Today @ 04:46 AM post located here
Socrates:
It would show that evolution is a foundationally racist philosophy.
Zeus:
Scientific theories say nothing about morals -- so by definition they cannot be racist. See my next post.
Socrates:
Evolution originally had ideas that some races were more evolved than others. So it can be racist.
Only if you
already have the idea that "more evolved" is somehow "better" or more "valuable", which you obviously do according to that statement. Those are value judgments, and you must bring those value judgments
to the theory -- you can't get them from it. Nowhere in the theory of natural selection does it state "more evolved is more valuable" or "more evolved organisms are superior" -- whatever "more evolved" would mean. From the beginning Darwin denied that natural selection necessarily leads to "higher" organisms anyway -- he had a whole chapter on the subject in
On the Origin of Species called "On the degree to which organisation tends to advance", where he says this:
"But here we enter on a very intricate subject, for naturalists have not defined to each other's satisfaction what is meant by an advance in organisation. ... natural selection ... does not necessarily include progressive development--it only takes advantage of such variations as arise and are beneficial to each creature under its complex relations of life."
Why would saying one "race" is "more evolved" than another necessarily be racist? If the statement that "X is more evolved than Y" is a statement that can be objectively determined and measured, then it is no different than saying that person X has green eyes and brown hair. Such statements only become racist when you make an external ethical value judgement and decide that green eyes are "inferior" or that "more evolved" is superior.
What if I think "less evolved" is more preferable and of higher value (since it is less changed from the original, ideal species)? In the theory of universal gravitation, is heavier equal to "better"? Why would it be? Why wouldn't it be? Your logic is absolutely pathetic Soc -- you fall hook line and sinker for the very atheistic, humanistic arguments you abhor. If you decide that "heavier" is more valuable, you can use Newtonian theory to find objects that are more valuable by your morals. But you can never get value judgments from scientific theories -- all you can do is make the value judgments first, and then use the theories as a tool.
Socrates:
[Evolution] can also provide no basis for opposing racism for the reason Zeus gives.
At least you got that right. Just like the theory of quantum mechanics can give no reason to oppose racism --
they are scientific theories, not ethical philosophies. But like any other scientific tool, you
can use evolutionary theory to do good, if that is your goal. For instance, in my research I use evolutionary theory to understand and discover the cellular mechanisms involved in cancer formation and aging, which will eventually lead to beneficial drugs and treatments to ease the suffering in both conditions.
Z: Hitler didn't get the idea of a "master race" from evolution, he got it from Nietzsche.
Socrates:
And Nietzsche got it from Darwin.
Darwin never said anything about a "master race" or a race of "supermen". You lie. If you disagree, back up your slander -- show us a single quote where Darwin talks about master human races or supermen, and approves of it.
Socrates:
Also, Hitler's policies on racism and euthanasia had been previously advocated in German universities, based on Haeckel's ideas which were in turn based on Darwin's. Also, the founder of eugenics was Darwin's cousin Francis Galton.
So ... you adhere to the principal of "guilt by association" eh? Not a very ethical, or logical, argument there Soc. In fact that is one of the well-known logical fallacies. Of course it has good emotional and rhetorical effect, which is why you use it. Haeckel of course was a racist and an evolutionist. That says nothing about evolution itself. There are plenty of baseball players who are racists too -- does that mean baseball is an inherently racist activity? Racists have, throughout history, long before Darwin was alive, applied Newtonian mechanics to kill people. Does that say anything about the morality of Newtonian mechanics? Not at all. Evil people will use any scientific means, any scientific theory at their disposal to accomplish their goals.
Scientific theories are all just tools. You can use them for good or evil.
Socrates:
The atheistic and anti-Nazi evolutionist Sir Arthur Keith had no doubt where Hitler's ideas came unlike our evolunary revisionist Zeus, (Evolution and Ethics, Putnam, NY, USA, p. 230, 1947):
"The German Fuehrer, as I have consistently maintained, is an evolutionist; he has consciously sought to make the practice of Germany conform to the theory of evolution."
Have I denied that? Hitler was an evolutionist, most certainly. Hitler applied evolution to accomplish his evil goals, there is not doubt. The point, which I cannot believe you can fail to comprehend, is that Hitler
justified the choice of his goals by wicked, twisted appeals to God, country, and family.
Henry Drummond, the famous Scottish minister who wrote the timeless devotion
"The Greatest Thing in the World", was also an evolutionist who consciously sought to make the practice of Christianity conform to the theory of evolution. Drummond saw altruism as the natural consequence of evolutionary theory, and Drummond's works and writings have had a more lasting impact than Hitler's.
Socrates:Here's another scholarly view (Fest, J.C., The Face of the Third Reich , Pantheon, NY, p. 99, 1970):
"Hitler was influenced above all by the theories of the nineteenth-century social Darwinist school, whose conception of man as biological material was bound up with impulses towards a planned society. He was convinced that the race was disintegrating, deteriorating through faulty breeding as a result of a liberally tinged promiscuity that was vitiating the nation's blood. And this led to the establishment of a catalogue of 'positive' curative measures: racial hygiene, eugenic choice of marriage partners, the breeding of human beings by the methods of selection on the one hand and extirpation on the other."
Sure, that is undisputed. As I'm sure you are aware, "Social Darwinism" is an ethical philosophy, it is not the scientific theory of natural selection. Similar "Moral Relativism" is an ethical philosophy, it is not equivalent to the scientific theory of general relativity (even though many relativists use that theory to support their ethics).
But, now, how did Hitler decide that interbreeding of cultures was equal to "disintegration" and "deterioration"? Evolutionary theory says nothing about those value judgments. In fact, if you want to make a population more vigorous it is well-known in genetics that inbreeding is bad and that introducing variation from other populations helps (the commonly observed phenomenon of "hybrid-vigor", a prediction of natural selection). Hitler got his values from somewhere besides evolutionary biology (somewhere like the Thule Society). Why were the "Teutonics" the master race? Why weren't the Jews the master race? Why didn't Hitler decide to kill everybody except the Jews, God's own chosen people? Evolutionary theory can't tell you who to kill, it can't tell you to kill people at all! If you want to evolve a Teutonic race, evolutionary theory can tell you how. If you want to evolve a French race, evolutionary theory can tell you how. If you want to intentionally evolve a race of musicians who have perfect pitch, evolutionary theory can tell you how. But it can't tell you what to choose to evolve, or even to choose anything in the first place. This is no different from any other scientific theory. If your goal is to incinerate 500,000 Japanese kids and their moms, relativity theory can give you an easy way to do it. If you want to suffocate 100,000 Kurds quickly, chemistry can tell you how to do it. Neither of those theories are "genocidal at core" because of that -- they are simply tools that you can use to further whatever goals you have already decided upon, whether good or evil.
Socrates:
Hitler even regarded Blacks as "monstrosities halfway between man and ape" very much an evolutionary idea, not a biblical one!
Oh whatever, Soc! Of course that's not a Biblical idea, but where in the world do you get that evolutionary theory calls anything a "monstrosity"?? This is how Hitler justified the idea you are referring to:
The State should consecrate it [marriage] as an institution which is called upon to produce creatures made in the likeness of the Lord and not create monsters that are a mixture of man and ape.
Hitler did not justify his views by appealing to evolution -- he appealed to the God of Genesis, to the "image of God." And the German public bought it! In evolutionary theory, nothing is a "monstrosity", it just is whatever it is, and it evolves. Hitler believed that Teutonics were made in the image of God, and that other races were not, and thus any thing that "destroyed that image" was a monstrosity. Does evolutionary theory tell you which races or species were made in the image of God? No, obviously.
Z:
Hitler defended his hate of the Jews with Christianity for goodness sake! You can't use a scientific theory as a basis for morals (see my next post to Wienerdog). In his writings and his public speeches Hitler ALWAYS said he was following "Christ his Lord" in protecting his country from Jews. Of course Hitler was a lying sack of dung, but he couldn't have done what he did alone.
Socrates:
Oh, puh-lease, not this boring old canard. TheFiveSolas and I have done this stupid claim to death by citing what Hitler REALLY thought of Christianity and the Nuremberg documentation that Hitler and the Nazis wanted to exterminate Christianity -- see my post
[snip irrelevant posturing]
Did I ever say Hitler was a Christian? No -- I said he was a "lying sack of dung." Did I ever claim that Hitler didn't hate Christianity? No.
My point, which you obviously would like to ignore, is that what came out at the Nuremberg trials and what Hitler allegedly said in private had no impact whatsoever on Hitler's success before and during WWII ("Table Talk" is well-known as a very unreliable source, being biased hearsay). Hitler
had to convince the German public to do what he wanted them to do. Hitler never killed a Jewish person himself -- he used oratory and argumentation to convince the German public to kill them, over 6 million of them. And what Hitler said in public was entirely justified by appeals to family values, Christianity, and country. One of the main slogans of the Nazis was "Church, Kitchen, Children." Hitler invented Mother's day. And in public, he said stuff like this (all from his book
Mein Kampf):
The folkish-minded man, in particular, has the sacred duty, each in his own denomination, of making people stop just talking superficially of God's will, and actually fulfill God's will, and not let God's word be desecrated. For God's will gave men their form, their essence, and their abilities. Anyone who destroys His work is declaring war on the Lord's creation, the divine will. Therefore, let every man be active, each in his own denomination if you please, and let every man take it as his first and most sacred duty to oppose anyone who in his activity by word or deed steps outside the confines of his religious community and tries to butt into the other. ... Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.
The undermining of the existence of human culture by the destruction of its bearer seems in the eyes of a folkish philosophy the most execrable crime. Anyone who dares to lay hands on the highest image of the Lord commits sacrilege against the benevolent Creator of this miracle and contributes to the expulsion from paradise.
Then, from the child's story-book to the last newspaper in the country, and every theatre and cinema, every pillar where placards are posted and every free space on the hoardings should be utilized in the service of this one great mission, until the faint-hearted cry, "Lord, deliver us," which our patriotic associations send up to Heaven to-day would be transformed into an ardent prayer: "Almighty God, bless our arms when the hour comes. Be just, as Thou hast always been just. Judge now if we deserve our freedom. Lord, bless our struggle."
The best characterization is provided by the product of this religious education, the Jew himself. His life is only of this world, and his spirit is inwardly as alien to true Christianity as his nature two thousand years previous was to the great founder of the new doctrine. Of course, the latter made no secret of his attitude toward the Jewish people, and when necessary he even took the whip to drive from the temple of the Lord this adversary of all humanity, who then as always saw in religion nothing but an instrument for his business existence. In return, Christ was nailed to the cross, while our present-day party Christians debase themselves to begging for Jewish votes at elections and later try to arrange political swindles with atheistic Jewish parties-- and this against their own nation.
Socrates:
(and I bet Zeus denies biblical inerrancy).
You just lost money.
Socrates:
Zeus would be better off if he stopped wallowing in atheistic gutter sites.
Huh? I didn't realize project Gutenberg was atheist -- maybe you should inform them, Soc. I read historical documents, like
Mein Kampf, to know what Hitler said. I don't trust hearsay from anti-Catholic Nazi aides. Here, read it yourself:
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200601.txt
Z: Well, Cuvier actually did "stick" to a literal interpretation of the Bible -- he was a catastrophist, but he believed in six literal days of Creation, and believed in a young earth. Very similar to what AiG and ICR teach.
Socrates:
Rubbish, Cuvier was famous for his belief in multiple catastrophism, and an Earth far older than the Bible would suggest.
I truly think you are wrong. Henry Morris of the ICR is happy
to list Cuvier as a Biblical Creationist, multiple times. Please, show me a single quote from Cuvier where he states he believes that the Earth is ancient. Cuvier believed in six large "catastrophies" that he ascribed to the days of Creation. He never states that they were longer than a day, and he certainly chides other scientists of his time for belief in an ancient earth. Cuvier, who found evolution of animals to be absurd, said this in his famous "
Discourse on the revolutionary upheavals on the surface of the globe":
We see that, while entrenching themselves entirely within the limits set by the Book of Genesis, naturalists still gave themselves a large enough goal. They found themselves soon at an impasse. When they succeeded in seeing the six days of the Creation as so many indefinite periods, discounting the centuries, their systems took flight in proportion to the lapses of time which they were able to deal with.
Even the great Leibnitz amused himself, like Descartes, by making the earth an extinguished star, a glazed globe, on which vapours, trapped at the time of its cooling, formed the seas which later deposited calcified earth (14). Demaillet covered the entire globe with water for thousands of years. He had the waters gradually ebb. All the land animals at first lived in the sea. Even man started as a fish. And the author asserts that it is not rare to meet in the ocean fish which are only half human, but from them the species will become completely human one fine day (15).
...
I know that some naturalists rely a great deal on the thousands of centuries which they add up with the stroke of a pen.
...
Although at first glance the traditions of some ancient peoples who trace their origin back so many thousands of years seem forcibly to contradict the newness of the present world, in fact when we examine these traditions a little more closely, it does not take us long to notice that there is nothing historical about them.
...
The most degraded of the human races, the Negroes, whose shapes most closely approximate the brute animals and whose intelligence has not grown to the point of arriving at a regular government nor the least appearance of coordinated knowledge, has preserved no written records or traditions at all.
...
Thus, I am of the opinion, with Deluc and Dolomieu, that if there is something confirmed by geology, it is that the surface of our world has been the victim of a great and sudden upheaval, whose date cannot go back much beyond five or six thousand years, that this revolutionary upheaval pushed down the countries where human beings and the species of animals best known to us today previously used to live and made them disappear, that it, by contrast, made dry land of the bottom of the most recent sea and from it created the countries now inhabited, that since this revolution the small number of individuals which it spared have spread out and propagated throughout the territories recently made dry land, and consequently that it is only since this time that our societies have resumed a progressive development, formed institutions, raised monuments, collected facts about nature, and put together scientific systems.
Socrates:
And I've pointed out that Endarkenment types like Hume and Voltaire were very racist, and you supported this inadvertendly by citing Jefferson.
I never disagreed. I simply was showing the contrast that Darwin made with his contemporaries.
Socrates:
You have to be joking. Darwin and his followers believed in the inferiority of negroes.
Socrates:
This quote from Darwin, The Descent of Man , shows that he was racist, even though he was not in favor of cruelty or slavery to these allegedly savage races.
'[But these breaks depend merely on the number of related forms which have become extinct]. At some future time, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes ? will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as the baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.'
You claimed that "Darwin ... believed in the inferiority of negroes" and you have been asked to support that claim. The Darwin quote you give says nothing of the sort. It is certainly not "PC" by today's careful standards, but that is really just a semantic issue. We wouldn't use the term "savage race" today, of course -- we'd use a euphemism, with exactly the same meaning, like "third world nation" (which is considered insensitive by some now) or the more PC, "non-industrialized culture." MLK exclusively used the word "negro" with pride less than 40 years ago. Language changes.
Darwin says nothing in there about one race being superior to another, in any sense. Darwin says nothing about any race being inferior to any other, or any race being less valuable in any way. His point, if you had actually read the previous paragraphs (or the preceding sentence which I re-inserted above in brackets), is simply that in the future the apparent "gap" between man and ape will be wider since humans will likely have killed off both many men and many apes. The preceding paragraphs and chapters were all devoted to showing that the differences between the human "races" are miniscule when viewed objectively (see
all the quotes from the preceding paragraphs that I posted earlier). You are simply showing me that you engage in that tired, worn-out, unethical, and ubiquitous YEC tactic of quoting out-of-context when it suits your purpose. Darwin's entire book was devoted to showing that human "races" blend into each other, and that the mental faculties of "savages" were similar to those of "civilized" people -- all in striking opposition to the common views of the day, in complete opposition to all that Darwin had been taught.
Given the terrible genocide that the "civilized races" have so skillfully performed, and the fact that most apes are on the verge of extinction, Darwin's prediction will likely be fulfilled. The Americans already have exterminated a very large fraction of Native Americans, and the few that are left form a tiny fraction of people living in the United States (less than 1%). As recently as 2000, the Washington state Republican party passed a resolution stating that the US government should "immediately take whatever steps necessary to terminate all ... non-republican forms of government on Indian reservations." The main sponsor was John Fleming, who warned that if tribes resisted "then the U.S. Army and the Air Force and the Marines and the National Guard are going to have to battle back."
The only value judgment Darwin
does make in the quote above is in reference to "Caucasians," where he not-so-subtly implies that they are quite uncivilized now, but that hopefully mankind as a whole
will be more civilized in the future (a point he touches on with great emotion in his private letters, repeatedly).
Socrates:
I was never wrong, since I agreed he was an abolitionist. But you have overlooked the racism in the earliest evolutionary teaching. Gould wrote, and he was a staunch anti-racist (Ontogeny and Phylogeny, Belknap-Harvard Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, pp. 127?128, 1977):
Z:
Gould got lots of things wrong -- that is a blatant appeal to authority.
Socrates:
And a cogent appeal to authority. Why should we believe you over him?
Why believe anyone who can't back up their statements with facts? Gould was gifted writer, but his facts were often wanting, and very often made unwarranted ethical extrapolations from data. If you believe his words are infallible please tell us why -- surely there are lots of references and historical notes to back up the claim.
Z
