Blue Collar Scientist

Ron Britton over at Bay of Fundie today has a good post about peculiar (and as he points out, minority) Christian views of science. It is worth a read, and covers such topics as the necessity of science’s naturalistic approach, the strange way that some Christians become separatists (”They invent themselves out of the majority”), and the currently hot topic of how biologists are really Nazis and are conspiring to kill another six million people in the next holocaust.

One remark made in the post, though, caught my attention, and I couldn’t let it go. Eventually I felt it worthwhile to leave a comment. Don’t get me wrong - I’m not disagreeing with Ron in any way here. I’m just pointing out that evolution denialists are even stupider than he makes them out to be. After I wrote it, I decided it might be appropriate to publish it here as well. So here’s my comment in its entirety (quoting Ron first):

The only real connection between evolution and Nazi-ism is that a few people misunderstood evolution, and they misapplied their distorted knowledge to the social sciences. Darwin is not responsible for the misunderstanding and misuse of his theory….

I don’t mean to be contentious, but even though it is technically correct, this is too generous to the evolution-denying religious whackos who want to link Darwin and/or evolution to Hitler and Nazism. Let me explain….

By Darwin’s time, it was already understood that species could change with time. This knowledge was put into practice in selective breeding of crops, flowers, livestock, puppy dogs, and so on, which had been done for centuries by Darwin’s time.

Darwin’s great insight, his big innovation and contribution to biology, was showing that nature itself served as a selective breeding engine - that instead of a human breeder making the choices about which organisms got to reproduce, in the wild it was nature that made such “decisions,” whether this was a result of the size and hardness of seeds that birds were eating, or the influence of storms, or what have you.

So yes, these people misunderstood evolution, and applied their misunderstanding in an evil way. But they didn’t misunderstand Darwin - they were, and are today, too ignorant to even know what Darwin was talking about, and what his contribution to science entailed. The Nazis applied the principles of deliberate, human-controlled selective breeding programs to what they thought were the problems of their society. Stupid people who know less than nothing about evolution somehow decided this was related to Charles Darwin.

The point I’m trying to make is that the evolutionary denialists - who are demonstrably (and sickeningly) gleefully happy about Nazism and the killing of six million people because it shows evolution is evil - are actually ignorant at a profoundly more fundamental level than they are usually called out for.

Let’s be clear here: Six million Jews Gypsies, and unfortunate others weren’t killed in the Holocaust by natural causes. If the denialists are genuinely trying link Darwin to the Holocaust, that’s what they’re saying - in essence, they are claiming that Holocaust victims died, and deservedly so, because they were unfit. Which is remarkably similar to what Hitler claimed.

But it isn’t true. Holocaust victims were killed by people, not nature; and people already understood well before Darwin’s time the effect that killing off a population - of people, or cattle, or whatever else - would have.

We’ve all heard about Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a propaganda movie being promoted by radical religious extremists that claims Hitler was inspired by Darwin to kill millions of Jewish people.

I have been copied on the following letter, purportedly sent to a theater employee, concerning the movie. I’ve been unable to learn any further details about the sender or recipient, and consider the letter apochryphal - I might be getting hoaxed or scammed. But I still think it is a pretty admirable piece of work. I’ve edited it a little to remove a few grammatical errors and clumsy constructions.

As you are aware, the movie Expelled claims that Hitler, the dictator of Germany responsible for the Holocaust, was inspired by the English biologist Charles Darwin, whose explanation of the diversity of life has, the movie says, a corrupting influence on the morals and virtues of people.

Millions, if not billions, of people around the world understand and accept Charles Darwin’s theory, including many heads of state and people in other powerful positions. If it were true that this scientific idea was morally corrupting, it is inexplicable why they have failed to attempt to kill millions of people in gas chambers in every country in the world at all times during the last 150 years.

Linking Charles Darwin with the Holocaust is a trashy lie. The Holocaust was merely another pogrom - a big one, to be sure, but not different from any other pogrom in its motivation or result. Pogroms are religious riots that took place over many hundreds of years, before and after the time of Darwin. The first anti-Jewish pogrom I am aware of took place in 38 CE during the reign of the Roman emperor Caligula. Pogroms were characterized by the destruction of the victim groups’ homes, business, and religious buildings, and by killings. I have enclosed a photograph of some of the victims, all of them children, of a pogrom that took place in Russia in 1905, which was instigated and led by Christian ministers. Normally I would not mention that, but it has ironic implications for the message of this movie.

A variety of cultural and political forces made Germany particularly susceptible to anti-Semitic pogroms in the middle 20th century. Hitler is well documented to have been influenced by a variety of ideas, and he frequently searched for anything, from any source, which he could take out of context to support his views. His sources included Greek history and philosophy, Napoleon, Martin Luther, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and the Bible, among many others. It should go without saying that Hitler perpetrated the Holocaust because he was evil, and not because he was influenced by any single, particular idea.

My uncle and aunt on my mother’s side were killed in the Holocaust. My father fought in the war, and was wounded by Nazi gunshots to his shoulder and hip. He remained crippled until his death twenty years ago. His brother, my uncle, was killed in the war, shot by Nazi soldiers.

As a daughter of Nazi victims, and the only person with a personal stake in preserving the memory and honoring the roles of my family during this dark period of history, I must speak out against this film’s abuse of history. By trivializing the very real tragedy of the Nazi killings, by depicting peaceful and gentle college professors as cheerleaders for killings, gas chambers, concentration camps, and other Nazi-style crimes against humanity, the film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed fulfills no other function than excusing Nazi hatred. For who, if this movie’s abhorrent claims are true, could be held to account for their actions in support of the Nazi regime, when they had been inevitably corrupted by a dangerous and virulent idea to which people can have no immunity? By promoting this viewpoint, the film smears the most respected pillars of our American communities and attacks the foundation of American values and liberties.

Despite my opposition to and contempt for this film, I support your theater company’s right to screen the movie, if they choose to do so. Worse than the expression of Expelled’s disgusting morals would be the suppression of even such hateful speech as they peddle. I realize you will have little, if any control on a decision to screen it. Still, I cannot help but express my misgivings, as such an attack on civilization as Expelled represents should not go unanswered in civil society.

The photo that was included with the letter appears to be this one.

I have posted previously that the creationists’ minions have been advancing the myth of Hitler’s atheistic motivations at the science presentations I’ve been giving, and I’ve documented some of Hitler’s own remarks that show he was a Christian and demonstrate that his inspiration for eugenics came from ancient Greece.

Now Skeptico, one of my favorite bloggers, has pointed out several passages from Mein Kampf that further illustrate how Hitler was influenced by Christianity. Take note, all who are in the same boat with me.

From Mein Kampf:

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 to 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.

It is not plausible to believe that Hitler, if he were an atheist, would have problems with a Christian political party trying to get votes from Jews for theological reasons.

But there’s more.

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.

This is simply not something an atheist would say.

Skeptico provides the only necessary commentary:

There’s a lot more of the same in Mein Kampf, and in other speeches Hitler gave, if you can stomach reading any more. It doesn’t sound to me as though Charles Darwin was much of an influence. In fact, I haven’t been able to find even one mention of Darwin or the theory of evolution in Mein Kampf. Not one. Now, isn’t that strange? Don’t you think that if Hitler had been influenced by Darwin that he would have mentioned it somewhere in his book? Why wouldn’t he? But not even once.

Skeptico also provides a good set of links to other resources on the subject.

The BCS does a lot of public speaking about science. It’s mostly astronomy, and some physics, but I emphasize the scientific method and how we know what we know, and that opens up the dialog with the audience to just about any scientific subject. Because so many whackjobs hate science in general, and evolution in particular, a lot of the give-and-take involves evolution.

Over the last six months or so, the under-20 crowd seems to be parroting the meme that Hitler practiced Darwinism, therefore Darwinism is bad. (Nevermind that a lot of evolutionary theory these days is non-Darwinian.) I’m guessing that there is some creationist propaganda mill that is priming these foot soldiers with the talking points, because everyone who brings the topic up says pretty much the same thing.

I’m working up a mini-program in response to these kinds of claims, and collecting pertinent quotations of Hitler’s to show the sources of his ideas. Via Bay of Fundy, here’s the latest addition to my collection:

At one time the Spartans were capable of such a wise measure, but not our present, mendaciously sentimental, bourgeois patriotic nonsense. The rule of six thousand Spartans over three hundred and fifty thousand Helots was only thinkable in consequence of the high racial value of the Spartans. But this was the result of a systematic race preservation; thus Sparta must be regarded as the first Völkisch State. The exposure of the sick, weak, deformed children, in short, their destruction, was more decent and in truth a thousand times more humane than the wretched insanity of our day which preserves the most pathological subject, and indeed at any price, and yet takes the life of a hundred thousand healthy children in consequence of birth control or through abortions, in order subsequently to breed a race of degenerates burdened with illnesses.

That’s from Hitler’s Zweites Buch, which wasn’t published until 1961. What this quotation helps establish is twofold - first, that eugenics was practiced long before Darwin’s time, and second, that a significant source of Hitler’s ideas on the subject derive from ancient Greece.

More as the program takes shape….