Hello, and welcome to episode 11 of Foundations Restored, a Catholic perspective on origins.
I'm your host Keith Jones.
This is the first of three episodes presented in four parts exploring the devastating historical
consequences of evolutionary thought.
In this episode you will see as completely false the claim that the question of origins
is only an academic matter that has little bearing on the real world, the eternal destiny
of millions of souls, and the current crisis of faith within the church.
As you digest the material in these episodes, ponder how different world history would have
been if Darwinism had been correctly seen as a deception used to destroy the foundations
of Christianity.
The publication of the Origin of the Species in 1859 created an immediate impact that was
felt throughout the Western world, but it was in Germany where the impact was most significant.
This impact was primarily due to the influence of Ernst Haeckel, the naturalist and philosopher
previously profiled.
As noted by Darwin's son, editor of Darwin's Life and Letters, it was through Ernst Haeckel
that the Darwinian question was placed publicly before the Forum of German Science, and it
was Haeckel's enthusiastic propagandism that chiefly contributed to its success.
In the meaning of the immediate success of his theory in Germany, Charles Darwin wrote in 1868,
The support which I receive from Germany is my chief ground for hoping that our views will ultimately prevail.
This observation was shared by a British naturalist who attended the Congress of German Naturalists
and Physicians during this period.
He explained,
What struck me was the universal sway which the writings of Darwin now exercise over the
German mind.
You see it on every side, in private conversation, in printed papers, Darwin's name is often
mentioned and always with the profoundest veneration.
But even where no allusion is specially made to him, we see how thoroughly his doctrines
have permeated the scientific mind, even in those departments of knowledge which might
seem at first sight to be farthest from natural science.
You are still discussing in England, said a German friend to me, whether or not the
theory of Darwin can be true, we have got a long way beyond that.
His theory is now our common starting point.
And so far as my experience went, I found it to be so.
This observation proved all too accurate, as the Darwinian view of the struggle for
survival quickly seized Germany's military establishment.
In 1911, an extremely influential book written by General von Bernhardi, called Germany
and the Next War, was published and proclaimed.
War is a biological necessity of the first importance, a regulative element in the life
of mankind which cannot be dispensed with, since without it, an unhealthy development
will follow.
The struggle for existence is, in the life of nature, the basis of all healthy development.
Without war, inferior or decaying races would easily choke the growth of healthy budding
elements and a universal decadence would follow.
The natural law, to which all laws of nature can be reduced, is the law of struggle.
This struggle is a creator, since it eliminates.
Strong healthy and flourishing nations increase in numbers.
From a given moment, they require a continual expansion of their frontiers, they require
new territory for the accommodation of their surplus population.
Since almost every part of the globe is inhabited, new territory must, as a rule, be obtained
by conquest.
War is not only a biological law, but a moral obligation, and as such, an indispensable
factor in civilization.
Struggles for peace would, if they attained their goal, not merely lead to general degeneration,
as happens everywhere in nature where the struggle for existence is eliminated, but
they have a direct damaging and unnerving effect.
This Darwinian mindset was the primary contributor to the extreme nationalism that ultimately
led to World War I.
As war was declared, German Kaiser Wilhelm announced to the people what they had long
believed.
The Reich needs new territory, and due to the perceived superiority of the German people,
he believed that Germany had a right to take it.
Thus, any hesitation, any delay, is treason.
Confident of victory, the German leader proclaimed that it would be all over in six weeks.
He rallied the homeland, calling them,
To arms!
We will hold out to the last man.
Withstand the power of the world.
Onward with God to victory!
The Darwinian beliefs of Germany's military leaders did not waver as the casualties mounted
and starvation began to threaten those in conquered territory.
Their mindset was chronicled by Vernon Kellogg of Stanford University, who worked with the
humanitarian group Commissioned for the Relief of Belgium during the war and happened to
be stationed at the German headquarters of the Great General Staff in Belgium.
He wrote the following about his discussions with leading Germany military staff.
The discussions begun at dinner lasted long into the night, and always we talked and tried
to understand one another to get the other man's point of view, his Weltanschauung.
If I understand theirs, it is a point of view that justifies itself by a wholehearted acceptance
of the worst of neo-Darwinism, the Allmacht of natural selection applied rigorously to
human life and society and culture.
Professor von Flussen is a biologist.
So am I.
So we talked out the biological argument for war, and especially for this war.
The captain-professor has a logically constructed argument why for the good of the world there
should be this war, and why for the good of the world the Germans should win it, win it
completely and terribly.
The creed of the almightiness of a natural selection based on violent and fatal competitive
struggle is the gospel of the German intellectuals.
All else is illusion and anathema.
As with the different ant species, struggle, bitter, ruthless struggle, is the rule among
the different human groups.
This struggle not only must go on, for that is the natural law, but it should go on so
that this natural law may work out in its cruel, inevitable way the salvation of the
human species.
That human group which is in the most advanced evolutionary stage is best and should for
the sake of the species be preserved at the expense of the less advanced.
This is the disheartening kind of argument that I faced at headquarters.
Argument logically constructed on premises chosen by the other fellow.
Add to these assumed premises the additional assumption that the Germans are the chosen
race and you have a wall of logic and conviction that you can break your head against but can
never shatter.
If allied victory should occur, then he would prefer to die and not live in a world perversely
resistant to natural law.
He means it all.
He will act on this belief.
He does act on it indeed.
He opposes all mercy, all compromise with human soft-heartedness.
There is no reasoning with this sort of thing, no finding of any heart or soul in it.
There is only one kind of answer, resistance by brutal force, war to a decision.
It is the only argument and rebuttal comprehensible to these men at headquarters and to whose
hands the German people have put their destiny.
Ideas have consequences.
After four years of war and an estimated 17 million military and civilian deaths, the
world had tasted the fruit of false Darwinian ideology as it played out in political circles
and on the battlefield.
Even so, the First World War did little to stem the enthusiasm for evolutionary thought.
In Germany, the evolutionary spirit survived thanks in large part to Adolf Hitler, who
fought in World War I and was outraged that his country somehow lost.
He was determined to have another go at the survival of the fittest and believed that
this time Germany would be favored by natural selection.
Hitler's book Mein Kampf translates as My Struggle and reflects his Darwinian views,
as does the entire premise of the book.
He wrote,
The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness.
Only the born weakling can view this as cruel, for if this law did not prevail, any conceivable
higher development of organic living beings would be unthinkable.
No more than nature desires the mating of weaker with stronger individuals, even less
does she desire the blending of a higher with a lower race, since if she did, her whole
work of higher breeding over perhaps hundreds of thousands of years might be ruined with
one blow.
This planet once moved through the aether for millions of years without human beings,
and it can do so again someday if men forget that they owe their higher existence not to
the ideas of a few crazy ideologists, but to the knowledge and ruthless application
of nature's stern and rigid laws.
All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died
out from blood poisoning.
To preserve a certain culture, the man who creates it must be preserved.
This preservation is bound up with the rigid law of necessity and the right to victory
of the best and stronger in this world.
Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in this world
of eternal struggle, do not deserve to live.
All the results of art, science, and technology that we see before us today are almost exclusively
the creative product of the Aryan.
He alone was the founder of all humanity.
Exclude him, and perhaps after a few thousand years, darkness will again descend.
The mightiest counterpart to the Aryan is represented by the Jew.
The second to last paragraph in Mein Kampf concludes.
A state which in this age of racial poisoning dedicates itself to the care of its best racial
elements must someday become lord of the earth.
With the intellectual power of Darwin, Heckel, Nietzsche, and the German academics supporting
Hitler's views, World War II became all but inevitable.
Again, ideas have consequences.
In World War II, the cost of human life was an estimated 100 million military and civilian deaths.
Estimates are that the Nazis alone murdered between 17 and 21 million people between 1933 and 1945.
And while the influence of Darwinism on global conflict is easily documented, we must never
forget that behind the conflicts were millions of individuals with immortal souls who were
deceived by Darwinism or directly impacted by evolutionary thought.
Many Catholics know that St. Maximilian Kolbe was arrested by the Gestapo in 1941 and later
placed in the German concentration camp of Auschwitz.
He became prisoner number 16670 due primarily to his writings against the Nazis.
These writings included the rejection of Darwinism.
When ten prisoners were selected by the Nazi guards to die after three prisoners escaped,
Fr. Kolbe volunteered to replace the man crying out in despair,
my wife, my children.
Fr. Kolbe was put in a small cell with the other prisoners and all were denied food and water.
One by one they died over a two-week period.
Fr. Kolbe ministered to all during the final days and when he alone remained alive, the
guards gave him a lethal injection on August 14, 1941.
He was canonized on October 10, 1982 by Pope St. John Paul II.
While many viewers are familiar with St. Kolbe, they may not know the story of Rudolf Hus,
the commandant of Auschwitz.
Like Fr. Kolbe, Hus was raised in a strong Catholic home where his parents hoped that
he would become a priest.
Like Fr. Kolbe, he was devoted to and would make great sacrifices for causes he believed
to be true and Hus would have agreed with Fr. Kolbe, who wrote,
Dear brothers, be blindly obedient in every instance.
But in 1922, the young Rudolf Hus joined the Nazi party after hearing Hitler speak.
He soon became immersed in Nazi terror tactics and became a member of the SS in 1934.
In World War II, he was stationed at Dachau concentration camp in 1934.
Sachsenhausen in 1938 and then was given command of Auschwitz in May 1940.
In June of 1941, two months before Fr. Kolbe was put to death, Hus was given personal orders
to help implement the final solution.
At the Nuremberg trials, Hus testified to the following,
I commanded Auschwitz until the 1st of December 1943 and estimate that at least 2,500,000
victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning and at least another
half million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total dead of about 3,000,000.
Technically, it wasn't so hard.
It would not have been hard to exterminate even greater numbers.
The killing itself took the least time.
You could dispose of 2,000 head in half an hour.
But it was the burning that took all the time.
The killing was easy.
You didn't even need guards to drive them into the chambers.
They just went in, expecting to take showers and instead of water, we turned on poison gas.
The whole thing went very quickly.
We knew when the people were dead because their screaming stopped.
After the bodies were removed, our special commandos took off the rings and extracted
the gold from the teeth of the corpses.
While other estimates suggest that Hus' estimates are inflated, there is no doubt
that the death total from Nazi concentration camps was enormous.
On April 2, 1947, Hus was sentenced to hang and in his final days he reflected on the
errant worldview that led him away from the Catholic faith.
In his last letters, he explained to his wife,
During my long isolated sojourn in prison, I have had ample time and peace to reflect
thoroughly on my whole life.
I see today very clearly what for me is very hard and bitter, that the whole ideology and
the whole world in which I believed so firmly was resting upon completely false foundations
and certainly had to fall into ruin someday.
Likewise, did not my fall from faith in God depend wholly on my false foundations?
This was very difficult to overcome.
Nevertheless, I have recovered my faith in God.
And to his children, he wrote,
The greatest mistake in my life was that whatever came from higher authority, I trusted blindly.
I did not dare have the least doubts as to the validity of a given order.
Go through life with an open mind, and all that you undertake, direct yourself
not only with your understanding, but particularly pay attention to the voice of your heart.
The Commandant's ability to finally perceive the false ideas that led him astray was aided
by the treatment he received from the Polish and Catholic guards who watched over him.
Haas wrote of them,
In spite of everything that's happened, yet they always see in me a human being.
The contrast with the Nazi Darwinian view of mankind was so clear,
the Nazi Darwinian view of mankind was stark, and ultimately too profound for Haas to reject.
By the grace of God, six days before he was hanged to death on April 16, 1947,
Rudolf Haas received the sacrament of penance from a Catholic priest
and received Holy Communion the following day.
He was 47 years old when he was executed,
as was Father Kolbe.
Leveraging the Darwinian deception to justify evil was not limited to Germany, as Karl Marx
and Friedrich Engels immediately understood that Darwinism would provide the worldwide
communist movement with much needed support. Friedrich Engels read Darwin's work within a
month after its publication in 1859 and wrote to Marx,
Darwin, whom I am just now reading, is splendid.
Marx read Darwin in 1860. Although he voiced certain differences with the theory,
he responded to Engels that,
During my time of trial these last few weeks, I have read all sorts of things,
among others Darwin's book of natural selection. Although it is developed in the crude English
style, this is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view.
Marx attended lectures by Thomas Huxley and in early 1861 wrote another confidant,
Darwin's book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural selection for the
class struggle in history. Despite all deficiencies, not only is Darwin's book a
deathblow dealt here for the first time to teleology and the natural science,
but their rational meaning is empirically explained.
At Marx's graveside, Engels declared,
Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature,
so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history.
The utility of Darwinism was well understood by the leaders of the communist revolutions
in China and Russia. In China, Mao Zedong regarded Darwinism as the foundation of
Chinese scientific socialism. This was testified to by Bishop Cuthbert O'Gara,
a Catholic missionary in China, from 1924 to 1953, the last two years of which were spent in prison.
Bishop O'Gara explained,
When the communist troops overran my diocese, they were followed in very short order by the
propaganda corps, the civilian brand of the Red Forces. The entire population was immediately
organized, and everyone, for a week or more, was forced to attend the seminar and in servile
submission listen to the official communist line. Now what, I ask, was the first lesson given to the
indoctrinees? One might have supposed that this would have been some pearl of wisdom let drop by
Marx, Lenin, or Stalin. Such, however, was not the case. The very first, the fundamental lesson
given was man's descent from the ape, Darwinism. At first, this maneuver amazed me. Later on,
when in a red jail, the reason for this unanticipated tactic became very obvious to me.
By that time, I knew very well that the primary purpose of the people's government in Peking
was to extricate all religious belief and practice. Religion must be destroyed.
Darwinism negates God, the human soul, the afterlife. Into this vacuum, communism enters
as the be-all and the end-all of the intellectual slavery it has created. In the red prison in which
I was held, the slogan, bring your mind over to us and all your troubles will end, was hammered
into the minds of the prisoners with brutal and numbing monotony.
And again, lies have consequences. Estimates are that 38 million or more died under the Chinese
communists. In Russia, the Bolshevik revolution would result in a communist government led by
Vladimir Lenin from 1917 to 1924. On his desk, Lenin displayed a sculpture of an ape holding
a human skull and sitting on top of a stack of books that included the origin of species.
As explained by John Koster in The Atheist Syndrome,
The ape and the skull were a symbol of his faith, the Darwinian faith that man is a brute,
the world is a jungle and individual lives are irrelevant. Lenin was probably not an instinctively
vicious man, though he certainly ordered a great many vicious measures. Perhaps the ape and the
skull were invoked to remind him that, in the world according to Darwin, man's brutality to
man is inevitable. In his struggle to bring about the worker's paradise through scientific means,
he ordered a great many deaths. The ape and the skull may have helped him stifle whatever kindly
or humane impulses were left over from a wholesome childhood.
Joseph Stalin, who ruled Russia from the mid-1920s to 1953, was also a Darwinist and lost his faith
when he read Darwin as a young student in Gori. In a book approved by Stalin, his loss of faith
is explained. At a very early age, he developed a critical mind and revolutionary sentiments. He
began to read Darwin and became an atheist. A boyhood friend of Stalin's relates,
I began to speak of God. Joseph heard me out and after a moment's silence said,
you know, they are fooling us. There is no God. I was astonished at these words. I had never heard
anything like it before. How can you say such things? I exclaimed. I'll lend you a book to read.
It will show you that the world and all living things are quite different from what you imagine.
And all this talk about God is sheer nonsense, Joseph said. What book is that? I inquired.
Darwin, you must read it. Joseph impressed on me. In 1894, Stalin entered Tiflis Theological Seminary.
One of Stalin's fellow students recalls of these days at the seminary.
We youngsters had a passionate thirst for knowledge. In order to disabuse the minds of
our seminary students of the myth that the world was created in six days, we had to equate ourselves
with the geological origin and age of the earth and be able to prove them in argument. We had to
familiarize ourselves with Darwin's teachings. I recall that we read Lyell's Antiquity of Man
and Darwin's Descent of Man. We gradually proceeded to a study of the development of
class society which led us to the writings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Comrade Stalin brought
these books to our notice. The first thing we had to do, he would say, was to become atheists.
Many of us began to acquire a materialistic outlook and to ignore theological subjects.
Our reading in the most diverse branches of science prepared their minds for the reception
of Marxist ideas. Every book we read, whether on archaeology, geology, astronomy,
or primitive civilization, helped to confirm us in the truth of Marxism.
Once more, ideas have consequences. Estimates are that some 62 million citizens and foreigners
died under the communist rule in Russia between 1917 and 1987. In total, approximately 100 million
were killed under the Russian and Chinese communist regimes. Estimates are that when
including other communist nations, the death toll is approximately 150 million.
When discussing the historical influence of Darwinism, a common mistake is to view the
influence as the thing of the past and to conclude that mankind is now beyond all the negative
impacts. Unfortunately, this view does not conform with reality as we will now explain.
In Britain, a cousin of Darwin's named Francis Galton was immediately impacted by Darwin's work
and Galton's own words. The publication in 1859 of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin made a
marked epoch in my own mental development as it did in that of human thought generally.
Its effect was to demolish a multitude of dogmatic barriers by a single stroke
and to arouse a spirit of rebellion against all ancient authorities whose
positive and unauthenticated statements were contradicted by modern science.
Galton's particular contribution to the horrors of the 20th and 21st centuries is called eugenics,
a term that means well-born and implies that those who are fit and are favored by natural
selection should be allowed to thrive at the expense of the unfit. Galton thought it possible
to accelerate human evolution through deliberate intervention, much in the way that the artificial
breeding of dogs and horses can produce animals with desirable characteristics. He wondered,
could not the race of men be improved? Could not the undesirables be got rid of and the
desirables multiplied? In 1869, Galton published Hereditary Genius in which he speculated,
If talented men were mated with talented women of the same mental and physical characters as
themselves, generation after generation, we might produce a highly bred human race,
with no more tendency to revert to meaner ancestral types than is shown by our long
established breeds of racehorses and foxhounds. The widespread social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer
contributed to public acceptance of Galton's views. In the study of sociology, Spencer warned,
Fostering the good for nothing at the expense of the good is an extreme cruelty. It is a
deliberate storing up of miseries for future generations. There is no greater curse to
posterity than that of bequeathing them an increasing population of imbeciles and idlers
and criminals. To aid the bad in multiplying is, in effect, the same as maliciously providing
for our descendants a multitude of enemies. This perspective emerged when in Britain and
elsewhere the birth rate was lower in the better educated middle and upper classes than in the
lower classes. It was widely feared that the unfit and less capable lower class would overwhelm the
eugenic members of society, resulting in degradation of the general population.
This fear helped propel eugenics to a national and international movement.
Among the new devotees was Carl Pearson, a statistician at London's University College.
In the mid-1890s, Pearson began conducting eugenics-related research at his biometric
laboratory. In 1904, Galton established a research fellowship in national eugenics at
University College. From this arose the Eugenics Record Office, which was dedicated to recording
the pedigrees of able families and determining how to identify the eugenic. Over the next decade,
the office and affiliated organizations produced hundreds of works on eugenics for the government
and the general public. In 1907, there arose in Britain the Eugenics Education Society.
Its purpose, stated one member, is to stir up interest and is, on the whole, frankly, propagandist.
The propaganda was intended to place eugenic considerations at the forefront of public
discussion of matters pertaining to human population. The society soon led to the local
eugenic groups in the U.S. and the 1923 founding of the American Eugenics Society.
The eugenic movement went in many directions over subsequent years, but one constant remained,
the acknowledged debt to Darwin and Galton. For example, in the 1930 presidential address
of the Eugenics Research Association, Dr. Clarence Campbell said,
The great importance of the contributions of Charles Darwin to human thought has been overlooked
by all, save a few. Darwin clearly discerned that human evolution and the earthly future
of humanity rested largely within the power of man himself, and depended upon human knowledge
human judgment, and human action. Darwin presented a new conception of life to intelligent men.
For the old concept of a benign providence was inevitably substituted with one that humanity
itself had been granted, and came to possess some measure of the power of determining its future.
Among the very first to seize the momentous human import of Darwin's discoveries
was Francis Galton.
Because of the global acceptance of Darwinism, eugenics quickly spread to all western countries,
including the United States, where 350 universities offered coursework in eugenics
before the Second World War. The eugenic strategies promoted generally fell into one of two categories.
Some strategies were positive eugenic measures, aiming to encourage the fit to reproduce.
There were also negative eugenic measures that aimed to limit the reproduction of specific groups,
population control, deemed to be unfit. In the United States, and beginning with Indiana in 1907,
28 states passed laws allowing forced sterilization in certain cases. By 1935, another seven states
had bills pending. Under these laws, an estimated 36,000 forced sterilizations were performed in the
U.S. by 1941. The legality of such laws was upheld by the 1927 Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell,
involving the forced sterilization of a young woman ruled by state authorities to be feeble-minded
based on input from the eugenics record office. In the decision, Supreme Court Justice Oliver
Wendell Holmes declared, "...the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives.
It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state
for these lesser sacrifices, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. The principle
that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes."
Inspired by such proactive measures as well as legalistic efforts to halt immigration,
German eugenicists applauded the United States. In Mein Kampf, Hitler praised the developments
and wrote, "...there is at least one state in which feeble attempts to achieve a better
arrangement are apparent. I, of course, do not mean our patterned German Republic,
but the United States of America." In the United States, eugenic efforts quickly
expanded to include birth control and population control by the end of World War I.
Leading the way was eugenicist Margaret Sanger, who wrote, "...the most intelligent members of
society are the less fertile. The feeble-minded are the more fertile. Herein lies the unbalance,
the great biological menace to the future of civilization. Eugenics suggests the re-establishment
of the balance between the fertility of the fit and the unfit." She also wrote, "...birth control
is thus the entering wedge for the eugenic educator. The unbalance between the birth rate
of the unfit and the fit is admittedly the greatest present menace to civilization.
The most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally
and physically defective." Sanger's book, Woman and the New Race, 1920, revealed her fear of
overpopulation and a contempt for large families. She wrote, "...the most merciful thing that the
large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it." She opened her first domestic birth
control clinic in 1916, followed by the launch of the Birth Control Review, and she started the
American Birth Control League in 1922. This organization was later renamed the Birth Control
Federation of America in 1939 and Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942.
Thus, Planned Parenthood grew out of the eugenic movement which is rooted in the thought of Galton
and Darwin. In the aftermath of World War II, the horror of negative eugenics became more widely
recognized and the movement stalled. This prompted a change in strategy and in 1956,
eugenicist Frederick Osborne addressed a gathering of the Eugenics Society in London with a proposal.
The eugenic movement is nothing but a few small handfuls of men in various countries. They are not
influencing public opinion. The very word eugenics is in disrepute in some quarters. We must ask
ourselves, what have we done wrong? I think we have failed to take into account that people
simply are not willing to accept the idea that the genetic base on which their character is formed
is inferior. We have asked whole groups of people to accept this idea. They have constantly refused
and we have all but killed the eugenic movement. We must rely on other motivation. Let's stop
telling everyone that they have a generally inferior genetic quality, for they will never
agree. Let's base our proposals on the desirability of having children born in homes where
they will get affectionate and responsible care, and perhaps our proposals will be accepted.
Osborne was proposing a strategy of crypto-eugenics,
involving the use of terminology that disguised eugenic objectives.
The strategy was soon adopted by British eugenicist Dr. C.P. Blacker, who urged his colleagues,
the society should pursue eugenic ends by less obvious means, that is, by a policy of crypto-eugenics,
which is apparently proving successful in the US eugenic society. Adopting the strategy in 1960,
the British Eugenic Society issued a new plan. The society's activities in crypto-eugenics
should be pursued vigorously. The society should increase its monetary support of the FPA,
the Family Planning Association, and the IPPF, the International Planned Parenthood Federation,
and should make contact with the American Eugenic Society, which already has a strong and active
membership, to find out if any relevant projects are contemplated with which the eugenic society
are contemplated with which the eugenic society could assist.
In the wake of the new strategy, the term eugenics faded in favor of the term
social biology. The periodical Eugenics Quarterly was renamed Social Biology,
while the American Eugenic Society became the Society for the Study of Social Biology.
In this manner, the eugenicists were able to detach themselves from the Nazi horrors,
and the great many who rejected Hitler's agenda but who accepted Darwinism, quickly backed the
crypto-eugenic objective of limiting population growth through contraception and legalized
abortion. Among the millions who thought such measures were needed was my own father, Sir David
Owen, who lost his Christian faith in university and embraced evolution-based secular humanism.
Later, as he rose to the rank of Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations,
he was firmly convinced that global access to abortion became essential if overpopulation was
to be avoided. Eventually discouraged that the UN was not pursuing this agenda aggressively enough,
he retired from the UN and became the first Secretary General of International Planned
Parenthood Federation, a position he held for about a year until he died unexpectedly of a
heart attack in 1970. The eugenicists of this period held as their highest priority the
legalization of contraception and abortion as these measures comprised the core of their negative
eugenics program. In the US, contraception was widely available in the 1950s and became a
constitutional right in an arranged court case that resulted in the 1965 Supreme Court decision,
Griswold v. Connecticut. What remained lacking, however, was the ability to legally eliminate
unwanted pregnancies, and so, in the 1960s, the primary target became liberalization of
restrictive abortion laws. Part of the strategy to attack these laws involved the redefinition of
medical terms to soften the resistance. During a 1959 joint conference of Planned Parenthood and
the Population Council, it was proposed that eugenic aims would be greatly assisted if pregnancy
itself was redefined. There, it was advised that implantation of a fertilized human embryo
should be regarded as the beginning of pregnancy, rather than fertilization itself. A proponent
explained, the social advantage of being considered to prevent conception rather than to destroy an
established pregnancy could depend on something so simple as a prudent habit of speech. In 1963,
eugenicist Garrett Hardin similarly argued, murder by definition is unlawful killing,
but we can define murder any way we want to. How do we want to define it? Where do we draw the line?
Most societies draw it very late, some hours or days after birth. Before this, the infant is not
a member of the community, and killing it is permitted. Whether the fetus is or is not a human
being is a matter of definition. It would be unwise to define the fetus as human given our belief
that the early fetus may, with freedom, be flushed down the toilet or thrown out with the garbage.
Also during this period, the American Law Institute began targeting America's abortion laws.
In 1962, the institute adopted its model penal code, a series of non-binding suggested legal
guidelines for state legislatures. The code pressed for the liberalization of U.S. abortion laws.
Utilizing the redefinition of pregnancy, the code suggested legalizing drugs or other substances
for avoiding pregnancy, whether by preventing implantation of a fertilized ovum or by any other
method that operates before, at, or immediately after fertilization. And it argued for what it
termed justifiable abortion by stating, a licensed physician is justified in terminating a pregnancy
if he believes there is substantial risk that continuance of the pregnancy would gravely impair
the physical or mental health of the mother, or that the child would be born with grave physical
or mental defect, or that the pregnancy resulted from rape, incest, or other felonious intercourse.
In 1969, Planned Parenthood formally acknowledged its support of abortion. That same year,
Frederick Yaffe, vice president of Planned Parenthood, outlined a population policy that,
among other measures, called for the government to pay for contraception, sterilization, and abortion.
Tax married persons more than single, with an extra tax on parents with more than two children
in school. Restructure the family, encourage increased homosexuality, and put fertility
control agents in the water supply. Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood president Mary Calderone
declared that we have yet to beat our drums for birth control in the way we beat them for
polio vaccine. We are still unable to put babies in the class of dangerous epidemics, even though
this is the exact truth. As the eugenic drums pounded, America soon buckled under the legal
and medical rhetoric. In 1967, California, Colorado, and North Carolina amended their abortion statutes
according to the ALI's Model Penal Code, thereby initiating the first wave of liberalized abortion
laws. Within five years, access to abortion was virtually unlimited in California, where 100,000
abortions were being performed annually, with 90% sanctioned on psychiatric grounds. In 1973,
the Roe v. Wade decision secured and expanded the killing of innocent children in the womb.
It is estimated that 1.5 billion unborn children have been aborted globally since 1980. This number
is 10 times the combined dead from World War I and World War II. It is estimated that in the U.S.
alone, the number of abortions since Roe v. Wade exceeded 60 million as of 2017.
The lie of Darwinism has led to horrific consequences. If you have never considered
the moral tragedy of even a single abortion, consider the testimony of those who have
witnessed the practice firsthand. This can help provide a better picture of what is now
happening throughout the United States. I can remember the resident doctor sitting down,
putting the tube in, and removing the contents. I saw the bloody material coming down the plastic
tube and it went into a big jar. My job afterwards was to go and undo the jar and to see what was
inside. I opened the jar. The resident doctor said, now put it on that blue towel and check it
out. We want to make sure that we got it all. I thought, that'll be exciting, hands-on experience
looking at tissue. I opened the sock up and put it on the towel and there were parts of a person
in there. I had taken anatomy. I was a medical student. I knew what I was looking at. There was
a little scapula and an arm. I saw some ribs and a chest and a little tiny head. I saw a piece of a
leg and a tiny hand and an arm. Well, I checked it out and there were two arms and two legs and one
head and so forth. And I turned and said, I guess you got it all. David Brewer, MD, former abortionist.
Saline abortions have to be done in the hospital because of complications that can arise.
Not that they can't arise during other times, but more so now. The saline, a salt solution,
is injected into the woman's sack and the baby swallows it. The baby starts dying a slow,
violent death. The mother feels everything and many times it is at this point when she realizes
that she really has a live baby inside of her because the baby starts fighting violently for
his or her life. He's just fighting inside because he's burning. Deborah Henry, former OBGYN staffer.
One night a lady delivered and I was called to come and see her because she was uncontrollable.
I went in the room and she was going to pieces. She was having a nervous breakdown, screaming and
thrashing. The nurses were upset because they couldn't get any work done and all the other
patients were upset because this lady was screaming. I walked in and here was her little
saline abortion baby kicking. It had been born alive and was kicking and moving for a little while
before it finally died of those terrible burns. Because the salt solution gets into the lungs
and burns the lungs too. David Brewer, MD, former abortionist. The baby's bones were too far
developed to rip them up with this curette and so he would have to try to pull the baby out with
forceps in about three or four major pieces. Then he scraped and suctioned and scraped and suctioned
and then this little baby boy was lying on the tray. His little face was perfectly formed,
little eyes closed and little ears. Everything was perfect about this little boy.
Kathy Sparks, former abortion clinic employee.
One central question about the Roe versus Wade decision remains. The question is how the Supreme
Court could have ruled in favor of legalized abortion as the decision was so clearly contrary
to Christian principles and given that from its founding America and American jurisprudence were
strongly linked to Christian morality. In fact at the time of the nation's founding a guiding
principle of jurisprudence was that man-made civil law must conform to the natural law which is
written in the hearts of all men and is a reflection of God's eternal law. This principle was found in
the writings of William Blackstone among others and was rooted in the catholic scholastic philosophy
of the middle ages. Blackstone, one of the two sources most cited in the writings of the founders,
declared that the natural law is dictated by God himself and is binding over all the globe
in all countries and that no human laws should be suffered to contradict the natural and eternal law.
Compare this to Saint Thomas Aquinas who wrote,
Since then the eternal law is the plan of government and the chief governor. All the
plans of government and the inferior governors must be derived from the eternal law. All laws
insofar as they partake of right reason are derived from the eternal law. The linkage between
Christianity, the American populace, and American jurisprudence is evident in a multitude of state
and federal supreme court decisions. In 1892, the U.S. Supreme Court found ample support for the
argument that America was a Christian nation simply by reviewing previous decisions by state
high courts, including a Pennsylvania declaration that Christianity, general Christianity, is and
always has been a part of the common law of Pennsylvania. From the New York High Court,
it quoted, The people of this state, in common with the people of this country, profess the
general doctrines of Christianity as the rule of their faith and practice. So what poisoned American
jurisprudence to the point that in 1927 the Supreme Court ruled in favor of forced sterilization
and in 1973 it legalized the killing of innocent children in the womb? The answer to this question
as with so many others comes down to worldviews and the infiltration of Darwinism. By the early
1900s, Darwinism would start to dominate jurisprudence and the judiciary became an
active force in divorcing the civil law from natural law and God's eternal law.
In 1870, Christopher Langdell became the head of Harvard Law School, a position he would hold for
25 years. He was hired by Charles Eliot, Harvard president from 1869 to 1909, whose worldview is
reflected in the following. Physics with its law of conservation of energy, chemistry with its
doctrine of indestructibility and eternal flux of atoms, and biology with its principle of evolution
through natural selection have brought about within 30 years a wonderful change in men's
conception of the universe. If the universe, as science teaches, be an organism which has by
slow degrees grown to its form of today on its way to its form of tomorrow, with slowly formed
habits which we call laws, then, as science also teaches, the life principle of soul of that organism
for which science has no better name than God, pervades and informs it so absolutely that there
is no separating God from nature. Eliot wanted to expand evolutionary thought into all domains,
including jurisprudence, and Langdell provided the means. At its core, an evolutionary jurisprudence
reflects the belief that since mankind and society are the product of evolution, so must the law
evolve to reflect the changing morals and beliefs of society. Langdell would bring this drastic
reorientation about through his case study method, in which the emphasis was no longer on the
straightforward meaning of the law as written, but how a law has been interpreted over time by the
courts. In practice, this meant that most laws were subjected to an ever-widening interpretation
and often departed drastically from the original intent. Explaining the case law approach,
Langdell wrote in 1879, "...law, considered as a science, consists of certain principles or
doctrines. Each of these doctrines has arrived at its present state by slow degrees. In other words,
it is a growth, extending in many cases through centuries. This growth is to be traced in the main
through a series of cases, and much the shortest and best, if not the only way of mastering the
doctrine effectively, is by studying the case in which it is embodied." In the Michigan Law Review,
Anthony J. Seabock explains that, building from Darwin's theory, "...Langdell made it clear that he
thought that his legal method most closely resembled the new science of evolutionary biology.
Langdell believed that the law of contracts could be best understood if one were to select, classify,
and arrange all the cases which had contributed in any important degree to the growth,
development, or establishment of any of its essential doctrines. By treating doctrine as an
organic living thing, Langdell saw himself as making a dramatic break with the Blackstonian
treaties tradition that had dominated American law schools throughout the early and middle 19th century."
As the nation's leading law schools followed Langdell, it was inevitable that the nation's
highest court would eventually be occupied by like-minded justices. Leading the way was one
of Langdell's students, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who served on the Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932.
In 1896, Holmes wrote in the Harvard Law Review, "...the development of our law has gone on for
nearly a thousand years, like the development of a plant, each generation taking the inevitable
next step, mind, like matter, simply obeying a law of spontaneous growth. We do not realize how
large a part of our law is open to reconsideration upon a slight change in the habit of the public
mind. No concrete proposition is self-evident. An evolutionist will hesitate to affirm universal
validity for his social ideals. He is content if he can prove them best for here and now."
To Holmes, the evolutionary direction that jurisprudence must take was clear.
"...I think it desirable at once to point out and dispel a confusion between morality and law.
For my own part, I often doubt whether it would not be a gain if every word of moral significance
could be banished from the law altogether. I look forward to a time when we shall spend our energy
on a study of the ends sought to be attained and the reasons for desiring them." Holmes considered
the courts, as expounders of the Constitution, to be the scalpel that would sever law and morality.
The 1927 eugenic decision, Buck v. Bell, authored by Holmes, resulted from the evolutionary worldview
as applied to jurisprudence. Another pupil of Langdell named Lerned Hand would also have a role
in severing the link between law and Christian morality. Hand helped form the American Law
Institute, which would produce the model penal code that reflected an easing of laws in the
the model penal code that reflected an easing of laws against abortion and various sexual
perversions, including pornography, rape, incest, abortion, sodomy, and pedophilia.
In the area of sexual conduct and the law, researcher and author Dr. Judith Reisman has
documented that the model penal code was linked with the bogus research and Darwinian view of
sexuality held by Alfred Kinsey, who is profiled in the next episode. The dramatic shift toward
the evolutionary view of law and morality is widely seen starting in the 1930s and through
the writings of Charles Evans Hughes, Chief Justice from 1930 to 1941. Justice Hughes proclaimed that
we are under a constitution, but the constitution is what the judges say it is. In Homebuilding
v. Blaisdell, 1934, Justice Hughes openly debated Justice Sutherland concerning the validity of
viewing the constitution as an evolving document that could be adapted to the various crises of
human affairs through judicial activism. The drafters of the constitution, he wrote,
called into life a being, the development of which could not have been foreseen completely
by the most gifted of its begetters. Therefore, the case before the court must be considered in
the light of our whole experience and not merely in that of what was said a hundred years ago.
Justice Sutherland countered that the duty of the court is to declare the law as written,
leaving it to the people themselves to make such changes as new circumstances may require.
In 1953, Justice Earl Warren declared that a constitutional amendment must draw its meaning
from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.
In 1985, Justice William Brennan Jr. observed that the genius of the constitution rests
not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone,
but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and current needs.
Hidden in such elegant phrases was the fact that the world dead and gone was Christianity,
and with it the view that civil law must reflect the natural law and God's eternal law.
Increasingly during the 20th century, many judges rejected the notion that citizens
working through the legislature were capable of passing laws reflecting the proper worldview.
Instead, these judges believed it to be their right and duty to take the nation where it may
not go on its own. Many judges became activists whose overriding agenda was to replace laws
based on Christian ideals with those consistent with humanism and other forms of atheism.
Many invented legal arguments emerged to circumvent morals legislation in the constitution.
Above all, the approach involved replacing the original intent of the law and the constitution
with the judge's view of what a law should mean in light of the purported evolution of social mores.
In this way, judges effectively became the nation's lawmakers
in place of the legislative and executive branches.
Specific arguments used to pass by the constitution and morals legislation included
1. Arguments that there exists the right of privacy and moral freedom predating the constitution
that cannot be violated. 2. Arguments that the result of a law is unfair,
substantive due process. 3. The argument that a law reflecting
Christian values has no rational basis. 4. The reliance on international law.
5. The separation of church and state argument, even though this phrase is from a personal letter
written by Thomas Jefferson and is not part of the constitution.
6. Skewed interpretations of the constitution's equal protection clauses.
And 7. The interpretation of the right to life, liberty, and happiness to mean that virtually
any act of sexuality must be permitted. The judiciary has given one victory after another
to those seeking to rid America of its Christian past. Some notable examples include
Everson v. Board of Education, 1947. The Supreme Court adopts the separation of church and state
argument. Engle v. Vitale, 1962. Prayer in public schools is found unconstitutional.
Reed v. Van Hoven, 1965. It is unconstitutional for a student to pray aloud over lunch.
Rowe v. Wade, 1973. Legalized abortion. Lawrence v. Texas, 2003. Struck down a Texas statute
making it a crime to engage in homosexual sodomy, arguing in part that the statute
furthers no legitimate state interest and that there is no rational basis for the statute.
In a blistering dissent, Justice Scalia warned that the ruling marked the end of all morals
legislation and observed that the court has taken sides in the culture war. He also predicted,
The court today pretends that we need not fear judicial imposition of homosexual marriage.
Do not believe it. Fields v. Palmdale, 2005. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that
there is no freestanding fundamental right of parents to control the upbringing of their
children by introducing them to matters of and related to sex in accordance with their personal
and religious values and beliefs, and that the asserted right is not encompassed by any other
fundamental right. Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down laws in all
states that defined marriage to be between one man and one woman and mandated acceptance of
homosexual marriage. As the separation between civil law and Christian morality continues to
widen, no one should be under the impression that those opposed to Christianity will be satisfied
when the separation is complete. In an interview with Focus on the Family, Dr. Robert George of
Princeton warned, No one should imagine that if the Christian community folds on these issues
related to the family that the cultural left is going to just leave us alone. They will not leave
us alone. They are coming after us with the legal mechanisms that will be available. They're not
going to tolerate what they consider to be Christian intolerance, even if it's in the private
domain. If you look at the law review articles, you'll see that there are genuine concerns expressed
over Christians being allowed to raise their own children due to the fear that parents will be
indoctrinating their children into intolerance, which will result in the abuse of people who are
homosexual, or discrimination against people who don't share Christian beliefs. This is really very
scary and people don't see it because it's not published in the major newspapers. But if you look
into the law reviews, you'll see the roadmap being set forth. While there is much more historical
impact to consider, this episode already illustrates that it matters greatly whether
evolution is true, and it is undeniable that it has been materialistic evolution that has dominated
and continues to dominate the world stage. The reality is that those who dismiss the relevance
of the origins debate by retreating to the position of theistic evolution do nothing but
put themselves on the sidelines as materialistic evolution continues to undermine the foundations
of Christian civilization. In fact, those who dismiss relevance of the origins debate and fail
to scrutinize evolutionary claims have unintentionally, through the resulting silence
toward a deception that should be opposed, contributed to the spread of false philosophy
and the ongoing negative consequences of Darwinism. The most tragic ongoing consequence is the brutal
slaughter of the innocent through abortion. If you are a Catholic, please never say that it doesn't
matter if we believe in evolution as long as it is attributed to God, for that false opinion allows
to go unchallenged the Darwinian logic behind the ongoing loss of innocent human life and the
deterioration of education discussed in the next episode. As we have repeatedly established,
truth matters and lies have consequences.
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