God could have done something about it but he didn't want to because he's caring and self-effacing enough to wait for the genuine emergence of what is truly other than God, with all the risk, tragedy and adventure this patience entails".

In one deft sentence Haught informs us that God is omnipotent but nevertheless has a psychological make-up that is identifiably human: he's caring, self-effacing and patient and apparently is currently enjoying himself watching a 13.7 billion year old adventure movie. We might even be his entertainment. And furthermore Haught even tells us why God has chosen to behave like this. But really, what is the source of this information? Swinburne too, is heavy on the anthropomorphic view, constantly referring to God as 'a person' before going on to list his personal attributes. This is not critical thinking. This is not 'sophisticated' theology. This is conjecture. Yet no matter which way you try to argue it, theodicy really only works with a monotheistic God like Haught's, for the simple reason that theodicy is no more than a futile attempt to answer for the evil that their anthropomorphic God has allowed to take place.

That some type of God exists, though, is the presupposition of nearly all theologians. Suitably defined according to the nature of the argument presented or defended, of course. Many theologians are astute enough nowadays not to define God in terms which are overly specific in any psychological sense and consequently there has been a marked shift in the literature of recent decades toward an 'apophatic' theology that deliberately under-characterises and offers an esoteric style of God using vaguely physics-like terms such as Paul Tillich's "the ground of all being", "being itself" or statistical synonyms such as "the sum of all possibilities". But if God is accurately defined as the "ground of all being" why not stop calling him God and call him just that? Why use language so elusive that it is effectively able to describe no more than an individual personal experience? Perhaps it's because:

"If God is a synonym for the deepest principles of physics, what word is left for a hypothetical being who answers prayers, intervenes to save cancer patients or help evolution over difficult jumps, forgives sins or dies for them?"

As Richard Dawkins observes. Similarly, why bother calling him God when you have de-specified the entity from all possible comprehension, as the ninth-century Irish theologian Johannes Scotus Eriugena did:

"We do not know what God is. God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not, because He transcends being."

Thus because God is not anything he can be whatever we want, or not, because although omnipotent, he does not even know what he is himself. You couldn't make this stuff up. Swinburne tries his best though. His formulation is similarly enigmatic:

"The hypothesis that there is a God is the hypothesis of the existence of the simplest kind of person which there could be.....[he] can only do what is best to do (or do one among many equal best actions. Insofar as an agent believes that some action is the best action (that is, what there is most reason to do) he will do it.....we can see that it is a good thing that God should make a universe containing men....."

This is simply more groundless assumption. What possible evidence is there that a phenomenon as complex as the known universe had to be created, ex-nihilo, by the simplest kind of entity possible? And are we really supposed to accept Swinburne's postulation that God is the simplest entity possible yet is comprised of three parts? Seriously, is philosophical argument and reasoning ever going to be able to distinguish a Monod from a Trinity? No reasoning is given as to why it is a good and reasonable thing that God chose to make a universe containing men. Why is it a good and reasonable thing that God did anything? After all, he seems to have spent an eternity doing nothing perfectly well before deciding to create a universe. And he somehow made that decision atemporally too. Was the idea of creating a universe somehow unreasonable before that? How so, pray? If God can only do what is best to do, wouldn't it have been better for everyone concerned not to have created a universe in the first place, if only to prevent evil from occurring? No wonder it has been labelled presuppositionalism.

In 3000 or so years, the concept of a monotheistic God seems to have evolved from an Old Testament megalomaniac present in everyday lives of his children to an all-purpose ad-hoc supernatural entity, defined solely in terms of itself on a continuum from nothing to a trinity; purely a 'no-thing' for one philosophical purpose, to a 'some-thing' defined by his uncannily human-like personality attributes for another philosophical purpose, and even more conveniently allowed to exist anywhere in between including, according to 'process theology', constantly changing over time. As it suits. That is, so long as he is placed nicely out of reach of naturalistic methodology for, in Dietrich Bonhoffer's telling words, "A God who lets us prove his existence would be an idol". John Allen Paulos summarises the versatile logic of Christian apologetics particularly well:

God is really this, that or the other thing
The existence of this, that or the other thing is somewhat plausible, if not obvious
Therefore God exists

One need not be a cynic to consider that a God whose definitions are endlessly malleable, constantly shifting, even mutually contradictory, and sometimes even deliberately portrayed as incomprehensible, is a God purposely intended to be difficult to argue against. We should be thankful indeed that science takes rather more care when defining entities such as viruses and bacteria. Nevertheless, if you are prepared to argue that the existence of evil does nothing to make you doubt your presupposition of the existence of God, whatever your definition, then might the contrary position not hold? Imagine, if you can, a world devoid of evil; everyone is perfectly kind and considerate, virtue is always rewarded and human suffering caused by natural phenomena is unknown. In effect, Heaven, or Paradise on earth. Would such a state then provide evidence against your presupposition that an omnipotent God exists? Why not?

Next, consider the possibility of an omnipotent God whose cruelty and malice knows no bounds. If he exists how come we have the ability to laugh and love and ease the suffering of others? Isn't the notion of such a God necessarily falsified by the fact there is so much good in the universe? If you cannot accept that the good in the world points to an omnimalevolent God, on what grounds do you accept that the evil in the world points to an omnibenevolent God? It seems that theism is caught in a logical bind. An omnibenevolent God leaves us with the 'problem of evil' to deal with while an omnimalevolent God generates the 'problem of good'. When it comes to the 'problem of evil' there seems to be no way out for the theist. If an omnipotent God does exist then he is a God that countenances evil. Why he might do so is another question but he does appear to have many reasons at his disposal. There is no way out for the theist. Epicurus still stands.

The question remains as to why so many of us appear unable to grasp the concept that our failure to identify morally sufficient reasons for why a God would allow evil to occur might be best explained by the absence of God? How come the centuries old effort to reconcile any of the internal contradictions inherent in a belief in God rarely signals the possibility that the notion itself might be fundamentally incoherent? As John Allen Paulos puts it:

"Is there such a shortage of things we don't understand that we need to manufacture another?"

Theology serves no-one with it's continued efforts to conjure up pious certainty; via special pleading, personal revelations, logical word-plays, theological just-so stories and culture-ridden faith values that might well have result in God offending no-one but does frustratingly little to prevent the people in my photographs from being massacred.

Allāhu Akbar? Yeah. Sure.

Camel Herders At Lunch © Gary Hill 1992

An Honest Look At Flood Mythology Leaves Biblical Literalists All At Sea

2012-10-19T00:36:00.000+01:00

'Edges Of Vast Space' © Gary Hill 2006

In previous essays I have discussed the misleading and dishonest claims and highly simplistic analyses made by fundamentalist Christians and young earth creationists. See, for example, the erroneous use of mathematics in ‘The Generation Game: No Prizes For Young Earther's’; the outright fabrication of a supposedly historical event in ‘The St. Fagans Pterodactyl: Lies, Damned Lies And Christian Fundamentalism’; the blatant and comical misrepresentation of a whole body of scientific knowledge in ‘The Missing Universe Museum: The Monty Python School Of Evolution’; and the deliberate distortion of original texts in ‘Fundamental Flaws In The Myth Of Darwin & Hitler’. Similar attempts at misinformation can be found in the evidence young earth creationists and Biblical literalists in general present for the historicity of the story of Noah’s Ark.

The Noah myth will be familiar, I’m sure, to the majority of people brought up in countries influenced by any of the three Abrahamic religions, but for those who aren’t here is a brief synopsis, taken from Genesis 6:1-9:17 in the Old Testament:

God is dissatisfied with human beings because they have become sinful and offended him (women were even copulating with fallen angels!). He therefore decides, as any loving parent would, that mass genocide of all human beings is the answer. One man, Noah, is considered by God to be leading a relatively clean and sinless life and so God decides to spare him and his immediate family. God informs Noah of his plans and commands him to build a boat, the ‘ark’, large enough to carry eight humans (Noah and his wife and his three sons and their wives) and seven of every kind of ‘clean’ animal on Earth and two of every ‘unclean’ animal (cleanliness being defined according to preordained dietary rules). Taking a hundred years to do so, Noah builds the ark and boards the animals. When he has finished, God himself closes the door. It rains for 40 days and 40 nights and for 150 days water covers the entire planet, submerging even the highest mountains. The ark eventually settles on Mount Ararat. According to James Ussher, the Anglican Archbishop of Armagh in 1654 and the first person to calculate the age of the Earth using Biblical dating, the ark landed there on Wednesday May 5, 2349 BC. The accuracy of his dating remains suspect; he also calculated that the world would end on October 23rd 1997. All told, Noah and his entourage remain in the ark for just over a year and he releases birds in an effort to ascertain whether dry land exists. Eventually a dove flies back with an olive branch. They all disembark and repopulate the Earth.

All humans currently living are therefore claimed to be descendants of Noah and his family. In one particularly strict literal Christian view, the different races resulted from the descendants of Noah's sons. According to the 'grandfather of creation science' Henry Morris, writing in 'The Genesis Record: A Scientific And Devotional Record Commentary On The Book Of Beginnings' (1978) the descendants of Japheth became the white Aryan race which eventually settled in Europe. The descendants of Shem settled to the north of the Persian Gulf and westward into toward the Indian Ocean, eventually becoming the Jewish and oriental peoples and the descendants of the son cursed by God, Ham (who saw his drunken father naked, and told Shem and Japheth about it), moved south west into North Africa and then southward into the rest of the continent, becoming the African peoples. The origin of people unknown to the ancient Hebrews, such as the Australian aborigines or the South American Indians is, of course, not mentioned in Genesis.

The story of the curse put upon Ham, his son Canaan and their descendants played a pivotal role in Christian objections to the abolition of slavery during the 19th century. The descendants of Ham were considered by some Biblical literalists to be have been divinely selected as slaves to the 'higher' races:

"Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers". (Genesis 9:25).

One book on the subject by the Presbyterian minister Josiah Priest, 'Bible Defence Of Slavery: On The Origin, History And Fortunes Of The Negro Race’, proved so popular it was reprinted eight times in the first five years after it's publication in 1843. Another highly influential work taking a literal Biblical view, as well as a pseudoscientific approach, was ‘Essai Sur l’inégalité des Races Humaines’ or ‘Inequality of the Human Races’ by Arthur de Gobineau, first published in French in 1853. The following passage from de Gobineau succinctly demonstrates the extreme nature of the wholly unscientific views a literal interpretation of the Bible has taken us:

".......there is nothing to show that, in the view of the first compilers of the Adamite genealogies, those outside the white race were counted as part of the species at all”.

It surprises many Christians today to learn that ideas such as these were considered mainstream, particularly by some Protestant sects, in the years before Darwin’s findings suggested that all humans, regardless of their ‘race’, have a common evolutionary origin. It may also surprise some Christians today also that these ideas are still taught as part of the curriculum in some Christian schools in the USA.

Despite these fanciful claims from fundamentalist Christian groups there is no evidence outside the literary sphere that Noah ever existed and I can’t even begin to list the multitude of logical, historical and scientific errors inherent in his story. Indeed, I have never had a conversation with anyone who believes the Noah story to be literally true, without them having to resort, eventually, to supernatural explanatory mechanisms. It is interesting to note that current Christian fundamentalist trends to Biblical literacy were not necessarily shared by the descendants of the people who wrote the Genesis story. For example, the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BC - 50 AD) consistently argued against a literal view while the noted Jewish rabbi and philosopher Moses Maimonides (1135-1204) stated that Genesis need not be taken literally if the text clashed with newly acquired knowledge.

Nevertheless, using the Bible’s own historical narrative as a referent, we are able to place the flood to about 1,300 years before Solomon built the first temple. Archaeological sources have dated this event to approximately 950 BC (at about the time the stories in Genesis are thought to have been first written down, though some authors date them as late as 540 BC). This suggests that the alleged worldwide flood occurred at around 2250 BC, a date roughly in keeping with most young Earth creationist literature. Henry Morris, writing again in 1974, used the year 2026 BC to calculate that the present population of the world could have been achieved in 4000 years starting with a mere eight people (see ‘The Generation Game: No Prizes For Young Earthers’ for discussion of why his figures just don’t add up). Certainly the majority of Biblical literalists accept a date somewhere in the region of 2200-2400 BC.

This date range places the Noah myth firmly within the Bronze Age, which commenced around 3500-3000 BC, probably in the Middle East, and lasted until approximately 1200 BC when some human societies entered the Iron Age. The Bronze Age coincides with another milestone in human achievement, that of the development of writing and the subsequent keeping of both historical and mundane written records. Postulating such a relatively recent date for a worldwide flood therefore proves highly problematical for young earth creationists. Although archaeological evidence has shown that the ancient societies of Ur, Kish, Lagash, Shuruppak and Nineveh all experienced flood events, they occurred at different times. Most notably, Israel shows no geological evidence of ever having been flooded. A number of written records from the neighbouring Egyptian ‘Old Kingdom’ which existed from 2800-2175 BC are available to us from this time and none of them make any mention of a flood. Indeed, the Great Pyramid of Cheops was built approximately 2589-2566 BC yet shows no sign of silt deposits or any other evidence of having been immersed in water. The Djoser Step Pyramid at Saqqara, built about 2630 BC, similarly shows no evidence whatsoever of water damage. Further, independently calibrated radiocarbon readings from charcoal extracted from intact bakeries discovered in 1991 near to the Giza pyramids have been dated between 2700-2500 BC. The Egyptologist Peter A. Clayton, writing in ‘Chronicle of the Pharaohs, The Reign-by-Reign Record of the Rulers and Dynasties of Ancient Egypt’ (1994) states:

“The absence of the mention of such a flood in Egyptian records and annals, from the same general Middle-Eastern area where can be found 'the mountains of Ararat,' combined with the archaeological evidence from the Pharaohs' tombs, created before the 2348 BCE flood occurred, reveal that the tale of Noah's flood is a myth.”

There are several other ancient societies with unbroken written records from this time that also make no mention of a flood. Apparently all of these civilisations had failed to notice their complete destruction. For example, the Minoan civilisation based on nearby Crete was highly advanced at this time. They had their own written language, based on an alphabet rather than Egyptian-style hieroglyphics. Their records provide us with no evidence of a flood. Similarly, by 2500 BC the Indus valley civilisation had established two major cities, Mohendaro and Harrapa, both of which rivalled the Egyptians and Minoans in population and technological achievement. They left a comprehensive, unbroken written history dating between 3100-1500 BC. None mention a civilisation-destroying flood. Further east, China’s written historical record can be traced back to about 3000 BC. Between 2400-2200 BC, during the Yaou Dynasty, the ‘Shu King’ text indicates that China was undergoing a particularly prosperous period, something which has been verified by archaeological evidence. Again, although there are a number of references to localised flooding, no mention is made of any cataclysmic flood affecting the whole empire.

It is simply not plausible to argue, as some Biblical literalists have, that these advanced civilisations had actually been destroyed by the flood, but within a relatively short timescale had managed to be repopulated from the descendants of Noah’s family. Did they then just happen to have conveniently recreated some semblance of the same culture, technology and infrastructures as existed before the flood? That is, the same culture in a debilitated state? Some creationists think so. As RL Wysong, a veterinarian and pet-food manufacturer explains in his 1976 book 'The Creation-Evolution Controversy':

"Primitive civilizations are simply wreckages of more highly-developed societies forced through various circumstances to lead a much simpler, less-developed life."

The Koran offers a far more realistic view of the Noah story. Noah (Arabic: Nur) is mentioned throughout the Koran and has a whole chapter devoted to him. The Koran states that the flood was localised to the region occupied by Noah and his tribe. There was no ark of Biblical proportions but only a large flat raft made of logs, tied together with rope, and wide enough only to carry Noah’s family and some of his farm animals. Discussion of this alternative version of the Noah myth is conspicuously absent from most fundamentalist literature. Which is surprising because, as we shall see, young earth creationists are not shy of claiming that flood myths from cultures existing much farther away and whose own flood stories often converge with the Biblical version in only the very flimsiest of ways, are actually disguised histories of the Biblical story of Noah.

There is a mountain of geological evidence disputing a worldwide flood event too, such as evidence from ice-cores extracted in Greenland which have been dated to > 40,000 years. These samples demonstrate no sediment layer, nor are there any changes in salinity and oxygen isotope ratios, fractures from buoyancy and thermal stresses, or a hiatus in trapped air bubbles, all of which would be expected if the Earth had been covered with flowing water at some point within this timeframe. Indeed, the volume and force of water considered by young earth creationists to have gouged out the Grand Canyon would have provided more than enough buoyancy to break up and float the entire Arctic ice cap away. The Greenland ice cap would have been unable to regrow to its present coverage within 4,000 years, even though it has retreated considerably in recent decades due to atmospheric warming.

Undaunted by such strong refutation from diverse sources, young earth creationists soldier on in their belief in a worldwide flood. As the Institute for Creation Research website affirms, “The divine inspiration of the Bible would demand that the Genesis account is the correct version”. Indeed, unlike any scientific society, this organisation not unlike other creationist clubs, requires members to sign a statement of belief (or tenets of creationism) in the inerrancy of the Bible, which must be adhered to regardless of evidence to the contrary. Such a-priori justification seemingly permeates everything published by fundamentalist organisations. One of their key claims, apart from “the Bible must be true because the Bible says it is true”, is that a literal interpretation of the Noah story is warranted because flood myths are ubiquitous and can be found in cultures throughout the world. They point to numerous narrative elements held in common, in particular, a displeased deity, the availability of a warning, the prior construction of a boat, the inclusion of animals as well as humans on the boat, the grounding of the boat on a mountain peak and the release of birds to determine if the water level had subsided. In his 1999 book ‘Tornado in a Junkyard: The Relentless Myth of Darwinism’, creationist author James Perloff claimed the following:

“In 95 percent of the more than two hundred flood legends, the flood was worldwide; in 88 percent, a certain family was favored; in 70 percent, survival was by means of a boat; in 67 percent, animals were also saved; in 66 percent, the flood was due to the wickedness of man; in 66 percent, the survivors had been forewarned; in 57 percent, they ended up on a mountain; in 35 percent, birds were sent out from the boat; and in 9 percent, exactly eight people were spared”

As there are more than 500 widely-divergent myths known to us that portray a flood in some way, in order to achieve such impressive statistics one can only presume that Perloff has been highly selective in the sample he has analysed. Another quote, this time from the website of the Northwest Creation Network:

“Old world missionaries reported their amazement at finding remote tribes already possessing legends with tremendous similarities to the Bible's accounts of the worldwide flood.......... The overwhelming consistency among flood legends found in distant parts of the globe indicates they were derived from the same origin (the Bible's record), but oral transcription has changed the details through time”.

'Hulk No. 1' © Gary Hill

There are real doubts that statements like this are actually true. It is also a disingenuous approach to history in light of Christian fundamentalist belief in Biblical inerrancy. On the one hand we are led to believe that a lack of eyewitness reports for the many incredulous events attributed to Jesus is not a problem. We must assume the accuracy of the Gospel stories. This, despite a plethora of historical and experimental evidence demonstrating the rapid decay of orally transmitted cultural information. Interpersonal communication is necessarily a constructive process derived from inferences made. It is not amenable to high fidelity copying of information. Even the most efficient form of social learning, i.e., imitation, produces considerable variation over time. Biblical literalists sidestep the issue in a less than parsimonious way. They claim that the stories have not been altered by the passage of years between event and author because God has personally guided the hand of the authors. However, tenuous similarities between the story of Noah and flood stories told in diverse cultures are also considered to be infallible evidence for historicity! It appears that young earth creationists are suffering from a particularly chronic case of having ample supplies of cake and eating too much of it.

If the Noah myth is historically true, then none of the authors of any of the flood myths in any other culture have experienced any global flood event themselves (just as none of the authors of the Gospels had actually witnessed any of the alleged events in the life of Jesus). Yet, the importance of having eyewitness testimony to historical events is acknowledged by fundamentalist flood researchers such as Lightner et al., in their paper 'Determining The Ark Kinds' published in the journal Answers Research in 2011:

“........a Christian should recognize that reliable eyewitnesses are invaluable for establishing historical facts".

However, to a Biblical literalist, there can never be such a thing as a lack of eyewitness testimony when it comes to matters Noah because, as Lightner et al. go on to explain:

"Clearly, in the first few chapters of Genesis, we have a historical account of the creation of the world and life on it from the most reliable eyewitness, God himself”.

So, what we are being asked to believe are the alleged experiences of eight people, written in the third person and transmitted across time as high fidelity copies of the original event. Indeed, this is just what is supposed to have happened in the time between between Noah and Moses according to the Institute for Creation Research website:

“The Genesis account was kept pure and accurate throughout the centuries by the providence of God until it was finally compiled, edited, and written down by Moses”.

If this is the case, why hasn’t the “providence of God” acted to preserve the story of Noah during transmission to other cultures? After all, he did it for Moses. The time gap between Moses receiving God's commandments and the first written records of the event are in the order of 300 years, or about fifteen generations of oral transmission, supposedly unaltered in not so much as a word. This is despite the fact that research demonstrates that people not only subtly change storylines from speaker to speaker but often use metaphors, both learned and novel, at a rate of several per minute of speech. For instance, we “save time” and “spend time” as if it were a physical thing such as money and we "walk someone through a problem". Furthermore, even when events are actually experienced by the original narrator, the quality of recall from memory is subject to a number of cognitive and emotional variables. This has been well established by research into eyewitness testimony and the 'Rashomon' effect, in which several people witness the same event yet describe it later in mutually contradictory ways.

The earliest written accounts of the life of Jesus appeared some 40-70 years after the time of his death, again, we are led to believe, the details were transmitted orally and in their entirety for up to three generations and then translated into Greek and Latin, apparently without any deprecation in meaning (note, however, the apparent deliberate harmonisation between authors in several books of the New Testament, including the Gospels, and between Ephesians and Collossians). So if oral transmission is as accurate as Biblical literalists claim, why are there now myriad flood myths involving hundreds of different characters in hundreds of different plots? There simply shouldn't be any other flood myths. Surely what should be most striking to Biblical literalists is not any perceived similarities between diverse flood myths but the fact that there are so many differences.

This art of doublethink has been honed to a fine art by young earth creationists in other ways. For example, Genesis states clearly that Noah was commanded by God to take every kind of land animal onto the ark. Nevertheless, prominent young earth creationists, such as John Whitcombe and Henry Morris, writing in their 1961 book ‘The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications’ appear happy to use the flood to explain the unavoidable fact of the extinction of many land animals. This, despite the very first line of their work boldly stating "the Bible is the infallible Word of God”. Similarly, in John Woodmorappe’s 1996 book ‘Noah's Ark: A Feasibility Study’ he suggests (pages 34-35) that earthworms provided the means for decomposing and handling solid waste on the ark. Then, only twenty-five pages later, in response to arguments put forward a year earlier by Glenn Morton in the book ‘Foundation, Fall and Flood’, he comments “After raising some transparently absurd problems of snails and earthworms (animals not on the Ark) migrating to the Ark, Morton……” Digging himself even deeper, forty pages further into the book he claims that snails provided food for the animals on the ark, directly contradicting a number of young earth creationist websites such as ‘x-evolutionist’ which claims, based on Genesis 1:30 and 9:3 that, “There were no carnivores on the ark. All living things were vegetarian until after the flood”.

On their website Northwest Creation Network have produced a table listing 35 flood myths collected from around the world that they have scored according to their inclusion of six criteria that characterise the Noah myth. They claim that a “number of outstanding similarities are found that leave no doubt these stories are rooted in the same event or oral tradition”. I have chosen this particular collection of myths because the table has been widely reprinted in creationist literature for several years, including for example, CreationWiki, and most recently in Charles L Sanders’ book ‘Did Jesus Believe Genesis?’ published by Holy Fire Press in 2012 (the answer of course is, yes he did). Let’s dissect their data:

The criteria they list are (i) destruction by water; (ii) divine causation; (iii) the giving of a warning; (iv) sparing of human life; (v) sparing of animal life; and (vi) use of a boat/vessel of some type. They report that 35/35 (100%) depict destruction by water, 18/35 (51%) mention divine causation; 17/35 (49%) note the giving of a warning; 35/35 (100%) mention sparing of human life; 24/35 (69%) mention sparing of animal life; and 32/35 (91%) tell of the use of a vessel of some kind.

Straightaway we can see how Northwest Creation Network have simply padded the data to suit conclusions arrived at a-priori. Two of these criteria are wholly redundant and one is highly questionable as a criterion for similarity. First, all original human settlements necessarily occurred near either sea, lake or river, a pattern repeated by European colonists in recent centuries. Thus it is not the flood myths themselves that are supposedly universal, it is a fact that most people who live next to watercourses experience floods at some time and often on a regular basis. This is still happening. For example, in 1931 in China the Yellow River, then the Yangtze and Huai rivers flooded their banks. At least one million people are estimated to have drowned, and a further three million died from disease and famine in the aftermath of the flood. The fatality rate of this localised flood alone would have represented about 20% of the entire world population in 2200BC. Forty-four years earlier a further two million (10% of the world's population in 2200BC) are estimated to have died when the Yellow River breached it's banks.

It is obvious that localised flooding with potentially devastating effects has occurred throughout history. It is surely not surprising that such events would have been recorded in any society’s oral and written history. In the case of Northwest Creation Network's dataset, destruction by water is a given in any major flood event so it’s not surprising that it is reported in 100% of cases. Second, the 100% of myths depicting the sparing of human life also tells us nothing. If all lives were lost then there would be no-one left to tell the tale. It would be absurd for a story to tell how every human without exception died in a flood. Third, the 91% of myths that depict the survivors having used a waterborne vessel is also hardly surprising. Those with access to a boat or raft would have a distinct advantage over those without. In a few tales in the sample, survivors climb onto higher ground or even tree tops – it is disingenuous of creationists to include these narratives as ‘similar’ flood myths – the apparently inerrant Biblical account clearly states this did not happen.

We are left, then, with only three criteria for Biblical similarity; divine causation, the giving of a warning and the sparing of animals. It is surprising that only 51% of the myths tell of a divine causation. In Bronze Age (and less advanced) societies it was commonplace for natural events such as thunder, storms, the rising sun or a successful harvest to be directly attributed to supernatural beings, often via the respectful or disrespectful actions of mortals. They still are today by the woefully ignorant. Witness Pat Robertson’s invidious pontification on Hurricane Katrina. The fact that 4000 years ago catastrophic floods were sometimes deemed to be due to supernatural causation should come as no surprise to anyone. That leaves Northwest Creation Network with two valid criteria out of the original six, one of which (a warning) is found in only half of the cases cited. Evidence of this quality might be considered acceptable for publishers of Christian home schooling textbooks but shouldn’t cut the mustard elsewhere.

Having lived the bulk of my life in two countries, Australia and Wales, I was interested to see that Northwest Creation Network’s sample included both a Welsh and a native Australian flood myth. The Welsh myth they cite describes a lake-dwelling monster named Afanc (or Addanc), who supposedly lived in Llyn Llion (thought to be the modern-day Llyn Tegid, near the town of Bala). Afanc was reputed to be an angry beast and to attack and devour anyone who entered the lake and one day, in a fit of rage, he thrashed around so much that all the water from the lake spilled out and caused a great flood. Everyone in Prydain (the ancient Welsh name for Britain) drowned except Dwyfan and Dwyfach who managed to survive in a mastless boat. They then built a huge ark named ‘Nefyd Naw Neifion’ (‘Work of Neptune’) in which they carried two of every living thing and repopulated Prydain. As told here, this myth appears to meet four of Northwest Creation Network’s six Biblical criteria for a valid flood myth; destruction by water, humans spared, animals spared, and a vessel used for safety.

Or does it? Unfortunately this myth is not all it seems. The Welsh myth was first published in two separate triads (a traditional Welsh literary style in which ideas or related narratives occur in threes) included in the medieval manuscripts collectively known as ‘Trioedd Ynys Prydain’ (‘Triads of the Island of Britain’), which are believed to have been gathered together in the late 13th century. Original copies of the Triads are housed in the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth. They certainly contain an ancient Welsh myth of a dangerous creature called Afanc living in Llyn Llion whose energetic writhing caused a great flood. However, the original story is devoid of two characters called Dwyfan and Dwyfach, and an ark. The version promoted by creationists was found in a cottage owned by the Welsh stonemason and antiquarian Iolo Morganwg, following his death in 1826. Although certainly considered an expert in Welsh mythology, Morganwg also had a reputation for forging large numbers of manuscripts. Written in his own hand, Morganwg’s Welsh flood myth comprised part of an attempted modern ‘reworking’ of ‘Trioedd Ynys Prydain’ which remained unfinished. It is difficult to believe that young earth creationists have not become aware of this fact. They are showing blatant dishonesty by including this story.

The Australian myth cited by is that of the Kurnai (or Gunai) people who occupied most of the region known as Gippsland in the present day state of Victoria and much of the southern slopes of the Victorian Alps. Gippsland borders the sea to the south and the Victorian Alps to the north, which can experience considerable snowfall in the winter months. This always melts entirely in spring. So it is not surprising that floods were experienced by these people. Northwest Creation Network claim that the Kurnai myth meets four of their six Biblical criteria; destruction by water; sparing of human life; sparing of animal life; and use of a boat/vessel of some type. Here is the myth as reported in L. H. Gray and G. F. Moore (Eds.), The Mythology of All Races (13 volumes., 1916–33):

“....all the country was under water, and all the black iciona(?). People were drowned except a man and two or three women, who took refuge in a mud island near Port Albert. The water was all round them. Just then the pelican, or Bunjil Borun, as the Kurnai call the bird, came sailing by in his canoe, and seeing the distress of the poor people he went to help them. One of the women was so beautiful that he fell in love with her. When she would have stepped into the canoe, he said, “Not now, next time”; so that after he had ferried all the rest, one by one, across to the mainland, she was left to the last. Afraid of being alone with the ferry- man, she did not wait his return on his last trip, but swam ashore and escaped. However, before quitting the island, she dressed up a log in her opossum rug and laid it beside the fire, so that it looked just like herself. When the pelican arrived to ferry her over, he called, " Come on, now." The black and log made no reply, so the pelican flew into a passion, and he kicked it, which only hurt his foot and made him angrier. He began to paint himself white so that he might fight the woman's husband. Another pelican came up when he was halfway through with these preparations, but not knowing what to make of the strange half black and half white creature, pecked him and killed him. That is why pelicans are now black and white”.

Does this myth really show an uncanny similarity to the Biblical account of Noah? I think not, unless your threshold for evidence is ludicrously low. The similarities appear more accidental than related. The last line is the key to the meaning of the story. This stylistic method of storytelling, using a short final sentence to reiterate the reason for telling the story, is commonly used in both the oral and written versions of Australian aboriginal myths.

While we are in Australia I thought it might be informative to examine another aboriginal myth, a story from Western Australia telling of the ‘Ark Gumana’. This myth is cited by the Answers in Genesis website (and retold extensively throughout young earth creationist literature) as a prime example of a myth whose content coincides to a high degree with that of the story of Noah. The story comes from the normally arid Noonkanbah region which is nevertheless subject to occasional extensive flooding resulting from heavy seasonal rain which sometimes causes the Fitzroy River to burst it’s banks. Two especially devastating flood events occurred in 1949 and 1954, with the intervening years characterised by a severe drought. The ‘West Australian’ newspaper reported in 1954 that the swollen river caused some local roads to be covered by three metres of water and 400 sheep were drowned on one property alone. The story, as told by Answers In Genesis, goes like this:

“During the Dreamtime flood, woramba, the Ark Gumana carrying Noah, Aborigines, and animals, drifted south and came to rest in the flood plain of Djilinbadu (about 70 km south of Noonkanbah Station, just south of the Barbwire Range and east of the Worral Range), where it can still be seen today. The white man's claim that it landed in the Middle East was a lie to keep Aborigines in subservience”.

Answers in Genesis are ecstatic at such a find proclaiming:

“That story mentions both the Ark and Noah. Aren’t those similarities unlikely to be merely coincidence? Indeed it is not a coincidence!”.

Answers In Genesis are being somewhat extravagant and premature in the value they place in this myth. The original publication of the story appears to be in a 1980 paper ‘Noah's Ark Revisited: On the Myth-Land Connection In Traditional Aboriginal Thought’ published in the journal ‘Oceania’ (and subsequently republished in 1988 as a chapter in a book edited by Alan Dundes, 'The Flood Myth'). It was written by the German anthropologist Erich Kolig, who had conducted postdoctoral research in the Noonkanbah region 10 years earlier. Kolig’s purpose in writing this paper was far from supportive of young earth creationist dogma. Rather, he was illustrating the impact of western influences on traditional Australian aboriginal cultures. As he wrote the following year in his own book ‘The Silent Revolution: The Effects of Modernisation on Australian Aboriginal Religion’:

“There is a generalised trend among Aboriginal people towards rethinking traditional cosmology along the lines of Western thought. With the move out of the desert, there has been a general decline in the need for topographical authentication of mythological incidents”.

It is important to remember that every flood myth collected from Australian aboriginal cultures occurred after contact with Christian missionaries, for they were usually the first Europeans to enjoy any prolonged contact. Tales such as this with overt references to Judeo-Christian imagery have almost certainly resulted from this contact. This was not likely to be coincidental, as the missionaries had a vested interest in Australian aboriginal societies accepting and believing Biblical stories, often giving them flour, tea and sugar as rewards for successfully memorising Bible verses. In addition, they did not come with the Bible alone, but with the many technological trappings of western society, making them appear, initially at least, as magical beings, perhaps akin to demigods themselves, as did the indigenous peoples of the Americas when first encountering Spanish conquistadors. Thus the Ark Gumana story is nothing more than a modern variant of some existing native myth contaminated by selective exposure to the Bible. As Kolig continues, these are

“the ways in which Aboriginal cultures tend to manage, on their own terms, incursions into their culture”.

Mitchell Rolls, lecturer in Aboriginal Studies at the University of Tasmania, has unearthed similar fusions of traditional Aboriginal mythology, western cultural practice and Christian instruction. In his paper ‘Black Is Not Green’ published in the journal ‘Australian Studies’ in 2005 he cites the widespread belief among native Arnhem Land societies of the feral buffalo as a significant mythological being, akin to the almost universally revered rainbow serpent. Yet the buffalo was introduced to Australia from south-east Asia less than 200 years ago. Rolls also mentions the emergence of native myths incorporating a hero riding another non-native animal, in this case a donkey, an attempt to emulate, no doubt, the story of Jesus riding a donkey on Palm Sunday. A further example concerns the influence visiting Muslim fishermen from Macassar, Indonesia had on the mythology of the Yolngu people of Elcho Island in Arnhem Land in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Yolngu now have a Dreaming figure named Walitha whose characteristics bear an uncanny resemblance to the Koranic view of Allah.

There are further problems for those blithely equating Aboriginal mythology with Christian mythology, however. Unlike Christian mythology or western anthropological methodology, Aboriginal mythology was never intended to be openly available. Much mythology is secretive and reserved for only men or women, or mothers, the elders, the initiated etc. Indeed, mythology is often deemed to be dangerous if given to the wrong person, or at the wrong time. Christian missionaries (and even modern anthropologists) were therefore faced not only with considerable language difficulties but with aboriginal groups divulging very limited and perhaps purposely inaccurate information.

Young earth creationists are not only highly selective and duplicitous in their choice of Australian flood myths, but in the specific aspects of the mythology they choose to report. For example, Aboriginal mythology commonly depicts separate creation events involving living beings such as humans, animals and sometimes plants. Some of these myths involve female homosexuality and a pivotal role for menstrual blood. The concept of the physical Earth itself having been created ex nihilo, however, as well as the concept of hell, appears to have been unknown to any Australian people before contact with Christian missionaries (indeed, notions of hell are completely unknown in all hunter-gatherer societies). Traditional Australian aboriginal belief systems are geosophical, i.e., it is the physical Earth itself, rather than any supernatural beings, that has always existed (this view is not unique to Australian peoples and is widespread, being found in many other indigenous tribes such as, for example, the Cubeo in modern Columbia). Obviously these mythological beliefs are not the kind that young earth creationists would want to advertise. So they don’t.

'Na Sgealaga' © Gary Hill

One aspect of flood mythology that seems particularly surprising is the lack of a strong correlation between areas known to suffer repeated flood damage and the number of flood myths that have originated from these areas. One example is the Polynesian islands, the majority of which lie very low in the water and a number of which are at serious risk of inundation should even minor rises in sea level occur. The following extract is from an editorial commentary in Gray and Moore’s ‘The Mythology of All Races’:

“The importance of flood-myths in Polynesia was apparently not very great. Deluge-episodes, of course, do occur; but so far as the published material goes, the floods referred to are merely incidents — and, as a whole, minor incidents”

Nevertheless, Northwest Creation Network do include a myth originating from the mountainous island of Raiatea (or Ra'iatea), in the Leeward Islands:

“A fisherman carelessly let his hooks get entangled in the hair of the sea god Ruahatu and angered the god when wrenching them out. The fisherman prostrated himself before the god and apologised profusely. Moved by his penitence, Ruahatu told him to go with his wife and child to Toamarama, a small low island on the east side of Raiatea. This he did, taking also some domesticated animals. As the sun set, the ocean waters began to rise and continued rising all night. At last even the mountaintops were covered, and everyone on Raiatea perished. When the waters receded, the fisherman and his family returned to the mainland and became progenitors of its present inhabitants”.

The version reproduced here is found in anthropologist Theodore Gaster’s book ‘Myth, Legend And Custom In The Old Testament’ (1969). Clearly, this myth includes four of the six Biblical criteria championed by Northwest Creation Network; destruction by water, divine causation, sparing of humans and sparing of animals. But we have reason to believe that this myth too might have been contaminated by Christian influence. The Swedish anthropologist Bengt Danielsson reports in his book ‘The Happy Island’ (1952) that when Father Albert Montiton, the first Catholic missionary to travel to Fangatau and Tatakoto (the remotest outlying atolls of French Polynesia) in 1869, he found “Christian intrusions in the native religious texts” to have already taken place. Danielsson hypothesises this was due to Spanish sailors having previously briefly visited the atolls on a number of occasions in the 1590s. In any case, the first Christian missionary to visit Raiatea, John Williams, arrived in 1818 and there has been a strong Protestant Christian influence on the island since then. It appears that even the most remote corners of the world were susceptible to cultural contamination from the outset of contact. Though not everywhere it seems – while preaching the Gospel in 1839, Williams and fellow missionary James Harris were killed and eaten by some of the natives on the island of Erromango.

Although accepting that the Raiatea myth might be authentic, Roland Burrage Dixon, also writing in Gray’s ‘The Mythology of All Races’, had this to say regarding flood myths from the Pacific Islands generally:

“Although there may be some question whether the end of the Raiatea story shows traces of missionary influence, all these [Leeward Islands] flood-tales are probably aboriginal. As much cannot be said, however, for the versions from New Zealand, the Marquesas, Hawaii, in all of which the Biblical parallel, extending even to names and details, is far too close to permit us to regard the tales as other than local adaptations of missionary teaching”.

Some of the New Zealand Māori stories of the hero Tāwhaki exemplify Dixon’s view. In one story Tāwhaki’s ancestors, including his grandfather Hema, release a flood from heaven which inundates the world, drowning everyone. Since Christian missionary influence Tāwhaki's genealogy has been altered, however. Hema has now been rebranded as Noah’s son Shem, who many fundamentalist Christians believe was the progenitor of the Asiatic races. Despite doubts as to their lack of authenticity, Northwest Creation Network list two more flood myths from the Pacific islands, one Melanesian, the other Maori. Changing mythology by altering genealogy is not confined to Christian missionaries, however, and has a long history. For example, the Islamic philosopher Al-Kindi (803-873AD) rewrote an ancient myth telling of the origins of the Arabic people by claiming that Qahtan, the supposed founder of the Arabs was the brother of Yunan, who Arab mythology considered to be the founder of the Ancient Greeks. The purpose was to claim that Ancient Greek scientific and philosophical knowledge actually emanated from themselves.

A similar situation of intercultural mixing of myths appears to have been the case in India, albeit occurring farther back in time. According to Gaster, writing in ‘Myth, Legend and Custom In The Old Testament’, no flood story had ever been written in Sanskrit until the Brahmana literary period, well after contact with Middle-Eastern peoples had been made. Written Sanskrit, in the shape of the Rigveda (which deals specifically with the origin of the world), has been available since the late Bronze Age and predates even the oldest dating of Genesis by several centuries. Although the Rigveda does mention flooding it is only in relation to the characteristics of the Goddess Saraswati, who was named after a river. There is no suggestion whatsoever of the destructive nature of a flood. Rather, the term is used only in deference, for example, “As on a chariot, the flood flows on, surpassing in majesty and might all other waters”. It is surely improbable that Noah’s descendants carried details of such a momentous event in the history of the world to India, where it was continually retold, generation after generation, for over a thousand years before anyone literate thought to write it down.

Northwest Creation Network list three flood myths from India. The best known story is that of Manu (an almost identical version they consider separately involves a central character called Matsyu) which forms part of the Manusmrithi of the Shatapatha Brahmana believed to have been written about 800-600 BC:

“A long time ago lived a man named Manu. Manu, while washing himself, saved a small fish from the jaws of a large fish. The fish told Manu, "If you care for me until I am full grown I will save you from terrible things to come". Manu asked what kind of terrible things. The fish told Manu that a great flood would soon come and destroy everything on the earth. The fish told Manu to put him in a clay jar for protection. The fish grew and each time he outgrew the clay jar Manu gave him a larger one. Finally the fish became a ghasha, one of the largest fish in the world. The fish instructed Manu to build a large ship since the flood was going to happen very soon. As the rains started Manu tied a rope from the ship to the ghasha. The fish guided the ship as the waters rose. The whole earth was covered by water. When the waters began subsiding the ghasha led Manu's ship to a mountaintop”.

However, mirroring the relative unimportance of flood myths to Polynesian culture, the Indian historian Burjor Avari writes of the ‘Shatapatha Brahmana’ in his book ‘India: The Ancient Past’ (2007):

“The text was not followed or acclaimed by the vast majority of Indians in their history; it came to the world's attention through a late eighteenth-century translation by Sir William Jones, who mistakenly exaggerated both its antiquity and its importance”.

The cultural contamination of native tales resulting from Christian contact is not confined to flood mythology. According to anthropologist Colin Turnbull, writing in his paper 'Legends of the BaMbuti' published in 'The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland' in 1959 this is just what has happened to the creation myth of the pygmy Efe people in the Congo. Their native creation myth has become amalgamated with that of Genesis and now tells of how the high God (who created humans to be immortal) forbade the people not to eat the fruit of the tahu tree. One woman does so and the female moon god then informs the high God who punishes all of humanity by limiting their lifespan. It seems obvious which components of the myth are traditional and which have been acquired from Christian missionaries.

Ironically, some of the best evidence we have for the cultural contamination of flood myths involves the Noah myth directly. It appears highly likely that the Noah myth is no more than an adaptation from earlier flood myths, specifically the Sumerian epic of Ziusudra (dated c.3000 BC), the Akkadian epic of Atrahasis (c.1640 BC) and the epic of Gilgamesh (c.1100 BC). These three versions, plus the later Noah story, all hail from geographically near regions and demonstrate not only similarities in plot but also share phrases that are, on occasion, almost identical. The epic of Gilgamesh is perhaps the best known. The Gilgamesh flood story is considerably more detailed than that of Noah, so only a very brief synopsis follows:

Enlil (the God of wind, height and distance) is angered by the noise and clamour created by humans and convinces the other Gods to kill everyone with a flood. Ea (the God of water and intelligence) disagrees with the decision and warns a righteous man, Ut-napashtim, of the plan. He tells Ut-napashtim to convert his house into a boat large enough to carry several humans and some animals. He builds the boat and boards his family and a few craftsmen, as well as samples of all the land animals, and sets to sea. A violent storm follows, lasting six days and six nights and water covers even the highest mountains. Even the gods themselves thought they would die. Eventually the boat comes to rest on Mount Nisir. Ut-Napishtim then releases three birds to ascertain when the water had receded. The first two birds return to the ark. The third bird apparently found dry land because it did not return.

Although the Gilgamesh flood myth is told in the first person, by Ut-napashtim to Gilgamesh himself, similarities with the story of Noah are obvious. However, we have good evidence to believe that the Gilgamesh version predates the Noah version of the story by some considerable amount of time. In turn, some scholars consider the Gilgamesh flood story to be composed of two earlier versions joined together by a third author. First, although the complete Epic is told on a collection of twelve Babylonian cuneiform tablets (with the flood story on the eleventh) which have been physically dated to about 650 BC (the tablets were actually found at Nineveh in the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal who reigned from 668 to 627 BC), various extracts of the story are also found on tablets dated about 2000 BC. Second, analyses of the language used in the tablets indicates that the story originated much earlier than 2000 BC. Third, the measurements for Ut-napashtim’s boat are given in ancient sexegesimal mathematics, used at the dates of the earlier tablets but largely abandoned at the time the Nineveh tablets were created. Fourth, variations of the Gilgamesh story have been found translated into several other ancient languages.

The Gilgamesh flood myth was certainly well-known throughout the ancient Middle East and a fragment of an ancient tablet describing the myth has been unearthed in Israel. The dominant culture in that part of the ancient world was undoubtedly polytheistic Babylonian, while Israel was a land occupied by a number of relatively small and unimportant tribes that tended toward monotheism. The general rule, as we have seen, is that myths from dominant cultures influence lesser ones, not normally the other way around. It is also possible, as Howard F. Vos argues in his book ‘Genesis and Archaeology’ (1963), that the author of the Genesis account used the Gilgamesh flood myth as a source text and simply “purified the account of polytheistic elements” in order to promote the Judaic monotheistic religion. Until 600-700 BC the religion of the Israelites was, like their neighbours, polytheistic. Judaic monotheism is believed to have developed for essentially political reasons (in the broadest sense of the term; unlike the ancient Greeks who developed the notion of polytheism on the basis of purely philosophical musings), that is, to encourage adherence to the authority of the Israelite tribes, the notion being that a single god, Yahweh, cared for that tribal group exclusively and to deny this would incur his wrath.

This monotheistic authority was underlined by listing of the Hebrews of specific elements in the six days of creation, all of which represented gods of neighbouring polytheistic cultures. On day one the gods of darkness and light are dispelled ("And the evening and the morning where the first day" according to Genesis 1:5; note that the Hebrews have adopted an astronomical custom from the Babylonians, i.e., measuring each new day starting from sunset, rather than sunrise; note also the scientific inaccuracy that light was created before the sun), on day two, those of sky and sea. Day three sees the gods of earth and plants removed, while on day four the gods of the sun, moon and stars are dealt with (note the obvious scientific inaccuracy of creating plant life before the sun was formed - it was commonplace in Bronze and Iron Age societies to not include plants under the rubric of living things - as well as the conceptual inaccuracy of days being thought to exist before the sun was formed). The gods of the animals are dispatched on day five and, of course, on day six humans are created in the image of the one god. Similarly, the first commandment given to Moses, supposedly by Yahweh, is to have no other gods. Remnants of polytheism can be found in other parts of the Bible, most notably in Psalm 82 where Yahweh holds council with the other gods, letting them know that they are subordinate to him, "he gives judgement among the gods.........you are gods". The original Hebrew leaves every instance of the words 'god' or 'gods' intact, while modern versions of the Bible tend to encase the words in quotation marks in an attempt to play down the notion that polytheism was ever taken seriously by the Hebrews.

It reasonably follows, then, that the Judaic story of Noah was part of this deliberate shift toward monotheism. It has either been copied and adapted from the earlier Gilgamesh myth or the stories have been copied and adapted from a common source predating both. Either way it is likely the result of cultural contamination. Of course any such politically-motivated possibility is vehemently denied by Biblical literalists whose ‘logic’ circumvents the evidence. Vos again:

“Even if Moses had used some source materials which are not extant today, the process of his gathering and compiling them to write Genesis would have been guided correctly by God”.

In other words, the Bible is true because it says it is true. However, we have seen that many of the myths proposed by young earth creationists to bolster support for their notion of a universal memory of a worldwide flood do not in fact do so. Too frequently there is evidence that flooding was localised, that myths have been inaccurately reported, contaminated by input from other cultures and, in some cultures at least, there is good reason to believe that flood myths are of little importance and played minor roles in their mythological lexicon. There is another avenue of evidence that brings into question the claim made by young earth creationists that “Native global flood stories are documented as history or legend in almost every region on earth”. What is not addressed in creationist flood myth literature is the uncomfortable fact that, regardless of the fact that flood myths are widely distributed throughout the world, the greater proportion of cultures simply have no flood myths.

This flaw in the young earth creationist argument was first recognised well over a hundred years ago by Richard Andre (sometimes cited as Andree). Collecting flood myths from 90 different cultures throughout the world, he noted, in his book published 1891, ‘Die Flutsagen: Ehnthographisch Btrachtet’ ('The Flood: An Ethnographic View') that 26 myths did show similarities to the Biblical version, while 43 myths appeared to have originated wholly independently and showed no discernible similarity at all. His strongest point, however, was that over 50% of all the cultures studied had no discernible flood myths at all, including none found in the Japanese islands and only a handful in sub-Saharan Africa. The vast majority of Australian aboriginal cultures too have no flood myths and despite numerous claims that the North American continent is a particularly rich source of flood myths (why do you think they called it Tennessea? - asks one creationist website!) the fact is that although many such myths do exist, the majority of native North American cultures have no flood myths that can be reliably traced to pre-European contact. Those with no flood myths at all include the Mescalero Apache, Lipan Apache, Chiricahua Apache, the Paiutes, Utes, the Crow, Hidatsa, Navajo Arapaho. Mohawk, Tuscarora, Oneida, Shoshoni, Kiowa, Osage, Quapaw, Shawnee, Chickasaw, Creek, Calusa, Huron, Yavapai, Chipewyan, Gros Ventre, Nez Perce, Flathead and Iroquois tribes.

Andre's findings were later corroborated by a number of Christian anthropologists such as J A Zahm in a paper entitled 'The Noachian Deluge' published in 'American Ecclesiastical Review' two years later and by Edmund J Sutcliffe in 'The Ethnographical Restriction Of The Flood' which appeared in 'Clergy Review' in 1942. One particularly strong source of flood mythology is that of James George Frazer. In 1918 he published a three volume anthropological study entitled 'Folk-Lore In The Old Testament'. He paid particular attention to the great flood (filling 250 pages in Chapter 4) and studied 175 cultures with this particular myth in mind. Bear in mind when reading the following quote that Frazer is continually cited by young earth creationists as having found evidence of the universality of a worldwide flood. This what he concluded:

"It is particularly remarkable that neither of the great civilized peoples of Eastern Asia, the Chinese and the Japanese, should, as far as I know, have preserved in their voluminous and ancient literature any native legends of a great flood of the sort we are here considering, that is of a universal inundation in which the whole or the greater part of the human race is said to have perished.........in Africa, including Egypt, native legends of a great flood are conspicuously absent, no single case of one has yet been reported".

It is rare to find an honest discussion of this type of evidence in the young earth creationist literature. The overwhelming assumption seems to be that if a flood myth exists in any culture and can be perceived to have even the slightest resemblance to the Noah story then this constitutes sufficient evidence that a worldwide flood has actually occurred. Essentially this is one-dimensional view of myths. They are perceived as no more than disguised history, a stance first taken by some early Greek philosophers, the most prominent being Euhemerus around 300 BC.

By denying the obviously poetic nature of flood myths Biblical literalists are, in effect, implying that ancient civilisations were devoid of any sense of poetry or metaphor. Yet, surprisingly, we see no corresponding discussion in the Christian fundamentalist literature of their ideas for when human societies actually did develop the use of metaphor and other non-literal meaning as a literary style. Surely one of the best ways to strengthen the Biblical literalist argument would be to present evidence that literary metaphor originated later than the Biblical texts. They cannot do so, however, because metaphor was clearly present in Genesis from the outset. This is instanced by, for example, use of the terms 'greater lamp' and 'lesser lamp' instead of the ordinary ancient Hebrew nouns for sun and moon (notwithstanding the scientific inaccuracy of referring to the moon as a lamp like the sun). Too often when science conflicts with scripture, Christians are ready to play their metaphor card. Doesn't this mean that the scripture simply wasn't literally true to begin with? Christians can, after all, accept that Jesus' parable of the prodigal son as a fable, a story with no basis in history. Rather than hold to views which are clearly irrational, Biblical literalists might do better to open up their horizons. One way might be to consider the work of those scientists who are Christians and do not accept a literal interpretation of the Bible.

Apart from the issue of cultural contamination there are at least four more reasons why flood myths might have no connection to a Biblical source. The first reason to doubt that flood myths are no more than disguised history is that myths in general often function as pre-scientific explanations for wholly natural phenomena. Paleolithic or even Bronze-Age humans had no real idea of the effects of long-term climate change or even how the planetary water-cycle works and so when flood events occurred they would naturally attempt to explain them in terms of supernatural causation. A logic then develops that operates by similarity, with a particular story, image or symbol being no longer simply descriptive but equated with an explanation. ‘Image-thinking’ is a strong characteristic of oral, pre-literate cultures who store their wisdom in easily-remembered stories, proverbs and genealogies. Nowadays however, we usually have far more evidence available to us than is contained in the myths themselves (geological or archeological, for example, or a better appreciation of historical context). We have no sound reason to invoke supernatural causation. Thus the Irish poet W.B.Yeats’s depiction of science as essentially “the critique of myth” has more than a ring of truth.

The second reason is that the recurring themes or motifs in flood myths might sometimes reflect subconscious fears common to all human beings in all cultures. I am thinking here of the writings of the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, who observed that images or motifs common to myths often appeared in the dreams or psychotic fantasies of patients suffering from psychological disorders. Jung reasoned that many of these motifs or themes must be the products of some sort of "myth-forming structural elements . . . in the unconscious psyche”. Although I am not particularly convinced of the Jungian synopsis, experimental psychology has reliably demonstrated that most human beings possess a variety of innate predispositions in the form of specific fears imbedded in the structure of the nervous system, such as a fear of heights, spiders and snakes, but not normally flowers, for example. It is obvious why humans might have evolved such fears. Thus, for example, dreams of flying and myths of snakes are abundant in many cultures and may have evolved to partially allay our innate fears. Flood myths may therefore confront another of our greatest fears, that of drowning. Similarly, apocalyptic myths such as those involving a flood may go some way in modifying our childlike psychological attitude, which naturally assumes that the world is permanent and indestructible.

The third reason is that sometimes myths may simply be stories, designed to amuse, entertain, placate and motivate. The American literary scholar Jonathon Gottschall, in his 2012 book 'The Storytelling Animal: How Stories make Us Human' notes that:

"Stories the world over are almost always about people with problems........a deep pattern of heroes confronting trouble and struggling to overcome."

The Noah flood myth being a perfect example of this seemingly universal template of introducing character(s), then their predicament followed by their attempt to escape the predicament. A number of other anthropologists and folklorists have shown that traditional tales often exhibit the same or similar plot patterns, regardless of the actual storyline or the culture in which they originate. Rather than attempting to unearth meanings in myths and fairy tales or to ascertain mood or tone, the Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp, for example, identified elemental building blocks that formed the basis of all narrative structure. He found all the stories he studied exhibited no more than eight fundamental generic characters (such as villain, father, hero etc.) and no more than 31 functional sequences (such as departure, receipt of a magical agent, trickery, punishment etc.).
Furthermore, recent psychological research has demonstrated that the best remembered stories are those that include a combination of miraculous or counterintuitive physical feats (such as superhuman feats designed to survive an impending disaster) performed by people with plausible human psychological characteristics (such as the moral nature of Noah). Storytelling may also enhance reasoning skills. Evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby have shown that when a common test of deductive reasoning such as the 'Wason Selection Test' is formally presented as a test of logic, fewer than 10% of the population are normally able to solve the puzzle. However, when the test is explicitly presented in story form, in the context of social relations (involving the detection of cheating) this figure jumps to 70-90%.

Propp also found that the actual storyline itself, whether natural disasters, diseases, magic spells, involving boats, forests, mountains etc. were found to be largely interchangeable and of less importance to many listeners than the functional sequences acted out by a limited number of generic characters. As the late Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky once said of critiques of his own films (all of which are widely considered to be pregnant with meaning):

"If you look for a meaning, you’ll miss everything that happens."

Thus, many flood myths may have no underlying religious meaning but merely use a flood scenario to convey an underlying plot sequence which listeners simply enjoy. In other words, the flood is incidental to the story. This view is strongly supported by the seeming cross-cultural ubiquity of myths involving an opposite fate, that is, destruction by fire.

The fourth reason lies in the highly selective nature of the myths that Biblical literalists choose to believe. If, as they claim, we should accept a whole panoply of flood myths as disguised history what prevents us from allotting the same degree of credence to other types of myth that are just as incredulous? Christians readily do so, but only when the myth is purportedly Judeo-Christian. The importance of being highly selective when it comes to myths was recognised by Christians early on. The existentialist psychiatrist Rollo May points out in his book ‘The Cry For Myth’ (1991):

“....use of the word ‘only’ as a deprecation of myth began with the Christian Fathers in the third century AD as their way of fighting against the common people’s faith in Greek and Roman myths”.

If young earth creationists are prepared to accept the Noah myth as absolutely true in every respect why do some of them not also accept Samuel 2:8?

"......for the pillars of the earth [are] the Lord's and he hath set the world upon them"

Or Psalm 93.1?

".....the world also is stabilised, that it cannot move"

"Or Ecclesiastes 1:5?

"The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down and hasteth to his place where he arose".

Such passages clearly affirm a geocentric view of the universe which, like the Noah flood story, is completely untenable in light of modern science. The Biblical literalist failure to adequately differentiate the metaphorical aspects of the Bible from the literal is also problematic in the case of Biblical views on slavery, the subjugation of women and God-commanded genocide. If the Bible is, at least in part, metaphorical, in what way does it differ from, for example, Aesop's Fables, which is also in part, metaphorical? And why we may ask (apart from their circular reasoning that the Bible must be true because the Bible says it’s true) do they not also accept the historicity of other kinds of religious myths which, like flood myths, are “documented as history or legend in almost every region on earth”? I finish with these wise words from Hypatia of Alexandria ( ):

"Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fantasies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them."

'Dic Jones Moelfre' © Gary Hill

Fundamental Flaws Underlie The Myth That Darwin Influenced Hitler

2012-09-22T13:36:00.000+01:00

Chapter 1: Dirty Deeds Done Cheap: Christian Fundamentalist Lies About Darwin's Influence On Hitler

In response to claims that he was a theist Albert Einstein wrote, in a letter shortly before his death, “It was, of course, a lie.....a lie which is being systematically repeated”. This is a sentiment that could just as easily have been written by either Charles Darwin or Adolph Hitler in response to the myth that Hitler had derived the core of his ideological beliefs from the earlier scientific findings of Darwin. So widespread is the claim that in some people’s minds it has been lifted to the status of historical fact. For example, the influential conservative American political commentator Ann Coulter in her book Godless: The Church Of Liberalism (2006) wrote:

“From Marx to Hitler, the men responsible for the greatest mass murders of the twentieth century were avid Darwinists..........So it should not be surprising that eugenicists, racists, and assorted psychopaths always gravitate to Darwinism. From the most evil dictators to today’s antismoking crusaders, sexual profligates, and animal rights nuts, Darwinism has infect the whole culture”.

According to Coulter, not only was Karl Marx responsible for mass murder, he was also an avid Darwinist. She is being somewhat less than truthful. Let’s look at the facts. There is no evidence that Karl Marx ever murdered anyone, or that he ever incited anyone else to kill on his behalf. The gestation period and birth of Marx’s communist ideology, first outlined in the ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’ in 1848, occurred without any influence whatsoever from Darwin’s scientific findings as he didn’t publish his seminal work ‘On the Origin of Species’ until 1859 (though he had published some of his ideas in a scientific paper a year earlier). Furthermore, despite living less than 25 km away from each other for over thirty years Marx and Darwin never actually met. Marx did write to Darwin on two occasions, but not until fourteen years after the publication of ‘Origin of Species’. He then gifted Darwin a copy of his book ‘Das Kapital’ in 1873 with a handwritten dedication. Marx did this because he had included a single reference to Darwin - in a footnote - he did not, as often claimed by fundamentalist Christians, dedicate the book to him. This was the only time Marx mentioned Darwin in any of his publications. The book still exists in the Darwin Museum at Down House and we can tell from it’s physical condition that it has never been read. So much, then, for Marx being an “avid Darwinist”.

I discuss Coulter’s allegation in a little detail because it is a prime example of how lies are spread and myths easily generated and how relatively recent historical events are deliberately distorted for nefarious reasons. But Coulter goes much further than historical indiscretion. She wilfully denigrates biology too by claiming that Darwin’s findings are responsible “for the greatest mass murders of the twentieth century”. Another writer, Richard Weikart, author of ‘From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics and Racism in Germany’, published in 2004, spices up the polemic:

“No matter how crooked the road was from Darwin to Hitler, clearly Darwinism and eugenics smoothed the path for Nazi ideology, especially for the Nazi stress on expansion, war, racial struggle, and racial extermination”.

Henry Morris, the grandfather of modern creationism takes the hyperbole goes even further in 'The Twilight of Evolution', published in 1963:

"Evolution is at the foundation of communism, fascism, Freudianism, social Darwinism, Kinseyism, materialism, atheism and, in the religious world, modernism and neo-orthodoxy."

Less abrasively, the far more erudite British political commentator Andrew Marr asked viewers of his three-part BBC2 TV series ‘Darwin’s Dangerous Idea’, first broadcast in 2010:

“But what has Charles Darwin ever done for … politics? It’s one of the great paradoxes of modern times that this liberal, kindly, cautious scientist has been used to justify … the Nazi holocaust …”.

Are any of these views actually true? Can we really observe any firm ideological link between Charles Darwin the man and his scientific findings, and Adolph Hitler the man and his subsequent political policies? Surely one man and his books cannot be held ultimately responsible for the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities? Well, of course not. Such a claim is ludicrously simplistic. Yet it is commonly made. Would it be considered a realistic analysis if any other major historical event were to be explained with reference to a single cause? The political rise of Nazism in Germany had multiple complex causes dating back especially to the aftermath of the First World War. In turn, the political and social policies of Hitler and his henchman have their origins many centuries before Darwin was born. Darwin and his scientific findings were in no way complicit in either the spawning or implementation of Hitler’s lunatic ideology. When presented honestly and cogently the case for the defence is compelling.

It is obvious from Hitler’s own writing and speeches, and those of his fellow Nazi ideologues, that they either did not really understand or accept Darwinian ideas on evolution. Hitler’s rambling and often incoherent ideology had it’s origin in multiple sources, most of which were broadly theological and philosophical, and all existed many years prior to Darwin’s findings. Making the Darwin-Hitler link, then, is a prime example of the rhetorical fallacy of ‘post hoc, ergo propter hoc’, i.e., simplistically assuming that an event that follows some other designated event must have been caused by it.

Hitler discussed the influences on his worldview in detail in his two-volume book ‘Mein Kampf’ (‘My Struggle’) which he published in 1924-25. Despite what plenty of people are being told and may believe, Darwin rates no mention at all. Furthermore, all of the authors from the late 19th and early 20th centuries who Hitler explicitly acknowledges as influences either ignored, only partially accepted or explicitly rejected Darwin’s findings, and were not afraid to say so. This seems obvious from any objective reading of their work and arguing otherwise is only possible from a basis of either profound ignorance or dishonesty. Those who proclaim an ideological link between Darwin and Hitler, therefore, appear to fall into three distinct camps:

First there are those who simply do not possess any reasonable grasp of the machinery of Darwinian evolution, or may think that they do despite having serious misunderstandings. They usually have a limited formal education in biology (and European history) and hold little interest anyway, so they are content to believe what others tell them. Unfortunately, they are prey to the opinions of others who also don’t understand evolutionary theory and especially to those people who are in the business of systematically lying to their audience. They probably attend fundamentalist Christian churches commonly located behind woefully ignorant signs that ask questions like “If evolution is real, how come there are still monkeys?”. This, despite the wide availability of popular science books explaining the mechanisms of evolution.

The second group are really a more obstinate and enthusiastic version of the first. They also have little understanding of evolutionary theory (and European history) but, unlike the first group, nevertheless see it as their duty to warn the world of the dangers of ‘evolutionism’. They can often be found trolling the internet making erroneous statements ad nauseam. To their minds, evolution is “only a theory” and they are happy to continue using this phrase in a perjorative fashion without bothering to understand what scientists actually mean when they bestow the title of ‘theory’ on an explanatory model. So enthralled of the worldview to which they subscribe (or more usually were subscribed to by their parents) that they are in pathological denial that any differing perceptions hold any legitimacy.

Although they are a long way from winning their war (at least outside of the USA), they undoubtedly win some battles. For example, as long ago as 1926 the American creationist and ardent anti-evolution Baptist pastor William Bell Riley made the claim that the phrase "we may suppose" occurs over 800 times in Darwin's ‘Origin of Species’, thus suggesting that the work was far more speculative than it actually is (another version of this myth commonly found in creationist literature uses the term "we may assume", still holding to the magical figure of 800). The phrase "we may suppose", however, actually occurs a mere three times, once each in chapters 10, 11 and 13. Like Coulter, Riley was of course lying, banking on his audience not having read the book. This particular example resonates with me because only a year or so ago, chatting with a street corner evangelist in a small town in North Wales, he proffered that almost identical ‘fact’. When challenged, he remained so sure of himself that he pointed to the bookstore conveniently located directly opposite us and confidently told me to go check for myself and then come back to apologise! It had obviously never occurred to him that it might be worthwhile to check such ‘facts’ for himself.

The third group are those that probably do possess a reasonable, or even good understanding of the mechanisms underlying evolutionary theory (and even European history) but their religious convictions oblige them to find the science disagreeable. Such people make a habit (and sometimes a living) seeking to discredit any aspect of modern biology based on Darwin’s findings which, in effect, means they are trying to discredit just about all of modern biology. Attempting to ideologically link Darwin and Hitler is a mere byproduct, then, of a generally anti-science, pro-faith attitude. Conservative Christian authors representing the intelligent design touting Discovery Institute such as Weikart, and Jerry Bergman, author of a number of anti-evolution articles such as ‘Darwinism and the Nazi Race Holocaust’, published in 1999 in the ‘Journal of Creation’ (submission guidelines: “Do not use too many big or extra words”) are probably the most commonly cited in recent years.

Bergman especially paints such a dishonest picture of Darwin’s life, scientific work and personal opinions that much would surely be considered libelous where he alive today. He even wrote a paper entitled 'Was Charles Darwin Psychotic? A Study Of His Mental Health' in which it is clear that Bergman either has no understanding of current psychological diagnoses or is cynically employing the word 'psychotic' as a lay person's notion of madness with evil intent. He details a constellation of psychological ailments (most of which are gleaned from works written post 1970s, only two from Darwin's own pen) such as anxiety, agoraphobia, digestive problems and depression, all of which point consistently to a neurosis rather than the diagnostic opposite of psychosis. The only 'symptom' which comes anywhere near to the psychotic end of a psychological personality continuum is his love of shooting as a young man (with which Bergman makes great play).

The extent of Bergman's basic historical and scientific errors can also be found in the opening statement of his paper entitled “The Ape-to-Human Progression: The Most Common Evolution Icon is a Fraud”, also published in the ‘Journal of Creation’, this time in 2009:

“Darwin suggested an unbroken evolutionary chain of life from simple molecules, such as ammonia, water, and phosphoric salts, to humans”.

This is sheer nonsense. Darwin deliberately did not speculate as to how the first life forms emerged, as he did not feel there would ever be enough information available in his lifetime to generate any meaningful hypotheses. From a letter written in 1863 to the English botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker:

“It is mere rubbish to talk about the origin of life; one might as well talk about the origin of matter.”

If Darwin had indeed suggested some mechanism for abiogenesis Bergman would no doubt have used a direct quote. He doesn’t because none exist. Instead he misleadingly cites a sentence from Stephen C. Meyer’s 2009 book ‘Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design’. Meyer isn’t a biologist, he’s not even a working scientist though he does have a joint first degree in physics and earth sciences. He has yet to conduct any experiments in an attempt to falsify evolution. He’s a philosopher and intelligent design advocate from the Discovery Institute where he enjoys the company of Weikart and Bergman.

This pseudo-academic affiliation is important. Publications that postulate a link between Darwin’s findings and Hitler’s ideology originate from very few sources and they are invariably not legitimate university history departments, with the possible exception of Daniel Gasman’s 1971 book ‘The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League’. Linking Darwin with Hitler is no more than a fringe view promulgated most notably by American fundamentalist Christians from the Discovery Institute and occasionally by Islamic authors such as Harun Yahya.

Evolution by natural selection simply describes a natural phenomenon. It can, in itself, be no more disturbing or distasteful than any other natural phenomenon such as the theory of gravity, or the germ theory of infectious disease. What these authors ultimately object to is this: before Darwin there was a consensus of perceived apparent design in nature, which required the actions of a top-down agent. Darwin discovered that this apparent design was able to be produced automatically, via bottom-up mechanisms. Darwin’s findings don’t necessarily dismiss the possibility of a deity entirely. However, they do demonstrate that although the actions of a deity might well be sufficient, they are certainly not a necessary condition to explain the diversity of life we observe on Earth today. As supporting data rapidly accumulated in the following years this view of the non-necessity of a deity in order to explain other natural phenomena naturally spilled over into all other branches of science.

One of the strengths of Darwinian evolution is that it offers a comprehensive historical narrative for the abundance of life on this planet. Intelligent design does not. Perhaps this is why, as we shall see, authors such as Weikart and Bergman have such difficulty presenting an honest and balanced account of history. Intelligent Design proponents not only offer no timeline, they detail no design mechanism at all other than ‘an intelligent designer must have done it’. Not surprisingly, they have little to show in the way of of peer reviewed publications to support their views and so, with nothing new to put on the table, are forced to repeatedly chant their mantra that ‘evolution is just not possible’.

The accepted method of engaging in science is to test hypotheses, present research findings at open scientific conferences and meetings, then to publish these data and findings in peer-reviewed journals, and finally to write textbooks. The Discovery Institute blatantly bypass the first three stages. They present opinions, not scientific findings and spend large amounts of money lobbying politicians to include intelligent design in the science curriculum of state schools all the while recommending 'textbooks' published by their own 'fellows'. Despite holding an annual budget of several million dollars they do no actual research into intelligent design (though they keep promising to; meanwhile they have their 'research fellows' interviewed in front of a green screen later replaced by stock images of laboratories) preferring to report and comment, usually in a highly distorted fashion, on the hard work done by others, most often in closed meetings. They publish their opinion pieces only in journals affiliated to their cause and go right ahead and write books (aimed only at the general public, never the scientific community). Furthermore, some of these authors rarely give permission to use excerpts from their books for the purposes of rebuttal and critique by evolutionary biologists. Not surprisingly, academically, their approach has been a failure; as far as the academic community is concerned they lack any scientific credibility whatsoever.

We can see that Robert Park's seven warning signs for bogus claims ('The Seven Warning Signs Of A Bogus Science, 'Chronicles Of Higher Education', January 2003) show a particularly tight fit in the case of the opinions offered by Discovery Institute authors and their ilk; (i) their claims are pitched directly to the media and general public, thus bypassing peer review; (ii) next, they play the victim by claiming that a powerful orthodox establishment is suppressing their 'evidence'; (iii) a substantial number of their claims are at the limits of the data available to them; (iv) they make abundant claims utilising the argument by popularity; (v) their 'research' is done in isolation from mainstream scientific communities and (vi) their claims would require new laws of nature to be formalised. Further evidence for the pseudoscientific credentials of Discovery Institute fellows is exemplified by their track record of supporting potentially dangerous medical causes. William Dembski, for example, has claimed that childhood autism is caused by vaccines while both Jonathan Wells and Phillip Johnson are both on record as denying that HIV is the cause of AIDS. Representing the Discovery Institute in a US Federal court, their keynote biologist Michael Behe has even claimed that astrology is a reputable scientific theory.

Discovery Institute fellow Paul Nelson has actually confirmed their arid research terrain. Quoted in an article entitled 'The Measure Of Design' which appeared in 'Touchstone' magazine in 2004, he admitted:

"Easily the biggest challenge facing the intelligent design community is to develop a full-fledged theory of biological design. We don't have such a theory right now..........we've got a bag of powerful intuitions and a handful of notions"

But intuitions and notions do not a science make. Their failure as researchers has therefore forced the Discovery Institute 'fellows' to take another, more sociologically based approach to push their agenda; by claiming that evolution by natural selection is simply rotten. The logic behind their argument is that because they claim to be able to identify disagreeable social consequences emanating from Darwin himself and/or his findings (with Hitler's regime at the pinnacle), then the findings themselves ought to be brought into question. However, as University of Chicago historian Robert Richards rightly notes in his paper ‘Was Hitler A Darwinian?:

“.........even if Hitler had the Origin of Species as his bedtime reading and clearly derived inspiration from it, this would have no bearing on the truth of Darwin’s theory or directly on the moral character of Darwin and other Darwinians”.

To claim otherwise would be absurd, an argumentum ad consequentiam. The tactics employed by members of the Discovery Institute, then, are simply a diversion to hide their real intentions of attempting to discredit any scientific endeavour that might lead to doubts as to whether a deity exists. Again, this strategy has been admitted to by their own 'Research Director' Bruce Gordon, in his article entitled 'Intelligent Design Movement Struggles With Identity Crisis', published in 'Research News And Opportunities in Science And Philosophy' in January 2001:

".....design theoretic research has been hijacked as part of a larger cultural and political movement......it must be worth pursuing on the basis of its own merits, not as an exercise in Christian 'cultural renewal'".

Ironically, the fact that the Nazi regime was able to exercise the power that they did surely brings into question whether a benevolent deity actually exists, or able to exert any effect. Or perhaps not, given the apparent propensity of the Judeo-Christian God to commit mass genocide himself. When Christian (or Muslim) apologists argue for the pivotal role played by Christianity (or Islam) in the development of Western (or modern) thought, they surely must also accept that the Bible (or Koran) also acted as an early prototype for the subjugation and slaughter of millions of people by numerous Western (and Islamic) societies.

If you still have any doubts as to Weikart and Bergman’s and other Christian fundamentalist motives, ask yourself why they don’t level similar absurd arguments at any other field of science. Did anyone ideologically link Isaac Newton (or even the Wright brothers) with Hitler because the Luftwaffe and the Italian airforce so effectively targeted a wholly civilian population when they bombed the Basque town of Guernica in 1937? Or to any other aerial bombing campaigns deliberately targeting civilians? Has anyone ideologically linked Antoine Lavoisier with Hitler because he decided to use the chemical agent Zyklon-B in the Nazi death camps rather than some non-chemical means of mass murder? Mendelian genetics directly informed the scientific basis for eugenics policies worldwide, yet we witness none of the vindictiveness aimed at Darwin targeted also at Gregor Mendel. Indeed, who outside of the fundamentalist Christian community would even consider it reasonable for a scientist to be deemed responsible when, after their death, another individual uses their research findings and exploits them to serve their own political agenda?

So what is it about Darwin that they hate so much? He simply discovered the existence of a mechanism that explains the diversity of the species currently observed on our planet (not, as Bergman and Meyer would like their audience to think, a mechanism for abiogenesis). He was a naturalist. He had no initial underlying philosophical interest in finding such a mechanism, other than a curiosity to explain phenomena as diverse as such as corals, orchids, birds and barnacles and there is a mighty long philosophical road from barnacles to concentration camps, despite Bergman’s pathetic assertion that “he wanted to murder God”. It is worth noting here that Bergman has quite a history of making asinine statements. In a 2009 debate with developmental biologist PZ Myers on whether creationism should be taught alongside evolution in schools he stated, incredibly, that "........no scientists opposed Hitler". Obviously he hasn't bothered to read Jean Medawar and David Pyke's 2001 book 'Hitler's Gift: The True Story of the Scientists Expelled by the Nazi Regime', detailing the hundreds of scientists who did just that.

Darwin initially trained to be a clergyman and at the time of writing ‘Origin of Species’ Darwin was a committed theist who was married to a devout Christian. Although in his later life he described himself as 'agnostic' - and never as atheist - he nevertheless had openly atheist friends and, when they were invited to dinner at his home his wife would arrange the table so she did not have to sit next to them. Indeed, Darwin wrote on several occasions that he perceived no general incompatibility between his findings on evolution and religion.

More specifically the theory of evolution by natural selection explains how the individual species that are observed today have descended, via means of often deceptively simple biological algorithms, from common ancestor species, a process referred to as ‘speciation’ (though, of course, evolution occurs in the absence of speciation). Darwinian evolution is descriptive. Unlike the Bible, it is in no sense prescriptive. Many fundamentalist Christians appear to be philosophically blind to this most basic fact.

Now Hitler had no scientific training at all and left school at sixteen with an undistinguished academic record in every subject, having been removed from an earlier school for his poor performance and then turned down by art college. Not surprisingly, it is obvious from his own pen that he possessed no real understanding of evolution. Bergman, however, tells us differently:

“As early as 1925, Hitler outlined his conclusion in Chapter 4 of Mein Kampf that Darwinism was the only basis for a successful Germany”

Did he really? Actually no, he didn’t. Please go ahead and read Chapter 4 and you will find that Bergman is blatantly fabricating history. Indeed, we have available to us a complete record of everything Hitler wrote and said in public, and quite a bit of what he said and wrote in private. In addition to the lack of mention of Darwin in ‘Mein Kampf’, the transcripts of every recorded speech made by Hitler are freely available. Nowhere did he use the words ‘Darwin’, ‘Darwinist’, ‘Darwinian’ or ‘Darwinism’ or the terms ‘theory of evolution’ or ‘theory of descent’. Similarly, in his private correspondence and personal notes, ('Hitler's Letters and Notes' published in 1974 by the German historian Werner Macer) not a single mention is found of Darwin or 'Darwinism'. This is indeed a surprising omission, considering the intellectual debt Bergman and Weikart claim Hitler owes Darwin. Indeed neither Weikart, Bergman or Gasman or anyone else have ever been able to uncover a single quote from Hitler (or from any other leading Nazi ideologue for that matter) praising the ‘theory of evolution’, ‘Darwin’ or ‘Darwinism’ by name.

It appears that Hitler was an avid reader. The writer Frederick Oeschner, who was given frequent access to both Hitler's private residence and offices estimated, in his 1942 book 'This Is The Enemy', that Hitler's personal library held 16,300 books. Of these, he noted that approximately 7,000 dealt with military matters, 1,500 with architecture and the arts and 800-1000 books could be classed as popular fiction. The remaining volumes dealt with diverse themes such as history and geography. Not a single work by Darwin was found. The portions of Hitler's library found in the United States Library of Congress and at Brown University confirm this. As Robert Richards remind us: “There's not the slightest shred of evidence that Hitler read Darwin”.

Weikart claims to have found a number of instances where Hitler uses the term ‘evolution’. On closer examination, however, we can see he is attempting to deliberately mislead. The phrase ‘theory of evolution’ in modern German is ‘evolutionstheorie’, however, in Hitler’s day a number of terms could be applied to convey the general notion of biological evolution, for example, abstammungslehre, deszendenztheorie and abstammungstheorie. More specific terms would be Darwin'sche evolutionstheorie or die Darwinsche evolutionstheorie. None of these words appear in any of Hitler's writings nor in any of his speeches.   It has been argued that Hitler simply conveyed Darwinian notions without ever mentioning them. However, given the gravity of the charges made against Darwin, that his scientific findings weren't simply a minor add-on to Hitler's worldview but (according to the strong view of the myth at least), the core philosophy that drove his political and social aims, does this seem at all plausible? Hitler had no qualms about showing his gratitude to others he acknowledged had influenced him so why not do the same for Darwin?

The term ‘entwicklung’ was commonly used by Hitler. Entwicklung translates as ‘development’, similar to the English usage, for example, ‘project development’, and it was commonly used in Hitler’s day with this type of meaning. Likewise the German word 'höherentwicklung', sometimes used in Nazi literature, can be translated as 'higher development'. Again, this is claimed by Weikart to demonstrate that the Nazis used Darwinian ideas. It does no such thing, for 'höherentwicklung' is most often applied in a philosophical sense, as in the 'higher development' of thought.  So Weikart’s claim that Hitler’s repeated use of certain words translating simply as 'development' signifies his approval of Darwinian evolution is disingenuous as well as dishonest; indeed there is no known instance of Hitler ever using the root-word ‘entwicklung’ to convey the sense of biological evolution.

There are two instances where Hitler appears to have alluded to Darwinian evolution. Both come from the ‘Table Talks’, a series of conversations and monologues recorded by stenographer between 1941 and 1944. It should be noted that the accuracy of the transcripts of these talks has been repeatedly questioned. Hitler would not allow any recording devices to be used during these talks and Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary, is known to have edited them. Indeed, one of the two stenographers employed, Henry Picker, has been quoted as saying “.....no confidence can be placed in Bormann's editing of it.” Translations, originally from German to French and then to English, are claimed to have resulted in further alterations to the text. Nevertheless, in October 1941 Hitler discusses the absurdity of schools teaching the story of the creation in one class and notions of evolution in another and how the two conflicting stories had confused him as a child. He then goes on to say that “it would be more profoundly pious to find God in everything”. He offers no value judgement as to the theory of evolution. In July 1942, Hitler likens himself to a scientist:

"I feel I am like Robert Koch [the German doctor who isolated the responsible agents for tuberculosis, anthrax and cholera] in politics. He discovered the bacillus and thereby ushered medical science onto new paths. I discovered the Jew as the bacillus and the fermenting agent of all social decomposition.”

This was the second occasion in which Hitler had likened himself to Robert Koch. The first was in a speech in Salzburg 22 years earlier when he also likened himself to Pasteur. Yet we are being led to believe that Darwin was his scientific hero. So why did he not say that? He praises men like Martin Luther, Arthur de Gobineau, Houston Chamberlain, Koch and Pasteur among others, but never, ever, Darwin. The previous January he was recorded as saying:

“From where do we get the right to believe, that from the very beginning Man was not what he is today? Looking at Nature tells us, that in the realm of plants and animals changes and developments happen. But nowhere inside a kind shows such a development as the breadth of the jump, as Man must supposedly have made, if he has developed from an ape-like state to what he is today.”

By any reading this is surely a straightforward and unambiguous denial of not only speciation but of the accepted evolutionary origins of human beings. Indeed this passage could have been written by any modern-day creationist trying to convince his audience that evolution sans speciation is as far as the evidence goes. It surely beggars belief that after writing two large volumes, giving dozens of public speeches, and then having regular conversations on a wide range of subjects over a period of three years, the man who supposedly based his entire political ideology on Darwinism had no more to say on the matter than these trivial few lines.

Weikart can surely see that Hitler negated Darwinian evolution completely, yet he chooses to consider this statement as an “abberation” (as if he had any others to compare it with) and so is forced to partially quote from Arthur Keith (1866-1955), a Scottish anatomist and anthropologist:

“The German Führer, as I have consistently maintained, is an evolutionist. He has consciously sought to make the practice of Germany conform to the theory of evolution.”

In addition to Weikart’s book this carefully selected quote can be found on a number of creationist websites. What you never find in these places, however, is Keith’s following sentence:

"He has failed, not because evolution is false, but because he has made three fatal errors in its application".

So contrary to what Weikart would like us to believe, the point Keith was actually making is that Hitler didn't understand evolution well enough to apply it. And neither, it appears, did Arthur Keith. He was  responsible in 1914 for giving a scientific name, Homo piltdownensis, to the fraudulent fossil skull (part human, part orang-utan, part chimpanzee) known as the Piltdown Man, despite a paper having appeared a year earlier in 'Nature' denouncing the skull as an obvious fake. Keith was not only convinced that Hitler was an “evolutionist” but he also denied the validity of all proto-human fossils found in Africa, believing instead that all humans originated in Europe and that “racial characters are more strongly developed in the Jews than in any other race”. Two out of three of these ideas sound like something pulled directly from ‘Mein Kampf’.

There is only a single direct reference to Darwinian ‘natural selection’ in the entire Nazi archives. This is found in the minutes of the Wansee Conference of 1942 where Reinhard Heydrich, one of the architects of the Holocaust (the name of the project to build three of the death camps was Operation Reinhard) reported on his plans for Jewish work camps:

“Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes. The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as a the seed of a new Jewish revival”.

Heydrich is stating, correctly, that Jews who are able to survive the rigours of the camp will be the hardiest and if allowed to reproduce will pass these traits onto their offspring. This would certainly be an example of natural selection. As Darwin explained in his book ‘The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex’ (1871): “the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health”. Note that Heydrich is simply reporting the possible natural consequences of his plans. He has not fallen for an argumentum ad consequentiam. He is not even remotely attempting to use natural selection as a justification for the Jews being placed in the camp. Indeed, Heydrich is bringing natural selection to the attention of his colleagues only because of its potentially negative effects on Nazi aspirations.

Because of this disturbing lack of direct quotations from Nazi sources, authors claiming a Darwin-Hitler link are forced to copiously scaffold their assertions by quote-mining from carefully selected third parties. Weikart’s book and Bergman’s papers are replete with examples of this practice. Further, they often deliberately convey these opinions in such a way that they masquerade as a primary source. Bergman again:

“His race views were not from fringe science as often claimed but rather Hitler’s views were “..… straightforward German social Darwinism of a type widely known and accepted””

A cursory glance would make it look like the nested quote emanates from Hitler. It doesn’t. If it did, why would Bergman not quote Hitler himself stating that his views were “straightforward German social Darwinism”? It’s not as if Hitler boxed shy of letting the world know his opinions. Well, apart from Hitler never having used the word ‘Darwinism’, the phrase ‘social Darwinism’ wasn’t even coined until the final year of Hitler’s life. Why else would Bergman feel the need to nest-quote opinion from George Stein’s 1988 paper in 'Scientific American', ‘Biological Science and the Roots of Nazism’?

Another sly trick employed by anti-Darwinian commentators is to use selective quotes derived directly from Darwin, but in a rebuilt form, in a blatant attempt to distort the original meaning. The following, for example, is an excerpt from the transcript of the voiceover from the documentary ‘Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed’. This film attempted, among other aims, to argue that the theory of evolution has led to all manner of atrocities, including eugenics and the Nazi Holocaust. This passage purports to be a direct quotation from Darwin that demonstrates his support of eugenics and callous lack of concern for his fellow humans:

“With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed”.

It certainly appears that Darwin is suggesting that weaker members of society not be allowed to have children. Now here is the original quotation in full, taken from ‘The Descent of Man’. The words deliberately omitted are in bold:

“With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed”.

This exact doctored quote has a long history and was first used by the anti-evolution prosecuting lawyer William Jenning Bryan in the 1925 Louisiana 'Scopes' trial which challenged the legality of the Butler Act which had made it illegal to teach evolution in a state school. It is difficult to imagine that the producers of the documentary were not aware of their falsehood. Even worse, the documentary simply ignores the paragraph immediately following in which Darwin makes crystal clear his contempt for eugenics :

“The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil”.

So, contrary to what 'Expelled' is claiming, Darwin actually told us that the practice of eugenics would result in "deterioration in the noblest part of our nature" and be "an overwhelmingly present evil". Comparing the two versions, I think anyone would agree that the view painted of Darwin in ‘Expelled’ falls far short of honesty. In fact, rather than being a cold-hearted eugenicist Darwin reveals himself to be considerably more tolerant and less bigoted than are many present-day fundamentalist Christians.

Another example purporting to be Darwin's exact words has been oft-quoted by creationist sources for almost twenty years. It goes like this:

"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous [i.e., most human-looking] apes … will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla".

This excerpt apparently demonstrates Darwin's acceptance of a racial hierarchy within human beings and the prediction that the 'civilized races' will replace the 'savage races'. It is invariably unreferenced and is a perfect example of the dishonest practice of quote-mining by an author attempting to support an assertion that is actually devoid of evidence. This particular passage originated sometime in the mid-1990s and its origin has been traced back to the Discovery Institute. In fact, Darwin said no such thing. Here is the original passage, from chapter 6 of 'The Descent of Man'. Again, the critical omitted words are in bold:

"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".

When the paragraph is rendered in full it becomes obvious that Darwin is not giving us his own views but discussing the opinions of someone else, in this case Hermann Schaaffhausen (1816-1893), Professor of Anatomy at the University of Bonn, writing in the 'Anthropological Review' of April 1867. Reading several sentences before this would also reveal the wider context of the quote; that Darwin is not even discussing the conquest of one species over another but apparent gaps in the fossil record at his time of writing and how these might be interpreted by observers in the future. But why let the facts get in the way when you can selectively quote and alter the text to produce some good propaganda? One could just as reasonably state that the Bible surely claims "there is no God" by selectively quoting Psalms 14:1, "the fool said in his heart there is no God".

None of these examples are as brazenly dishonest, however, as this offering from Michael Craven, President of the Center for Christ & Culture, in his paper 'Expelled: Exposing the Darwinian Paradox'. Here he quotes Thomas Huxley (1825-1895), the English biologist and famous supporter of Darwin, as saying "only from death on a genocidal scale could the few progress". Yet the term 'genocide' was unknown until 1944 when it was coined by the Polish-born writer Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959) in his paper 'Axis Rule in Occupied Europe'.

Even if Hitler had been influenced by Darwin he would have found himself to be squarely at odds with the official scientific policy of his own Nazi Party. In the first volume of the ‘Zeitschrift für die Gesamte Naturwissenschaft’ (Journal of All Natural Science, the official science journal of the Nazi Party) in 1935, one of the editors, Kurt Hildebrandt (1881-1966), wrote that Darwinism had to be rejected because:

“.......the creative unfolding of species, the origin of species from the amoeba to man, cannot be explained by this mechanistic theory. Rather exact research on heritability has clearly destroyed the mechanistic framework of Darwinian theory”.

Note the critical use of the term "mechanistic theory", implying that evolution has no explanatory power because it has no supernatural basis. Hildebrandt would feel quite at ease with the Discovery Institute on this point. He also clearly didn’t realise that Mendelian genetics supported Darwin’s basic thesis. Or maybe he did but he didn’t like it because it simply didn’t fit with Nazi volkisch-biological (folk-biology) views. This appears likely, as two years later the botanist Ernst Bergdolt (1902-1948) wrote in the same journal that Darwinian natural selection was, “typical of the kind of passive environmentalist theory declaimed by Jewish liberals”.

Nazi political ideology rested on a particularly narrow base and to a large extent this was reflected in the scientific community. Whereas socialism and communism, it’s main philosophical and political rivals within Europe, had a number of reference works to refer to, such as the writings of Marx, Engel, Lenin and Stalin, Nazism relied heavily on Hitler’s writings and speeches. After Hitler came to power, ‘Mein Kampf’ was distributed free of charge to all newly-wed couples and to everyone serving in the armed forces, a total of 10 million copies in all. If, as Christian fundamentalists claim, Hitler himself was the driving force behind the enthusiasm for Darwinian thought in Nazi Germany, he appears to have been spectacularly unsuccessful. As late as 1940 the Darwinian zoologist Konrad Lorenz complained in the journal ‘Der Biologie’ that there were:

“schools of National-Socialistic Greater Germany who in fact still reject evolutionary thought and descent theory”.

Lorenz further mentions that the rejection of descent theory in German universities had less to do with the concept of evolution per se and more specifically with Darwin's synopsis of natural selection.

The truth is that Hitler too had no enthusiasm whatsoever for Darwinist thought. Throughout ‘Mein Kampf’ Hitler discusses the history of the human species and ‘racial theory’ in general in the language of creationist polygenics (i.e., separate creations for the different races), Biblical-style bloodlines and supernatural causation. This was clearly the ideology and language with which he was more familiar, not the terminology of Darwinian evolution and Mendelian or population genetics. Hitler actually believed, as the Bible says, that 'racial heritage' is primarily passed from generation to generation less by cultural means than physically, through the 'life-blood' itself. Because of his fundamentalist belief in verses such as Leviticus 17:11 he strictly limited the availability of blood to hospitals, causing the needless deaths of tens of thousands of German civilians and soldiers.

It is particularly interesting to note that Hitler frequently used the word ‘kind’ in place of the now commonly used ‘species’, which had gained much common usage at that time. ‘Kind’ (translated from the Hebrew ‘min’ or ‘miyn’; ‘created type’) is a term lifted directly from the Old Testament Books of Genesis, Deuteronomy, Leviticus and in one instance, Ezekiel. One formidable ongoing problem for creationists has been defining what a ‘kind’ is. They are plagued by a lack of agreement as to the actual phylogenetic level at which a ‘kind’ resides. For example, one early ‘creation scientist’, J. Barton Payne, writing in the late 1950s, classified ‘kind’ as any group of animals displaying distinct morphological similarities and many current creationists stick to that definition. This reasoning would place, for example, Australian echidnas (egg-laying mammals of the family Tachyglossidae), the European, African and Asian hedgehogs (of the subfamily Erinaceinae, which are distantly related to shrews), some species of Madagascan tenrecs (mammals of the family Tenrecidae) and the Asian, African and American porcupines (all rodents belonging to the families Erethizontidae or Erethizontidae) within the same ‘kind’ due to the prominence of their prickly protrusions of the skin. Such a grouping would obviously negate any genetic link. However, the ‘kinds’ of animals allegedly taken onto Noah’s Ark apparently had to be able to breed together successfully, thus requiring genetic compatibility (and far larger numbers). It is in the interests of creationists and intelligent design proponents to maintain vagueness and elasticity whenever they need to characterise a 'kind' because they are then free to swap definitions to suit different purposes. Only one 'kind' is never considered to be so malleable; human beings.

Thus a ‘kind’ (or it’s pseudoscientific counterpart, the ‘baramin’) simply represents some group of organisms whose genetic structures are hypothesised to be protected by some undetermined form of barrier that can never be breached genetically (again by some unspecified mechanism) and so preserves the God-endowed morphology of the ‘kind’ (whatever that is). If, as Hitler believed, Homo sapiens have not “developed from an ape-like state to what he is today”, then such a (surely supernatural) barrier would be necessary. Darwin’s (and neo-Darwinian) findings, however, flatly contradict Hitler’s view. There is no conceivable barrier, either natural or supernatural, that would prevent speciation from occurring within any species given suitable environmental exigencies. There is no evidence whatsoever that DNA specified to act only within certain 'species' or 'kinds'.

Chapter 2: The Influence Of Hitler's Three Un-Darwinian Racist Musketeers And Several Prominent German Clergymen

Hitler’s racial ideology hinged upon the notion that human beings do not comprise a single composite species but are made up of a number of ‘races’ or ‘subspecies’. This Hitlerian worldview has somehow been morphed into a principle accusation made by Christian fundamentalists toward Darwin, i.e., claiming that Darwin was inherently racist and used science to portray human beings as split into ‘subspecies’ according to a hierarchy. He did no such thing. Indeed, Darwin refuted this view on a number of occasions during his career and dedicated a whole chapter of ‘The Descent of Man’ to demonstrating his doubt and contempt for such ideas.

Polygenist views can be traced back to ancient times in several cultures, but for Hitler it was the work of Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882) a Frenchman born into a family of minor nobility that struck the major chord. Obsessed with heredity and bloodlines, and claiming to have descended from Norman and Viking royalty, Gobineau somehow managed to conjure up a personal philosophy comprised of a mixture of pseudoscience, Catholic values, anti-democratic views, French aristocratic sentiment and German romanticism. Written several years before Darwin’s findings suggested that all humans, regardless of their ‘race’, have a common evolutionary origin, his highly influential book ‘Essai Sur l’inégalité des Races Humaines’ or ‘Inequality of the Human Races’ was first published in French in 1853. It was translated into German in 1897 by Ludwig Schemann, a leading proponent of Nazi theory. Two quotes from the book encapsulate his racial views:

“It is said that Genesis does not admit of a multiple origin for our species..........we must, of course, acknowledge that Adam is the ancestor of the white race. The scriptures are evidently meant to be so understood, for the generations deriving from him are certainly white..........there is nothing to show that, in the view of the first compilers of the Adamite genealogies, those outside the white race were counted as part of the species at all”.

“I conclude......... that the permanence of racial types is beyond dispute; it is so strong and indestructible that the most complete change of environment has no power to overthrow it.”

The first quote is pure Christian-based polygenism. Two sections of the second passage, concerning ‘racial types’ are of particular note with regard to biology. First, he claims that “the most complete change of environment has no power to overthrow it”. Thus, de Gobineau succinctly and completely denies the possibility that humans have resulted from speciation within the primate line. Even after becoming aquainted with Darwin’s findings, Gobineau remained disdainful throughout his life. He then qualifies his statement by going on to say “so long as no crossing takes place”. By “crossing” he refers to ‘miscegenation’ or ‘interacial breeding’. Hitler later echoed de Gobineau’s thoughts, writing in Mein Kampf:

“Marriage is an institution called upon to produce images of the Lord and not monstrosities halfway between man and ape."

Hitler signed miscegenation statutes into law in 1935 in both the ‘Nürnberger Gesetze‘ (Nuremburg Laws), which made all sexual relations, including marriage, between Aryans and Jews illegal, and ‘Gesetz zum Schutze des Deutschen Blutes und der Deutschen Ehre’ (The Protection of German Blood and German Honour Act) which applied similarly to other races where at least one of the partners was a German citizen. Those already in such a marriage suffered legal discrimination by being excluded from government employment or government funded organisations. The first law explicitly considered Jews as a distinct racial group, rather than in any religious sense. Having a single Jewish grandparent classified an individual as Jewish, regardless of the religion they had been raised with, or whether they practiced any religion at all. This ‘racial purity’, as opposed to cultural definition of Jewishness was later to backfire on the Nazis in unexpected ways. That same year, Emil Maurice, one of the founders of the SS, was discovered to have had Jewish ancestry but, after personal intervention from Hitler, was declared to be ‘Ehrenarier‘ or honorary Aryan. Similarly, the Luftwaffe officer in charge of procurement, Erhard Milch, was found to have a Jewish father and was given Aryan status only after his mother signed an affadavit naming another man as the real father.

Putting aside the fact that Darwin gave no credence whatsoever to polygenism, the notion of a direct ideological pathway from Darwin to Hitler can only really be taken seriously if it can be demonstrated that the concepts of human ‘subspecies’ did not exist before Darwin. This is, of course, not so. For Hitler, the modern cradle of such laws was not Darwin’s mind but the governments of the United States. Anti-miscegenation laws were present in the first Thirteen Colonies in the late 1600s, long before Darwin or de Gobineau. At their peak, 31 states had anti-miscegenation laws on their statute books and in every case the justifications given for instituting such laws were based on Christian morality. Although there was never any equivalent Federal law, the right for states to pass such laws was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1883, twelve years after Darwin had suggested that all the ‘races’ had a common origins.We now know Darwin was correct. Genetic variation within any one 'race' is greater than the genetic variation between any two 'races'. It has even been observed that variation in a single trait can be greater in an extended family than in the population as a whole. In other words, it is possible that any two random individuals from different 'races' are genetically closer than any two random individuals from the same 'race'. A number of the most significant genetic differences between human 'races', such as lactose and malaria tolerance, appear to have resulted from adaptations that have occurred only within the past 10,000 years.

In 1912 however, Representative Seaborn Roddenberry of Georgia tried to enable a federal anti-miscegeneration law through Congress arguing that:

“Intermarriage between whites and blacks is repulsive and averse to every sentiment of pure American spirit. It is abhorrent and repugnant. It is subversive to social peace. It is destructive of moral supremacy”

Note that Roddenberry makes his appeal not to Darwinian notions of biology but to emotional and moral sentiment. Thus there was ample legal and religious precedent from the United States, devoid of any Darwinian motivation, that could have influenced Hitler. What is surprising is how entrenched these laws proved to be. Even after Hitler was defeated and anti-miscegenation laws were repealed in occupied Germany, they hung on in several US states for another two decades. As late as 1959 a mixed-race couple of white and African-Native American descent who had married in Washington DC, were jailed for one year under Virginia’s ‘Racial Integrity Act’ of 1924 by Judge Leon Bazile. The sentence was suspended for 25 years on condition that they did not step foot in Virginia. Paraphrasing the German physician and anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840), with whom he was obviously familiar, Judge Bazile wrote in his summing up:

“Almighty God created the races White, Black, Yellow, Malay and Red, and he placed them on separate continents. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix”.

Even fourteen years after Hitler’s demise, Bazile was couching his arguments in favour of anti-miscegeneration laws in terms of Christian morality, not Darwinian biology. Blumenbach, though not a polygenist, did promote the idea that Adam was white-skinned and all the other four ‘races’ (‘Mongolian’, ‘Ethiopian’, ‘American’ and ‘Malayan’, in addition to ‘Caucasian’) were the result of degeneration in his bloodline largely due, he hypothesised, to the effects of climate. His work with craniometry, however, led him to change his views somewhat after his data revealed that both mean skull volumes and variations in skull volume were similar in both Europeans and Africans. A later study by Friedrich Tiedemann (1781-1861) confirmed Blumenbach’s findings. In ‘Das Hirn des Negers’ (‘The brain of the Negro’) published in 1837, he reported no differences in brain and skull volume, either absolutely or in relation to body size, between ‘Caucasians’, ‘Mongolians’, ‘Malays’, ‘American Indians’, and ‘Negros’. Thus scientific evidence that human beings did not comprise distinct ‘subspecies’ but shared important phenotypic characteristics was available many years before either de Gobineau, Hitler or Bazile had formulated their own views. All evidently chose, however, to ignore the science.

The last anti-miscegenation law was quashed in the USA as late as 1967. That same year, a judge sitting in the Supreme Court of Georgia, who clearly did not understand either Darwin’s or Gregor Mendel’s scientific findings on hybridisation, stated that:

“Amalgamation of the races is.....unnatural, [yielding offspring who are] generally effeminate, and.....inferior in physical development and strength to the full-blood race”

Unfettered Darwinian natural selection would, of course, result in just what Hitler or these learned judges found so objectionable, i.e., it increases the likelihood of ‘crossing’ in all sexually reproducing species, including humans. What American anti-miscegenation laws were doing (unknowingly, for they were founded on Christian notions of morality, rather than having any scientific basis) was profoundly un-Darwinian as they were hindering natural selection via the crude promotion of artificial selection.

As with the American states, the Nazis defended their use of anti-miscegenation laws, not by referring to Darwin’s findings, but to pseudoscientific imperatives based firmly on Judeo-Christian precedent. Hitler himself wrote in Mein Kampf:

"...it is one of those concerning which it is said with such terrible justice that the sins of the fathers are avenged down to the tenth generation...Blood sin and desecration of the race are the original sin in this world..."

Did Hitler get the idea that blood desecration is a sin down to the tenth generation from Darwin? No, he got it direct from Deuteronomy 23:2-3:

"No bastard shall enter the assembly of the Lord; even to the tenth generation none of his descendants shall enter the assembly of the Lord. No Ammonite or Moabite shall enter the assembly of the Lord; even to the tenth generation none belonging to them shall enter the assembly of the Lord for ever"

Hitler had his friend Julius Streicher (1885-1946), the founder and publisher of the pro-Nazi weekly newspaper Der Stürmer’, help set up the ‘Instituts zur Erforschung Jüdischen Einflusses auf das Deutsche Kirchliche Leben’ or ‘Institute for the Study and Elimination of Jewish Influence on German Church Life’. Headquarted in Jena, the institute, whose members included professors of theology and bishops, trained the clergy in anti-semitic theory and practice, organised conferences with an anti-Jewish theme and published a number of pamphlets and books vilifying Jews, including a de-Judaised version of the New Testament, on the basis that Jewish forgeries had been added to the original texts. Der Stürmer’s title banner carried the slogan ‘Die Juden sind unser Unglück’ (‘the Jews are our misfortune’; a phrase originating from the 19th century German historian Heinrich von Treitschke) and Streicher produced record sales by publishing lurid stories of the sexual violation of German women by Jews, accompanied by staged semi-pornographic photographs. In recognition of his work, the city council of Nuremberg voted to present Streicher on his 52nd birthday with a first edition (1543) of the Christian theologian Martin Luther’s (1483-1546) anti-Semitic treatise ‘Von den Juden und Ihren Lügen’ or ‘On The Jews And Their Lies’. In their story reporting the gift, ‘Der Stürmer’ described the work as “the most radically antisemitic tract ever published”.

During his trial at the the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg in 1945, Streicher was unambiguous as to the religious basis for Nazi anti-miscegenation laws:

"......the Jews should serve as an example to every race, for they created the racial law for themselves.....the law of Moses, which says, "If you come into a foreign land you shall not take unto yourself foreign women”......These laws of the Jews were taken as a model for these [Nazi] laws........notwithstanding many Jews had married non-Jewish women, these marriages were dissolved......That was the beginning of Jewry which, because it introduced these racial laws, has survived throughout the centuries, while all other races and civilizations have perished."

His last words before being hanged were "Now it goes to God!". That indigenous German Christian thought had an early anti-Semitic slant is no more evident than in Luther’s comprehensive 65,000 word treatise.

The language he employs is ornate, even for a 16th century clergyman, and particularly vexatious, describing Jews as a "base, whoring people.......full of the devil's faeces.......which they wallow in like swine", while the synagogue was an "incorrigible whore and an evil slut”. Hitler was clearly taking his cue from Luther when he wrote in 'Mein Kampf':

"........the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew."

Luther recommended seven remedial actions to be taken against the Jews. Summarised, these are for Jewish synagogues, schools and homes to be burned to the ground; for any gold and silver owned by Jews to be confiscated; for their religious writings to be confiscated, for Jewish preaching to be made illegal, with death as the punishment; for Jews to be given no legal right of safe passage and Jews to be forced to work as agricultural slave labour. It is not difficult to see that the essence of what Luther wrote in the 16th century was what the Nazis actually achieved in the first half of the 20th century. Every single one of Luther's seven suggested actions were implemented by the Nazis. They were simply carrying out his suggestions. They needed no input from Darwin.

The importance of Luther in framing Hitler's political ideology did not stop at hatred at Jews, however. Eighteen years before Luther published his infamous anti-Semitic tract he had published a pro-feudal pamphlet 'Against the Peasant Bands of Robbers and Murderers' that goes beyond despotic. detailing the divinely-ordained autocratic rights that all rulers should exercise over their subjects. The peasants, Luther declared:

"........are no better than straw. They will not hear the Word and they are without sense; therefore they must be compelled to hear the crack of the whip and the whizz of bullets, and it is only what they deserve. We must pray for them that they may become obedient; but if they do not, pity is of no avail here; we must let the cannon-balls whistle among them, or they will only make things a thousand times worse..........Like the drivers of donkeys, who have to belabour the donkeys incessantly with rods and whips, or they will not obey, so must the ruler do with the people; they must drive, beat, throttle, hang, burn, behead and torture, so as to make themselves feared and to keep the people in check.........the duty of the preachers is to preach hatred. If the authorities refuse to follow this drastic advice, the pastors and preachers are at all events to proclaim it to the people."

Again, Luther provided Hitler with a template for government derived not from Charles Darwin but from Germanic Christianity. Similarly, the coloured stars that Hitler demanded be worn by the Jews and homosexuals were not of his invention but an idea borrowed from the church. They derived from the earliest Catholic Inquisitions against the French Cathars who had denounced the God of the Old Testament as Satan and considered the Catholic church as having betrayed and corrupted the original purity of Christ's message. After massacring 20,000 Cathars in a single day, the Inquisitors required all those remaining alive who denounced the Cathar teachings to wear a yellow cross on their clothing for the rest of their lives.

That Luther’s ideas were entrenched early in the development of Nazi policies is evidenced by this line from Mein Kampf, "beside Frederick the Great stands Martin Luther as well as Richard Wagner" and by a quote from Bernhard Rust, Hitler’s Education Minister, in the Nazi Party newspaper, ‘Völkischer Beobachter’ (‘People’s Observer’). This he said in early 1933, before Hitler had passed any anti-miscegenation or anti-Jewish laws and well before the destructive events of 9-10th November 1938 (Kristallnacht; note that November 10th was Luther’s birthday):

"Since Martin Luther closed his eyes, no such son of our people has appeared again. It has been decided that we shall be the first to witness his reappearance ... I think the time is past when one may not say the names of Hitler and Luther in the same breath. They belong together; they are of the same old stamp”.

The continuing importance of Martin Luther to Nazi thought during their regime is apparent by, for example, Hans Hinkel’s 1942 acceptance speech as Director of Film at the ‘Ministry for the People's Enlightenment and Propaganda’:

"Through his acts and his spiritual attitude, he began the fight which we will wage today; with Luther, the revolution of German blood and feeling against alien elements of the Volk was begun”.

Another prominent German theologian who gave the Nazi party considerable ideological succour was the Lutheran Gustav Adolf Deissmann (1866-1937). Deissmann held Professorships in theology first at Heidelberg and later at Berlin, the latter position long considered to be the most eminent chair in German theology and certainly so during the Reich. In September 1914 he wrote a theological treatise for the Lutheran church and the German people entitled 'The War and Religion' which outlined the Christian case for Germany's involvement in what we now call World War I. His argument was based on the notion that the war provided an important opportunity for Germany to realise Luther's ideals. He goes on:

“The positive effects of war upon religion are infinitely stronger than its negative ones.......Our present religion is national and German, and we preach a German God! A German, a national God!........Christianity is the religion of war”.

Deissmann considered Lutheran German Christianity to be the true expression of Christianity, unlike the “.........sweet-sentimental, and sentimental-weak Christianity” of Germany's opponents and in his sermons (which were invariably held to packed audiences) has been quoted as saying in response to German soldiers handing out poisoned sweets to children in Belgium:

"I am proud to preach the religion of might and what our enemies call barbarism.........only in a German cloak can the real Christ breathe."

All this nourishing food for Hitler's thought, and not a single mention of Darwin anywhere in Deissmann's writings and speeches. Indeed the above quote could have been lifted straight out of 'Mein Kampf'. However, at least three other leading Lutheran theologians bear responsibility for recommending the ideologies of both Luther and Hitler to the German people.

The first, Gerhard Kittel (1888-1948), was Professor of Evangelical Theology at the University of Tübingen. He was a passionate anti-Semite throughout his life and became a (prominent) member of the Nazi Party in 1933 and stated at the time that his choice to join was not pragmatic but was based on "a Christian moral foundation." He was a member of a group of twelve leading German theologians and pastors who issued the 1939 'Godesberg Declaration' in which they thanked God for Hitler, described Nazism as "a call of God" and pledged to transform their respective churches into "an instrument of racial policy".

Second was Emanuel Hirsch (1888-1972), Professor of Theology at Göttingen University and a member not only of the Nazi Party but also holding a post within the SS. He described Hitler coming to power in 1933 as a "sunrise of divine goodness" and the Nazi Party "should be accepted and supported by Christians as a tool of God's grace." He gave enthusiastic public support to both the 'Nuremburg Laws' and the 'Protection of German Blood and German Honour Act' and was highly critical of theologians and clergy who did not show active support for the Nazi cause.

The third was Paul Althaus (1888-1966), Professor of Practical and Systematic Theology at the University of Göttingen. He wrote 'The Theology of Martin Luther' (1962) and 'The Ethics of Martin Luther' (published posthumously 1972) both of which offer an unrepentant and uncompromising glorification of the man and his ideology. Like Deissmann he too viewed the waging of war as a perfectly Christian endeavour in order to resolve differences with other nations. He went so far as to equate Hitler with Martin Luther and even Christ himself.

Again, powerful home grown theological underpinning for Hitler's political ideologies with Darwin nowhere in sight. Furthermore, as we shall see, there were often frightening ideological similarities between German and American Protestant theologians and clergy in the 1930s. Despite such evidence, however, it has been suggested by some contemporary German theologians such as Johannes Wallman (b.1930) and Uwe Siemon-Netto (b.1936) that Luther’s treatise actually had little effect on the development of Nazi attitudes toward the Jews, as there had been a decline in the number of occasions the treatise was cited in academic works published in the 19th century. They both claim that the Nazis were already anti-Semitic and merely revived Luther’s treatise to bolster their policies. This might be so, but it begs the question as to whether, if Luther’s treatise had never existed, Nazi vehemence toward the Jews would be so strong and so devastatingly effective. The fact remains that Hitler and his many supporters within the German clergy were able to call upon a nationalistic German and Christian-based hatred of the Jews that pre-dated Darwin by centuries.

Some Christian churches in Germany have accepted the role played by Luther’s treatise in motivating their clergy into supporting Nazi policy. For example, on the 60th anniversary of 'Kristallnacht’ the Lutheran Church of Bavaria issued this statement:

"It is imperative for the Lutheran Church, which knows itself to be indebted to the work and tradition of Martin Luther, to take seriously also his anti-Jewish utterances, to acknowledge their theological function, and to reflect on their consequences. It has to distance itself from every [expression of] anti-Judaism in Lutheran theology.”

Anti-Semitism was by no means confined to German Lutheran Christian circles, however. Cosmo Lang, the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury from 1928-1941, contended in a speech to the House of Lords that "the Jews themselves" were to blame for the "excesses of the Nazis."

Another political party that claimed to have been directly influenced by Martin Luther was the Christian Social Party of Hitler's native Austria. Founded in 1893 with a great deal of support from the Catholic priesthood within Austria it became the first political party in the world to attain power on the issue of anti-Semitism, winning 66% of the seats on the Vienna City Council in 1895. For the following 25 years it's emblem consisted of a Jewish snake strangling the Austrian eagle. In 1907 the party merged with the Austrian Catholic Conservative Party and, representing the vast majority of Catholic voters, the party rose in power to form every national government except one in the period 1918-1938. Despite some Catholic Bishops petitioning Pope Leo XIII to censure the party because of its racist platform he refused to do so and by not doing allowed the party to claim publicly that it had Vatican approval.

It is commonplace for authors claiming an ideological link between Darwin and Hitler to seriously downplay the influence of Martin Luther on Hitler’s ideology. They have good reason to do so. Criticisms of Luther, who effectively, like Hitler, viewed the Jews as sub-human, effectively destroys the Christian fundamentalist falsehood that the notion of humans being comprised of a hierarchy of ‘sub-species’ is a Darwinian invention. Fundamentalists could argue from the ‘no true Scotsman’ angle, of course, claiming that Luther’s ideas of Christianity were simply a distortion of the genuine article. They tend not to do this either however as the argument skates on even thinner ice. Luther was, after all, the primary historical initiator for the existence of Protestantism, the broad Christian grouping from whose churches nearly all of them belong. It is important to note, in this regard, that in the 1932 Reichstag election in which the Nazis won the largest representation in the German parliament, the Nazi share of the vote in the predominantly Protestant north and east of Germany was approximately double that of the mainly Catholic south and west of the country. Weikart manages to gracefully sidestep all of these issues. He simply makes no mention of Martin Luther at all in his book.

The claim that Adam was white-skinned also predates Darwin. It had been given a thin veneer of scientific credibility through the writings of, among others, the Swiss paleontologist and geologist Louise Agassiz (1807-1873), the American surgeon Josiah Clark Nott (1804-1873), and the American Egyptologist George Gliddon (1809-1857). Nott’s writings were particularly popular. In 1857, two years before Darwin published ‘Origin of Species’, his book ‘Indigenous Races of the Earth’ had pre-orders well in excess of it’s first print-run. These three polygenists accepted a translation of the name ‘Adam’ as "to show red in the face" or "blusher". Since only lighter skinned people display a discernible blush, they took this as evidence that Adam must have been Caucasian. This notion was, in turn, predicated on studies of ancient Hebrew made by a number of Christian academics including the Presbyterian minister Josiah Priest, author of ‘Bible Defence Of Slavery: On The Origin, History And Fortunes Of The Negro Race’, published 1843, who wrote:

“First Adam, as above, signifies earthy man, red; second Adamah, signifies red earth, or blood; third Adami, signifies my man red, earthy, human; fourth Admah, signifies earthy, red, or bloody ; all of which words are of the same class, and spring from the same root, which was Adam, signifying red, or copper color.”

Like Nott's work, Priest's own book was not considered fringe. It proved to be immensely popular, being reprinted eight times in the first five years of publication. Later additions included a supplementary pamphlet by the Rev. W.S. Brown, which was highly critical of the anti-slavery movement. On the basis of evidence as flimsy as this, fellow polygenists such as de Gobineau enthusiastically partitioned humans into distinct ‘groupings’. In de Gobineau’s case he chose the white (Aryan) race (superior in terms of intelligence, morality and physical harmony), the black race (intense, willful) and the yellow race (lazy, uninventive). In the obvious absence of a biological barrier between the races he proposed the need for a ‘moral’ barrier, in the best interests not only of the Aryan race but of humans in general.

In stark contrast to the polygenists, however, Darwin did not start out with any particular views on ‘race’ but simply tried to explain the sometimes mutually reinforcing presumptions made by others for racial differences. Writing in ‘The Descent of Man’, he made plain he considered all attempts to subdivide humans into races or subspecies to be premature and likely scientifically worthless:

“The question whether mankind consists of one or several species has of late years been much discussed by anthropologists … . But it is a hopeless endeavour to decide this point, until some definition of the term “species” is generally accepted; and the definition must not include an indeterminate element such as an act of creation. We might as well attempt without any definition to decide whether a certain number of houses should be called a village, town, or city”.

Darwin also commented on the disagreement between the various factions of anthropologists on how the human ‘races’ or ‘subspecies’ should be delineated. As he saw it the problem was that all of the physical and mental characteristics chosen to categorise each ‘race’ proved, on closer examination, not to be unique to any one ‘race’. It was obvious to Darwin, therefore, that the various ethnic groups had a common evolutionary origin with all identifiable human characteristics highly intermingled. As he further wrote:

“.........all the races agree in so many unimportant details of structure and in so many mental peculiarities that these can be accounted for only by inheritance from a common progenitor; and a progenitor thus characterised would probably deserve to rank as man...........It may be doubted whether any character can be named which is distinctive of a race and is constant. Savages, even within the limits of the same tribe, are not nearly so uniform in character, as has been often asserted...... Man has been studied more carefully than any other animal, and yet there is the greatest possible diversity amongst capable judges whether he should be classed as a single species or race, or as two (Virey), as three (Jacquinot), as four (Kant), five (Blumenbach), six (Buffon), seven (Hunter), eight (Agassiz), eleven (Pickering), fifteen (Bory St. Vincent), sixteen (Desmoulins), twenty-two (Morton), sixty (Crawfurd), or as sixty-three, according to Burke...... the races ought not to be ranked as species......they graduate into each other, and that it is hardly possible to discover clear distinctive characters between them”.

African-American Christians appeared to have understood the import of Darwin's findings much earlier than many of their white counterparts. Indeed, many African-Americans were more disposed to Darwinian science than to some of the teachings of the white churches in the southern states (polygenist views were so rife in these places that European ethnologists had begun referring to such notions as the 'American School' of ethnology). In 1863 the African-American Methodist paper 'The 'Christian Recorder' positively reviewed Darwin's findings and particularly praised him for having acted as a counter to polygenist views:

"One question of much dispute seems to have been settled by Mr Darwin.......the Caucasian, the Malay, and the Negro, according to his facts, are varieties of a species, and may all have descended from a single pair, as set forth in the scriptures"

It is mind-boggling indeed that modern day fundamentalist Christians can read passages like these and infer from them that Darwin was convinced that human beings could and should be classified and placed on a hierarchy according to racially specific characteristics. Those who do so would surely fail any standardised reading comprehension test. Compare for yourself the above quotation from Darwin with Bergman’s own warped version of Darwin’s beliefs outlined in his paper, ‘Darwinism and the Nazi Race Holocaust’:

“........it was Darwin who claimed that certain races were genetically inferior as was scientifically ‘proven’ by Darwinism..........the ‘superior race’ belief was based on the theory of group inequality within each species, a major presumption and requirement of Darwin’s original ‘survival of the fittest’ theory”.

Even when ignoring the embarrassingly tautological nature of the first quote I cannot imagine a more dishonest rendering of what Darwin actually said. Biologist Steven J Gould didn’t share Bergman’s difficulty in understanding Darwin’s words. Writing in his essay ‘Eternal Metaphors of Palaeontology’ (1977) he succinctly notes:

“an explicit denial of innate progression [of a racial hierarchy] is the most characteristic feature separating Darwin’s theory of natural selection from other nineteenth century evolutionary theories.”

Even Gasman, in the final pages of his book, recognises this and curiously, given the theme of his work, admits that Darwin's findings were, in fact, wholly incompatible with Nazi racial theories, writing:

“It was therefore hardly ideologically admissible at the same time to allow for the evolution of the Aryans from a group of inferior anthropoid progenitors. Any theory of this kind would have destroyed the notion that the Aryans were in possession of racial superiority from the beginning”.

Despite such clear differences between the likes of de Gobineau, Hitler and Darwin in their attitude to the ‘races’, however, it is Darwin who creationists frequently claim was inherently racist. One very common source of such accusations is based on the full title of his first book, which is ‘On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life’. Throughout the book Darwin uses terms like ‘race’, ‘sub-species’ and variety’ interchangeably when discussing a range of animals such as dogs and horses as well as plants. For example, in this passage from Chapter 1 he uses three different words to describe the same concept:

“When we look to the hereditary varieties or races of our domestic animals and plants, and compare them with species closely allied together, we generally perceive in each domestic race, as already remarked, less uniformity of character than in true species”.

The irony is that ‘Origin of Species’ doesn’t even discuss the evolution of humans, so whenever someone remarks on the racist nature of the book’s title, you can be certain he or she hasn’t actually familiarised themselves with his work but is merely parroting the words of misinformed and dishonest Christian fundamentalist sources.

True though, by today’s standards Darwin probably was racist. He was after all, a middle-class white Englishman brought up in the 19th century Church of England where the inferiority of the non-white races was considered to be an empirical fact. Indeed, during Darwin's lifetime the vast majority of Europeans had never set eyes on a non-European. The term ‘racism’ is not an absolute and we can observe degrees and varieties of racism. For instance, Darwin made no anti-Semitic comments anywhere in his writing (except perhaps in one case; in a letter to his sister Susan in 1845 he used the relatively innocuous phrase "we are as rich as Jews") and he expressed pleasure when he found his work quoted and discussed in Hebrew language publications. Nevertheless, a recent anti-evolution primary school 'Islamic Science' textbook published in Turkey has bettered even the Discovery Institute authors by taking the ad hominem fallacy regarding Darwin to a whole new level of absurdity:

"First, he was a Jew. Second, he hated his prominent forehead, big nose and misshapen teeth"

How either of these statements might impact on the veracity of his findings is not mentioned, of course. Unless intelligence is a Zionist conspiracy. Darwin did, however, commonly use the terms ‘savage’ and ‘barbarian’ when referring to Africans and some other ethnic groups. These comments were unlikely to be intended as derogatory. It was simply an acknowledgement of the English lexicon of the time and such words were used both formally and informally by people from all walks of life, including in children’s books. The term ‘negro’, especially, was in formal use at that time and included in Parliamentary and other legal documents, medical and scientific papers and certainly by the church. We are able to glean nothing from Darwin’s writings, therefore, that suggests that he was any more racist than any of his peers and in some ways he was much less so, obviously much less so than de Gobineau or Hitler.

He did make what appear to be derogatory remarks about Africans being intellectually inferior to Europeans in his correspondence with fellow naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913). It is important to understand, though, that naturalists such as Darwin and Wallace did not consider intelligence to be more desirable than any other trait for members of any species to possess. They recognised that nature has no trait hierarchy, simply favouring those traits that conferred a greater chance of reproduction in a specific environment. In his 1890 paper ‘Human Selection’ for example, Wallace had written "Those who succeed in the race for wealth are by no means the best or the most intelligent." He also considered such people to fall short in the moral stakes too, writing of his distaste for those who were comfortable risking human life and health by employing people to perform dangerous occupations in the service of their bank balance.

While at medical school in Edinburgh Darwin came across the work of a black taxidermist and asked if he would teach him his art. He later wrote in his autobiography:

"By the way, a negro lived in Edinburgh, who had travelled with Waterton, and gained his livelihood by stuffing birds, which he did excellently: he gave me lessons for payment, and I used often to sit with him, for he was a very pleasant and intelligent man."

Darwin (along with the rest of his extended family) was a notable opponent of the slave trade and, at the time, made no secret of his wish that the Confederate States would lose the American Civil War. In ‘The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin’, published in 1887 by his son Frances Darwin, he tells of his sharing a cabin with the captain of the Beagle, a devout Christian with a missionary zeal named Robert FitzRoy, en route to the Galapagos Islands. Although they were in agreement on many scientific matters, they argued on the subject of slavery to such an extent that Darwin chose to eat alone and seriously considered leaving the ship. Fortunately for him (and for science) the gun-room officers invited him into their cabin whereupon FitzRoy sent a naval officer with a written apology and request that they remained sharing a cabin. Years later, after Darwin had published his work on evolution, and Fitzroy's faith had become stronger, he became wracked with guilt at the part he had played in Darwin's discovery of "the abomination of evolution" writing that it had caused him "acutest pain".

Darwin counted Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Colonel of the First South Carolina Volunteers (the first federally organised African-American regiment, which fought in the American Civil War), as a good friend and had him stay in his home. Writing to him in 1873 Darwin remarks:

“I always thought well of the negroes, from the little which I have seen of them; and I have been delighted to have my vague impressions confirmed, and their character and mental powers so ably discussed”.

At the time of writing, Higginson was actively involved in fighting for the rights of the freed slaves. Later he wrote two books, ‘Common Sense About Women’ (1881) and ‘Women and Men’ (1888), in which he advocated gender equality in all spheres of life. Darwin had previously written in 1834 to the clergyman and geologist, J.S. Henslo:

“I was told before leaving England that after living in slave countries all my opinions would be altered; the only alteration I am aware of is forming a much higher estimate of the negro character”.

He also tells us that when he doing his field work aboard the ‘Beagle’ he enjoyed the company of the three westernised natives from Tierra del Fuego every bit as much as his own countrymen and remarks:

“I was incessantly struck, whilst living with the Feugians on board the "Beagle," with the many little traits of character, shewing how similar their minds were to ours”

He was obviously not averse then, when occasion permitted, to mixing with other races and treating them as his equal. More likely he suffered, as we all surely do, from a whiff of cultural supremacy, suggested by his also writing about how much he disliked native Fuegan culture. Unlike de Gobineau, he probably discriminated more against the cultures he found objectionable rather than the people of other races per se.

One particularly fanciful notion held by de Gobineau was that Aryans were descended from a primeval people from Northern India who had originally lived an ideal ‘Rousseau-esque’ existence and it was from these origins that all the major human cultures such as Ancient Egyptian and Greek, Roman, Chinese and pre-Columbian American, had flourished. He wrote that, "history springs only from contact with the white races." All these societies had eventually failed, he believed, because the Aryan bloodline had eventually become diluted by interbreeding with the other two inferior races. Only the Germanic peoples were deemed to have enough of the original Aryan bloodline left to be able to reconstitute a pure Aryan race once again. This would obviously require an end to all interacial breeding in order to reduce the previous ‘deleterious’ effects of Darwinian natural selection.

de Gobineau observed this process of racial dilution being continued in 19th century Europe as a result of colonisation and for this reason he opposed Europeans becoming too involved in other cultures, lest the pure Aryan bloodline was further diluted and purity become even more unattainable. de Gobineau was not particularly anti-Semitic, however, and in ‘Inequality of the Human Races’ wrote at some length in praise of the “free, strong, and intelligent” Jewish people who had succeeded despite their “natural disadvantages”. Obviously these opinions were anathema to the Nazi party and they heavily edited this aspect of his work for public consumption.

Although he wrote ‘Inequality of the Human Races’ before Darwin had published ‘The Descent of Man’, de Gobineau lived for another eleven years after Darwin’s findings became available and would certainly have become aware of how Darwin so strongly negated polygenist ideas and notions of racial hierarchies. Despite having ample opportunity to defend his ideas, however, he chose not to do so, writing only fiction and historical texts in his remaining years.

Although Darwin was responsible for first outlining the actual mechanism by which natural selection has effect, it is only fair to mention that notions of ‘speciation’, that plants and animals (including humans) had changed over vast amounts of time, existed long before Darwin’s findings, originating as far back as Ancient Greece with philosophers such as Anaximander, Empedocles and Aristotle. Having been a diplomat in the French mission in Tehran, and a keen and knowledgeable student of oriental culture (he wrote a history of the Persian people and was the first European to publish on the Baha’i faith), it is almost certain that de Gobineau would also have been aware of the views of early Islamic thinkers on the subject of the common ancestory of humans.

Compared to the Bible the Koran contains a relatively incomplete chronology of creation. In particular, the ‘six ayums’ it supposedly took Allah to create the seven firmaments plus the Earth do not equate to the six days outlined in Genesis. Ayums tend to be defined as developmental stages, each of which is of an indeterminant time. It is not uncommon for Islamic scholars to consider the concept of the six ayums to be consistent with the scientific evidence for the timeline of the universe. Thus notions equating to the silliness of Christian young Earth creationism are comparatively recent concepts to Islam. Having an indeterminate and potentially extended timeframe at their philosophical disposal resulted in a number of early Islamic scholars producing texts that anticipated both abiogenesis and modern evolutionary theory.

The prolific Arabic author Al-Jahiz (c. 776-869), for example, in his seven-volume ‘Book of Animals’ suggested a form of ‘Lamarkian’ inheritance in which environmental factors caused a ‘struggle for existence’ resulting in the survival of stronger bloodlines by the transmission of inherited characteristics. Another Christian fundamentalist Darwin myth has him learning Arabic from the Cambridge University linguist Samuel Lee (1783-1852) and then plagiarising Al-Jahiz. Unfortunately for the purveyers of the story, Darwin knew no Arabic at all and and, in any case, he records meeting Lee on one occasion only, at a dinner party. Later, Persian scientist Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (1201-1274) outlined a notion of evolution not unlike that of the 20th Century Catholic scientist, philosopher and priest Pierre de Chardin. Al-Tusi considered that the universe initially consisted of equal and similar elements. However, internal contradictions began to appear, resulting in differences between elements. These elements then evolved into minerals, then plants, then animals, and now humans. This evolutionary process was claimed to result from individual variability to adapt to environmental contingencies. Humans were deemed by al-Tusi to be at an intermediate level of evolution with any further evolution taking place in a spiritual dimension (whatever that means). In the 19th century, after initial scepticism, the later writings of the Islamic political activist and commentator Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani (1838-1897) pointed out that Islamic scholars had long written about evolutionary principles. He himself came to accept Darwin’s findings but was unable, like Hitler, to acknowledge that they applied to human beings also.

The concept of a separate creation for each of the human races was, as de Gobineau continually affirms, a distinctly Christian notion, although to be fair the majority of Christians did not adhere to that belief until the African slave trade became established and needed to be defended. While the Koran posits a sharp distinction between Muslims and non-Muslims, teaching for example that Allah loves believers and comparing unbelievers to the lowest of animals for whom just about every type of sanction is permissable, there is no similar delineation made on the basis of a biological concept of ‘race’ anywhere in Islamic teachings. In contrast to the Nazis the Jews are generally only considered lower beings on the basis of their (lack of) faith, not their ‘race’. Islamic ‘colour-blindness’ was certainly recognised in the mid-19th century. For example, a Dr. Browning (a member of the London Abolition Convention) recounting his experiences of travelling in Islamic countries in the ‘Pennsylvania Freeman’ of August 6th August, 1840 noted that:

"There was one circumstance connected with the East that was peculiarly interesting, and that was, that there they knew of no distinction of color; they had no nobility of skin. White men, of the highest rank, married black women, and black men frequently occupied the highest social and official situations."

So, despite de Gobineau having ready access to contrary views from both another religion and from scientific investigation, he seemed unwilling to modify his view that the ‘races’ were created separately and that the Biblical Adam was the progenitor of only the Aryan race. Hitler’s attitude was no different, by allowing himself to be guided by de Gobineau rather than Darwin, he was effectively opting for a racial view of humanity based on religious faith and romantic ideals rather than scientific evidence. Accordingly, in ‘Rassenpolitik’, a government pamphlet issued in 1943 attempting to explain Nazi racial policies in a ‘scientific’ way to the German people, no mention is made of ‘Darwin’, ‘Darwinism’ or of ‘natural selection’. There is mention, however, of de Gobineau and of Gregor Mendel and of course some typical Nazi un-Darwinian pseudoscientific nonsense. Some extracts:

“Gobineau recognized with sure perceptiveness the danger of race mixing........We owe to these Nordic scientists this revolutionary knowledge: Humanity is not equal.......Racial differences are physical, spiritual, and intellectual....... Gregor Mendel was the first to discover the laws of genetics......Genetics tells us that characteristics are passed unaltered from generation to generation, and that spiritual and other characteristics are inherited along with physical ones”
A particularly major intellectual influence on Nazism was Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927). Chamberlain was a British-born author and self-described devout Christian who chose to live in Germany for most of his life and whose second wife was Eva von Bülow-Wagner, Franz Liszt's granddaughter and Richard Wagner's step-daughter. He became a German citizen during the First World War and was awarded the Iron Cross by Kaiser Wilhelm II. Hitler became a close friend of Chamberlain in the last few years of his life and visited him, along with Joseph Goebbels, on a number of occasions in the years 1923-1926 at his home at Bayreuth, at the time Hitler was writing ‘Mein Kampf’. In 1923 Chamberlain wrote to Hitler giving him his blessings:

“Most respected and dear Hitler … That Germany, in the hour of her greatest need, brings forth a Hitler – that is proof of her vitality … I can now go untroubled to sleep… May God protect you!”.

Chamberlain became a member of the Nazi Party and penned a number of articles for their periodicals. Despite possessing a BSc degree and having conducted postgraduate experimental work in plant physiology, Chamberlain repeatedly made it clear that he had no time whatsoever for Darwin’s evidence and thoughts on evolution. Bear in mind when reading the following quotes that Chamberlain is acknowledged to have been a primary ideological influence on Hitler by a number of creationist authors. In a letter to his future mother-in-law Cosima Wagner, written in 1896, he stated:

“this hair-raising absurdity poisons not only natural science but the whole of human thought: Darwinism rules everywhere, corrupting history and religion; it leads to social idiocy; it degrades judgment about men and things.”

And from his philosophical work, ‘Kant’ (1905):

“.........man was said to be descended from the ape; the anatomical impossibility of this is established to-day by a thousand reasons …”

Where else have we read such sentences? Their blunt and erroneous nature – they are as wrong then as they are now – is mirrored by any number of creationist authors and websites today. Chamberlain’s own seminal book (‘Die Grundlagen des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts’; ‘The Foundations Of The Nineteenth Century’; decoriusly described by Robert Richards as “a rich farrago of Goethean sentiment, Kantian epistemology, Wagnerian mysticism, and Aryan anti-Semitism”) was published in 1899, and continued his anti-Darwinian theme along with his own novel ideas on Christianity and no less than 135 pages examining Jewish physiology and character traits. In his introduction, Chamberlain referred to ‘Darwinism’ as “a manifestly unsound system”, an “English sickness” and “a craze”. He then goes on to describe it as “the evolution mania and the pseudo-scientific dogmatism of our century”, followed by:

“.......we have seen the idea of evolution develop itself till it spread from biology and geology to all spheres of thought and investigation, and, intoxicated by its success, exercised such a tyranny that any one who did not swear by it was to be looked upon as a simpleton.”

Slightly more florid in style than something that might be published by the Discovery Institute, perhaps, but the sentiment is near identical. In ‘Kant’ he further wrote:

“the historical sketch with which Darwin prefaced his book is a mere mockery. From the very first sentence Darwin speaks of species as if they were things running about like Tom, Dick and Harry, which any child might see by merely opening its eyes.”

Chamberlain’s hatred of evolutionary theory did not stop at criticism of the science, however. He disparaged Charles Darwin the man at every opportunity, venting his spleen particularly strongly in ‘Kant’ where he informs us that “Darwin.......did not see clearly, and still less did he think deeply” and jibes “Had Darwin...... been in ever so slight a measure a thinker”, and “what a want of reflection disfigures the fundamental thoughts of Darwin and his followers.”

Jerry Bergman, ever seeking to discredit Darwin insists, quite incredibly, in 'Darwinism And The Nazi Race Holocaust' that Chamberlain was actually pro-Darwin and that Darwin's theory was merely "modified by Chamberlain" and "clearly contributed to the death of over nine million people in concentration camps". I feel can safely leave it up to the reader to make their own mind up about Bergman's honesty in this regard.

Unsurprisingly for someone who could not accept Darwin’s scientific findings, Chamberlain also advanced explicitly racist sentiments. There are significant differences in thinking between de Gobineau and Chamberlain in this regard, however. While de Gobineau was primarily motivated by romantic and scholarly endeavours, and did his best to place his opinions within a Christian context, Chamberlain, although also a Christian, was far more overtly political. Chamberlain’s view of what comprised the Aryan race was also much wider than that of de Gobineau, emphasising a Proto-Indo-European culture linking the northern European Nordics, Celts and Teutons with the southern European Slavs, Greeks, and Latins. He also considered the North African Berber tribes to have originated from Aryan stock. Of course the natural leadership of this racial grouping and of all ethnic groups was considered to be provided only by the Germanic peoples:

“the less Teutonic a land is, the more uncivilised it is..........the Aryans are pre-eminent among all peoples; for that reason they are by right ... the lords of the world”.

Further, he championed governance of the Aryan people by a non-democratic, "thought out by a few and carried out with iron consequence”, Catholic-based theocracy:

“the Roman Church is not only a religion but also a secular system of government, and that the Church as representative of God upon earth may eo ipso claim — and always has claimed — absolute power in all things of this world.”

Unlike de Gobineau, Chamberlain held particular disdain for the Jewish people, typically pronouncing that “Their existence is sin, their existence is a crime against the holy laws of life” and “all that is derived from the Jewish mind, corrodes and disintegrates what is best in us” and, apparently unaware of the irony, described Judaism as “a religion of exclusive self-assertion and fanatical intolerance”. As a result of his comprehensive analysis of the Jewish character, he became certain that Jesus could not have been a Jew, but a Galilean of Aryan descent. One peculiar perception he had of Jews was that they were more likely than Christians to become atheist, “theists become in the twinkling of an eye atheists, a strikingly common thing in the case of Jews …” Of course, this conversion was not so prevalent in Germans as “…...for us (Teutons) God is always in the background”. Hitler, with his characteristic hatred of both atheists and Jews, picked up on Chamberlain’s idiosyncratic Jewish-atheist link and later included it as a criticism of the Jews in ‘Mein Kampf’. He also accepted Chamberlain’s view that Jesus was not a Jew.

Hitler would have had more than the historical views of Luther or the contemporary views of Chamberlain to influence him, however, as virulent anti-semitic and anti-evolution feelings were not confined to Germany. They were particularly prominent in the United States among Baptist preachers. Perhaps the best known was William Bell Riley, founder of the World Christian Fundamentals Association. He was also the founder and long-time director of the Northwestern Bible School in 1902 (shut in 1966 and reopened in 1972 as Northwestern College) which at the time of his death in 1947, aged 86 years, was the second largest Bible college in the world. Riley was a staunch advocate of the inherent superiority of the white race and a rabid anti-Semite and hater of evolutionary theory. He regularly praised Hitler throughout the 1930s on his weekly radio show broadcast throughout the United States, sharing such gems as “There is no question in my mind that Hitler is an instrument of God with help from on high" and asserting that Hitler had “snatched Germany from the very jaws of atheistic Communism" and supported his efforts to "foil the nefarious Jewish plot". He maintained this stance until the United States entered the war on the side of the allies when, realising that he would be perceived as unpatriotic, he did an abrupt about-turn and started referring to the Nazis as “pagans”. He later published a number of anti-Hitler pamphlets including 'Hitlerism: The Philosophy of Evolution in Action'.

In 1934 in the basement of his church Riley published and widely distributed ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ a fraudulent document originating in Russia in 1902, purporting to have uncovered the Jewish plan for global economic domination and slavery of the non-Jewish peoples. Protocol 2:3 of the Protocols states:

“Do not suppose for a moment that these statements are empty words: think carefully of the successes we arranged for Darwinism, Marxism, Nietzsche-ism. To us Jews, at any rate, it should be plain to see what a disintegrating importance these directives have had upon the minds of the Goyim [non-Jew]”

The pamphlet had previously been published more than ten years earlier in the United States by car-maker Henry Ford through his Dearborn Publishing Company, which was forced to cease trading due to the large number of lawsuits they attracted due to anti-Semitic editorials and articles which libeled several prominent Jewish-Americans. After Riley, in 1938, the Protocols were republished by the Catholic priest Charles Coughlin, with financial help from Henry Ford and, it has been claimed, from Nazi Germany. Like Riley, Coughlin had a nationwide radio show, with an audience estimated at up to 30 million, in which he regularly spewed forth his pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic venom. An investigation by the Department of Justice into the activity of the priest found:

"...there is at least one occasion upon which [Father Coughlin's magazine] 'Social Justice' reprinted in almost identical form a speech delivered by Joseph Goebbels. The 'Social Justice' article gave no credit to Goebbels and did not in any way indicate that it was a reprint of Goebbel's speech."

The popularity and influence of anti-Jewish rhetoric in the United States at this time was remarkable. When Ford first gained control of the medium-sized weekly newspaper, the Dearborn Independent in 1919, it was distributed only in the Dearborn, Michigan area and had a circulation of 72,000. After the first anti-Semitic article appeared, however, circulation steadily rose, reaching ten-fold within five years, eventually becoming by 1925, the newspaper with the second-largest circulation in the United States after the New York Daily News. It was distributed primarily through Ford car dealerships and churches, as well as colleges and schools, often given away. On March 8th 1923, The Chicago Tribune published an interview with Hitler. When asked about the possibility that Henry Ford might run for President, Hitler responded:

“I wish I could send some of my shock troops to Chicago and other big American cities to help in the elections. We look on Heinrich Ford as the leader of the growing fascist movement in America. We admire particularly his anti-Jewish policy which is the Bavarian fascist platform. We have just had his anti-Jewish articles translated and published. The book is being circulated to millions throughout Germany”.

Ford’s compilation book, 'The International Jew: The World's Problem' comprised 91 anti-Semitic articles and was originally published in 1920. It was rebadged as 'The Eternal Jew' in Germany in 1923 where it sold very well. Hitler praised the work of Henry Ford in 'Mein Kampf' and striking similarities can be observed between some of the passages in that book and 'The Eternal Jew'. The leader of the Hitler Youth Movement, Baldur von Schirach, stated at the International War Tribunal in 1945 that Ford's book had been the primary reason he had joined the Nazi Party at the age of seventeen, adding:

"You have no idea what a great influence this book had on the thinking of German youth."

While Dearborn publications and the views of Ford himself were certainly denounced by ‘liberal’ church pulpits on the east coast of the United States, the more conservative, evangelical-style churches in the south and mid-west proved far more supportive. Even the normally circumspect Christian Science Monitor published an editorial entitled ‘The Jewish Peril’ in 1920. The ‘Protocols of Zion’ appealed to Riley, not only because they provided him with anti-Semitic ammunition but also because he abhorred anything to do with Darwin and evolution, especially when it was taught in schools. He often claimed, in similar manner to the Nazi botanist Ernst Bergdolt, that evolution was no less than "an international Jewish-Bolshevik-Darwinist conspiracy”. In 1923 he set up the Anti-Evolution League of Minnesota which grew within a year to be the Anti-Evolution League of America. The organisation was anti-evolution to what bordered on a perverse level. One of his closest colleagues, T.T. Martin claimed on more than one occasion that teachers in American public schools who taught evolution were less moral than German soldiers who had killed Belgian children during the first World War by giving them poisoned candy.

It is obvious why people like Riley disliked evolution. If all the ‘races’ shared common ancestry, as Darwin suggested, then state laws promoting racial barriers, which he avidly supported, could be perceived as arbitrary and so difficult to justify on the basis of Biblical knowledge and authority. One of the first campaigns fought by the Anti-Evolution League of America culminated in the 1925 Tennessee anti-evolution law known as the 'Butler Act', which banned teachers in state schools from denying the Biblical account of human origins. They made no secret in their pamphlets as to why they gave their support. Apart from the fact that evolution questioned the Biblical creation, they also feared that evolutionary theory promoted the notion that the black and white races were equal and belonged to the same species.

A further difference between de Gobineau and Chamberlain concerned their view of the current status of the Aryan race. To de Gobineau, although the Aryan race was superior in most aspects of human endeavour, other races might have minor superiorities which could be capitalised on by a small influx of blood from other races. However he warned that too much race mixing would result in the dilution in purity of the Aryan race with the ultimate destruction of civilisation. Chamberlain, on the other hand, perceived the Aryan race as enjoying a high level of purity and the object should be to preserve this purity at all costs. Thus Hitler’s attitudes toward other races, and particularly to the Jewish people, as well as his ideas of racial purity were influenced far more by the Darwin-phobic Chamberlain than by Darwin-ignoring de Gobineau.

‘The Foundations Of The Nineteenth Century’ was distributed to all German libraries on the instructions of Kaiser Wilhelm II and included in the German school curriculum. It was later considered recommended reading by all Nazi Party members simply because Hitler was so impressed by it. Not surprisingly, given this level of recommendation, it sold extremely well; surpassing 60,000 copies within 10 years, 100,000 copies by 1914 and 24 editions and more than 250,000 copies sold by 1938. In 1925, the official Nazi Party newspaper dedicated five columns to Chamberlain to honour his 70th birthday, describing his book as the ‘gospel of the Nazi movement’.

A third influence on the Hitlerian worldview, albeit with a much more chequered history, is that of Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919). Haeckel was a polymath with particular expertise in biology and zoology, rising to Professor of Comparative Anatomy at the University of Jena where he spent 47 years. Impressed with Darwin’s work at an early stage he wrote, rather sycophantically, to Darwin in July 1864:

“Of all the books I have ever read, not a single one has come even close to making such an overpowering and lasting impression on me as your theory of the evolution of species ........Since then your theory — I can say without exaggerating — has occupied my mind every day.”

Haeckel later travelled to England to visit Darwin on several occasions. His own book ‘Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte’ or ‘The History of Creation’, published in 1876, was marketed in Germany as an attempt to explain Darwin’s ideas to the general public. It was not an accurate description of its content. Although he is often painted as the man who did more than anyone else to promote the work of Charles Darwin in Germany, Haeckel’s views on biology in general and on human origins in particular can be considered no more than semi-Darwinian. Although certainly an enthusiastic proponent of the concept of evolution, in no sense can he be labelled a ‘Darwinian’ as he did not believe that natural selection was the method by which evolution progressed. He was also a polygenist.

Despite these most basic scientific disagreements between Haeckel and Darwin there is no shortage of Christian fundamentalist authors who try to convince their readers that the two men were in complete agreement. In order to do so they often invent their own definitions of a ‘Darwinist’ which are invariably far broader than would be accepted by mainstream biology (they also frequently resort to inventing their own definitions of genetic 'information' whenever it suits their purposes). For instance, in their paper ‘Haeckel: Legacy of Fraud to Popularise Evolution’, published in the ‘Journal of Creation’ (where else?), Finnish authors Ojala and Leisol refer to Haeckel as “a Darwinian demagogue”. This is nowhere near being true. By his own admission, Haeckel’s view of evolution was far more Lamarckian than Darwinian. To be considered a Darwinian in the first half of the 20th century required, at a minimum, acceptance of two of Darwin’s claims re humanity. First, that Homo sapiens comprised a single species, were part of the primate family and had evolved from a common ancestor shared with modern non-human primates. Second, that the evolution of Homo sapiens had been mediated by natural selection. Haeckel accepted the first claim in part only while Hitler accepted neither of these claims.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) was the French naturalist credited as the first to suggest explicitly that human beings had evolved from a species of apes. His book ‘Philosophie Zoologique’ published in 1809 contains the following paragraph:

“Certainly, if some race of apes, especially the most perfect among them, lost, by necessity of circumstances, or some other cause, the habit of climbing trees and grasping branches with the feet..…and if the individuals of that race, over generations, were forced to use their feet only for walking and ceased to use their hands as feet, doubtless … these apes would be transformed into two-handed beings and … their feet would no longer serve any purpose other than to walk”.

This passage demonstrates key differences between the views of Lamarck and Darwin. Lamarck is suggesting that speciation was caused by phenotypic changes occurring during an organism's lifetime due to use and/or disuse, being passed on to future generations (the ‘inheritance of acquired characteristics’). Darwin, on the other hand, hypothesised something very different; that advantageous traits would appear more often in future generations simply because the individual organisms having that advantageous trait would be more likely to reproduce (‘naturally selected’ characteristics). Although Darwin shows great respect for Lamarck in his publications, it is clear from his private correspondence that an early repudiation of his views was the case. This from a letter he wrote to the English botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker in January 1844:

“Heaven forfend me from Lamarck nonsense of a ‘tendency of progression,’ ‘adaptions from the slow willing of animals,’ etc.!”

Conversely, Haeckel considered ‘Philosophie Zoologique’ to be “the first systematically founded presentation of the theory of the origin of species”, representing “the beginning of a new period in the intellectual evolution of mankind.”

Darwin disagreed particularly with Lamarck’s further notion of directed variation, or an underlying teleology to evolution which would always flow in the same direction, and which had enabled a selected ‘lower’ form of life to eventually become a ‘higher’ form of life (i.e., humans). It was not that Darwin outright rejected the notion of evolutionary progress, at least in his early work. As he wrote in the penultimate paragraph of ‘Origin of the Species’:

“.......as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection”

This is highly unusual wording for Darwin as his main premise for direction in natural selection was that it tends toward fecundity, nothing more. Darwin was, of course, a theist when he wrote ‘Origin of the Species’ and it likely that this passage might simply reflect his belief. He had, however, written earlier in the text:

“It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as "plan of creation," "unity of design," etc., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact”.

Nevertheless, this sole suggestion of Darwinian teleology was naturally picked up by Chamberlain:

“Darwin specially recommends his theory for our acceptance in that it also promises to mankind that all corporal and mental endowments will tend to progress in the direction towards perfection”.

Taken at face value this is a profound misunderstanding of what Darwin meant. His contention was, that with natural selection, ‘progress’ (whatever that is) could potentially occur equally in any lineage, albeit at differing rates and in different ways, according to the specific environmental exigencies. In other words, there is no such thing as any favoured lineage. Unlike Darwin, who conducted extensive fieldwork, Lamarck’s ideas were largely philosophical and he presented far less data. In contrast, then, Lamarck took a theological view. He concluded that progress had occurred in one deity-favoured lineage while Haeckel suggested very few (human) lineages.

Bearing in mind that both Lamarck and Haeckel perceived the human ‘races’ as separate lineages it was not a huge leap, then, to view the ‘lower’ races as having been exposed to difficult environmental conditions for so long that significant progress in their ‘direction toward perfection’ was unlikely. Haeckel never came to fully accept a Darwinian view and kept to a Lamarckian outlook even after Gregor Mendel’s (1822-1884) work on trait inheritance demonstrated that Lamarck was wrong and Darwin was right. Haeckel may well have been someone’s demagogue, but he was certainly not a Darwinian demagogue.

Nowhere else in Darwin’s work (or in later mainstream biology for that matter) does there exist the notion that evolution tends to “progress in the direction towards perfection”. This was well appreciated during both Haeckel and Hitler’s lifetimes. Even if there was some kind of teleological force directing evolution it would appear to be an incredibly wasteful process, as 99% of the species ever evolved have since become extinct and the remaining modern species are riddled with examples of how evolution has driven phenotypic changes by ‘piggy-backing’ on existing structures, often resulting in inefficiencies that no good designer would countenance. It would also beg the question: when is perfection reached and evolution ends (and what or who is it that decides)?

Haeckel did agree with Darwin that human beings had evolved from a common ancestor shared with modern apes, albeit thinking the cradle was in Asia rather than Africa. He departed from Darwin’s ideas far more seriously, however, in that he was also an adamant polygenist, unable to accept Darwin’s view that all human races were members of not only the same genus but the same species. Like de Gobineau and Chamberlain he was also resolute in his support of the notion of a superior Aryan race. He categorised human beings first crudely by their hair type and wrote that those people with ‘woolly-hair’, such as Africans, as opposed to ‘straight-hair’, such as northern Europeans, were:

“.......incapable of a true inner culture or of a higher mental development..........only among the Aryans was there that “symmetry of all parts, and that equal development, which we call the type of perfect human beauty”.

He then went on to identify a hierarchy of ten distinct sub-species of humans, going so far as to label each separately within the genus Homo. In his numerous human tree diagrams, Caucasians (Aryans or ‘Homo mediterraneus’) were, of course, always at the top and Negros always at the bottom of the ladder. What is perhaps most surprising given the society and era in which he published his tree diagrams was his consistent placing of the Jews at or very near the highest rungs of the ladder. For unlike Chamberlain, Haeckel was not nearly as anti-Semitic, if he could even be considered such at all, becoming known for his ‘Judenfreundschaft’, or friendliness toward Jews.

In 1894 the Austrian journalist and dramatist Hermann Bahr (1863-1934) published a series of interviews on the subject of anti-Semitism with several dozen of the leading contemporary European commentators, including Haeckel. Haeckel told Bahr that despite having students who were anti-Semitic, several of his good friends were Jewish and they were “admirable and excellent men”. He then went on to praise educated Jews:

“I hold these refined and noble Jews to be important elements in German culture. One should not forget that they have always stood bravely for enlightenment and freedom against the forces of reaction, inexhaustible opponents, as often as needed, against the obscurantists And now in the dangers of these perilous times, when Papism again rears up mightily everywhere, we cannot do without their tried and true courage”

Haeckel displayed other relatively liberal views for his time. In the last decade of his life Haeckel befriended the Jewish physician and sexologist, Magnus Hirshfeld (1868-1935), founder of the ‘Scientific Humanitarian Committee’, now considered the first advocacy group in the world for homosexual and transgender people (he also coined the term transvestite). His book ‘Naturgesetze der Liebe’ or the ‘Natural Laws of Love’, published in 1912, in which he contended that homosexuality was an innate part of human sexuality and therefore perfectly natural, was dedicated to Haeckel after he had read the proofs and praised them. Sexually liberal notions such as these proved too much for Hitler’s Catholic-minded sensitivities (indeed they remain abhorrent to the Catholic hierachy even today). Within a year of coming to power Hitler had Hirshfeld’s ‘Institut für Sexualwissenschaft’ (Institute for Sexual Research) closed down. The standard archival newsreel of the Nazi book-burnings that was distributed throughout the world is believed to be of Hirschfeld's library and records. Hirshfeld was in France at the time and died in Paris two years later.

Another interesting feature of Haeckel’s tree diagrams was that of the relative position of the ‘races’. They appear to have been malleable, not because of new scientific findings, but according to the effect Haeckel thought the ranking might have on his reputation. For example, earlier versions of his human tree show native Americans near the top, ahead of the Asian ‘races’. They were, however, relegated in favour of the Japanese ‘race’ when his books were translated into Japanese. Native Americans never did regain their lost position, forever placed lower than the Asian peoples in subsequent versions. Nevertheless, Haeckel always maintained the presumption that some sort of racial hierarchy existed. Again from ‘The History of Creation’:

“ … the morphological differences between two generally recognized species - for example sheep and goats - are much less important than those … between a Hottentot and a man of the Teutonic race”.

Darwin would have been either bewildered or appalled, likely both. Similarly from Haeckel’s book ‘Die Lebenswunder’ (‘The Wonders of Life’), published in 1904:

“the lower races, such as the Veddahs or Australian Negroes, are psychologically nearer to the mammals, apes and dogs, than to the civilised European. We must, therefore, assign a totally different value to their lives......their only interest are food and reproduction......many of the higher animals, especially monogamous mammals and birds, have reached a higher stage than the lower savages”.

The notion that sheep and goats, whose offspring are invariably stillborn, are closer in an evolutionary sense than two humans, such as an African and a European, who would ordinarily have no problem in achieving viable offspring, is obvious nonsense even to someone with no knowledge of phylogenetic trees. Nowadays, of course, there is an agreement among biologists that the concept of ‘species’ can effectively be defined by genetic relationship and ability to reproduce. In the late 19th century, however, the nature of a ‘species’ had yet to be so exactly determined. Darwin himself acknowledges this in Chapter 2 of ‘Origin of Species’:

“no one definition (of species) has as yet satisfied all naturalists” but then goes on to say, “yet every naturalist knows vaguely what he means when he speaks of a species”.

Defining a ‘species’ by the ability of two of it’s members to successfully breed was certainly not alien to Haeckel. As with de Gobineau, Chamberlain and Hitler, however, he appears to have decided to ignore evidence contrary to his views. The idea was first mooted in Alfred Russel Wallace’s book ‘Darwinism’. Briefly, he (correctly) proposed that natural selection contributes to reproductive isolation and that over time two populations can become reproductively isolated and eventually become two distinct species. When it came to humans, though, Haeckel appears to have dismissed any role for reproduction in his view of what constituted a species or sub-species, arbitrarily choosing perceived differences in language development as the delineating factor:

“With each of these human species, language developed on its own and independently of the others..…If one views the origin of the branches of language as the special and principal act of becoming human, and the species of humankind as distinguished according to their language stem, then one can say that arose independently of one another”.

Note that Haeckel’s culturally-based approach to defining “the different species of men” is, paradoxically, species-specific; it could not be used to sub-categorise any other species of animal. So we can see a general two-fold trend of un-Darwinian thought running through de Gobineau, Chamberlain, Haeckel and finally Hitler; that humans are not a singular species but made up of subspecies (or even different species) and that some subspecies are somehow more ‘advanced’ than others and so exceptional.

To substantiate an ideological link between Darwin and Hitler requires that one or more people acted as important intermediary influences. There are a number of reasons for this, not the least that there is no evidence that Hitler actually read any of Darwin’s works. Also, given that he was unsuccessful at any academic pursuit, even if he had read Darwin, it is questionable whether he would have sufficiently understood the material to have gained enough insight to be able to put the ideas into practice. de Gobineau could not have been an intermediary as his relevant work was written too early and, in any case, he ignored Darwin’s work. It was certainly not Chamberlain - he absolutely hated Darwin and all he stood for. The task, then, is left to Haeckel. However, evidence for this role has proven a highly contentious issue.

Notwithstanding the debate between Weikart and Gasman (who both accuse Haeckel of providing the link) and Robert Richards (who staunchly defends Haeckel), which I have no intention of contributing to here, the problems in establishing an ideological link between Haeckel and Hitler are twofold. First, and most importantly to this discussion, Haeckel’s heart was never really into being a ‘Darwinian’. Although he was a champion for the concept of evolution he never accepted that natural selection was the mechanism by which it operated. As mentioned, it is really not feasible to consider someone a ‘Darwinian’ if they outright deny natural selection, despite the arbitrary and inconsistent definitions of Darwinism employed by creationists such as Weikart, Ojala and Leisola. Plus, Haeckel was a polygenist. Second, although Hitler would have had no difficulty with Haeckel’s basic racial ideology, he would certainly have taken umbrage at many of Haeckel’s political and philosophical beliefs.

One particularly tenuous line of evidence linking Haeckel to Hitler is his alleged membership in 1918 to the Thule Society. This claim was initially made by Gasman and has been repeated in a number of creationist publications since then. It is pertinent because the Thule society sponsored the ‘Deutsche Arbeiterpartei’ (‘German Workers Party’) who, under Hitler’s tutelage, became the National Socialists. Gasman describes them rather grandeously as “a political-theosophical-astrological-anti-Semitic secret organization.” Despite their support for the German Workers Party the Thule Society included a number of aristocrats in their membership and were wealthy enough to purchase a large circulation newspaper in Munich, which they used to publish pro-Nazi articles. To be accepted as a member the following oath was required:

"The signer hereby swears to the best of his knowledge and belief that no Jewish or coloured blood flows in either his or in his wife's veins, and that among their ancestors are no members of the coloured races".

The man who became Hitler’s deputy, Rudolph Hesse, was a prominent member, as was the Nazi propagandist Alfred Rosenberg. Despite claims to the contrary, however, there is no evidence that Hitler himself ever joined. Nor is there any evidence that Haeckel was a member. For a start, Haeckel was not anti-Semitic, at least to that degree, and was far too much of a naturalistic materialist to have anything to do with subjects as esoteric as theosophy or astrology. In addition, at the supposed time of his membership Haeckel was an invalid - he was to die within a year - and unable to leave his home. The society did, however, list a painter named Ernst Häckel as a member and we can distinguish between the two because the latter actually wrote to the former on a few occasions and these letters were kept by Haeckel and are currently archived.

Unlike de Gobineau and Chamberlain, Haeckel was not particularly enamoured with any of the Christian churches, especially Catholicism, and could be pugnacious in his dealings with clergy. One story goes that after he gave a lecture in Rome the Pope was so incensed he ordered a "divine fumigation." His philosophical views were probably responsible for the Pontiff’s indignation for Haeckel was a staunch philosophical materialist and strongly denied dualism in any form. In Haeckel’s ‘Monist’ view, organic and inorganic substances are different only in the relative sense. In essence they are identical. This sole primordial substance was even considered to include the concept of God. In other words the universe, including all it’s tangible and intangible manifesations, is ultimately made up of one material substance only, which remains always inseparable. The theological consequences are obvious: humans are solely material and there is no place for the existence of the soul. This type of thinking was, as with anything vaguely resembling atheism, anathema to Hitler.

Chapter 3: Hitler's Lifelong Antipathy Toward Atheism

This brings us to another Christian fundamentalist-originating myth that Hitler was an atheist. As discussed earlier, this was certainly not what highly influential American clergymen, such as the Baptist minister William Bell Riley and the Catholic priest Charles Coughlin, thought in the 1930s. They argued forcefully that Hitler's correct sense of Christianity was instrumental in stopping communism and evolution from gaining ground. Nor was it the opinion of the majority of German Lutheran clergy or even senior Anglican clergy. William Temple, for example, who served as both the Archbishop of York and Canterbury during the Reich wrote two books, 'The Hope of a New World' (1941) and the 'The Church Looks Forward' (1944) in which he discusses Hitler's motivations at length. In neither does he suggest that Hitler is anything other than a misguided Christian. Indeed, the charge that Hitler was an atheist was never made by any of his contemporaries, either in Germany or elsewhere. It therefore has as much currency as the mythological Darwin-Hitler link. Less, perhaps; even Richard Weikart acknowledges that Hitler was not an atheist.

It is certainly the case, pervasive in his writings, speeches and political policies over three decades, that Hitler held a lasting hatred of atheism. 'Mein Kampf' (1924-25) in particular is replete with justifications for his political ideology based on Biblical influence. Indeed, the book contains 116 references to a deity (e.g., God, Goddess, Creator, Lord) and in every case these terms are used they are referred to in a wholly positive sense. In contrast there are only two references to atheism. Both are perjorative.

The following quotes are some examples of Hitler's consistent antipathy to atheism. On the inauguration of the Vatican as a sovereign state in 1929 Hitler wrote, in the Nazi Party newspaper 'Völkischer Beobachter' ('People's Observer'):

"The fact that the Catholic Church has come to an agreement with Fascist Italy ...proves beyond doubt that the Fascist world of ideas is closer to Christianity than those of Jewish liberalism or even atheistic Marxism."

Watching old newsreels of Hitler shouting, violently gesticulating, punching the air and generally whipping himself and his audience into a frenzy, was he really shouting, as Christian fundamentalists would have us believe, Nietzsche's maxim 'God is dead'? No, on the contrary, in March 1933, in a speech before the Reichstag, he had this to say:

"By its decision to carry out the political and moral cleansing of our public life, the Government is creating and securing the conditions for a really deep and inner religious life. The advantages for the individual which may be derived from compromises with atheistic organizations do not compare in any way with the consequences which are visible in the destruction of our common religious and ethical values."

From another speech given in Stuttgart in February 1933:

"..........Christians and not international atheists are now standing at Germany’s fore."

Similar sentiments in a speech in Koblenz, August 1934:

"..........our fight against the Bolshevist culture, against an atheistic movement, against criminality, and in our struggle for the consciousness of a community in our national life......

Not surprisingly then, one of the first political moves made by Hitler on becoming Chancellor was to ban all atheist organisations in Germany, including the 600,000 member-strong ‘Deutscher Freidenker-Verband’, which at the time was the largest atheist organisation in the world. Hitler ordered that the 'Deutscher Freidenker-Verband' not only be made a banned organisation but had their Berlin city-centre headquarters stormed by elite SS troops in March 1933 and the building given to the Lutheran church. We can be sure that the troops who stormed the offices of the ‘Deutscher Freidenker-Verband’ were believers in God: although membership of the SS was open to German males of all religions their Oberführer, Heinrich Himmler, who held a long-term interest in Pagan mysticism (considered by the more Christian-inclined Hitler to be "nonsense") prohibited both Jews and atheists from serving in any capacity.

It is another commonly held myth that Hitler was interested in Paganism, this is highly unlikely as he was notoriously suspicious of any organisation or school of thought that involved secret ceremonies and initiations, preferring to build an openly practised, mass ideological movement. In a speech in Hamburg in September 1938 he made this position clear:

"We will not allow mystically-minded occult folk with a passion for exploring the secrets of the world beyond to steal into our Movement. Such folk are not National Socialists, but something else."

After banning atheist movements Hitler gave a speech in October of the same year in which he said in front of an estimated 250,000 people:

“We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.”

Also informative are the comments and notations made by Hitler in his personal collection of books. For example, examination of a collection of works by the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (described by the historian Robert Nisbert as "the true author of National Socialism"), gifted to Hitler by the filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl reveals, according to the right-wing, pro-Christian, Holocaust-denying historian David Irving, "a veritable blizzard of underlines, question marks, exclamation points, and marginal strikes that sweeps across a hundred printed pages of dense theological prose". Irving particularly remarks that whenever the Holy Trinity is discussed, or whenever Jesus is referred to as the Son of God, Hitler's notations are approving. Particularly revealing is Hitler's response to Fichte's question: "Where did Jesus derive the power that has held his followers for all eternity?" Hitler had boldly underlined Fichte's answer: "Through his absolute identification with God." Another passage underlined by Hitler is also telling:

"God and I are One. Expressed simply in two identical sentences -- His life is mine; my life is his. My work is his work, and his work my work."

Article 24.6 of Hitler’s program of ‘Positive Christianity’ (a de-Judaised version of Christianity which places greater emphasis on Jesus) included the statement:

"The German religion is a religion of the people. It has nothing in common with free thoughts, atheist propaganda, and the breakdown of current religions."

The first international treaty signed by Hitler after gaining power was the 'Concordat' with the Vatican. In the speech he gave after signing the treaty in April 1933, he made the following statement:

"Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently all character training and religion must be derived from faith"

This last statement would surely find no fault with many modern Christians. In accordance, Bernhard Rust, Hitler's education minister, made Christian religious education, including communal daily prayer, a compulsory subject in all state schools, including trade schools.

Although Darwin’s findings do not negate the possibility of a deist creation, they bring into question theistic interpretations as to the origins and purpose of life, as did Haeckel’s Monism. It is hard to see how either Haeckel’s or Darwin’s views on this matter would have been tolerated by the Nazis, and they weren’t. In the Guidelines from Die Bücherei 2:6 (The Lists of Banned Books 1935) the following were included as being banned from general retail sale or stocked in public libraries, except for inclusion in the so-called ‘Poison Cabinets’ of the large city and university libraries:

Item 2. The literature of Marxism, Communism and Bolshevism.

Item 6. Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism (Haeckel).

Item 10. Literature by Jewish authors, regardless of the field.

All told, the Nazis banned over 4,100 books. In comparison to the Nazis, the Vatican were surprisingly liberal. Their equivalent list of banned books, the ‘Index Librorum Prohibitorum’, active until 1966, never included any publication by either Haeckel or Darwin (or notably, Hitler) although a number of works attempting to amalgamate evolutionary theory with Catholic theology were added. To the Nazi Party, however, Haeckel’s 'Monism' well overstepped their philosophical mark. Gunther Hecht of ‘Rassenpolitischen Amt der NSDAP’, or the ‘National Socialist Department of Race-Politics’, writing in 1937 in the ‘Journal of All Natural Science’ makes plain their attitude:

“The common position of materialistic monism is philosophically rejected completely by the volkisch-biological view of National Socialism........The party and its representatives must not only reject a part of the Haeckelian conception — other parts of it have occasionally been advanced — but, more generally, every internal party dispute that involves the particulars of research and the teachings of Haeckel must cease.”

Hitler's antipathy toward atheism continued as late as the 'Table Talks' where he is recorded as saying, for example:

"An educated man, on the other hand, runs the risk of going over to atheism, which is a return to the state of the animal".

Perhaps one of the least cited pieces of evidence for Hitler not having any atheist sympathies is his preservation of the neutrality and integrity of the Vatican State (which is completely surrounded by the city of Rome) during the German occupation of much of Italy in 1943-44. Here was an opportunity for Hitler to make a decisive strike against the largest Christian church in the world that would undoubtedly have had a devastating effect on the future of the church. However, research performed by the British historian and Anglican priest Owen Chadwick and published in the book 'Britain And the Vatican During The Second World War' (1988) reveals that the Vatican had no concerns whatsoever of a German invasion. They were far more concerned with the reduction in the domestic policing of Rome as a result of the political upheaval caused by the war.

Chapter 4: The Notion That Natural Selection Is The Basis For Eugenics Is Not Even Wrong

The notion of an ideological link between Darwin and Hitler can be no more odious than when claims are made that Darwin’s findings and views were the inspiration for the Nazi Party’s policy of eugenics. Perhaps the most chilling statement of all from Haeckel is a single sentence embedded in a paragraph in which he is discussing the ‘lower races’. In the ‘Wonders of Life’ he says simply, “We must, therefore, assign a totally different value to their lives”. Elaborating, he goes on to say:

“We must class as a traditional dogma the widespread belief that man is bound under all circumstances to maintain and prolong life, even when it has become utterly useless - a source of pain to the incurable and of endless trouble to his friends. Hundreds of thousands of incurables - lunatics, lepers, people with cancer, etc. are artificially kept alive in our modern communities, and their sufferings are carefully prolonged, without the slightest profit to themselves or the general body … What an enormous mass of suffering these figures indicate for the invalids themselves, and what a vast amount of trouble and sorrow for their families, what a huge private and public expenditure! How much of this pain and expense could be spared if people could make up their minds to free the incurable from their indescribable torments by a dose of morphia!”

Haeckel is speaking explicitly here of eugenics. Compare what he has written above with this passage from Darwin’s ‘Descent of Man’, already quoted earlier in this essay:

“The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.”

Does this honestly read like someone in agreement with Haeckel? Someone enthused by eugenics? Alfred Wallace was no less direct. In his personal letters, published by James Marchant in 1916, he had vilified eugenics as, among other things, "the meddlesome interference of an arrogant scientific priestcraft". Note the linking of religion and eugenics in his statement. In stark contrast to Darwin and Wallace's admonition against ill-feeling toward Haeckel’s “incurables”, many people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries considered eugenics to not only hold great promise for the benefit of future generations, but to be entirely consistent with Christian morality. Haeckel’s eugenic-friendly views were not unusual for his time. What made him stand out as a promoter of eugenics was his suggestion that it was the state who should sponsor and administer a comprehensive program of eugenics in order to strengthen the German nation and people.

There is one ‘Darwinian’ idea which, on the surface at least, appears to be shared with Hitler’s philosophy. I refer to the general concept of struggle between species. ‘Survival of the fittest’ is the relevant phrase, first used by the British polymath Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) in his book ‘Principles of Biology’ (1864). He certainly intended the term to be synonymous with natural selection, writing:

"This survival of the fittest, which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called ‘natural selection’”

Spencer originally employed the phrase to argue in support of a laissez-faire economic system of the type now seemingly beloved by American Christian fundamentalists. Darwin repeated the phrase as a synonym for natural selection in the fifth edition of ‘Origin of Species’, which he published in 1869. By Hitler’s time, the term ‘survival of the fittest’ had become mangled in use and synonymous in popular culture with not only physical fitness and strength but also with the victors in any number of competitive activities including but not limited to the sporting, social and economic arenas. ‘Social Darwinism’ therefore remains simply defined as any attempt to incorporate observed natural processes, such as ‘survival of the fittest’ into human social structures. The term has been applied retrospectively to Nazi Germany.

Despite what many fundamentalist Christians believe, and regularly portray, at no point did Darwin extend his theories beyond biology. Yet there appears to be no shortage of anti-Darwinian critics claiming that acceptance of the concepts of ‘natural selection’ and ‘survival of the fittest’ have been a major cause of immorality. Natural selection, they argue, acts to justify a whole raft of selfish behaviours which result in the weaker members of society becoming prey to the ‘fittest’ in society. As one particularly puerile Creationist website opines:

“The most evolution could produce would be the idea that ‘might makes right’........if you teach children that they evolved from monkeys, then they will act like monkeys”

Taken to it’s extreme, social Darwinism states that the strongest or fittest individuals or social groups should be allowed to flourish, while the weak and unfit should be allowed to die or otherwise become extinct on the basis that this is what happens in nature, ‘red in tooth and claw’ (another phrase widely and erroneously attributed to Darwin by Christian fundamentalists; it was actually written in 1848 by the poet Alfred Tennyson). Nazi-style eugenics policies are, therefore, conveniently trotted out by Christian fundamentalists as an inevitable consequence of Darwin having discovered evolution by natural selection. One fine riposte to this simplistic, deterministic and overtly bleak Christian view of human nature comes from Richard Dawkins, in his essay ‘A Devil’s Chaplain’ (2003):

“There is no inconsistency in favouring Darwinism as an academic scientist while opposing it as a human being; any more than there is inconsistency in explaining cancer as an academic doctor, while fighting it as a practising one. For good Darwinian reasons, evolution gave us a brain........capable of understanding it’s own provenance, of deploring the moral implications and of fighting against them”.

In other words, the creationist idea that if you tell people they are animals they will behave like animals is logically obvious nonsense. Neither does it accord with the evidence. By taxonomically equating people with animals, Darwinian style thinking can be shown to have influenced a number of schools of thought which have proposed giving animals greater rights, sometimes on a par with human rights. The Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer, for example, has cogently questioned the validity of 'speciesism', in which the welfare of human beings is privileged over other animal species. The reality is that possessing knowledge does not debase us; simply understanding that we belong to the animal kingdom does not make us any less human (or humane).

While Spencer was concerning himself with the structure of social and economic systems, Haeckel saw the struggle for existence in terms of polygenic racial ideology, in which the Aryans were continuously pitted against ‘inferior races’. Hitler embraced the notion of ‘survival of the fittest’, to not only expand on de Gobineau, Chamberlain (the phrase “struggle for existence” was used eight times in ‘Foundations of the Nineteenth Century’, while the word ‘struggle’ itself appears 112 times) and Haeckel’s racial ideologies, but to provide the moral basis for a new German society. The following excerpts are from Mein Kampf:

“I do not see why man should not be just as cruel as nature. ..............Struggle is the father of all things. It is not by the principles of humanity that man lives or is able to preserve himself above the animal world, but solely by means of the most brutal struggle........ The very first essential for success is a perpetually constant and regular employment of violence......... Mankind has grown strong in eternal struggles and it will only perish through eternal peace”.

Does that sound like anything Darwin would have written? Following on from these ideas, Hitler had no doubt that state-ordained eugenics served a higher ‘spiritual’ purpose than that of ‘materialist’ science. Again from Mein Kampf:

“Thus for the first time a high inner purpose is accredited to the State. In face of the ridiculous phrase that the State should do no more than act as the guardian of public order and tranquillity, so that everybody can peacefully dupe everybody else, it is given a very high mission indeed to preserve and encourage the highest type of humanity which a beneficent Creator has bestowed on this earth.”

The charge that ‘Darwinian’ concepts of ‘natural selection’ and ‘survival of the fittest’ are primarily responsible for the atrocities perpetrated by Hitler and his fellow Nazis can be effectively refuted on a number of levels. First, and most importantly, the concept of ‘Darwinian fitness’ has nothing in common with the numerous concepts of ‘fitness’ employed in either popular culture or social theory. ‘Darwinian fitness’ never refers to physical size, or physical prowess or even degrees of selfishness or possessing greater intelligence. It simply refers to the ability of an organism to adapt successfully to it’s immediate habitat, resulting in reproductive success. This in no way implies physical strength or intelligence.

A student of Darwinian evolution would consider, for example, the bacterial lineage known as Pelagibacteraceae, which make up between 25-50% of all the bacteria found in the ocean to have exhibited far more ‘fitness’ than humans thus far. Or, on land, the common earthworm can be considered magnificently ‘fit’, having survived 600 million years since it’s last direct ancestor species, including five extinction events. In the case of adult human males, 50kg weaklings with highly motile sperm are far fitter in an evolutionary sense than an army of Arnold Schwarzenegger look-alikes with less motile sperm. Ironically it is in the Biblical account of Genesis where we first see a single species elevated to a Nazi definition of ‘fitness’; our own species being divinely commanded to subdue the planet, use it for our own purposes and to multiply freely. Clearly, Darwinian and Hitlerian notions of ‘fitness’ are world’s apart and could not even begin to share any moral basis.

Second, even if Darwin’s and Hitler’s views of 'fitness' had coincided, moral arguments for applying ‘social Darwinism’ to any society would still be subject to the naturalistic fallacy, i.e., that prescriptive moral statements or intentions cannot necessarily be derived from purely descriptive premises. Some less hardline creationists, of course, do accept a denuded version of natural selection, conceding that ‘microevolution’ is possible i.e., they claim that evolution occurs solely within a ‘kind’ or ‘species’ (or barymin) but never proceeds to speciation. It is precisely this within-species genetic variability that eugenics seeks to exploit. However, this begs the question: if ‘social Darwinism’ and eugenics really are based on the principles of natural selection, as creationists claim, how come they are so unwilling to link their own concept of ‘microevolution’ with the alleged inevitable consequences of ‘social Darwinism’? What is good for the goose is surely good for the gander.

Third, although Darwin does, in the ‘Descent of Man’ discuss the possibility of a blind utilitarian ethics based on natural selection he was shrewd enough to appreciate that natural selection doubtless also evolved overtly caring and altruistic behaviours in species that had developed sufficient intelligence to develop social instincts such as cooperative effort. Sympathy, Darwin writes in the ‘Descent of Man’:

“......can hardly be doubted was originally developed through natural selection as one of the most important elements of the social instincts”.

Indeed he devotes much of Chapter 5 of the 'Descent of Man' to argue that a progression in morality is necessary to survival of human beings. We now know that Darwin was likely correct. Altruistic behaviours can readily be observed in non-human primates (there is even evidence that some species may have some degree of sentience) and there is evidence that they existed in some proto-human species too. We commonly observe two distinct evolutionary mechanisms resulting in ‘moral’ or altruistic behaviours from one member of a species toward others. Furthermore, Homo sapiens are producers of these altruistic behaviours par excellence.

There is the obvious case of altruism toward those with whom we share some immediate genetic inheritance. Groups of genetically related individuals commonly act in unison, particularly when competing with non-kin out-groups. Next, there is reciprocation, or the bestowing of favours with the expectation of a future payback. In addition to these two broad behaviour patterns, there is the paradox of ‘true altruism’, observed thus far only in humans, where individuals act in such a way that they sacrifice themselves (or more accurately their reproductive potential) to aid a non-kin individual or group. It is highly unlikely that ‘true altruism’ is selected for in any direct sense as the trait would not confer any obvious selection benefit. It is surely an example of Dawkin’s observation that humans are able to deplore “the moral implications” of natural selection and concern ourselves with “fighting against them”, in contrast to the simplistic, bleak and dark view of human nature suggested by Christian fundamentalism.

The term ‘Social Darwinism’ was first used by the American historian Richard Hofstadter in the title of his book ‘Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915’ published in 1944. Coming from the political left, he intended the term to be derogatory in his criticism of free market economics and especially American style capitalism. Hofstadter’s main premise, still relevant today, was that by the 20th century ‘Darwinian’ principles had become almost meaningless within social and political theory as they had been annexed by groups of all complexions, often in ways which demonstrated a limited understanding of the actual science or even the ethical values of Darwin himself. Particularly interesting in light of the Darwin-Hitler link is that despite being Jewish and an ardent anti-fascist and having written during the Nazi era, he appears to have deemed the Nazi contribution to the concept of ‘social Darwinism’ to be so irrelevant that he made no mention of them at all.

Hofstadter’s ghost lives on. Modern American anti-Darwinian Christian fundamentalists, nearly all of whom are advocates of unfettered free market economics, have effectively hijacked a term originally aimed perjoratively at some of their own views, in order to ideologically link Darwin with Hitler, while neither fully understanding the actual science or the ethical values of Darwin himself. They are thus a prime example of a group that Hofstadter would consider to be utilising ‘social Darwinist’ traits. Indeed, Joseph Palermo, an historian from Sacremento State University, wittily described the 2012 American Republican Party National Convention in an article in the Huffington Post as “social Darwinism meets theocracy”.

Soon after being voted into power, in July 1933, Hitler signed into law the ‘Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses’ or ‘Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring’. This act required that people suffering from a wide range of illnesses, including but not limited to hereditary deformities, blindness and deafness or mental illnesses such as manic-depression (now bi-polar disorder) and schizophrenia, be sterilised to eliminate the possibility of descendents becoming a burden on the state and wider society. This was followed, on the imminent outbreak of war in 1939, by a decree ordering the widespread euthanasia of the chronically ill and disabled, starting with babies and young infants, but eventually progressing to adults, and soon afterward, during wartime, by the ‘Holocaust’, the mass killing of primarily non-Aryan ethnic groups, especially Jews, across much of Germany and German-held territory. It is estimated that 12 million non-combatants died, approximately 50% of whom were Jews, and the rest a wide range of humanity including, but not limited to Gypsies, homosexuals, atheists, communists, Jehovah’s witnesses, Christian clergy who publicly opposed Hitler’s policies and various other opponents of the Nazi regime.

The French social theorist Michel Foucault, writing in his book ‘The Will To Knowledge’ (1976) argues that the Nazi regime could not have prevailed for much longer even without the allied war efforts as Nazi social policies were inherently unsustainable, short-sighted and illogical. On the one hand, although they had created a society which had perfected 19th century techniques of social discipline, on another level they were:

“a society of blood......an absolutely suicidal state” with an “oneiric exaltation” of savagery in “the systematic genocide of others, and the risk to oneself of a total sacrifice”.

There is no mechanism within natural selection that would similarly act to lead a species to it’s own extinction. What Hitler was attempting was as far from natural selection as you can get. I challenge anyone to find something - anything - written by Darwin or implied by the theory of evolution by natural selection that would justify behaviour that comes anywhere close to what the Nazis became after 1932. Once again, though, Darwin unfairly gets the blame for Nazi policy. According to Weikart:

“Darwinism provided the moral justification for infanticide, euthanasia, genocide, and other policies that had been (and thankfully still are) considered immoral by more conventional moral standards. Evolution provided the ultimate goals of his policy: the biological
improvement of the human species”.

William Dembski and Benjamin Wiker, intelligent design creationists allied with the Discovery Institute and co-authors of ‘Moral Darwinism: How We Become Hedonists’ (2002) seem to suffer from the same reading comprehension deficit as Weikart. Their view is:

“Darwin is the founder of the modern eugenics movement…….whether it is expressed through a call to weed out the unfit, breed more of the fit, abort the undesirable and deformed or manipulate our nature genetically through technology”.

Hang on a minute, didn’t Darwin describe the notion of eugenics as “an overwhelming present evil”? How can someone tell us that a behaviour is “an overwhelming evil” and subsequently be considered to have provided “the moral justification” for those who act in that way? At the very least Dembski and Wiker are obliged to tell us where Darwin expressed this “call to weed out the unfit” or “abort the undesirable”. In true creationist fashion, however, they offer no reference, because none exists. It is no more than unsubstantiated assertion. Similar fare comes from the Islamic creationist Harun Yahya:

“The eugenics, euthanasia, forced sterilization, concentration camps, racial purity and gas chambers of the mid-20th century emerged as a result of the Darwin-Haeckel-Hitler coalition, representing the worst and most ruthless cruelty in the history of humanity”.

What “Darwin-Haeckel-Hitler coalition”, you might well ask? And does it bear any relation to Riley’s “Jewish-Bolshevik-Darwinian conspiracy”? Is there any group threatening the sanctity of the civilised world that Darwin was not in league with? Well, just in case you still might suspect that Darwin made a habit of threesomes, here’s another couple of quotes concerning ‘Darwinists’ from Harun Yahya, from his own website:

“Since Darwinists are fearful of science, they employ propaganda tactics instead. Darwinists employ a hypnotic technique that prevents people from thinking independently or examining the true scientific evidence”.

And another quote, from a 2008 interview in the German magazine ‘Der Spiegel’:

“Muslims who commit acts of terrorism are really atheistic Darwinists trying to discredit Islam”.

Yes, those quotes are real and made by the same Harun Yahya from whom the Discovery Institute have publicly dissociated themselves. The reason? Well it’s not because of his penchant for lunacy and the comedic phrase, or even because he’s a Muslim. It’s because Yahya is critical of intelligent design. He considers it to be a deceitful endeavour. Not because intelligent design is intended to counter evolution, obviously, but because it does so without mentioning God.

There is a further oft-quoted link made between Darwin and his fellow Englishman labelled the ‘father of eugenics’. Like Harun Yahya’s views it is similarly laughable. Francis Galton (1822-1911), creator of the first weather map, the founder of psychometrics and the statistical concepts of correlation and regression toward the mean, was also a proponent of eugenics, in fact he coined the term. In his book ‘Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development’, which he published in 1883, he suggested that British society should instigate a policy of ‘positive eugenics’ in which families be given marks according to their hereditary strengths. Families with higher ranks would then be encouraged to intermarry as early as possible and given financial incentives to do so. In effect, these arrangements are not dissimilar to what had been going on for centuries between Europe’s noble and wealthier families. Galton intended that these arrangements be widened and in a novel twist suggested that the churches were to some degree responsible for degeneration within humanity because they encouraged some of the more intelligent and able members of the younger generation to become celibate by becoming priests, monks and nuns. Haeckel similarly pointed out the folly of a society allowing the strongest, bravest and brightest young men to die in war while leaving the weakest males of a generation to freely reproduce.

The strength of the Darwin-Galton link, seemingly a compulsory one to be made by anti-Darwin commentators, is none other than the fact that Darwin and Galton shared a grandfather, Erasmus, though not a grandmother; they were thus second cousins (with a coefficient of relationship of only 3.13%; though they are more often erroneously referred to as first cousins). Note also that at no point did Galton ever propose ‘negative eugenics’ in the Hitlerian sense, such as the sterilisation or the mass murder of those people deemed undesirable. He proposed only the promotion of positive traits. Indeed, he was heavily criticised in some circles for not advocating ‘negative eugenics’. One such critic was the English novelist H G Wells, an enthusiastic promoter of eugenics who, when asked about Galton’s views, remarked in 1904:
"I believe ... It is in the sterilisation of failure, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies".

The Nazis did implement one policy of ‘positive eugenics’. In their ‘Lebensborn’ project, set up in 1935, ‘biologically fit’ and ‘racially pure’ women were encouraged to have children with elite German soldiers. In return they were provided with maternity homes, superior medical care and financial assistance. The fact is that Nazi eugenics programs were more characterised by being overtly ‘negative’ and as such were not even strictly Galtonian, never mind Darwinian. To distance Darwin further from any sense of support for eugenics, Galton published his work and coined the term ‘eugenics’ only after Darwin’s death. Furthermore, as mentioned, Darwin discussed the subject of both positive and negative eugenics, specifically in Chapter 21 of ‘Descent of Man’ as a possible misinterpretation of his findings. He clearly rejects eugenics as “evil” and “inhumane” and also points out difficulties in implementation as it would be impossible to agree on who should be a fair judge of desirable traits.

As it turns out Darwin was right once again. This lack of agreement is just what happened when eugenics programs commenced in the 1920s. While Hitler considered the Jewish people to be “the vermin of society”, advocates of eugenics in other countries invented their own scapegoat peoples. With delicious irony, one such advocate in the United States, the Reverend Newell Dwight Hillis (1858-1929), a Congregationalist minister from New York, travelled throughout the country giving lectures calling for the sterilisation of America’s German-derived citizens. In his 1918 publication ‘’The Blot on the Kaiser’s Scutcheon’ he refers to Germans, in language not dissimilar to Hitler or Chamberlain’s description of Jews, as “brutes” and “orang-outangs”.

The fact that different advocates of eugenics representing different social groups had differing ideas of what constituted good human stock demonstrates that, like the polygenists before them, their criteria were not primarily based on objective scientific data, ‘Darwinian’ or otherwise, as we are led to believe by creationists, but on religious, political, cultural, subjective and aesthetic considerations. The Nazi criteria for who constituted an Aryan (or an honorary Aryan) was no different.

The Nazis had plenty of excuses for a moral basis for eugenics at their disposal. Twenty-seven US states had adopted eugenics laws based on pseudoscientific ideas by the time Hitler had gained power and Hitler demonstrated in ‘Mein Kampf’ that he made a particular study of American eugenics laws and programs. American business leaders and medical scientists travelled to Germany to share their knowledge of and plans for eugenics. Indeed, a pro-eugenics poster depicting a young blindfolded couple walking off the edge of a cliff was a common site in medical centres in Nazi Germany. It was not a product the of the Nazi publicity machine. It had been copied directly from a similar poster campaign issued by the Louisiana Department of Public Health. Hitler merely followed their lead, attempting to legitimise his anti-Semitism by swathing it in a façade of pseudoscience, none of which bore the slightest resemblance to ‘Darwinian’ thought.

A number of Nazi ideologues even stated publicly that their racial and social policies were not based on scientific principles but on cultural, religious and political motivations. And they were proud of it too. The ‘Journal of All Natural Science’ referred frequently to “the volkisch-biological view of National Socialism”. Folk-biology? Darwin would undoubtedly have been amused at notions that the natural world is able to alter the way it operates to suit political and/or religious viewpoints. Consider also this statement by Gerhard Wagner, the German government’s chief medical advisor, in a speech titled ‘Race and Population Policy’ at the Nuremberg Nazi Party Rally in 1936:

“Our genetic and racial thinking stems.......not from our scientific, but rather from our National Socialist convictions, and that it was not learned scientists, but rather our Führer Adolf Hitler, and he alone, who made genetic and racial thinking the centre of our National Socialist worldview............the doctrines of blood and race are not first of all an important and interesting piece of biological science to us, but rather above all else a political-ideological attitude”

Similarly, these two statements from the science-trained Chamberlain make it further clear that his own racial philosophy made no pretense to having a scientific basis:

“biologists delude themselves with the belief that empirical theories such as those of Darwin are sufficient”

“if a man possesses a sacred book, which contains all wisdom, then all further investigation is as superfluous as it is sinful”

Doesn’t that second statement read more like the doctrine of a modern-day creationist than a Darwinian? Well, compare Chamberlain’s thoughts above to those of the British creationist Paul Taylor (who holds a degree in chemistry), taken from the ‘Answers in Genesis’ website:

“........scientific models, while helpful, must never take the place of scripture. The scientific model can be superseded. Scripture cannot”.

Indeed, it seems to be the case that Nazis rejected Darwinian evolution for the very same reasons as do the advocates of intelligent design at the Discovery Institute. In 1996, the then President of the Institute, writing in their journal had this to say:

“...for over a century western science has been influenced by the idea that God is either dead or irrelevant......the centre seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and it’s cultural legacies.......to raise serious doubts about scientific materialism and reopen the case for a broadly theistic understanding of nature”

Note the similarities between Nazi ideology and that of the Discovery Institute. Both parties view science not as an objective enterprise but as a primarily culturally-based pursuit, viz the Nazi “volkisch-biological view” and the Discovery Institute’s use of the term “western science”. It could also be argued that the Discovery Institute are, in effect, purveyers of folk-science as 80% of @DiscoveryCSC, their Twitter account, hail from the USA. If they were truly an organisation that promoted science you would expect this figure to be far more international, representative of a scientific, rather than national community.

Both parties also make a habit of denouncing ‘materialism’ and in so doing frequently and erroneously, and perhaps deliberately, equate naturalistic or scientific materialism with philosophical materialism. Indeed, one of the oft-made claims of Discovery Institute supporters is that a conspiracy exists to silence their views. They perceive the scientific evidence supporting evolutionary theory not only to be weak but claim that many biologists actually know this, continuing to support the theory because it so effectively reinforces philosophical materialism! However, while all philosophical materialists are naturalistic materialists (as was Haeckel), it does not follow that all naturalistic materialists are necessarily philosophical materialists. Gregor Mendel, for example, was an Augustinian friar and a number of contemporary researchers of evolutionary theory, such as Ken Miller, are life-long practising Christians. Nevertheless, conflating naturalistic and philosophical materialism allows attacks on evolution, as it is probably the science that most directly inform ethics. In this way they aim to weaken the ‘materialism’ of society.

Even in those instances when science was explicitly claimed to have informed Nazi thought it was never allowed to be given a greater prominence than political or religious motivations. Nazi pronouncements on the natural sciences, when not erroneous, were often cynical. George Stein, in a 1988 article in American Scientist ‘Biological Science and the Roots of Nazism’, sums up the attitude well:

“......... it is clear that science was used merely as raw material or evidence by ideologically interested political actors as proof of preconceived notions..........all attempts to use science in this manner are, in fact, mere pseudoscience”

Indeed, the view of eugenics having both a knowledge- and a moral-base outside of science was not confined to the Nazis. One prominent advocate of this view was the English Baptist pastor Frederick Brotherton Meyer (1847-1929). Meyer was author of the book ‘Religion and Race Regeneration’, published in 1912. He argued strongly that attempting any nationwide policy of eugenics based solely on scientific considerations was bound to fail. In his view:

“only one force supplies us with the inspiration and discipline necessary for achieving lasting race improvement: religion”.

There is considerable irony in Hitler’s notion of purifying the Aryan bloodline. Because it was founded on pseudoscience underpinned by a lack of understanding of natural selection and principles of heredity it was likely doomed to fail. Any species that reproduces using sexual mechanisms has, despite smaller overall numbers of offspring per mating pair, a considerable advantage over asexual reproducing species in terms of the quality of progeny. Although molecular biology did not appear until after the Nazi era, the basic mechanisms of population genetics were certainly understood by biologists at the time (and even, to a lesser extent, by farmers with little or no formal education). They understood that limiting genetic variation by reducing the size of a gene pool makes certain traits more readily available but ultimately leaves a population ‘less fit’ and more susceptible to disease processes.

However, despite a plethora of evidence from agriculture and animal breeding programs, Hitler seemed to think that hybridisation was harmful, against the “law of Nature” (for some reason Hitler capitalised 'nature') and “a sin”. Nothing could be further from the truth. Hybridization actually produces genetic vigour and more successful offspring. On the other hand breeding within a relatively small genetic pool is shown to result in reduced fertility, lower birth rates, higher infant mortality, shorter lifespan, the increased expression of heritable disorders and a reduction in immune system function. The very high levels of disability, deformity, and disease associated with pedigree dogs attests to this. Genetically pure races such as espoused by the likes of de Gobineau, Chamberlain, Riley, Coughlin and Hitler can also be likened to an agricultural monoculture. Compared to a human grouping with a larger genetic pool, a pure ‘race’ faced with a hardy enough disease or parasite would have its ability to survive compromised. If, as Christian fundamentalists claim, Nazi racial theory had truly been inspired by evolution by natural selection surely Hitler would have been encouraging German citizens to mate with as wide a variety of humans as possible, so as to increase the genetic fitness of their population by expanding their gene pool?

Other important non-German moral advocates of eugenics were the English clergymen, Ernest Barnes (1874-1953), who was the Bishop of Birmingham from 1924 until his death, and the Reverends J.H.F Peile and John Percy Hinton. All three elucidated a Christian moral basis for eugenics. As a member of the House of Lords, Bishop Barnes petitioned the British government on a number of occasions to enact eugenics legislation, particularly that concerned with sterilisation. Peile authored what was then a highly influential paper ‘Eugenics and the Church’ published in ‘The Eugenics Review’ in 1909, later given as a talk at the ‘Eugenics Education Society’. He viewed Galton’s ‘positive eugenics’ as perfectly compatible with Christian philanthropy, but agreed also with some of the milder aspects of ‘negative eugenics’, describing the recent marriage of two deaf mutes as “a triumph of unenlightened philanthropic effort”. Hinton on the other hand, was a particular advocate of ‘negative eugenics’, apparently under the impression that “mental deficiency is increasing by leaps and bounds”. In his 1935 book ‘Sterilization: A Christian Approach’, which he co-authored with Josephine E. Calcutt and the prolific Christian author the Rev. Leslie Dixon Weatherhead, they stated:

“We consider it a sin against the idea of personality and conscience to insist upon the propagation of degenerate and sick life, if means are available to oppose such a calamity. It seems blasphemy to imagine that the birth of sick children could be at all God's will and Divine providence".

A number of extracts from Hinton, Calcutt and Weatherhead's book were included in an unpublished German book manuscript (‘Eugenics and Christianity: Questions of Sterilisation, Northernisation, Euthanasia, Marriage’) being written by Karl Brandt, the head of the Nazi euthanasia program and Hitler’s personal physician. The manuscript came to light when it was accepted into evidence at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. Most pertinent to the present discussion is that neither Peile nor Hinton et al. make any mention at all of either ‘Darwin’ or ‘Darwinism’ in their writing. Piele uses the term ‘natural selection’ once only, describing it in terms which make clear his disapproval of this aspect of the natural world:

“crude and wasteful, carried out at the cost of an amount of suffering which neither our instinct nor our reason will tolerate if we can prevent it.”

Whenever fundamentalist Christians acknowledge past Christian support for eugenics programs they invariably blame liberal or modernist tendencies within the churches (see Bergman’s paper in the Journal of Creation, 2006, ‘The Church Preaches Eugenics: A History of Church Support for Darwinism and Eugenics’ for an outline of such views, as well as mention of eugenics support from liberal Jewish rabbis). This is a less than accurate picture, at least in the United States. What Bergman declines to discuss, for example, are the large numbers of anti-evolution Baptist, Presbyterian and Congregationalist ministers who enthusiastically competed in the many 'sermon contests' in favour of eugenics organised by the American Eugenics Society in the 1920s and who refused to marry couples where one or both partners had a physical infirmity or history of psychological illness. Clergymen like Barnes, Piele and Hinton were also considered perfectly mainstream, in this case, establishment Church of England. Bergman is surely aware of all this and chooses to argue from a parochial standpoint, misleading his readers by discussing only the opinions and activities of so-called ‘liberal’ American churchmen.

Darwin’s discovery of natural selection and the practice of eugenics (whether ‘positive’ or ‘negative’) are polar opposites also in terms of underlying ‘motivations’. Arguably the most consequential factor in natural selection, both scientifically and philosophically, is that it operates automatically and needs no conscious agent. It is a blind mechanical process, having no inherent teleological design, purpose, intent or destiny. Indeed, evolutionary processes are able to, and have, exploited any DNA, regardless of where it comes from. Because of this, the effects of natural selection can only ever be identified in retrospect. Indeed, this aspect of evolution is invariably portrayed by creationists as it’s cardinal philosophical evil.

So what Hitler and other eugenicists attempted to do was the exact opposite to the ‘Darwinian’ evolutionary process; they were in effect acting as a deity might, purposefully planning and designing the characteristics of future generations of people in order to determine their destiny. Artificially selecting for the future. Eugenics, like the Christian view of creation, is a form of controlled selective breeding and it is not difficult to see how eugenicists could conceive themselves as doing, or at least ‘helping along’ God’s work, something the clergy cited seemed to have no difficulty understanding. The modern Christian fundamentalist view, then, is paradoxical. How can they link Darwin’s findings to Hitler’s intentions when, by their own admission, evolution by natural selection is evil because it has no agency behind it, no goals, a blind mechanism, devoid of any purpose?

Another important reason why artificial selection (or “sculpting the gene pool” as Richard Dawkins so aptly refers to it), whether ‘positive’ or ‘negative’, cannot be linked to Darwin is that it predates him by a very long way. Breeding techniques had been employed successfully by livestock farmers, horticulturists, horse, dog and pigeon breeders etc for millennia. Studies of mitochondrial DNA, for example, suggest that dogs were first bred from wolves somewhere in the region of 12-15,000 years ago, an example of artificial selection which is still going on. At the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show in New York held in February 2011, no less than six new breeds were introduced. Indeed, Hitler’s own pet German shepherd was the result of artificial selection. Although Darwin did write a book about artificial selection, ‘The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication’, published in 1868, none of the research was his own. He simply discussed knowledge which was already in the public domain, apart from Chapter 27, which outlines some of his own speculative ideas on heredity.

Ironically, probably the oldest available text that describes the benefits of eugenics is a passage from the creationist’s favourite book of the Bible, Genesis 30:31-43:

“What shall I give you?” he asked. “Don’t give me anything,” Jacob replied. “But if you will do this one thing for me, I will go on tending your flocks and watching over them: Let me go through all your flocks today and remove from them every speckled or spotted sheep, every dark-coloured lamb and every spotted or speckled goat. They will be my wages. And my honesty will testify for me in the future, whenever you check on the wages you have paid me. Any goat in my possession that is not speckled or spotted, or any lamb that is not dark-coloured, will be considered stolen.” “Agreed,” said Laban. “Let it be as you have said.” That same day he removed all the male goats that were streaked or spotted, and all the speckled or spotted female goats (all that had white on them) and all the dark-coloured lambs, and he placed them in the care of his sons. Then he put a three-day journey between himself and Jacob, while Jacob continued to tend the rest of Laban’s flocks. Jacob, however, took fresh-cut branches from poplar, almond and plane trees and made white stripes on them by peeling the bark and exposing the white inner wood of the branches. Then he placed the peeled branches in all the watering troughs, so that they would be directly in front of the flocks when they came to drink. When the flocks were in heat and came to drink, they mated in front of the branches. And they bore young that were streaked or speckled or spotted. Jacob set apart the young of the flock by themselves, but made the rest face the streaked and dark-colored animals that belonged to Laban. Thus he made separate flocks for himself and did not put them with Laban’s animals. Whenever the stronger females were in heat, Jacob would place the branches in the troughs in front of the animals so they would mate near the branches, but if the animals were weak, he would not place them there. So the weak animals went to Laban and the strong ones to Jacob. In this way the man grew exceedingly prosperous and came to own large flocks, and female and male servants, and camels and donkeys”.

Discussing the knowledge of eugenics held by the ancient Jews, Rabbi Max Reichler one of the authors in 'Jewish Eugenics and Other Essays' (1916) had this to say:

"To be sure eugenics as a science could hardly have existed among ancient Jews; but many eugenic rules were certainly incorporated in the large collection of Biblical and Rabbinical laws. Indeed there are clear indications of a conscious effort to utilize all influences that might improve the inborn qualities of the Jewish races, and to guard against any practice that might vitiate the purity of the race or ‘impair the racial qualities of future generations’ either physically, mentally, or morally...The very founder of the Jewish race, the patriarch Abraham, recognized the importance of certain inherited qualities, and insisted that the wife of his ‘only beloved son’ should not come from ‘the daughters of the Canaanites,’ but from the seed of a superior stock".

Putting aside the typical Biblical nonsense about the effects of animals mating in front of peeled branches, the history of agriculture and animal breeding demonstrates that the basic knowledge underlying eugenics was certainly known and used several thousand years ago. Hitler just attempted to substitute people for goats and dogs. Although he was attempting to repurify, rather than to create a new ‘breed’, or master race of people (as is often thought), the mechanisms of heredity are the same. And it is emphatically not based on Darwin’s findings, whether you believe in the genetic effects of peeled branches or not.