Ever since Iowa State University illustrated its academic bigotry in the case of Professor Gonzalez I have wanted to write a bit about Darwinism (I use this term as Charles Hodge used it, concluding that it was atheism) and initially I wanted to express something of my outrage at what happened. Now, I’m more inclined to just express my sadness.
Quite apart from the Gonzalez matter at ISU I recently did some study of William Jennings Bryan, a highly admirable man in many respects who is unfortunately remembered by history as the fundamentalist buffoon of the 1925 Scopes Trial. The “reporting” done of the trial by H.L. Mencken made Bryan look bad, the play and subsequent movie Inherit The Wind made him look worse. But regardless of how he may be remembered, I am convinced that he was right when he spent the latter part of his career warning of the dangers of Darwinism to anyone who would listen.
He went so far as to blame Darwin and Nietzsche for some of the evils of Germany in World War One. He didn’t live to see National Socialism take power in Germany less than two decades later, but if he had he would doubtless have repeated his claim. In retrospect, Bryan seems truly prescient. The connection of a godless philosophy, biology, and anthropology to Nazi Germany’s eugenics, xenophobia, and the systematic extermination of human beings seems hard to deny, Hitler’s contradictory “anti-godless” movement notwithstanding.
Recently I saw Ben Stein’s movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Stein also makes this connection between Darwin and the Holocaust. But additionally what one glimpses in Stein’s film is the utter hopelessness of the Darwinian view. It robs life of any real meaning. There is no right, and no wrong. No essential difference between humans and the animals (we possess no eternal soul, we were not made in the image of God). No purpose to our existence. No absolute truth with the exception, of course, of evolution and the denial of God’s existence. If guys like Richard Dawkins are right, all is lost.
It is a sad thing to see men so rigorously defend something that will only lead them to despair and destruction.