Doing Violence to Darwin: Conflicting Christian Evaluations of Darwinism and Violence

Abstract

At issue is the degree to which Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of natural selection is to blame for violence caused by communism, Nazism, and other societal dysfunctions. Conservative Christian opponents claim Darwinism undermines Biblical authority and supports ideologies causing violence. Secular and Christian supporters of Darwinism argue that Darwinism has not promoted violence but has been used to provide a scientific rationale for violence that would have been caused anyway. Moreover, Christian supporters of Darwinism maintain that Darwinism is by no means incompatible with the Bible. This paper examines claims by both sides as well as the attempts by Darwinism’s Christian opponents to supplant Darwinism with theories which they hope will restore Biblical authority, including Creationism, Creation Science, and Intelligent Design theory. The paper concludes that despite the legal setbacks encountered by adherents to these alternative theories, the conflict continues.

1. Introduction

More than a century and a half after Charles Darwin first published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, hereinafter referred to as The Origin of Species, Christians remain divided over the validity of his theory of evolution through natural selection, or Darwinism.

Many Christians have accepted Darwin’s work as accurate science yet not in conflict with Christianity or other faiths. They consider the Bible allegorical and accept evolution, considering God the Creator and evolution the humanly discernable means by which He creates (Pew Research Center 2014). For example, the Center reports that those who believe humans evolved over time and were not created in their present form include the following:

• 60% of all adults;
• 76% of the religiously unaffiliated;
• 78% of white mainline Protestants;
• 68% of white non-Hispanic Catholics;
• 53% of Hispanic Catholics.

Several Catholic Popes have accepted Darwinism. In 1950, Pope Pius XII, in the encyclical Humani Generis, rather grudgingly acknowledged that one could use evolution to study “the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existing living matter”. But, he was quick to add that nonetheless, “Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God (Pius XII 1950)”.

But in 1996, Pope John Paul II announced his more enthusiastic embrace of Darwinism. He wrote that

Today, almost half a century after publication of the encyclical, new knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis. It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory”.

(Linder 2004)

Leaders of mainline Protestant denominations have likewise issued endorsements of Darwinism, as in the following examples:

At its 75th General Convention in June 2006, the Episcopal Church passed a resolution saying that “evolution is entirely compatible with an authentic and living Christian faith”, and encouraging state legislatures and boards of education “to establish standards for science education based on the best available scientific knowledge as accepted by a consensus of the scientific community (The Archives of the Episcopal Church 2006)”. Moreover, the newly elected Presiding Bishop, the Rev. Katherine Jefferts Schori, said, “Evolution most definitely should be taught in school. It’s a well-tested premise and the best model that fits the data available. Creationism can’t make that claim. I believe in the creeds. They say God created the world, but they don’t say how” (National Center for Science Education 2006).

The United Church of Christ has said that

Evolution helps us see our faithful God in a new way. Our creator works patiently, calling forth life through complex processes spanning billions of years and waiting for us to awaken and respond in conscious participation in God’s own overarching dream for all living things. Evolution also helps us see ourselves anew, as creatures who share a common origin with other species. Today we know that human bodies and brains share the same genetic and biochemical processes with other creatures, not just mammals but insects, plants, and bacteria. How then should we understand ourselves as evolved creatures, sharing much of our DNA with other species, and at the same time as distinct creatures in the image of God.

(National Center for Science Education 2008; Thomas 2008)

The position of the United Methodist Church is that

We recognize science as a legitimate interpretation of God’s natural world. We affirm the validity of the claims of science in describing the natural world and in determining what is scientific. We preclude science from making authoritative claims about theological issues and theology from making authoritative claims about scientific issues. We find that science’s descriptions of cosmological, geological, and biological evolution are not in conflict with theology.

(United Methodist Church 2008)

And the General Assembly of the largest Presbyterian denomination, the Presbyterian Church (USA), said “that the true relation between the evolutionary theory and the Bible is that of noncontradiction and that the position stated by the General Assemblies of 1886, 1888, 1889 and 1924—which had interpreted Scripture as being opposed to the theory of evolution—was in error and no longer represents the mind of our Church (Presbyterian Church (USA) 1982, p. 10)”.

In sharp contrast, however, only 44% of Black Protestants accept evolution and just 27% of white evangelical Protestants accept evolution, while 64% of the latter group believe man has existed in his present form since his creation. Several more theologically conservative denominations likewise reject evolution. For example, the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod said

We teach that God has created heaven and earth, and that in the manner and in the space of time recorded in the Holy Scriptures, especially Gen. 1 and 2, namely, by His almighty creative word, and in six days. We reject every doctrine which denies or limits the work of creation as taught in Scripture. In our days it is denied or limited by those who assert, ostensibly in deference to science, that the world came into existence through a process of evolution; that is, that it has, in immense periods of time, developed more or less of itself. Since no man was present when it pleased God to create the world, we must look for a reliable account of creation to God’s own record, found in God’s own book, the Bible. We accept God’s own record with full confidence and confess with Luther’s Catechism: “I believe that God has made me and all creatures.”

(Lutheran Church Missouri Synod n.d.)

And the Southern Baptist Convention, representing the largest Protestant denomination, has declared that “The theory of evolution has never been proven to be a scientific fact”, and that “Creation Science”, also known as “Scientific Creationism”, the doctrine that a literal interpretation of the Bible “can be presented solely in terms of scientific evidence without any religious doctrines or concepts”, should be taught in America’s public schools (Southern Baptist Convention 1982).

But opposition to Darwinism is not confined to the Young Earth Creationists. Other politically and theologically conservative Christians, who do not necessarily believe in Scientific Creationism, nonetheless reject Darwinism. Like the Young Earth Creationists, they claim Darwinism is the product of a flawed approach to science which weakens Biblical authority and is thus responsible for the violence, suffering, and death caused by laissez-faire capitalism, crime, communism, racism, and Nazism. Although they do not advocate Scientific Creationism as a substitute for Darwinism, they nonetheless seek not only to replace Darwinism with alternative theories of human development, but to make science itself more God-centered and accepting of the supernatural as an explanation for otherwise natural phenomena, thereby restoring Biblical authority and thus helping society combat Darwinian-inspired violence and evil. Prominent among them are theorists at the Discovery Institute, a politically and socially conservative think tank in Seattle, Washington, which is developing and advocating the theory of Intelligent Design to challenge Darwinism.

This paper examines both the Christian attack on Darwinism and the Christian defense of Darwinism. Special emphasis is placed on the accusations that Darwin and Darwinism were at least partly to blame for the violence associated with laissez-faire capitalism, crime, Nazism, communism, racism, and eugenics, as well as on how Christians who believe in Darwinism defend it against such accusations and further argue that Darwinism and Christianity are actually compatible. Topics discussed will include the following:

• Darwinism;
• The Nature of Science as the Basis of Christian Opposition to Darwinism;
• The Origins of Christian Opposition to Darwinism;
• Darwinism and the Law;
• The Ongoing Christian Assault on Darwinism;
• Absolving Darwinism of Blame for Violence;
• The Compatibility of Darwinism with Faith;
• The State of the Conflict Today.

2. Darwinism

In developing his theory of evolution by means of natural selection, Darwin was greatly influenced by English clergyman Thomas Robert Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus wrote that populations grow exponentially, while the quantity of available food grows only arithmetically. In other words, populations, unless their increase is somehow checked and limited, will always outgrow food supplies, thereby causing the “struggle for existence” as more and more people or animals compete for scarce food (Malthus 1976, p. 20). Reading Malthus, Darwin wrote in his Autobiography included in the Charles Darwin Collection that

being well-prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species.

(Darwin 2020c, p. 559)

But how would this happen? In Chapter Four of The Origin of Species, Darwin identified and described “natural selection” as the driving force of evolution, creating new species as others go extinct (Darwin 2020a, pp. 84–130). A species can be defined as being “composed of all individuals that can exchange genes with each other (Scott 2004, p. 41)”. Tigers, for example, can breed with other tigers, thereby creating offspring whose genes are a mix of their parents’. But tigers cannot breed with, say, bears, tigers and bears being separate species.

“Darwin”, explained Asimov, succinctly summarizing the core of Darwin’s argument,

suggested that every generation of animals was composed of an array of individuals varying randomly from the average. Some would be slightly larger; some would possess organs of slightly different shape, some abilities would be a trifle above or below normal. The differences might be minute, but those whose make-up was even slightly better suited to the environment would tend to live slightly longer and have more offspring. Eventually, an accumulation of favorable characteristics might be coupled with an ability to breed with the original type or other variations of it, and thus a new species would be born.

(Asimov 1984, p. 711)

Exactly what differences exist putting their possessors at a competitive advantage and hence enabling them to live longer and pass on their advantageous traits can vary greatly from one species to another, and from one generation of a species to another, depending on the nature of the environment in which a given species lives (Scott 2004, pp. 34–36). One can speculate that larger size might make its possessors better able to defend themselves against predators—or make them more attractive prey. Faster wolves may more easily chase down, kill, and feast on their prey, while faster deer may more easily outrun their pursuers. White bears may more easily thrive in circumpolar regions where their coloration may provide more effective camouflage as they stalk their prey, while the coloration of dark brown and black bears may serve them better in forests.

3. The Nature of Science as the Basis for Christian Opposition to Darwinism

Darwinism posits that all species share a common ancestor and that they developed, changed into new species, or went extinct over hundreds of millions of years. This contradicts “the creationist view that the earth is only a few thousand years old, as is the entire universe [and] that life was created suddenly with all its species distinct from the start… (Asimov 1984, p. 715)”. Moreover, although Darwin in the final sentence of The Origin of Species made no mention of “life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one… (Darwin 1958, p. 560)”,1 he otherwise specified no role for God in the evolution of species or in the creation of new species. And therein lay the original sources of controversy among Christians and between Christians and nonbelievers.

Central to the conflict between those who accept evolution and those who do not are issues concerning the nature of science: What is science? What are its limits? What (if anything) can science say about God and the supernatural?

The National Academy of Sciences (1998, p. 128) says,

Science is a way of knowing about the natural world. It is limited to explaining the natural world through natural causes. Science can say nothing about the supernatural. Whether God exists or not is a question about which science is neutral.

This is not to say there can be no reconciliation between science and religion, or between belief in evolution and belief in God: “Most religions of the world”, says the Academy,

do not have any direct conflict with the idea of evolution. Within the Judeo-Christian religions, many people believe that God works through the process of evolution. That is, God has created a world that is ever-changing and a mechanism through which creatures can adapt to environmental change over time.

At the root of the apparent conflict between some religions and evolution is a misunderstanding of the critical difference between religious and scientific ways of knowing. Religions and science answer different questions about the world. Whether there is a purpose to the universe or a purpose for human existence are not questions for science. Religious and scientific ways of knowing have played, and will continue to play, significant roles in human history.

No one way of knowing can provide all of the answers to the questions that humans ask. Consequently, many people, including many scientists, hold strong religious beliefs and simultaneously accept the occurrence of evolution.

(National Academy of Sciences 1998, p. 127)

Indeed, no less an authority than Darwin himself said, in a letter to clergyman John Fordyce dated 7 May 1879, “It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist & an evolutionist (Darwin 1974)”. To those who saw conflict between faith and Darwinism, Darwin cited the example of Asa Gray, devout Christian, former physician, Professor of Botany at Harvard, and a friend of Darwin, who took it upon himself to supervise the publication of the American edition of The Origin of Species and secure Darwin’s American royalties for him. Gray believed in the authority of the Bible and in the doctrine of natural theologian William Paley, who said that all plants, animals, and people seemed to have been designed to fit their environments, and that the appearance of design implied the existence of an Intelligent Designer:

The marks of a designer are too strong to be gotten over. Design must have a Designer. That designer must have been a person. That person is GOD.

(Paley 2012, p. 163)

To Gray, Darwinism was the means by which God designed His creation (Livingstone 1984, pp. 63–64; DuPree 1988, pp. 136–37, 276–77; Gray 2010, pp. 5–80).

Darwin himself did not actually share Paley’s religious beliefs. Prior to setting out on the voyage of the Beagle, Darwin had believed in Biblical inerrancy and Paley’s conception of God as Creator and Designer. However, as Darwin wrote in the version of his Autobiography published in The Charles Darwin Collection, his faith began to fade as he concluded that neither the Bible’s Old Testament nor the New Testament could be taken literally (Darwin 2020c, pp. 530–31). Moreover, he explicitly rejected Christianity because

“the plain language of the [Biblical text on belief and salvation] seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine”

(Darwin 2020c, p. 531)

Darwin’s explicit rejection of Christianity and overall weakening of faith may have also been partially prompted by the death of his beloved daughter, Annie, at the age of ten. Darwin himself never mentioned her death as a reason to abandon God, and some scholars consider the evidence of a relationship between his daughter’s death and his loss of faith to be scant and inconclusive (Van Wyhe and Pallen 2012). But, several of his biographers have nonetheless identified his grief over her loss as adding to his loss of faith. Desmond and Moore wrote that for Darwin, Annie’s death “put an end to three years’ deliberations about the Christian meaning of mortality; it opened up a fresh vision of the tragic contingency of nature (Desmond and Moore 1991, p. 386)”. And, Paul Johnson wrote that Darwin “never forgot her, and he never forgave God for taking her away. The cruelty, as he saw it, blew away the last vestige of his belief in a benign deity (Johnson 2012, p. 62)”.

But Darwin never became an atheist. He seems to have been conflicted on the overall issue of whether he was a theist or an agnostic. Darwin wrote in his Autobiography of the

extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards, and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist.

(Darwin 2020c, p. 536)2

Yet, Darwin also admitted that

I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.

(Darwin 2020c, p. 537)

So, Darwin evidently believed that if Darwinism was true but that the existence of God was at least a possibility, if not a certainty, one could conceivably believe in both. To Darwin, Darwinism and theism were not necessarily mutually exclusive.

But Christians opposed to Darwinism disagree with both the compatibility of Darwinism with Christianity and even with how science should be defined. They believe science in general, and Darwinism in particular, is not neutral on the question of God, but actually hostile. They denounce Darwinism as the product of a flawed approach to scientific research—scientific naturalism, or materialism, an approach which they believe asserts, at the very least, the irrelevance of God to the affairs of the universe and the world.

Henry Morris, the founder of the Institute for Creation Research and a leading proponent of Young Earth Creationism—which asserts that the Bible is literally true and therefore the earth was created only 6000 years ago in six 24 h days, and all species were separately and independently created at that time and have remained unchanged since their creation—said that as a result of the acceptance of “the evolutionary basis of modern thought”,

Everything has seemingly been turned upside-down, and the older standards of right and wrong have been almost completely interchanged. Observe the symptoms: [H]uge nuclear arsenals in the great nations, developing nuclear capabilities in many smaller nations, the imminent AIDS pandemic, chemical and biological weapons ready to be unleashed, the unknown dangers of genetic engineering looming ahead, the terrors and conflicts generated by world communism (not to mention Nazism, racism, imperialism, and other evil systems), the wide resurgence of paganism and occultism, the inexorable spread of the cancerous drug culture, giant crime syndicates in the capitalist nations, pan-Arabic aggression in the Islamic nations, and a worldwide breakdown of personal and governmental morality.

(Morris 2000, p. 13)

Phillip Johnson, one of Darwinism’s most prominent critics today, asks, “Are we created beings who exist because a supernatural intelligence brought about our existence for a purpose? Or are we accidental products of some purposeless material mechanism that cares nothing about us or what we do? (Moreland 1994, p. 7)”. Darwinism implies the latter.

Johnson argues that scientific naturalism “insists that the entire history of the cosmos belongs to the subject matter of natural science”, and “is the doctrine that the cosmos has always been a closed system of material causes and effects that can never be influenced by anything from ‘outside’—like God…[who] is merely an entity in the minds of those who believe. (Moreland 1994, p. 7)”. In other words, God is simply a figment of one’s imagination.

William Dembski, another prominent critic of Darwinism, adds that naturalism

does not require that we explicitly deny God’s existence. God could, after all, have created the world to be self-contained. Nonetheless, for the sake of inquiry we are required to pretend that God does not exist and proceed accordingly. Naturalism affirms not so much that God does not exist as that God need not exist. It is not that God is dead so much as that God is absent. And because God is absent, intellectual honesty demands that we get about our work without invoking [H]im (except, of course, when we need to pacify our religious impulses). This is the received impulse, and it is pure poison.

(Dembski 1998, p. 14)

Perhaps the most scathing condemnation of naturalistic science has come from the Discovery Institute, a Christian conservative think tank based in Seattle, Washington, with which Johnson and Dembski are both affiliated, and which is dedicated to discrediting Darwinism and replacing the NAS’s concept of science with a more faith-based approach, Intelligent Design. In an introduction to “The Wedge”, a prospectus outlining its plans to challenge and replace Darwinism, it said

The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built. Its influence can be detected in most, if not all, of the West’s greatest achievements, including representative democracy, human rights, free enterprise, and progress in the arts and sciences.

Yet a little over a century ago, this cardinal idea came under wholesale attack by intellectuals drawing on the discoveries of modern science. Debunking the traditional conceptions of both God and man, thinkers such as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud portrayed humans not as moral and spiritual beings, but as animals or machines who inhabited a universe ruled by purely impersonal forces and whose behavior and very thoughts were dictated by the unbending forces of biology, chemistry, and environment. This materialistic conception of reality eventually infected virtually every area of our culture, from politics and economics to literature and art.

The cultural consequences of this triumph of materialism were devastating. Materialists denied the existence of objective moral standards, claiming that environment dictates our behavior and beliefs. Such moral relativism was uncritically adopted by much of the social sciences, and it still undergirds much of modern economics, political science, psychology, and sociology.

Materialists also undermined personal responsibility by asserting that human thoughts and behaviors were dictated by our biology and environment. The results can be seen in modern approaches to criminal justice, product liability, and welfare. In the materialist scheme of things, everyone is a victim and no one can be held accountable for his or her actions.

Finally, materialism spawned a virulent strain of utopianism. Thinking they could engineer the perfect society through the application of scientific knowledge, materialist reformers advocated coercive government programs that falsely promised to create heaven on earth.

(Discovery Institute 2003)

Thus, while Darwin’s Christian opponents have theological differences among themselves, they are united in their belief that Darwinism represents science at its worst and has helped promote the chaos and violence afflicting humanity.3

4. The Origins of Christian Opposition to Darwinism

Initial reactions in both England and the United States to the publication of The Origin of Species seemed to portend the general acceptance of Darwinism.

An oft-told story credits an early debate over Darwinism in England with discrediting faith-based opposition and winning its widespread acceptance. Attacking Darwinism at an 1860 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science was Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, while defending the new theory was Thomas Huxley, an agnostic, an eminent biologist, and an outspoken champion of Darwinism (“Darwin’s Bulldog”). According to legend,

Wilberforce “begged to know whether it was through his grandfather or his grandmother that [Huxley] claimed his descent from a monkey”

While the audience roared with glee, Huxley whispered to a neighbor, “The Lord hath delivered him ton my hands;” then he rose slowly to his feet and answered: “If, then, the question is put to me, would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather, or a man highly endowed by nature and possessing great means and influence, and yet who employs those faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion—I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape”

(Asimov 1984, pp. 713–14)

Initially, Darwinism won widespread acceptance in America without any similar dramatic confrontation between its advocates and its faith-based opponents. Hofstadter notes that the release of the first American edition of The Origin occurred in 1860, when Americans were more preoccupied with the presidential election, the secession crisis, and the looming Civil War. Moreover, Darwinism won acceptance in academia and in liberal Protestant churches, thanks largely to the persuasiveness of many scientists who were also Christians, especially Asa Gray, Darwin’s foremost American champion and advocate (Hofstadter 1992; Numbers 2006; Scott 2004).

With the widespread acceptance of Darwinism as the leading theory explaining biological evolution came a widespread acceptance and usage of Darwinism as a means of explaining and justifying human behavior and prescribing policies to exploit that behavior. As Leonard noted, “there was something in Darwin for everyone” (Leonard 2016, p. 89). For example, Darwinism could be used to justify the following:

• War, to allow Anglo-Saxons to conquer “inferior races”;
• Pacifism, since “the fittest” were most likely to be recruited by the world’s military and sent into battle to be killed in action, leaving the least fit home to reproduce;
• Birth control, to limit the reproduction of the “least fit”, as advocated by Margaret Sanger;
• Natalism, or encouraging more births to increase the variation needed for more effective natural selection of the fittest;
• And many other contradictory policies and attitudes.

Indeed, wrote Leonard,

It is a tribute to the influence of Darwinism that Darwin inspired exegetes of nearly every ideology: capitalist and socialist, individualist and collectivist, pacifist and militarist, pro-natalist and birth controlling, as well as agnostic and devout.

(Leonard 2016, pp. 89–90)

Especially noteworthy were “arguments that explained and justified the economic status quo as survival of the fittest, so-called Social Darwinism (Leonard 2016, p. 89)”. Foremost among these “Social Darwinists” was English sociologist Herbert Spencer, who popularized the terms “survival of the fittest” and “evolution (Asimov 1984, p. 714)”. He considered human civilization to be “a part of nature, all a piece with the development of the embryo or the unfolding of a flower”. Hence, the workings of human civilization could be discussed in evolutionary terms (Desmond and Moore 1991, pp. 393–94).

The most prominent American Social Darwinist, sociologist William Graham Sumner, shared the views of Spencer and other Darwinian students of society who saw human struggle as comparable to the struggle among plants and animals for existence. Sumner believed that

The facts of human life…are in many respects hard and stern. It is by strenuous exertion only that each one of us can sustain himself against the destructive forces and the ever recuring needs of life; and the higher degree to which we seek to carry our development the greater is the proportionate cost of every step.

(Ruse 2000, p. 171)

Both Spencer and Sumner believed in laissez-faire economic policies—minimal government interference in economic activity. Spencer argued that if, as Darwin said, the struggle for existence within and among plant and animal species in nature produced the “survival of the fittest”, then competition within humanity would likewise produce the “fittest” people, institutions, and nations. Spencer believed, in Miller’s words,

that the state should not interfere with the social equivalent of natural selection…[A]id to the poor, universal education, and laws regulating factory working conditions were all bad ideas because they might interfere with the natural order of social competition.

(Miller 2000, pp. 174–75)

Of those who disagreed with him and favored government assistance, Spencer said,

Blind to the fact that under the natural order of things, society is constantly excreting its unhealthy, imbecile, slow, faithless members, these unthinking, though well-meaning, men advocate an interference which not only stops the purifying process but even increases the vitiation—absolutely encourages the multiplication of the reckless and incompetent by offering them an unfailing provision, and discourages the multiplication of the competent and provident by heightening the prospective difficulty of maintaining a family.

(Ruse 2000, p. 171)

Sumner likewise warned of the dangers of government welfare. The dangers of efforts to promote equality were the loss of individual liberty and the deterioration of society:

Let it be understood that we cannot go outside of this alternative: [L]iberty, inequality, survival of the fittest; not-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries society forward and favors all its best members; the latter carries society downwards and favors all its worst members”

(Hofstadter 1992, p. 51)

The ongoing Christian assault on Darwinism began in earnest with the rise of Protestant Fundamentalism in the first decades of the twentieth century. The growth of the Fundamentalist movement was provoked by challenges to Biblical inerrancy from German scholars interpreting the Bible as an ancient historical and literary work produced by fallible humans rather than the sacrosanct Word of God (Scott 2004, pp. 91–92; Larson 2006, pp. 20–22). The Germans’ methods, called modernism or higher criticism, called into question the authority of the Bible by producing results indicating significant differences between the Gospels as well as evidence that stories of Jesus and the miracles He performed were not necessarily original but could have been borrowed from other sources. For example, notes Giberson, “Matthew places two women at Jesus’s tomb, Mark places three, Luke more than three, and John only one”. Such discrepancies could undermine faith in the Bible’s accuracy and authority as a force for peace and order. Moreover, notes Giberson, Christian miracle stories were similar to those frequently found in other myths. “Pythagoras, for example, was said to be the son of Apollo, born of a virgin, and to have calmed storms and visited the dead in Hades. Why do we privilege such claims when we find them inside the Bible and reject them when we find them outside it? (Giberson 2008, p. 47)”.

The Fundamentalist movement itself took its name from The Fundamentals, a series of pamphlets published between 1910 and 1915 and designed to strengthen a more conservative Protestant interpretation of the Bible. Several contributors to The Fundamentals did, in fact, accept some versions of Darwinism, but the overall goal of those who edited and published The Fundamentals was to encourage their readers to reject higher criticism and accept the Bible as inerrant and authoritative (Scott 2004, pp. 91–92).

The Fundamentalist movement was supported and reinforced by millions of Americans suffering from “social and psychological unrest” and seeking to strengthen Biblical authority in the aftermath of the First World War and “the appalling death, brutality, destruction, and devastation” it had produced. The war itself was seen as the product of Darwinian-inspired German militarism (Scott 2004, p. 92).

Also producing social and psychological unrest and thus a desire to return to Biblical authority were the rapid economic and social changes American society was experiencing as America became more industrialized and urban. America’s industrialization was driven by businessmen labeled by their contemporaries as “robber barons” who accused them of exploitative labor practices and cutthroat competition within the system of laissez-faire capitalism, and with only minimal governmental supervision, regulation, or assistance to the economically displaced, in accordance with the theories of Spencer and Sumner (Scott 2004, p. 93).

How fair these charges of economic malfeasance against the “robber barons” truly are is debatable. The Myth of the Robber Barons: A New Look at the Rise of Big Business in America offers a vigorous defense of the beliefs and practices of some of the most famous, or notorious, of the men who dominated American industrialization in the late 1800s and early 1900s, including steamboat magnate Commodore Vanderbilt; James T. Hill, who helped develop America’s transcontinental railroads; John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil; the Scrantons of Pennsylvania and Charles Schwab were steel magnates; and Andrew Mellon, an industrialist who became Treasury Secretary in the administrations of Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. These men risked their own capital and without government assistance developed the industries on which American prosperity became based, and Mellon was one of the first to advocate tax rate cuts to stimulate economic growth and increase revenue (Folsom 2013).

But some industrialists justified their policies by claiming that they were merely working to improve society in accordance with Darwinian principles. Andrew Carnegie, for example, wrote that

The price which society pays for the law of competition, like the price it pays for cheap comforts and luxuries is also great; but the advantages of this law are also greater still for it is to this law that we owe our wonderful material development, which brings improved conditions in its train. But whether the law be benign or not, we cannot evade it; no substitutes for it have been found, and while the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department.

(Scott 2004, p. 93)

However, those who found the law “hard” frequently turned to Fundamentalism for solace. And given the widespread use of Darwinism, social or otherwise, as at least an allegory, and, worse, as a justification for policies which they blamed for their suffering in both the economy and war, their acceptance of Fundamentalism came with antipathy to Darwinism.

The growth of American public education at the high school level likewise generated opposition to Darwinism. But it also suggested a means of attacking and possibly reducing, if not destroying, the perceived evil effects of Darwinism.

Between 1890 and 1920, the number of students in American high schools increased almost tenfold, from just over 200,000 to 2 million (Larson 2006, p. 24). The rapid expansion of high school enrollment over the past thirty years meant a growing number of students were being exposed to Darwinism and might be led to question Biblical authority, notwithstanding the evils attributed to Darwinism and the efforts of the Fundamentalist movement to combat it (Scott 2004, p. 91). If the American high school was the forum in which students were being indoctrinated with Darwinism, then it had to be the forum in which Darwinism could be discredited, if not destroyed.

Darwinism’s leading opponent in the 1920s was William Jennings Bryan, three-time presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, President Woodrow Wilson’s first Secretary of State, and the most prominent public figure to whom Fundamentalists, those scarred by war, those exploited by the so-called robber barons, and those otherwise fearful of the possible consequences of rapid industrialization looked for leadership in the war against Darwinism. And Bryan accepted the leadership role so-conferred.

Bryan was not a strict Fundamentalist. He believed the earth’s age was in the millions of years, and not a mere 6000 years as Biblical literalists believed. He was even willing to accept Darwinism as it applied to the evolution of all lifeforms other than humans—but not the application of Darwinism to human evolution as well. For that reason, he publicly opposed all aspects of Darwinism. He said he would have accepted “evolution before man but for the fact that a concession as to the truth of evolution up to man furnishes our opponents with an argument which they are quick to use, namely, if evolution accounts for all the species up to man, does it not raise a presumption in behalf of evolution to include man? (Numbers 2006, p. 58)”.

But if Bryan did not accept all the Fundamentalists’ doctrinal beliefs, he did share their concern for the German philosophical assaults on the Bible, and he likewise believed German militarism, which he saw as another manifestation of social Darwinism, to be the root cause of World War I (Numbers 2006, p. 56). Moreover, he deplored the economic impact on those for whom Social Darwinism was “hard”, claiming that “The Darwinian theory represents man as reaching his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate—the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak. (Bryan 2010, pp. 17–18)”. And he saw both the threat and the opportunity presented by the growing high school population: “We believe that faith in a Supreme Being is essential to civilization as well as to religion and that abandonment of God means ruin to the world and chaos to society (Bryan 1968, p. 29)”. But “Those who teach Darwinism are undermining the faith of Christians; they are raising questions about the Bible as an authoritative source of truth; they are teaching materialistic views that rob the life of the young of spiritual values (Bryan 1968, p. 28)”. Thus, Darwinism could, and should, be attacked through public education.

To that end, Bryan encouraged the passage of laws banning the teaching of evolution in public schools and sought to help prosecute a confessed violator of the Tennessee Butler Act, which limited the teaching of evolution in Tennessee’s public schools (Numbers 206, 58, 88). In doing so, Bryan created the pattern for Christian conflict with Darwinism for the next century: charging that Darwinism promoted antisocial and disruptive violence, and using the law to either suppress Darwinism or promote faith-based alternatives to Darwinism in public school biology curricula.

The first and most famous use of this strategy was Bryan’s participation in the prosecution of John T. Scopes for violation of the Butler Act. The Butler Act was adopted by the Tennessee state legislature in 1925, and named for its originator and sponsor, farmer and state representative John Washington Butler. It said

That it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals, and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the state, to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.

(Larson 2006, p. 50)

The American Civil Liberties Union chose to challenge Butler’s constitutionality if someone admitting to teaching evolution in a Tennessee public high school could be found. A group of businessmen and lawyers in Dayton persuaded the local high school football coach, John T. Scopes, to claim he had taught evolution while serving as a substitute biology teacher. He initially pled not guilty, thereby setting the stage for the dramatic showdown between Bryan and Clarence Darrow, the most famous of Scopes’ defense attorneys. But at the conclusion of the trial, to expedite an appeal to the state Supreme Court, Scopes’ defense team had him switch his plea to guilty, thereby guaranteeing a conviction which could be appealed (Larson 2006).

The Tennessee Supreme Court reversed Scopes’ conviction on a technicality: the judge had sentenced him to pay a fine of USD 100.00, the minimum mandated by the Butler Act. However, noted the Court, the Tennessee Constitution said that only a jury could impose a fine greater than USD 50.00 (UMKC School of Law n.d.).

But the Tennessee Supreme Court did rule that the Butler Act was constitutional. In the majority opinion, the Court argued that as a public school employee, Scopes had to follow the laws of the state, including the Butler Act. But while the law prevented the teaching of evolution, it neither required Scopes to teach anything else contrary to his opinions nor prohibited him from teaching evolution or anything else outside the classroom. Thus, his rights were in no way violated. Moreover, the Court said that since evolution was not part of any religious doctrine, the issue of religious freedom was irrelevant, and since Scopes had moved out of state following the conclusion of the trial, the authorities should drop the “bizarre case” (UMKC School of Law n.d.).

5. Darwinism and the Law

While the Butler Act remained Tennessee law for another forty years, nobody else was ever prosecuted for teaching evolution in Tennessee’s public schools. But in 1967, in Jacksboro, Tennessee, schoolteacher Gary L. Scott was fired for allegedly telling his students that “The Bible was just a bunch of fairy tales”. He promptly went to court over his dismissal, claiming his First Amendment free speech rights had been violated. Although he was promptly reinstated with full back pay, he nonetheless brought suit in federal court seeking a permanent injunction against enforcing the Butler Act. The Tennessee legislature had already begun to consider its repeal, and ultimately, both houses of the legislature passed, and the Governor signed, a bill repealing Butler (Larson 2006, pp. 250–53).

Nobody in other states where laws prohibited the teaching of Darwinism was ever prosecuted either. But Darwinism itself was rarely taught anyway, and interest in the issue seemed to have died down, if not out (Giberson 2008, pp. 92–93). However, three developments revived the conflict over what was to be taught in high school biology classes—Russia’s launching of Sputnik in 1957, the U. S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Abington School District v. Schemmp (1963) prohibiting mandatory Bible readings and the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer in public schools, and the 1967 Epperson case, in which the Supreme Court would declare that barring the teaching of evolution was unconstitutional after all.

The fact that the Soviet Union beat the United States in the competition to put an artificial satellite into orbit led to demands that science be given greater emphasis in American schools. This in turn regenerated controversy in how science, especially biology, was to be taught (Giberson 2008, p. 94).

Abington mandated government “neutrality” concerning religion in public schools (Abington School District v. Schemmp 1963). This suggested a new strategy to be pursued by Darwinism’s Christian opponents: insisting that, if evolution were to be taught, then in the interests of religious neutrality, faith-based theories refuting Darwinism be given equal time as well (Giberson 2008, p. 94). And the felt need for a new strategy was strengthened by the outcome of the Epperson case.

In 1967, The U. S. Supreme Court in Epperson vs. Arkansas reviewed an Arkansas law prohibiting both the teaching of evolution and the use of textbooks discussing evolution, in response to a lawsuit brought by the ACLU with Susan Epperson, a devout Christian who nonetheless favored the teaching of Darwinism. The Supreme Court ruled that the banning of evolution, contrary to the ruling of the Tennessee Supreme Court, really was the unconstitutional promotion of religion in violation of the First Amendment (Epperson v. Arkansas 1968).

The first attempt to implement the equal-time principle for Darwinism and faith-based alternatives was a Tennessee law passed in 1973, mandating that if evolution were to be taught, so too must alternative theories, including the creation stories in Genesis. That approach was rejected by both a federal appellate court (Daniel v. Waters 1975) and the Tennessee Supreme Court (Steele v. Waters 1975) as unconstitutional under the First Amendment’s Establishment clause.

So too was an approach that mandated balanced treatment of evolution and “Creation Science”, the doctrine that a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis is supportable by science. Defining the basic tenets of Creation Science, The Institute for Creation Research asserts the following:

The physical universe of space, time, matter, and energy has not always existed, but was supernaturally created by a transcendent personal Creator who alone has existed from eternity.

The phenomenon of biological life did not develop by natural process from inanimate systems but was specially and supernaturally created by the Creator.

Each of the major kinds of plants and animals was created functionally complete from the beginning and did not evolve from some other kind of organism. Changes in basic kinds evolve from sone other kind of organism. Changes in basic kinds since their first creation are limited to “horizontal” changes (variations) within the kinds, or “downward” changes (e.g., harmful mutations, extinctions).

The first human beings did not evolve from an animal ancestry, but were specially created in fully human form from the start. Furthermore, the ‘spiritual’ nature of man (self-image, moral consciousness, abstract reasoning, language, will, religious nature, etc.) is itself a supernaturally created entity distinct from mere biological life.

(Institute for Creation Research n.d.b)

Believers in Creation Science distinguish it from Creationism, the literal interpretation of Genesis, by asserting that Creation Science is based on science, while Creationism is based on faith. Henry Morris, one of the leading proponents of Creation Science, wrote in his book, What is Creation Science?, that

Scientific Creationism is not based on Genesis or any other religious teaching. There is not a single quotation from the Bible in the entire book! Neither is any other argument based on Biblical authority or doctrine.

(Morris and Parker 1987, p. 297)

Yet, the Institute for Creation Research, which Morris founded, says its “scientific” work is conducted within a framework set by Creationism and may not produce results which contradict Creationism:

The Institute for Creation Research is unique among scientific research organizations. Our research is conducted within a biblical worldview, since ICR is committed to the absolute authority of the inerrant Word of God. The real facts of science will always agree with biblical revelation because the God who made the world of God inspired the Word of God.

All origins research must begin with a premise. ICR holds that the biblical record of primeval history in Genesis 1–11 is factual, historical, and clearly understandable and, therefore, that all things were created and made in six literal days. Life exists because it was created on Earth by a living Creator. Further, the biblical Flood was global and cataclysmic, and its after-effects therefore explain most of the stratigraphic and fossil evidence found in the earth’s crust. It is within this framework that ICR research is conducted.

(Institute for Creation Research n.d.a)

The distinction, if any, between Creationism and Creation Science was lost on the federal courts, which declared laws passed by Arkansas and Louisiana in 1981 mandating “balanced treatment for creation-science and evolution-science” unconstitutional. Arkansas’ law was struck dowan by a U. S. District Court in McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education (1982). Five years later, the Louisiana law was declared unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court in Edwards v. Aguillard (1987).

The rejection of the teaching of Creationism or Creation Science, whether instead of or in addition too, the teaching of evolution, prompted the development of the doctrine of Intelligent Design (ID). The degree to which ID is a scientific or a religious doctrine remains the subject of hot debate.

To define ID and argue that it is not a religious doctrine, The Discovery Institute, the Seattle, Washington, think tank which has developed ID, says,

The theory of intelligent design is simply an effort to empirically detect whether the “apparent design” in nature acknowledged by virtually all biologists is genuine design (the product of an intelligent cause) or is simply the product of an undirected process such as natural selection acting on random variations. Creationism typically starts with a religious text and tries to see how the findings of science can be reconciled to it. Intelligent design starts with the empirical evidence of nature and seeks to ascertain what inferences can be drawn from that evidence. Unlike creationism, the scientific theory of intelligent design does not claim that modern biology can identify whether the intelligent cause detected through science is supernatural.

(Discovery Institute n.d.)

Elaborating on what the Discovery Institute says are the key differences between ID and Creationism, it adds the following:

Creationism is focused on defending a literal reading of the Genesis account, usually including the creation of the earth by the Biblical God a few thousand years ago. Unlike creationism, the scientific theory of intelligent design is agnostic regarding the source of design and has no commitment to defending Genesis, the Bible, or any other sacred text. Instead, intelligent design theory is an effort to empirically detect whether the ‘apparent design’ in nature observed by biologists is genuine design (the product of an organizing intelligence) or is simply the product of chance and mechanical natural laws.

(West 2002)

Believers in Creation Science and Creationism agree. They note that because ID does not accept a fundamentalist interpretation of Genesis and is “agnostic” on the identity of the Intelligent Designer, ID “is not synonymous with Biblical creation and is absolutely not a substitute for it” (Benjamin n.d.).

But despite the “agnosticism” professed by the Discovery Institute, it also says it wants “to defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies”, and “to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God. (Discovery Institute 2003)”. The closer links between ID and Creationism were highlighted during the course of the 2005 trial in the case of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005).

In 2004, a group of parents of children attending the public schools of Dover, Pennsylvania, had sued the district because its Board of Education had required that a statement be read in biology classes saying evolution was just one theory and encouraging students to study Intelligent Design as well. The plaintiffs said that Intelligent Design was merely a new form of Creationism and the statement, by urging children to study Intelligent design, was the unconstitutional promotion of religion (Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District 2005).

Federal judge John E. Jones III, presiding over the case in a bench trial, declared that ID was indeed merely an updated form of Creationism and therefore, its advocacy by the Dover School Board was unconstitutional. Judge Jones noted that The Discovery Institute clearly indicated the religious basis of the ID movement. Moreover, noted Jones, a content analysis of Of Pandas and People, the ID text which children were urged to read, showed it was actually a copy of an old Creation Science text indicating “that the intelligent designer is God (Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District 2005)”.

6. The Ongoing Assault on Darwinism

Despite the legal setbacks Darwin’s Christian opponents have experienced in the courts, they continue to seek to undermine and discredit Darwinism. Since Bryan and his cohorts began cataloging the evils they attributed to Darwin more than a century ago, the Christian indictment of Darwinism has grown far more comprehensive. A review of books, articles, and websites produced by Darwinism’s Christian opponents shows that they blame Darwinism for crime, communism, eugenics, racism, Nazism, and all the violence, especially genocide, produced thereby.

For example, C. S. Lewis (1996, pp. 17–21) contended that God has instilled in humans a universal “Moral Law” which instinctively tells us what is right and wrong, and which proves God’s existence. Dr. Francis Collins (2006, pp. 21–31) attributes his conversion from atheism to evangelical Christianity to his discovery of the Moral Law. Ray Comfort (2007, pp. 81–87) argues that because Darwinism encourages atheism, it erodes the adherence to God’s Moral Law and thereby increases crime.

Much the same argument would have been made by William Jennings Bryan when he helped prosecute John T. Scopes for teaching evolution. In the closing remarks he would have made to the jury had Scopes not changed his plea to guilty, Bryan would have used the 1924 Leopold–Loeb murder case as an example of the impact of social Darwinism on human behavior in the absence of Biblical authority (Bryan and Bryan 2022, pp. 543–47).

Richard Leopold and Nathan Loeb were two teenagers from wealthy Chicago families who murdered a boy for no reason other than to find out what it was like to kill someone and to see if they could get away with their crime. Ironically, their defense lawyer was none other than Clarence Darrow, whom Bryan would confront the following year. In his successful bid to save Leopold and Loeb from the death penalty, he acknowledged their guilt but also blamed social Darwinism for their thoughts and deeds (Larson 2006, pp. 71–72).

Darwin’s Christian opponents have also linked Darwinism to Marxism. Evangelical Christian leader D. James Kennedy, radio broadcaster, social conservative political activist, and senior pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for 47 years until his death in 2007, wrote that

Karl Marx wrote his Communist Manifesto before Darwin published his The Origin of Species, but communism is nonetheless indebted to evolution. Marx, the founder of communism, found in evolution exactly what he needed: [a] pseudo-scientific foundation for his godless worldview. Marx wrote Friedrich Engels that Darwin’s Origin ‘is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view.

(DeRosa 2006, p. 9)

Kennedy also cited Lenin’s approval of Darwin and also claimed that “Communist henchman Joseph Stalin became an atheist as a young man while reading Darwin in seminary”. Citing estimates that communist regimes and movements had killed possibly as many as 100 million people, Kennedy proclaimed “Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot [of Cambodia] and all the rest [in the communist movement] are the greatest mass murderers of all time—and all compliments of evolution (DeRosa 2006, p. 10)”.

Dr. Jerry Bergman, writing for the website maintained by Creation Ministries, International, also says that “Darwinism as a worldview was a critical factor…in the rise of communism and the communist holocaust that, by one estimate, took the lives of more than 100 million persons:” He adds the following:

Many of the central architects of communism, including Stalin, Lenin, Marx and Engels, accepted the worldview portrayed in the book of Genesis until they were introduced to Darwin and other contemporary thinkers, which ultimately resulted in their abandoning that worldview. furthermore, Darwinism was critically important in their conversion to communism and to a worldview that led them to a philosophy based on atheism. In addition, the communist core idea that violent revolution, in which the strong overthrow the weak, was a natural, inevitable part of the unfolding of history from darwinianistic concepts and conclusions.

(Bergman 2001)

Darwinism’s Christian critics have also been especially eager to link Darwinism to racism, eugenics, Nazism, and the resulting violence, including forced sterilizations—and the Holocaust. For example, Jonathan Welles, a leading ID theorist with the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, when discussing Darwin’s attitudes on race, wrote that,

Darwin clearly regarded white Europeans as more highly evolved than other races. He predicted in The Descent of Man that at some future time ‘the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.’ Since the higher apes will also be exterminated, “the break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider” because it will be between Caucasians and baboons “instead of as now between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla.”

(Wells 2006, p. 163)

Welles also wrote,

From a Darwinian perspective human beings are nothing more than highly evolved animals, so the same principles that breeders use with livestock should be applied to us. Thus Darwin wrote in the Descent of Man: “With savages, the weak in body or mind are 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;…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.”

(Wells 2006, p. 162)

This comment, said Welles, “justified eugenics”, which Wells defined as “the use of forced sterilization and infanticide to eliminate people deemed unfit by the cultural elite (Wells 2006, pp. 162–63)”.

Actually, the scientist who coined the word “eugenics”, Darwin’s cousin Sir Francis Dalton, initially had both a more benign meaning for eugenics and more benign policies for its implementation in mind. “Eu” was Greek for “good”, and “eugenics”, roughly translated from its Greek roots, meant “good in birth” or “noble in heredity” (Caudill 1997, p. 99). Dalton himself defined eugenics as “the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage (Galton 2004, p. 35)”. He said the upper classes should breed more while the lower classes should breed less (Caudill 1997, p. 98).

But eugenicists in America advocated and implemented a wider range of policies. Like Dalton, they advocated marriage and more breeding among the upper classes—as well as limits on immigration from Southeastern Europe, birth control for urban dwellers, especially those who were not of northern European or “Nordic” ancestry, and forced sterilization of those considered genetically defective, especially epileptics, those with intellectual disabilities, and others born blind or with some other defect, or otherwise born into families or environments which would make them more likely to pursue lives of crime. Eventually, thirty-two states had forced sterilization laws and 60,000 people in America adjudged somehow defective were sterilized against their will to prevent them from producing offspring. Perhaps the most notorious case was Bell vs. Buck, in which the state of Virginia successfully sought permission to sterilize Carrie Buck, a 21-year-old woman adjudged “feebleminded” after she was allegedly raped and impregnated by a relative of her foster parents. Both her mother and her daughter were likewise considered “feebleminded.” Supreme Court Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who in writing the Court’s opinion supporting her sterilization, proclaimed “three generations of imbeciles are enough (Giberson 2008, pp. 73–75)”.

To the eugenics policies developed in America, the Nazis added mass murder. The Nazis considered Poles, gypsies, homosexuals, and, above all, Jews as inferior and therefore worthy only of extermination.

Richard Weikart, for example, a Discovery Institute fellow, writes that Darwinism was but one source of the Holocaust, which had many other causes as well in history, politics, and society. But Darwinism provided a scientific gloss to lend respectability to the Nazis’ crimes:

“Darwinism by itself did not produce the Holocaust, but without Darwinism, especially in its social Darwinist and eugenics permutations, neither Hitler nor his Nazi followers would have had the necessary scientific underpinnings to convince themselves and their coordinators that one of the world’s greatest atrocities was really morally praiseworthy. Darwinism—or at least some naturalistic interpretations of Darwinism—succeeded in turning morality on its head”.

(Weikart 2004, p. 233)

Bergman goes further. Like Weikart, he does not name Darwinism as the sole cause of the Holocaust, but he focuses more on the degree to which Hitler and other Nazi leaders actually studied Darwinism and were so inspired to commit mass murder, claiming that Hitler and other Nazi leaders not only used Darwinism as a rationale for genocide, but were true believers in Darwinism as well. He argues first that the main potential obstacle to the Holocaust could have been Christianity, but Darwinism weakened Christianity to the point where it could offer no effective resistance to Nazi genocide. Moreover, while it is probable that neither Hitler nor his inner circle of advisors and confederates had ever actually read On The Origin of Species or The Descent of Man, they nonetheless had absorbed Darwinism through German books, articles, pamphlets, and newspaper accounts. Indeed, Hitler’s library, seized by allied forces after World War Two, contained many books with Darwinian themes annotated in Hitler’s own hand. German biology texts were based on Darwinism. Not only was Hitler a Doctrinaire Darwinist, but so too were leading scientists, academics, doctors (including Dr. Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death” at Auschwitz), and Martin Bormann, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, Herman Goring, Reinhard Heydrich, Alfred Rosenberg, and Julius Streicher (Bergman 2012).

Thus, according to Creationists, Darwinism is at least partially responsible for all the violence perpetrated by criminals, communists, and Nazis. Darwinism’s victims number in the countless millions. Never has one idea perpetrated so much evil, violence, suffering, and death, or been such an afront to God.

7. Absolving Darwin of Blame for Violence

Supporters of Darwinism, both secular and religious, have criticized the attempts to link Darwinism to political ideologies and violence and have sought to absolve Darwinism of responsibility for the societal disruptions and especially for the mass murders committed by communists and Nazis, allegedly “compliments of evolution”. A major theme uniting the defenses of Darwinism is that the ideologies citing Darwinism for justification were actually developed independently by ideologues who then used Darwinism to legitimize the reasoning, goals, policy prescriptions, and actions they were going to implement anyway. Moreover, Darwinism is a descriptive biological theory, making its application to prescriptive theories of human behavior and public policy utterly inappropriate. Asimov, for example, says Spencer’s analyses of society and public policy prescriptions are “invalid”, since “the biological changes involved in evolution are in no way similar to social changes (Asimov 1984, p. 714)”.

So why use Darwinism at all for any purpose other than to better understand biological evolution? Miller says that

For a biologist, the embrace of Darwinism by both capitalism and socialism is easy to understand. Evolution is good science, and ideological partisans, even contradictory ones, seek to bolster their causes by associating with it. The truth is that evolution, however persuasive, is a biological theory fashioned to explain descent with modification. By what logic could anyone pretend that principles found to apply biological systems must also apply to social organizations, societies, or nations? Economic theorists may derive colorful analogies, insight, and even inspiration from evolution, but to prove the validity of economic theories by mere reference to evolution, a biological theory, seems to me to be stretching Darwin’s good work too far.

(Miller 2000, p. 175)

Indeed, many of the ideas defended or rationalized by Marxists or laissez-faire capitalists actually came from sources other than Darwin’s writings. After all, DeRosa, as noted earlier, while attempting to link Darwinism to Marxism, did admit that Marx produced his The Communist Manifesto before Darwin published The Origin of Species. Spencer developed his views on limited government independently and well before Darwin published The Origin and Sumner owed much of his economic thinking to classical economic thought and the Protestant work ethic (Hofstadter 1992, locations 99–100, 109).

Much the same could be said for attempts to blame Darwinism for Nazism and Nazi-driven genocide. Those who posit a linkage between Darwinism and Auschwitz have argued, as has been noted, that Darwinism supplied a pseudo-scientific rationale for mass murder. But Giberson argues that the linkage is not causal. Rather, he argues that the linkage is

one of rhetoric and rationalization. It is rhetorical in the sense that dumb ideas play better when dressed in fine clothes. It sounds better to promote ‘cleansing the human race’ than ‘killing people you don’t like’…It is rationalization in the sense that conclusions already embraced rest easier on one’s conscience if supported by some thread of rational argument.

(Giberson 2008, p. 78)

Caudill identifies Volkish philosophy, and not Darwinism, as the main source of Hitler’s antisemitism. He describes Volkish philosophy as “a combination of mysticism, paganism, romanticism, racism, and nationalism” which “helped to transform the struggle for survival into a racial imperative”. He says, “social Darwinism became a catalyst to the racial aspects of the philosophy and provided an apparently scientific foundation for them (Caudill 1997, p. 116)”.

Ruse rejects any connection at all between Darwinism and Nazism. He writes that

Hitler’s philosophy owed most to the Volkish ideology of the nineteenth century, which saw Germans uniquely as the supreme race, threatened by outsiders: threatened above all by the Jew. This led to what has been called ‘redemptive’ or ‘apocalyptic’ anti-Semitism: an anti-Semitism which has a kind of ontological or religious status.

(Ruse 2000, pp. 175–76)

Ruse further adds that Darwinism

“was fundamentally opposed to the ideology of National Socialism. Within evolutionary theory, there is no warrant saying Germans are uniquely the superior race, there is denial that this can be a permanent state of affairs, there is the connection of all peoples including Aryans and Jews, there is the simian origin, and much more”.

(Ruse 2000, p. 176)

The connection between Darwinism and eugenics in general is likewise weak. Selective breeding to produce superior offspring had been conducted for centuries before Galton coined his term. And the murder of humans deemed unfit to breed and reproduce themselves, as well as other forms of harassment, persecution, and violence against those considered unfit, had been practiced for centuries as well—in ancient Greece and Rome, where newborn infants who seemed to have birth defects were promptly put to death, as well as in other ancient and medieval cultures and down through the ages (Hughes 2020, pp. 116–333). The actual practice of eugenics, like Nazism and Marxism, originated independently of Darwinism, which was used only to justify and rationalize what would have been done anyway had Darwin never existed.

Moreover, other than expressing the hope that “the weak members” of societies could be induced to breed less, Darwin rejected the application of eugenics to humans. To the contrary, he said in The Descent of Man that

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…more tendered and widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration of the noblest part of our nature…[I]f we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil. We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind…

(Darwin 2004, p. 159)

And Darwin further showed his concern for the “weak and helpless” in his adamant opposition to slavery, which was hardened by his travels to South America which supported and reinforced his lifelong devotion to the cause of abolitionism. Indeed, Desmond and Moore argue that Darwin researched and wrote both The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man at least partly to prove that Blacks were not a species inferior to Whites, that both Blacks and Whites shared a common ancestry, and that therefore it was evil for Whites to enslave Blacks (Desmond and Moore 2009, pp. xv–xxi). On leaving Brazil and of his travels and observations, he wrote, in the Voyage of the Beagle, which is included in The Charles Darwin Collection cited in this paper’s bibliography, that

I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country. To this day, if I hear a distant scream, it recalls with a painful vividness my feelings, when passing a house near Pernambuco, I heard the most pitiable moans, and could not but suspect that some poor slave was being tortured, yet knew that I was as powerless as a child even to remonstrate…Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves. I have stayed in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten, and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal. I have seen a little boy, six or seven years old, struck thrice with a horse-whip (before I could interfere) on his naked head, for having handed me a glass of water not quite clean; I saw his father tremble at a mere glance from his master’s eye…Those who look tenderly at the slave owner, and with a cold heart at the slave, never seem to put themselves into the position of the latter…[P]icture to yourself he chance, ever hanging over you, of your wife and your little children—those objects which nature urges even the slave to call his own—being torn from you and sold like beasts to the first bidder! And these deeds are done and palliated by men who profess to their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that His Will be done on earth! It make’s one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty…

(Darwin 2020b, pp. 1205–6)

Thus, Darwinism, rather than being the cause of these evils, was mainly used as the excuse, justification, or rationalization for evils inspired by other ideas and perpetrated to achieve other goals. Darwinism is not the perpetrator of evil, but the scapegoat.

8. The Compatibility of Darwinism and Faith

Darwin’s Christian defenders, while seeking to absolve Darwin and Darwinism of guilt for all the violence Darwinism has allegedly inspired, also argue that while Darwinism makes no mention of a role for God in the evolutionary process, it does not explicitly exclude Him either. In fact, say those who believe in both Jesus and Darwin, although instances of a divine role in the creation of the universe and the evolution of life on earth cannot be proved, they cannot be disproved either.

Their views differ markedly from those of both Young Earth Creationists and believers in Intelligent Design: both of the latter groups believe that God directly intervenes in matters of creation and evolution. Young Earth Creationists accept as literally true the Bible’s creation stories. As noted earlier, believers in ID are more guarded in public assertions concerning the identity of the Intelligent Designer, but their internal documents such as “The Wedge”, and their promotion of the Creation Science textbook, Of Pandas and People, clearly indicate they, too, believe the true Intelligent Designer is God.

But Darwin’s Christian defenders make no claims of direct divine intervention. Whatever role, if any, God may play in the evolutionary process is currently, and probably permanently, undetectable.

Miller, for example, posits that the genetic mutations that emerge through intra-species breeding, and which may lead to the evolution of new species, could be the result of divine manipulation of subatomic particles in genes. He also notes that Christians see God as existing not in our timeline, but outside it, from where He could manipulate our timeline any way He chooses to change the course of events. In each instance, God’s intervention, whether through the manipulation of subatomic particles or the changing of the timeline, would be humanly undetectable and therefore impossible to prove or disprove (Miller 2000, pp. 241–42).

Miller maintains that God’s subtlety, to the point where His role in evolution is scientifically undetectable, and the fact that the future appears unpredictable to humans are consistent with God’s desire that humans have free will in accepting or rejecting Him as opposed to worshiping him out of fear. Humans retain the freedom of action to shape their own lives. Such free will would be destroyed if “the hand of God” was so obvious and manifest as to make life completely predetermined and leave humans with no choice but to accept His rule (Miller 2000, pp. 239–43, 250–53, 290–91).

But could not the absence of direct evidence of divine intervention in the evolutionary process actually undermine belief in God’s existence altogether? Several principal advocates for belief in both Darwin and Jesus point to various cosmological phenomena as evidence of God’s existence, and therefore the possibility of His use of evolution to unfold His creation. In doing so, they are reflecting the views of geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, who wrote that

Evolution comprises all the stages of the development of the universe: [T]he cosmic, biological, and human cultural developments. Attempts to restrict the concept of evolution to biology are gratuitous. Life is a product of the evolution of inorganic nature, and man is a product of the evolution of life.

(Dobzhansky 1967, p. 409)

Collins, for example, points to the Big Bang theory as evidence of God as the ultimate Creator of the universe and all that is in it. “Physicists are in agreement”, he writes, “that the universe began as an infinitely dense, dimensionless point of pure energy”, called a “singularity”, before exploding and creating the galaxies of today’s ever-expanding universe (Collins 2006, p. 65).

But what, if anything, came before the Big Bang? Nobody knows. But Collins argues that the Big Bang theory, if not proving that God created the universe when He said, “Let there be light,” is nonetheless consistent with the first verse of Genesis. Collins quotes astronomer Robert Jastrow, who says,

Now we see how the astronomical evidence leads to a biblical view of the origin of the world. The details differ, but the essential elements and the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are one and the same; the chain of events leading to man commenced at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy.

(Collins 2006, p. 67)

Collins himself adds,

The Big Bang cries out for a divine explanation. It forces the conclusion that nature had a defined beginning. I cannot see how nature could have created itself. Only a supernatural force that is outside of space and time could have done that.

(Collins 2006, p. 67)

And the design of the universe is likewise considered evidence that it was designed by God for evolving life. Miller, Collins, and the Haarsma all note that the universe seems to have been “fine tuned”, i.e., that certain variables seem to have been set exactly at the level to support human life, at least on earth. Among the commonly cited variables are the expansion rate of the universe, the force of gravity, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and the nuclear reaction rates. If any of these forces were only slightly larger or slightly smaller, the universe as we know it would not have come into existence. Those who see no divine significance in “fine tuning” argue that of course the variables would favor our existence; otherwise, we would not be here to make the observation. But the Haarsma assert that

the careful construction of the universe is consistent with the biblical belief that God planned the universe to include intelligent human beings who can in turn relate to [H]im. The Universe itself testifies to God’s amazing craftsmanship.

(Haarsma and Haarsma 2011, p. 174)

And Miller quotes physicist Freeman Dyson, who says,

I do not feel like an alien in this universe. The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.

(Miller 2000, p. 229)

9. The State of the Conflict Today

Many who believe in both Darwinism and Christianity or some other form of theism prefer their beliefs to be referred to as Evolutionary Creationism rather than Theistic Evolution, another term commonly used to describe the belief in the compatibility of theism and Darwinism. The latter term puts too much emphasis on evolution rather than theism. On the other hand, “Evolutionary Creationism”, they believe, emphasizes their belief in God as the Creator of all things, and signifies that they, too, like believers in Young Earth Creationism or Intelligent Design, are Creationists as well (Biologos n.d.).4

To date, however, there is little evidence that any reconciliation will occur among these groups. Believers in Creation Science and those in Intelligent Design thoroughly reject each other’s views, while both groups reject the views of believers in Evolutionary Creationism because of its acceptance of Darwinism as God’s tool for creation.

The most likely course forward for believers in Fundamentalism is to continue to try to persuade the public, through books, articles, and websites, of the veracity of Creation Science in the hope of building enough public support to one day offer Creation Science as either a substitute or a supplement for Darwinism in public school biology classes. Given the series of court decisions ruling that the teaching of Fundamentalism and Creation Science would violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, their chances of success may seem remote. But it is not altogether impossible that someday public opinion will favor both the reintroduction of Fundamentalism and Creation Science to public schools, and the reshaping of the judicial system to so permit.

Judge Jones’s ruling in the Kitzmiller case that the teaching of Intelligent Design is likewise unconstitutional applies only to the federal judicial district encompassing Dover, Pennsylvania. Because the case was not appealed to the Supreme Court, no judgment applicable to the entire nation has yet been made, but the Discovery Institute to date shows no sign of attempting to make Intelligent Design Theory part of any high school biology curriculum.

Rather, since the resolution of the Kitzmiller case, the Discovery Institute and other supporters of ID have been advocating that public school teachers be granted the “academic freedom” to “teach the controversy” between evolution and ID and offer a “critical analysis” of evolution and ID in public schools. ID’s advocates believe that to do so will raise more doubts about evolution, erode what they consider to be its deleterious effects on religion, and begin to restore the authority of God and the Bible. To that end, the Discovery Institute has secured the adoption of such policies in Minnesota, New Mexico, Alabama, Pennsylvania, Missouri, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Wisconsin. Particularly noteworthy are the laws passed in Louisiana—the first state to adopt a “teach the controversy” policy after Dover—and in Tennessee, home of the Butler Act and the Scopes Monkey Trial (Discovery Institute 2018). The long-range success of this approach remains to be seen.

But what is certain is that the debate over God and Darwinism, and especially the degree, if any, to which Darwinism has fostered violence, suffering, and evil on society will continue, quite possibly for as long as God and humankind exist. Whatever the culpability, if any, for the untold misery and death inflicted on mankind in the name of Charles Darwin and Darwinism, the enormity of the crimes allegedly committed in Darwinism’s name guarantees continuous debate.