Darwin's Deadly Legacy, as originally broadcast nationwide.
What have Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution contributed to humanity?
Coming up, the true legacy of Darwinism.
Your morality is whatever you want to make it to be.
That's really Darwin's legacy.
Perhaps the most pernicious and destructive manifestation of Darwinism was
in what happened in Nazi Germany.
Ironically, there is no concrete evidence for evolution.
I think we can say that quite emphatically.
It's more in the minds of men than it is actually, in fact, out there in nature.
We keep hearing about gaps in the theory of evolution.
The whole theory is a gap.
Coral Ridge Ministries presents Darwin's Deadly Legacy, a shocking look at the
historical impact of the theory of evolution and the shaky scientific ground
on which it rests.
In 1859, Charles Darwin published his bombshell book entitled On the Origins of
the Species, in which he laid out the foundation for the view that mankind and
all other species evolved through a purely random physical process.
The world has never been the same since.
This view is now mandated as the official view in all public education institutions.
But have you ever thought about the social impact of Darwin's theory of evolution?
It has been enormous.
Evolution permeates virtually every aspect of our culture.
Pick up a book or read a magazine or watch a television program or a movie and you
will see the assumption of evolution.
Here's a sampling.
Evolution is supported by the entire scientific community.
Intelligent design is supported by guys online to see the Dukes of Hazzard.
Sometimes it seems hard to avoid being indoctrinated about evolution,
whether on TV or the radio.
Among scientists, Darwin's theory of evolution is the accepted understanding,
grounded now in many years of research and deep evidence, of how the multitude of
living things came to be.
The idea is promoted in newspapers and magazines and books.
Everywhere, evolution is just assumed.
Creation scientist Ian Taylor.
Evolution permeates our entire society.
Not surprisingly, because it's taught in the public schools.
And most children in North America go to a public school.
And evolution is promoted in Hollywood films.
I think Darwinism is popular as a story because it allows atheists not to have to
explain why we're here.
Ann Coulter, author of the New York Times' number one book, Godless.
There's no such thing as morality, there's no such thing as our consciousness
of our mortality.
We're about one step above a porpoise, although many of them seem to believe
we're below a porpoise, because we have nukes and we pollute and have hate crimes
and don't recycle.
So we are below a porpoise, but it's just a matter of, it's just random mutation,
this bloody battle of survival, which exists no place in the fossil
record.
The late Dr. Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard said,
It has been said that ideas have consequences.
That is so true, as we'll see in this program.
We're being told today that life is just the product of time and chance and random
forces.
Well, if we've just evolved from the primeval slime, then humanity sinks in
significance.
Darwin's second major book was rightly titled The Descent of Man, where man was
no longer viewed as a little lower than the angels, but rather a little higher
than the apes.
What Darwin theorized about biology was applied by later thinkers to society,
economics and government, with devastating consequences.
Prior to Darwin, people had believed on the basis of revelation, that human beings
were the product of God's creation.
But they also believed that human reason could figure that out.
That the great order that we see in nature, and especially the unique
capacities for free will and reason that you see in human beings, pointed to a
source above nature as the origin of nature, and especially the origin of man.
And Darwin's argument seemed to be that we really don't need to have recourse to
those kinds of explanations anymore.
Dr. Carson Holloway, author of The Right Darwin, professor at the University of
Nebraska, recently taught for a year at Princeton.
To the extent that Darwin's theory tended to give intellectual force to atheism,
the belief there is no transcendent good, and what follows from that, the belief
there can't be any transcendent dignity to every human being, would have contributed,
at least indirectly, to a kind of obliteration of the old and firm basis for
the moral decency that tended to prevent organized mass bureaucratic slaughter,
which is what you got in the 20th century.
The acceptance of evolution brought in a totally new way of looking at life on
earth, and especially humankind, and our place in the cosmos.
As evolution began to be accepted in intellectual circles, one of their own,
British philosopher Herbert Spencer coined the phrase, survival of the fittest.
That phrase caught on as the essence of Darwinism.
Social Darwinism is the idea that human beings will evolve, and social systems
will evolve, and social institutions will evolve, and the fit ones will survive and
overcome the weak ones, and go on to become stronger.
It is a survival of the fittest sort of system.
It is a dog-eat-dog, top-dog-win-out kind of system that flies in the face of the
Judeo-Christian tradition.
Dr. Earl Tilford, Jr. is a professor of history at Grove City College in
Pennsylvania.
So, with survival of the fittest, it was okay to exploit people.
After all, they were weak, and they should go by the wayside.
It was for the betterment of the race, of the human race, that they should.
Intellectually deficient, those who are physically deficient, those who are
morally deficient, would fall away.
Evolution had implications for virtually every discipline it touched, including
labor.
Ian Taylor, author of In the Minds of Men, Darwin, and the New World Order,
mentions the so-called robber barons, a handful of industrialists who became
inordinately wealthy by unethical means in the early stages of capitalism.
They were enthusiastic Darwinists.
There was a lot of misuse of labor in England at that time, and it was all
justified by the robber barons, by Darwin's argument, by survival of the
fittest.
Well, the elite said, we are the fittest, and we're surviving.
And it's perfectly all right, it's for the benefit of the country, isn't it?
In America, it was the late 1800s, early 1900s, when you found the robber
barons.
Andrew Carnegie and others believed that this was all justified.
The idea of encouraging unemployment, so that the wages could be kept low,
and the working hours could be kept long, and so that they could make maximum profit
on these things.
That was survival of the fittest, and of course, he would have been one of
the fittest to survive.
Evolution also has had implications on racism.
It gave it a scientific rationale.
The biblical view is that racism is wrong, not that all followers of the Bible have
lived up to its teaching.
Specifically, the book of Acts, in chapter 17, verse 26, teaches that from
one man came all men.
Thus, we are all ultimately related.
There is no basis for racism.
But here again, Darwinism is at odds with the Bible.
Now, a lot of people might not connect Darwinian evolution with racism,
but as the late Dr. Stephen Jay Gould said, that racist attitudes were common
before Darwin, but what Darwin did was fuel racism.
And the reason is, because when you popularize a philosophy that man is just
an animal, and we evolve from ape-like ancestors, and there are different races
that evolved at different levels, and some are more advanced than others,
you can see how people can then develop racist attitudes towards those they
thought were more primitive than themselves, or inferior to themselves.
And there's no doubt that Darwinian evolution has certainly influenced
cultures around the world.
Creationist educator Ken Ham, founder and director of Answers in Genesis,
saw what Darwinism did to the Aborigines in his native country of Australia.
Darwin taught in his book The Descent of Man, for instance, Australian Aborigines
were basically closest to the ape-like ancestors.
Australian Aborigines were looked on as the missing links in history.
In the very early 1900s, they were even listed as animals in a Sydney museum
booklet.
And there were scientists from Germany and England who sent people to Australia with
instructions on how to kill the Aborigines, how to skin them, how to boil
up their skulls for specimens for museums around the world.
It was because they thought these were not quite human yet.
It was all laid down with the idea of they were evolving, and they had not yet
evolved into the white man's idea of what is being human.
Another man who shared some key tenets of Darwin's theory in particular,
its implications about God and its implications about man, was Karl Marx,
the father of communism.
Marx also embraced Darwinism as the scientific version of his political
philosophy.
He saw the struggle as among classes.
When you take God out of the equation, whether it is in social Darwinism or in
Marxism, all of your attempts to do noble things, and certainly what they had in
mind in the Soviet Union was the most ambitious endeavor that mankind has ever
tried in terms of social engineering, and it fell flat and cost millions of
lives.
Because proponents of evolution believed that man was not made in the image of God,
they felt free to remove those who got in the way of their social engineering.
Karl Marx wrote to his collaborator Friedrich Engels in reference to Darwin's
On the Origin of Species, This is the book that contains the foundation in natural
history for our view.
That view, of course, was communism.
No one can deny that communism was based upon atheism.
The communist leaders explicitly said so.
While Karl Marx did not like the Darwinian concept of every man for himself,
he found Darwin's theory useful for removing God from the equation and
substituting the almighty state as he envisioned it.
In communism, the state was God, and literally tens of millions of people
have died because of this false belief.
In his book Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler said, The purity of the racial blood should be
guarded so that the best types of human beings may be preserved and that thus we
should render possible a more noble evolution of humanity itself.
Adolf Hitler relied on evolutionary concepts in his chilling treatise Mein
Kampf.
What was the real connection between the horrors of Nazism and the theories of
Darwin?
The following contain some graphic scenes.
Parental discretion is advised.
Perhaps the most evil figure ever is Adolf Hitler.
He and the Nazis committed unspeakable actions, crimes against humanity.
What link, if any, is there to the theory of Charles Darwin?
Dr. Richard Weikart heads the Department of History at the University of California
Stanislaus in Turlock, California.
He has written the important new book From Darwin to Hitler.
Hitler was taking ideas of Darwinism in a certain kind of direction.
An important point of Darwinism was that there is no distinction between humans and
animals, at least no qualitative distinction.
Darwin, in fact, termed it this way, there is a quantitative but not a
qualitative distinction between humans and animals.
There was also a sea change with the acceptance of Darwin in how humanity was
to view human death itself.
One of the most important ways that Darwinism revolutionized thinking about
morality, especially relating to bioethics and medical ethics, was by introducing a
new idea of what death is.
The Judeo-Christian conception of death is that death is an enemy that is to be
overcome, and ultimately will be overcome through Christ.
But the Darwinian vision is that death is a positive force that brings progress.
And in fact, the more death, the more progress.
The more people are born, the more variation you have.
This gives more possibilities for good variations.
Charles Darwin's theory was not accepted widely at first, but he noticed it began
to gain a foothold in Germany some 50 years before Hitler.
And so Darwin wrote, The support which I received from Germany is my chief ground
for hoping that our views will ultimately prevail.
They prevailed in ways unimaginable.
To truly understand the atrocities of the Holocaust, one must first understand the
major movement which paved the way for it.
One of the major influences on Darwin's work was the thought of British economist
Thomas Malthus.
Thomas Malthus was an earlier philosopher and thinker who came up with a number of
theories about population and population control that Darwin actually built on in
his work.
Dr. George Grant is the author of many books, including Grand Illusions,
the Legacy of Planned Parenthood.
What Malthus argued was that it was a good thing to allow the poor and the
undesirable aspects of populations to essentially kill themselves off through
ill health and so forth.
In fact, he actually argued that philanthropy and charity to the poor was
bad for the human race because it allowed the breeding of what he called human
weeds.
In Malthusian theory, the world human population would quickly outgrow the
available food supply, and so population needed to be limited.
Combined with Darwin's theory of evolution, it resulted in a dangerous
movement.
When Darwin and also other Darwinists, such as Ernst Haeckel, who was Darwin's
chief disciple in Germany, looked around the world at different races, they saw the
American Indians being exterminated by the whites.
They saw the Australian Aborigines being exterminated by the Europeans.
And their conclusion was, that's part of the struggle for existence.
And because these inferior races are not as intellectually sound, then they're
going to be decimated by the Europeans, and that's just a natural process.
Charles Darwin had a cousin by the name of Francis Galton, who took the ideas of
Darwin and began to apply them to the realm of genetics.
Galton wondered, is there a possible way to actually steer evolution through
scientific methods, so that we actually create a race of thoroughbreds?
Galton assumed that there were certain good genes and certain bad genes in the
human gene pool.
The movement Galton spawned became known as the eugenics movement.
The word eugenics literally means good birth.
The eugenics movement resulted in restrictions on who could and could not
marry, involuntary sterilization, and even forced abortions in many cases.
In America, tens of thousands of those deemed unfit were forcibly sterilized by
the state.
Even the U.S.
Supreme Court declared the practice constitutional in 1927, a decision in
which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously declared, three generations of
imbeciles are enough, thus clearing the way for a Virginia woman to be sterilized
against her will.
Eugenics essentially argued that there were certain population centers that were
so polluted with bad human genomes that they simply needed to be eliminated.
Though it is frequently ignored now, Planned Parenthood is a direct result of
the eugenics movement in America.
Its founder, Margaret Sanger, believed in removing what she called, quote,
the dead weight of human waste, unquote.
That's why Margaret Sanger would say things like, our purpose is to raise up a
new race of thoroughbreds.
She's talked about eliminating human weeds.
And the eugenics movement of the 19th and 20th centuries had an enormous influence
on the policies of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich.
I mean, Goebbels sounds like Margaret Sanger and today's Planned Parenthood and
NARAL people when Goebbels talks about useless eaters.
Well, that's, I mean, it's about the ugliest term I've ever heard, useless
eaters, human beings with the spark of the divinity in them.
They don't see humans that way.
They don't see humans as an engine of creation.
They see them as, you know, depriving the earth of resources, useless eaters or
unwanted babies.
Adolf Hitler was clearly trying to speed evolution along, and he wasn't the only
one.
He was drawing on what many other scholars, biologists, geneticists in
Germany were also preaching and teaching in the early 20th century.
Natural selection was a guiding idea for Hitler and the Nazis.
In Mein Kampf, he talks a good deal about the struggle for existence and how humans
are struggling.
Especially races is mainly where he's focusing there.
But in other places, too, he talks about even within German society, there's a
struggle for existence going on, which brings about natural selection.
They used the word selection quite freely.
And in fact, if you read just about any books about the Holocaust, you'll come
across the word selection, because in the camps, that's exactly what they did.
And they used the term, and the term was related directly to Darwinian terminology,
that when you went to the camps, you went through a selection process.
They were selecting this person to survive and this person to go to the gas chambers.
Hitler's Mein Kampf refers to evolution quite a bit.
But the English translator of the book uses the word development instead of
evolution.
Neither Charles Darwin nor his immediate followers were anti-Semitic per se,
but their ideas just made the whole thing possible.
He saw races locked in competition, and in The Descent of Man, he explains
this, and that because of that, different races will be exterminated.
Now, he didn't necessarily believe the Jewish race was one of those inferior
races that would be exterminated, but Hitler, of course, did, and he began
applying that to Jews.
Anti-Semitism had existed for centuries before Hitler came along, but no one tried
to exterminate the Jews.
For Hitler, extermination was necessary because it's the only way to rid the
Jewish blood from the gene pool.
Adolf Hitler fancied himself an intellectual.
He was always referring to Darwin and to the science of Darwinism as a reason and
as a support for his racist theories.
And in that you bring in science, and the Nazis loved science, then this
sort of gave it the blessing of modern liberal thinking, of scientific thinking.
And so Darwinism and the idea that you had superior races, that you had the fittest
surviving, certainly underlay the Nazis and their thinking.
Before the systematic destruction of Jews and Gypsies and Slavs and other supposedly
inferior races, the Nazis killed off tens of thousands of the chronically ill.
The Nazis began a so-called euthanasia program in 1939 when World War II began,
and they carried these out by setting up six killing centers.
It was to get rid of people who had congenital illnesses of various sorts.
Most of these were institutionalized people who were shipped from various
institutions of Germany, then to these six killing centers.
The total numbers the Nazis killed are difficult to pin down for a number of
reasons.
It depends on who you're counting.
The numbers of Jews killed were about 6 million, Gypsies 6 to 800,000,
the euthanasia program about 200,000, but then there were also several million
Soviet POWs.
I mean, we're talking about in the neighborhood of 10 to 15 million,
though, likely.
Once the killing began, it never stopped.
A private meeting was held at the Wannsee Conference Center where they decided on
the final solution, as in the final solution to the Jewish problem,
the decision to exterminate the Jewish people.
They did refer to Darwin.
At the Wannsee Conference, Reinhard Heydrich commented at the end,
Darwin would be astounded at the progress we're going to make in one year as we move
the human race forward.
The reason that the Nazis killed the Jews was because they believed that they had
bad heredity, didn't want it to infiltrate the German gene pool, and they believed
that they were a threat to the Aryan race and to Western culture in general.
The Nazis believed that many races were inferior.
In fact, they didn't think the Jews were the most inferior, but they were the most
threatening to them, precisely because they were cunning and sly.
That's basically how they portrayed them.
In other words, the Jewish victims of the Holocaust were slated for destruction
simply for who they were.
It was pure racism.
The Nazis systematically tried to remove all Jews.
Hitler declared the Jews formed a subhuman counter race predestined by their
biological heritage to evil, just as the Nordic race was destined for nobility.
The Nazis thought they were doing humanity a favor.
Hitler actually thought that what he was doing was good for humanity.
He thought he was going to produce a better human, that ultimately he was going
to produce this master race that was going to be more highly cultured, more moral,
more civilized, was going to take things to a higher level of creativity,
and was going to get rid of these immoral and inferior races, other races.
Again, what the Nazis did was to take the eugenics program inspired by Darwinism to
the next step.
Eugenics is applied Darwinism, and it sticks out like a sore thumb that
all of these German eugenicists preceding the Nazi regime were enthusiastic
Darwinists.
Margaret Sanger, of course, in this country of Planned Parenthood,
enthusiastic Darwinist.
Hitler.
That is the most amazing of all that I could get through 12 years of government
schools here in the United States, Cornell and Michigan Law School,
and with all of the chitchat about what led to the Nazi regime, I never knew about
the link between Darwin and Hitler until reading Richard Weikart's book.
And once you see it, it's one of those things you see that the truth has an
inherent appeal.
The moment you hear it, suddenly it all makes sense.
I mean, how is it that Hitler could simultaneously seem to be anti-abortion,
but be slaughtering six million Jews?
Well, that's because he wasn't against abortion for Jews.
He was applying Darwinism.
He thought the Aryans were the fittest, and he was just hurrying natural selection
along.
I mean, Mein Kampf means Mein Struggle, which he described in explicitly Darwinian
terms, the struggle among races.
World War II in particular, I think, was based even more strongly on social
Darwinist ideology, because Hitler, I mean, that was a central aspect of his
worldview, and it drove pretty much everything that he did.
It was not just a peripheral part of his ideology.
If we think of anti-Semitism as being sort of the core idea of Nazis, which many
people do think, I think that's erroneous.
It is a central part.
I'm not denying that.
But even more fundamental, I think, in his worldview was the social Darwinist
ideas.
The great lesson of the Holocaust is what happens when man tries to decide who
should live and who should die.
When man tries to, quote, clean up the gene pool from those viewed as
undesirable.
To put it simply, no Darwin, no Hitler.
Certainly, Darwin could never have foreseen the rise of someone like Adolf
Hitler and the Nazis, nor presumably desired it.
But the fact is, Hitler and the Nazis thought they were doing humanity a favor
by weeding out supposedly inferiors and breeding only the supposedly superior
race.
So, who are you, asked Hitler, to question the marvels of evolution?
Hitler tried to speed up evolution, to help it along, and millions suffered
and died in unspeakable ways because of it.
Columbine shooter Eric Harris wrote on his website, You know what I love?
Natural selection.
It's the best thing that ever happened to the earth.
Getting rid of all the stupid and weak organisms.
If you think that the shedding of human blood by those who embrace evolution ended
with the Nazi death camps, think again.
As Darwinism becomes more and more accepted in our culture, our young people
are becoming both the perpetrators and the victims.
I started screaming and crying and telling them not to shoot me.
Tuesday, April 20th, 1999, 11.19 a.m., Columbine High School, near Littleton,
Colorado, just outside Denver.
In a hail of gunfire, 11 students and one teacher are killed, and 24 others are
wounded, before the shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, both students at the
school, turn their guns on themselves.
It is the deadliest school shooting in U .S.
history, in a decade that saw school shootings sharply increase overall.
We're reaping the consequences right now in this culture of generations that have
been taken through a public education system and taught a Darwinian view,
taught that you can explain life by natural processes, and therefore,
ultimately, your morality is whatever you want to make it to be.
That's really Darwin's legacy.
If you don't accept real truth, then all other things can creep in there,
and social Darwinism will creep in there and become one of the cornerstones of your
worldview.
In fact, it becomes an underpinning of your worldview.
This can lead to violence.
It can lead to kids killing kids, as they did at Columbine.
Debbie Phillips' niece, Rachel Scott, was one of the students killed at
Columbine.
The killers, Eric and Dylan, badgered the kids over and over that they were killing
that day.
Do you believe in God?
Why do you believe in God?
You believe in God?
Well, there, and they would kill them, as if they had more power than God.
Foolishly, they thought they were controlling people's lives at that point,
and they wanted that power.
They wanted to play God during that whole scene.
While there were presumably many factors that led to the shootings at Columbine,
the notion of Darwinian evolution clearly played a major role.
Indeed, the autopsy report for shooter Eric Harris revealed that on the day of
the attack, which would intentionally be the last day of his life, he had chosen to
wear a T-shirt emblazoned with the words, Natural Selection.
Denver Area High School teacher, Ken Poppe.
To me, that would signify that if natural selection is the person's point of view,
that it is a fight for survival, and the people who are the strongest are
going to rule.
And on that day, I believe their armaments gave them the impression that they were
the stronger, and they had the right to deprive the lives of their students.
The killers had been planning the rampage for about a year.
They chose April 20th to honor the birthday of one of their heroes,
Adolf Hitler, who also took many of his ideas from Darwinism.
They set bombs up that never went off.
Their intention to slay over 500 victims that day fell short by 485.
While Columbine was the most dramatic example of such incidents, there have been
more than a dozen school shootings in the United States since then.
And there's no telling how many young people have been involved in serious,
less publicized crimes outside of schools.
Ken Ham summarizes a pervasive view among many young people today, a view which has
had devastating consequences.
Life is just meaningless.
Life is just purposelessness.
So therefore, you know, why shouldn't students say, no, just go and kill a few
students at my school?
We're just animals anyway.
There's no God.
Why shouldn't I do that?
And when I die, that's going to be the end of me anyway.
I'm told that everything's just a result of natural processes.
So what does it matter when I die?
And what does it matter when others die?
Why shouldn't I do whatever I want to do?
You see, that's really the philosophy that's pervading the culture.
John Phillips, uncle of Columbine victim Rachel Scott.
That's why 16 kids will kill themselves today.
16 did yesterday.
16 will tomorrow.
1,400 will attempt suicide today in America.
16 will succeed.
Why?
Because they feel no worth, no value.
I don't matter.
No hope.
Critics point to the removal of any notion of God from public schools and its
replacement with Darwinism as leading America down a slope of increasing
violence.
And yet, it's the biblical, theistic view which gives hope and significance to human
beings.
Look at how ordinary Christian Ashley Smith responded to a brutal killer who had
just killed four people escaping from the Atlantic Courthouse.
She is not a spectacular woman.
I mean, God bless her.
She's in God's image.
And look, she accomplished a miracle with God working through her.
She reads from the Bible.
She reads from the purpose-driven life.
And it touched him.
It transformed his soul.
What if someone had said that to the Columbine killers?
What if they had ever been told that they were in God's image and that we're all
sinners?
Yet naturalistic evolution is still the only officially allowed view.
In fact, after Columbine, they were putting up tiles that the students were
making, and one of the tiles was Jesus wept.
From the Bible, it does kind of grab you after what happened out there.
No, that tile was prohibited.
That tile could not be put up.
Tragic, isn't it?
But is it all that surprising?
If you teach children that they're no more than trousered apes and that life has no
purpose or meaning, then why are we shocked when they act like that?
Evolutionist George Du Maurier called man a fungus on the surface of one of the
minor planets.
Arnold Schoenberg referred to man as a hairless ape.
And Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, I see no reason for
attributing to man a significant difference in kind from that which belongs
to a grain of sand.
Well, the fungus just got demoted.
And we wonder why our young people are killing themselves and others.
Writing in the New York Times, evolutionist Richard Dawkins penned,
It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet someone who claims not to believe in
evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid, or insane, or wicked.
But I'd rather not consider that.
Is that true?
Is evolution a fact?
We've already seen the devastating consequences of the acceptance of the
theory of evolution.
But it's simply scientific fact.
And we're stuck with it.
At least, so we're told.
Well, actually, not quite so fast.
Let's take a closer look.
I think on the surface, you can build a scientific case for Darwinism.
In reality, though, the more you examine it, the more its pillars rot under
scrutiny.
The so-called fact of evolution is not a fact at all.
It, too, is a hypothesis still looking for evidence.
The missing links to me are missing everywhere.
No evidence will ever be accepted to disprove Darwinism, because they must
believe in Darwinism.
In the public school classroom, in the mainstream media, and in natural
history museums, Darwinism is pushed everywhere, even to dogmatic degrees.
Darwin theorized that all life could have originated from a common, one-celled
ancestor over long periods of time, and that natural selection retained the
random changes that were most helpful to the organism's survival.
And this was the origin of all of life, in all of its variety.
But how accurate is the theory on closer examination?
Now, in science, we scientists propose theories.
Some are true and some are false.
Dr. Jonathan Wells has earned two PhDs, one at Yale and one at Berkeley,
in science.
He is the author of the groundbreaking book, Icons of Evolution.
Darwin proposed a good theory, which I think has turned out to be largely
false.
That's not to reflect on Darwin, but I do think it reflects on people who
nowadays teach his theory as though it were an established fact.
Though Darwinian evolution is being attacked on many scientific fronts,
we will look at three major areas where it falls short.
First, there is the fossil record.
I came to see that this wasn't really a scientific question.
At bottom, it was a philosophical question.
Retired Berkeley law professor Philip Johnson is widely regarded as the father
of the intelligent design movement.
He is the author of Darwin on Trial.
Far from having proof, they were constantly fighting against the evidence
to explain away the evidence.
The fossil record did not record the kind of evolution that they believed in.
The genetic experiments simply showed that you can get a limited variation within the
type.
And I saw that in area after area, the evidence was in fact at war with the
theory.
One type of animal changing into a completely different type of animal over
time.
That is the essence of Darwinism.
But is that what we find in the fossil record and in what is observed today?
The evidence of fossils disproves and works against the case for Darwinism.
It does not support Darwinism.
Lee Strobel is a former investigative reporter for the Chicago Tribune and
graduate from Yale Law School.
He is the author of The Case for a Creator.
You can take examples of ancient creatures, apes that once walked the
earth, and you can take an example of a human being, fossils from a human being,
and you can look at those two side by side, and I'll say, where is the evidence
that one became the other?
There is no evidence.
What we see is two different, similar maybe in some ways, fossils that represent
two different kinds of animals.
Did life arise, as evolutionists say, gradually?
Or did it arise abruptly?
If you look at the fossil record, you will see that organisms appear
abruptly without transitional forms, and these are found in the oldest rocks
from the Cambrian Period.
They suddenly appear in the fossils in what is called the Cambrian Explosion.
There is no progression.
Ann Coulter is the author of the number one New York Times bestseller,
Godless.
One third of her book is devoted to exposing Darwinism.
What Darwin expected to find was all sorts of interlocking fossils.
Slowly you have the mutation, the bloody battle for survival, and a new species
arises from that.
The fossil record looked nothing like that when Darwin promoted his theory.
But he said, just keep looking, keep digging.
I'm sure the evidence will turn up to the contrary.
The evidence has come in showing quite the opposite, and the Cambrian Explosion is a
big part of that.
We have all animal phyla right there appearing in the blink of an eye during
the Cambrian Explosion.
Is there any evidence for evolution?
Well, when you look in the biology books, the textbooks, fossils are usually given
as evidence.
Creation scientist and author Ian Taylor from Canada hosts Creation Moments on more
than 800 radio stations.
And transition fossils would be wonderful.
You know, if you had some transition creature halfway between one and another,
that would be wonderful.
If you could see that, and if hundreds of them could be found, as they should be
found.
But actually, there is not one that's ever been found that would stand up as a
transition fossil in a court of law.
And I didn't say that, that was Patterson.
Dr. Patterson said that, who was head of the British Natural History Museum in
London, just before he retired.
But what about the prehistoric ape men we see in the museums and textbooks that are
supposedly based on the fossil evidence?
Dr. Ken Poppe, author of the new book, Reclaiming Science from Darwinism,
is a 30-year veteran of teaching science in public schools in Colorado.
What Darwinists are awful good at is taking like a single jaw bone and
constructing an entire creature.
In one case, one of the famous mistakes of science, the Nebraska man, they dug up a
pig's tooth and took that tooth that they suddenly assumed was of a prehistoric
human, and they built an entire race of people.
Pictures that appeared in London newspapers, showing them walking in a
prehistoric setting.
And later, they finally gave the tooth to somebody who knew their dental work,
and they realized it was a pig's tooth, and the whole thing collapsed.
The lack of transitional forms in the fossil record has not gone unnoticed by
evolutionists.
The leading evolutionist of our day up until his death a few years ago was the
paleontologist Stephen J.
Gould of Harvard.
Long before he died, Gould actually admitted that Darwinian evolution,
gradual change in species over eons of time, was nowhere to be found in the
fossil record, much to the consternation of his colleagues.
He said, quote, the fossil record doesn't show gradual change, and every
paleontologist has known that ever since Cuvier, end quote.
In reality, Gould admitted that the fossil record showed sudden explosions of life,
as seen, for instance, in the Cambrian explosion.
So did Gould reject evolution?
No.
He postulated the theory that evolution simply occurred so quickly, it could never
be seen in the fossil record.
For a while, Darwinists explained that there were no preceding the transitional
fossils, preceding that because their evidence failed to fossilize.
He started to detect a pattern in their miracles.
Oops, the evidence that would support our theory just isn't there, it didn't
fossilize.
The second area in which Darwinism crumbles is in its attempt to blur the
important distinction between microevolution, small changes within
species, and macroevolution, one major kind evolving into a completely new kind
of creature.
The evidence for microevolution is abundant.
We see minor changes within species everywhere we look.
The evidence for macroevolution is missing.
The interesting thing here is that before Darwin, microevolution wasn't called
evolution at all.
It's just minor changes within existing species.
Darwin didn't call his book, How Existing Species Change Over Time.
He called his book, The Origin of Species.
And for that, there's just about no good evidence at all.
But evolutionists take evidence for microevolution, which can be found in
abundance, and use it as proof of macroevolution, for which there is
virtually no evidence.
What Darwin proposed was that any creature given enough time and in different
circumstances would grow into another creature.
That's macroevolution.
There's never been any evidence for it.
Microevolution is nothing more than just variation within the species.
The third area in which Darwinian evolution fails is in explaining the
enormous complexity of biological structures, even at the microscopic level.
No evolutionist has been able to propose a plausible way such structures could have
arisen randomly.
In other words, random chance alone could not have created life.
Certainly before Darwin's day, most scientists had no trouble seeing
design in the biological world.
Dr. Michael Behe, Lehigh professor and author of Darwin's Black Box, elaborates
further on the complexity of the human body, even down to the trillions of cells
that make up our bodies.
In Darwin's day, scientists were vaguely aware that there were things such as
cells, but most of them thought that they were like little pieces of jello,
little microscopic pieces of protoplasm.
But in the past hundred years, especially the last 50 years, we've seen
that cells are enormously complex.
How complex?
Dr. Behe says that if you converted the DNA information from the simplest cell of
the human body into volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica, it would
translate to two to three dozen volumes, just in one cell.
Our bodies contain about 100 trillion cells, each containing tiny little
machines, if you will, with interacting parts.
There are molecular machines which actually occur inside of cells,
so they are really smaller than cells themselves.
A good example of a molecular machine is the little molecular trucks which shuttle
supplies from one part of a cell to another.
No one has been able to fit these molecular machines into a Darwinian
framework.
This is why Dr. Behe and other scientists talk about intelligent design.
I consider myself right now to be what I call an intelligent design theorist.
And that means that from what I can see in biology, a lot of systems have
intelligence behind them.
They were not produced by random processes.
Can you get a dictionary from an explosion in a printing press?
Can you get a 747 from a catastrophe in an airplane parts warehouse?
Can you get the works of Shakespeare from the flying pen and pages at a printing
press or something like that?
We keep hearing about gaps in the theory of evolution.
The whole theory is a gap.
They've got nothing.
Nothing.
We've been looking for 170 years through the fossil record or in the laboratory,
mutilating, torturing fruit flies.
We've never seen one species come from another in the wild, in the laboratory,
looking for the fossil evidence.
And to the contrary, the fossil evidence not only is what should be there not
there, but what shouldn't be there is there.
Ironically, Charles Darwin himself said, If it could be demonstrated that any
complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous
successive slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.
Nearly 150 years after Darwin wrote The Origin of the Species, after more than 100
million fossils have been cataloged in museums around the world, Darwin's theory
has indeed broken down.
As one prestigious French scientist put it, Evolution is a fairy tale for adults.
Evolutionist Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education declared,
It is not fair to mislead students by pretending that discarded ideas are still
viable.
We only confuse students by presenting special creation and evolution as if both
were equally scientific and as if scientists were still trying to decide
between them.
Despite the crumbling of its support in the science lab, evolution is still the
only game in town in the public school classroom.
The famous film Inherit the Wind is a highly fictionalized account of the famous
Scopes Trial of 1925, in which a teacher was prosecuted for supposedly teaching
Darwinian evolution in the classroom.
Though the facts of the movie are far from the actual facts of the Scopes case,
which itself was something of a publicity stunt, the movie is best remembered for
its caricature of the Christian townspeople who only wanted biblical
creationism taught in schools.
How ironic, then, that it is now Darwin's theory of evolution that is protected by
law, with all other views being excluded.
If you can look at Darwin as a theory, it is a theory that should be taught in
our schools.
But it is just a theory.
However, in our society, in our culture, and in this nation, it has been accepted
as fact, and it has been enforced in the schools.
We are forced to look at one viewpoint, and that is Darwin's theory of human
development out of lower species, and neglect others.
And it is illegal in many places to even propose that there may be a different
viewpoint here, that we may be creatures of a sovereign God.
Naturalistic evolution has been enshrined in the nation's public schools as the only
acceptable theory of human origins.
It is protected by the courts to such a degree that one judge ruled that a school
district in Dover, Pennsylvania, could not even inform students that there
were scientific challenges to evolution, or direct them to critiques of the theory.
All the Dover School Board actually did, they really didn't mandate the teaching of
intelligent design in biology class.
What they said was, there are criticisms of evolution from a scientific standpoint,
one of which is something called intelligent design, and if you'd like to
read more about this, there's a book in the library that we have provided that you
can read.
That's all it did.
Frank Mannion is an attorney for the American Center for Law and Justice,
which defends the First Amendment rights of Christians around the country.
Both in my own experience, and in the experience of other attorneys,
teachers who attempt to present scientific criticisms of evolution find themselves,
more often than not, on the receiving end of a threat, either from their superiors
within the school district, or from the ACLU, or Americans United for Separation,
or similar groups.
But though the Dover case was widely hailed as a landmark defeat for
intelligent design theory, in reality, the results of the case have no actual
effect beyond the case itself.
To put too much weight on the Dover decision is a mistake.
It's only courts of appeals and Supreme Court decisions that really carry any kind
of significant precedential weight.
But why is the Darwinian view so zealously protected against all questions in public
schools by groups such as the ACLU, Americans United for the Separation of
Church and State, and the National Center for Science Education, led by Eugenie
Scott, which took part in the Dover case?
The ACLU has a stake in the argument over Darwinism, simply because the ACLU has a
very distinctive religious and political agenda, rooted in a revolutionary
worldview, that comes from Darwinism.
The whole intent of the ACLU is to change our society, to make it into something
new, something that the old Christian foundations of America could never allow.
Einstein would not be allowed to teach in a public school, a government school
today, because he referred to God.
He said, I am trying to discover God in the universe.
Can you imagine?
He'd be driven out of a public school today.
All the great scientists saw their work as finding God in the universe, as finding
the design.
And to have these hacks like Eugenie Scott come in and say, oh, that's not real
science, unless you keep God out, it's not real science, it's preposterous.
Proponents of evolution have argued that their view should be the only one taught
in schools, because their view is science, while other views are theology.
But critics note that evolution itself proceeds from religious assumptions.
Darwinism is essentially a theory of the universe, a theory of origins.
Therefore, Darwinism is a study of ultimate things.
Darwinism really is an alternate theology.
If you teach that all of life is simply matter, that everything is simply matter,
that it just has always existed, that it has no purpose, it has no reason,
there is nothing guiding it or no one guiding it, those obviously are
philosophical statements.
And yet that sort of language has appeared and probably continues to appear in
standard high school biology textbooks in this country.
And then you've got to get all the modifications that go along with this
skull to this skull.
Dr. Ken Poppe has taught science in public high schools for over 30 years.
He has encountered firsthand the stranglehold evolutionists have on the
curriculum.
And so after faithfully teaching what the standards have you teach, like in public
schools there are standards that you are supposed to follow and you are obligated
to teach the evolutionary theory.
It's probably in every state standard ever written for science education.
And yet after that I would always take the time to bring up some objections that
maybe the monkey to man theory does have some problems with it.
But like many teachers, Dr. Poppe found that there is almost no room in today's
classroom for scientific objections to protected scientific theories.
I had a forced transfer last year from a job because just the mention of
intelligent design in an elective class was all it took for a couple parents to
start.
Well first they sent a message straight to the superintendent.
And then it worked its way back to my principal and he said, Okay, what's going
on in your science class?
And even though there were many Christian parents who really supported what I was
doing, all it took was the voice of a couple Darwinists to make the system get
all nervous and say we ought to remove this problem rather than deal with it.
Dr. Poppe was reassigned to teach in another school within the same district,
thankfully with a principal that was more objective on the subject.
The principal that I was working with just really didn't want to take on the problems
because if the media suspects that you're changing the mold of science education,
they will start investigating.
There are groups like the ACLU that are very afraid of such movements and it often
can become a political firestorm that some people just don't want to take on.
The ACLU has been the principal means of guarding the sanctity of the theology of
Darwinism.
They are, in a sense, the palace guards.
They are the royal priesthood to protect the idol of Darwinism.
I fully believe that still today if you talk too much about anti-Darwinism,
you're going to get in trouble with the establishment.
They don't want to release their stranglehold.
Well in modern America, we no longer have blasphemy laws regarding God, but
Darwinism is one of those things that is now protected against any kind of attack
by a kind of blasphemy law system.
And so in the schools, Darwinism simply cannot be questioned.
Evolutionists today have an absolute conniption at the very thought of both
sides of the origins debate being presented in school.
They want evolution alone taught, and that dogmatically.
They think that it is terrible that anyone would suggest such a thing as presenting
both sides.
One man has said, quote, A fair result can only be obtained by fully stating and
balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.
To present both sides of this argument is the only way, he said, to come to a fair
result.
Well that's certainly contrary to what the evolutionists want to happen today.
Where did I get that quote?
Well, right out of this book entitled The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.
To hear many evolutionists speak, you would think that the evidence for the
theory is absolutely unassailable.
But that is simply not the case.
And as you're about to see, when an evolutionist dares to examine the
scientific proofs with an open mind, the results can be astonishing.
To the late Dr. Richard Lumsden, former professor of biology at Tulane
University and Medical School and the former dean of the graduate school,
evolution was science, whereas creation was merely religion, and he taught as much
to his students.
What I would try to get across is that science is science, science deals with the
real world with real phenomena.
We don't bring into such discussions inferences of supernatural.
Dr. Lumsden, who studied at Tulane, Harvard and Rice, couldn't believe it when
the Louisiana State Legislature passed a law that if evolution were taught in the
public school classroom, then equal time had to be made for creation science.
My reaction to that was just total consternation.
Who are these people telling us, Ph.D.
level scientists, how to teach and what to teach regarding science?
So I just thought the whole thing was just absolutely absurd.
But it was not the energy of a supernatural nature.
I was prompted at that point to give a lecture on the origin of life,
giving creation its due with as much mockery as I could summon.
Truly, in the beginning was the word, but the word was hydrogen.
After that class, one of his graduate students came up to him and said,
Great lecture, Doc.
Well, that got my attention.
Flattery always did.
And she said, but I have some questions.
And indeed she did.
She had a legal pad and I could see line after line after line after line.
So they had an appointment, which ended up lasting longer than anticipated.
The appointment also ended up changing Dr. Lumsden's life.
Now, I'm not trying to challenge anything.
I just want to get my science straight.
That's fair enough.
Last month you taught how mutations were genetic disasters.
How by natural selection can they randomly produce new and better structures?
That's a good question.
Good question.
I'll probably have to think more about that.
Okay, well, aren't the odds of the random assembly of genes mathematically
impossible?
You've had your share of mathematics.
Let's see if we can't figure that out.
Not only were we talking about a mathematical impossibility, we were
talking about a physical and chemical impossibility, which gave me pause.
10,000 genes, that might be 10 to the 200th, 10 to the...
Those are pretty formidable odds, aren't they?
But the fact remains is that we're here.
And in reality, the only way we could have gotten here is through the evolutionary
process.
So the fact that we're here really proves evolution, doesn't it?
I could buffalo a student when I felt myself get a little bit in trouble,
okay?
I'd had a few years' experience at this, okay?
It's a trade secret.
But for the first time maybe in my life in explaining various facets of evolution
theory, I began to listen to what I was saying.
And what I was saying wasn't making very good scientific sense.
Where exactly in the fossil record is the evidence for progressive evolution?
The transitional forms between the major groups?
You know, most of them, come to think of it, are fully formed kinds in their own
right.
This conversation with the young lady went on for approximately three hours,
during which time, again, we entertained these questions.
And the whole time I'm answering, I'm listening to my own responses and
trying not to betray this to the student.
I was rapidly concluding that this is not making good scientific sense.
What I'm telling this young lady and what I told the students this morning is not
good science.
So far, I guess, we just haven't been lucky enough to pick up the critical
evidence.
It dawned on me right then and there that evolution was bankrupt as a scientific
theory.
Well, if that were so, if life did not originate by a naturalistic,
materialistic, spontaneous process, what was the alternative explanation?
Oh, my God.
And I said it then, not in blasphemy, but in awe.
What happened that afternoon was, first of all, a mortal embarrassment to me
as a professor.
Professing to be wise, the professor was made a fool.
And then, secondly, with the realization that, hey, God exists and God created,
was that experience of fear.
Now, that's enough to turn a corner in anyone's life.
After much study and soul-searching, Dr. Lumsden became a creationist first and
then a Christian.
One event led to the other, and the culmination was finding myself before a
saving altar, on my knees, that stiff neck broken, in obedience, asking Jesus to come
into my life to be my Lord and personal Savior.
Dr. Lumsden, former evolutionary professor, went on to become a committed
creationist.
Unfortunately, this champion of creation science has died.
But not without leaving us his important conclusion that in light of the great
recent advances in science, evolution is no longer tenable.
The evidence of science, the best in paleontology, the best in biochemistry,
the best in genetics and so on, is all compelling for creation.
Creation theory does not rest on some purely metaphysical principles.
It rests on the same science that evolution theory would rest on,
except that the better explanation is creation, not naturalistic, materialistic,
stochastic, or random evolutionary process.
What an incredible story of a transformed life!
I challenge anyone who believes in evolution to study the facts for himself.
Unless his mind is already made up and he doesn't want to be confused by the facts,
I believe anyone with an open mind who looks at the data will see, just as Dr.
Lumsden did, that evolution is indeed scientifically bankrupt.
If one were to ask how much blood has actually been shed in the name of
Darwinism, I think for most people it would be a total surprise.
Because you could start off with Darwin and his little theory, and I'm sure Darwin
never had a clue of where it would lead to.
But if we were not made in the image of God, but rather in the image of man,
then you could get rid of the undesirables.
Well, this went along, and it certainly went along in America as much as Europe,
where they sterilized what they called the feeble-minded.
We see vestiges of social Darwinism even today, particularly among those who would
say, we're better off if we don't bring children into the world when they're
coming in under disadvantageous circumstances.
Whether that's economic, or whether perhaps they don't fit in the plans of a
family because you don't want to get too large, or maybe it's not exactly the child
you wanted, there may be a risk here in that child, and so we terminate
pregnancies.
And that is a form of social Darwinism.
I had a child that was born with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, and that child was a
magnificent human being.
And I wouldn't have done without that child for anything in the world.
When you have a biology teacher mentioning scientific facts, like the Cambrian
explosion, he's out of work.
Lawsuits are brought to prevent facts from being told about Darwinism because
children must be baptized in the religion of Darwinism to prepare them for the
coming belief in atheism.
And ordinary people are constantly on the defensive on this separation of church and
state, separation of church and state.
Well, that means separation of your church and state.
Their church is the state.
Dear friend, we have had nearly 150 years of the theory of Darwinian evolution.
And what has it brought us?
Whether Darwin intended it or not, millions of deaths.
The destruction of those deemed inferior.
The devaluing of human life.
Increasing hopelessness.
Darwin's legacy has been deadly indeed.
Ironically, many of the scientific foundations on which evolution is based
are crumbling.
Yet, the ACLU and their friends on the courts make sure that there's only one
view of science taught in our schools.
A godless one at that.
The time has come to recognize that evolution is a bad idea and should be,
frankly, discarded into the dustbin of history.
Thank you for joining me today, dear friend, for this special broadcast.
And may God, the creator and sustainer of all life, bless you and yours.
If you would like information about Dr. Kennedy's weekly television program,
The Coral Ridge Hour, or his daily radio program, Truths That Transform,
log on to www.crm.tv.