Thinking Christian

A few days ago Tony Hoffman suggested,

Expelled’s charge and the constant revival of this aspersion on this website — that Darwin leads to Hitler — seems fundamentally wrongheaded….

Tom, you keep saying that although you concede that there is no philosophical link from Darwin to Hitler there is in fact a historical one. While I agree with you, I have no idea what your point is in raising it….

It’s a good question. Besides having had about half a dozen deadlines land on me since then, I’ve had to take time to give it some serious thought. Now that I have some time again, what, indeed, is the point of all this?

I hope Tony recognizes I didn’t start this discussion. It was brought up by a movie that’s proving to be fairly popular, as documentaries go. There were some who objected that the Darwin-Hitler link was an ID proponents’ fabrication. I’ve weighed in to respond to that, but I didn’t start it.

Also, if one reviews what I’ve actually posted on this topic, I think “constant revival of this aspersion” is overstated. I wrote one post calling for understanding on why this is such a sensitive issue. I hope an approach of that sort isn’t considered off limits. Other than that, I’ve posted just one link to an article on another website, and two other sentences. Of course there has also been discussion, fueled by participants on all sides of the issue.

But whether or not I’m not to blame as Tony apparently thinks I am, that doesn’t address his real question: why would anybody expend any effort on this at all? Isn’t it all a complete red herring, a distraction from genuine issues? I don’t think so.

First, we ought to learn from history. That ought to be relatively uncontroversial. If the German scientists made a mistake interpreting Darwin, then for heaven’s sake, let’s not forget what they did, and make the same kinds of mistakes all over again! I see potential for it even in our enlightened 21st century. Haeckel’s biggest error was dehumanizing some races of humanity. Peter Singer and PETA are doing the same for the whole human race. For Ingrid Newkirk of PETA, “a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.” For Singer, we are guilty of “speciesism” if we hold humans to be of more value than animals. This is Haeckel’s error writ large.

Second, it’s not quite true that there is no philosophical link from Darwin to Hitler. There are two at least two valid connections between them.

A. There is an ethical consequence to Darwinism. It is not, as was supposed at the time, that it leads to a moral requirement that we “advance the species.” The connection is this: naturalistic Darwinism, if taken to be the sole explanation for all of life,* erases all ethical requirements. It is specifically the naturalism–closely related to atheism–that is the serious problem in all non-theistic versions of evolution (which I think answers Point 1 in Tony’s comment).

I’ve never seen a good refutation or even rebuttal for this. Paul stated the issue quite well two and a half years ago, long before the current debate began:

Just to be clear, I think the Holocaust was wrong. From my culture’s morality, from many cultures’ morality, but not from Hitler’s. I would fight against it no less.

That’s a hole big enough to drive a Panzer division through. Paul would “fight against it,” and for that I commend him; yet for him, that’s all he has. The only ultimate moral decider is power:

A relativistic moral law is made when a group of people (family, tribe, culture, country, etc.) decide to do so. There is no absolute or objective foundation for doing so: as I’ve said before, it is merely a question of power what laws are made…. When differing moral cultures clash, it’s up to power to decide the difference. Doesn’t look pretty, but that’s the way it is, assuming there’s no God.

Fighting is all anyone can do. There’s no recourse to any higher ethic. If Hitler had won, his power would have decided the difference between the differing moral cultures. Now, lest anyone think I’m picking on Paul, I think he’s right, based on his assumptions. I think he gets it. “That’s the way it is, assuming there’s no God,” says Paul, quite rightly; and that’s an assumption that squares up quite nicely with naturalistic, unguided evolution.

B. There is an ontological implication in Darwinism: humans are the same kind of thing as animals. Hitler applied this selectively, to be sure, but he applied it with great effect. He packed up hordes of people on trains like cattle, took them to the slaughtering plant, and used their parts as raw materials for industry. Yes–they wove gunny sacks out of Jewish hair. You can see unused remains of it still warehoused at Dachau. This, I believe, is why we abhor Hitler so much more than other great murderers like Stalin or Mao: they all killed; but only Hitler so thoroughly dehumanized. Darwinism dehumanizes in a different way. Hitler treated humans like animals; Darwinism says that’s what we are.

Third, ideas matter. I suppose we could trace all kinds of historical linkages to the Holocaust. In fact, I’ve actually heard people say this, even taking it to ridiculous extremes: “if you’re going to say Darwin was responsible, then so were the people who invented shower heads. It couldn’t have happened without them, either!” The difference is in ideas and their consequences. Darwinism–the naturalistic version–is not ethically neutral. It is not lacking in ethical implications. True, it doesn’t prescribe an ethic–it just applies a kind of metaphorical poison gas to any overarching, culture-transcending ethic a nation might turn to, in deciding whether to stand with or against a would-be tyrant like Hitler.

Fourth, contrary to Tony’s point 2, influencers certainly can be blamed for the actions of others that follow. They can be blamed to the extent that others did harm while following them:

• Doing actions the influencers recommended, taught, or prescribed, or
• Doing actions for which the influencers opened an ideological or ethical door, which would not otherwise have been opened.

Darwin was responsible in the second sense. This is the sense in which Berlinski (in Expelled), and Weikart (in his book on this topic) said, “Darwinism was not a sufficient condition for Hitler’s atrocities, but it was a necessary condition.” Without Darwinism, I believe, Germany would have resisted Hitler. It was not the only necessary link leading up to Nazism, but it was one of them.

*This is the sense in which I am speaking of “Darwinism” throughout this article: naturalistic evolution by means of random variation and natural selection, unguided by any intelligence. I recognize there are other versions of evolutionary theory.

This from Martin Cothran is the review of Expelled I wish I had been a good enough writer to do. It includes:

In fact, ID critics seem to find it singularly profound to judge this movie on criteria that have little to do with the purpose of the movie. The movie doesn’t prove ID; the movie doesn’t give an accurate and detailed scientific description of this or that; the movie doesn’t give a balanced treatment of the issue; yada, yada, yada. Of course, these are not things the movie even purports to do, much less attempt. This is not a movie about intelligent design or evolution. This is a movie about the debate over intelligent design and evolution. Any criticisms that don’t take account of this are simply nonsensical and irrelevant.

If you slog through the comments from critics and keep your eye peeled, you can find an occasional criticism that, right or wrong, actually belongs in a movie review. One of these rare specimens is the charge that the film is “boring.” C’mon. Unless you fall within the category of totally ignorant of the issue of evolution and uncaring (in which case you didn’t buy a ticket to go see the movie in the first place), you’re going to be mad–either at the Darwinists’ ideological cartel, or at the producers for making the movie. You’re either going to be cheering Ben Stein on or gnawing on knuckles in frustration. But bored? No way.

Well, finally I’ve seen it. I loved it. It was entertaining, it was motivating, it was interesting, at times it was moving. That’s my short reaction.

From there, though, I’m going to say what I wish many others writing about this movie would say: I’m too engaged in it to try to write an objective review, so I’m not going to try. I have something to say, but we all know it’s coming from my acknowledged position as someone who supports Expelled’s general thesis. (This is not the time for me to support my position, by the way. I’ve done that before, I’ll do it again, but not now.)

First, I can easily tell why some people didn’t like it. If you disagree strongly with its thesis, you’re going to hate the film. Nothing else could be expected. Reviews by anti-ID writers claiming to be objective, and especially on the anti-ID blogs, need to be taken with a large grain of salt. (Reviews by anti-ID writers who haven’t even even seen the film will have to be swallowed with an entire salt-lick–or better yet, not ingested at all.)

Second, the Darwin-to-Nazism connection was not over-stated. Historical facts are historical facts.

Third, I appreciate the way some evolutionary scientists are recorded on film speaking the truth. Michael Ruse and Richard Dawkins said they don’t have a clue (well, Ruse has a clue, but not a very good one) how life originated. Will Provine said evolution means life is meaningless and free will does not exist. P.Z. Myers said one of his purposes as a scientist is to eliminate religion. This is not news to anyone who has been participating in this debate, but it will be to a lot of other viewers.

Fourth, I’m surprised I haven’t seen more noise raised about how religion is dwelt on in the film. There’s been some mention of it at Panda’s Thumb, and especially by Larry Arnhart, but I would have thought they would have been all over this. The relation between ID and religion keeps being over-simplified, and Expelled offers a ripe target for taunters who tend to do that: “See, it’s all about religion after all! Told you so!” I’ve encountered some of that, but having seen the film now I’m surprised there hasn’t been more.

But then, that’s the aspect of this debate I’m most interested in. Our church’s youth group is going to see the film tomorrow, and since I’ll be leading them later on through some reflections on it, I’ll be going with them. I’ll have more to say about this religion connection after that.

The other burning question is, what will this movie contribute to the evolution-ID debate? From the evolutionist side, anger. For others, it’s the kind of thing that ought to whet an appetite for more information. It touched on the science just enough to show that ID has something going for it–mostly in terms of the origin of life, and in the massive complexity of the cell. To believe ID is valid just on the basis of the film, having done no other study, would be jumping to an unwarranted conclusion. (Their conclusion might be right, but their way of coming to it is inadequate.)

If on the other hand the film opens the door for more research–through increased academic freedom, and increasing interest in the topic–it will have a slow but very significant effect on the debate.

In the meantime, I strongly encourage you to see Expelled.

William Dembski asked again yesterday, “What’s wrong with uttering ‘Darwin’ and ‘Hitler’ in the same breath?” There actually is a connection, he says (rightly), so why is something like Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed so vilified for saying so? Expelled’s most criticized feature in the period prior to its release has been its use of Nazi-related imagery. (I was on an airplane last night, so I still haven’t seen the film myself.)

Dembski asked this question rhetorically. It would help to consider some actual answers anyway. I propose four of them here.

1. There is no inevitable link from Darwin to Hitler.

Richard Dawkins pointed this out in his predictably scathing review of Expelled:

It is one of the classic philosophical fallacies to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. Stein (or whoever wrote his script for him) is implying that Hitler committed that fallacy with respect to Darwinism.

He goes on to say he doubts Hitler is more guilty of this fallacy than other world leaders have been. Dawkins is right at least to this extent: to say, or even to imply, that there is a strict philosophical and ethical progression from Darwin to Dachau is wrong. Darwin’s theory was a description of how life’s complexity and diversity arose. It’s a statement of a condition of nature. As such, it contains no ethical imperative. It just is, or rather, Darwinian theory just claims to tell about an “is.” Oughts don’t come from is-es.

Now, as I have suggested elsewhere, we still have to wonder about the problem this raises. For Dawkins and others, neo-Darwinism is the sole explanation for life. If the sole explanation of life cannot lead to any oughts, then are there any oughts at all? Where do they come from? Dawkins’s own ethics (see his review article, in the paragraph about Hitler) have nothing to do with his beliefs about what life is about. They almost seemed snatched out of thin air, so disconnected are they from his other views regarding reality.

Nevertheless, we must be quite cautious never to suggest that Darwin led inevitably to Hitler by philosophical necessity.

2. We’ve forgotten that there is an historical link from Darwin to Hitler.

Darwinism did not have to lead to Hitler, but the way evolution was interpreted in Germany, it happened anyway. The story is told in Richard Weikart’s From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany. David Klinghoffer has recently written a short synopsis of the same. Weikart traces a line among German scientists, physicians, psychiatrists and other thinkers that began a (philosophically false yet historically real) belief that, under evolutionary theory, the “progress of the species” is a great moral imperative. Progress was defined such that the mentally or physically handicapped were impediments to this progress, so they should not be allowed to reproduce. Eugenic practices–both forced sterilization and “elimination” (killing)–were vigorously promoted.

This theory was not confined just to individuals, though. The Northern European “species” of humans (yes, they used that term) was considered the most advanced. Ernst Haeckel, famous for doctoring drawings of embryos, used his creative artistry also to “show” that some “species” of humans were more close related to simians (apes, etc.) than to Europeans. I’ve been unable to find an internet-available version of the Haeckel woodcut that Weikart reproduced in his book, but there is one very similar to it here. Just imagine the same, only rearranged to show a “progression” from human to ape, in which the Hottentot and Papuan are placed next to the simian, and look much more simian than human (as Haeckel represents them).

Haeckel was not the only one. There was, as a matter of historical fact, an influential group of people writing of a moral imperative to improve humanity by eliminating its “lesser” members. These scientists do not appear to have been particularly anti-Semitic–that was HItler’s special contribution to the horror. But they laid a cultural groundwork. I’m convinced that Hitler could never have persuaded an entire nation to cooperate with his murderous program if they had not already been conditioned by this principle of racially-oriented eugenics. Darwin has hardly the only basis for Nazism–war and anti-Semitism have a much longer history than that!–but this particular form of murder could not, in my opinion, have happened without the groundwork laid by German Darwinists.

3. The Darwin-Hitler link carries incredible emotional and rhetorical power.

I find myself having to pause often for a sigh or a deep breath when I’m writing on this topic. Hitler was a horror. He invokes an incredible emotional effect–emotions that are entirely legitimate. We recoil from the images of the Holocaust.

Now when I try to put myself in the shoes of someone who is not prone in the first place to support Expelled’s message, I can easily imagine feeling outraged. Part of that outrage would be toward the Holocaust itself, and part of it would be toward the possibility that Expelled is making an effective point with it. But this leads to a far deeper and more important issue:

4. We’ve sacralized the Holocaust, so that it seems wrong to use it in support of another purpose.

Dembski’s article, to which this one is a response, refers to the Anti-Defamation League’s complaint of “trivializing the horrors of the Holocaust.” I don’t think that just speaking of historical realities leading up to the Holocaust could be considered trivializing. The problem is that this was used to support another theory, another agenda.

Let me compare this to something else on a far smaller and less important scale. For me as a musician and as a Christian believer, there is hardly anything higher or greater in all of art than Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus. Musically magnificent, it is also an incredibly glorious recounting of the greatness of Jesus Christ and his coming kingdom. Some bright advertising agency apparently got the idea, though, that its message was not much more than, “Gosh, I’m happy.” And they used it as the musical score for a toilet tissue advertisement. I was incensed. I think that ad disappeared rather quickly–I don’t watch much TV so I don’t know for sure–but I still get worked up just remembering it.

Six million deaths are considerably more significant than that, and if we can distinguish “sacralizing” from “deifying,” then there is something sacred, holy, and untouchable about the six million–each of them as individuals, and collectively as the victims of the Holocaust. We tread on holy ground here, and we ought to expect emotions to rise quickly and forcefully. Why is it wrong to say “Darwin” and “Hitler” in the same breath? Partly for the same reason, magnified, that it’s wrong to use the Hallelujah Chorus to sell toilet tissue.

And yet…

Yet there is a difference, too. God help us if we don’t learn from the Holocaust. If there really was an historical link from Darwin to Hitler–and there was–we must learn what happened, and why. The very sacredness of the Holocaust, the memory of the victims, demands it.

Richard Weikart’s recent article on this topic outlines six lessons to learn from it. I will focus on just one. What was it about Hitler and the Holocaust that was (and is) so horrifying? Stalin and Mao both killed more people than Hitler did. Pol Pot and Idi Amin rank high among genocidal maniacs. Why Hitler? Why is it that when we want to point to one glaring example of utter evil, it’s always his name that comes up?

I think it’s because before he killed the six million, he dehumanized them. He dehumanized them rhetorically, in his writings and his speeches; and he dehumanized them by packing them like merchandise on trains, carting them off to death factories, killing them by assembly-line methods, using them for horrific experiments, and storing parts in warehouses. There’s still a roomful of human hair at Dachau, according to a friend of mine who has visited there. The thought angers me deeply even as I write this. Yes, Hitler was worse than the rest!

Before Hitler, Haeckel dehumanized vast sections of humanity. He did it in the name of evolution. And here, I think, the philosophical link is valid. There may not be an “ought” to derive from the “is” of evolution, but there is this: if Darwin’s version (along with its 21st century updates) is the whole story of humans, then there isn’t much difference between us and any other organism. There is no such thing as “more advanced,” because evolution knows no advancement except for the more excellent adaptation to an ecological niche. Ingrid Newkirk of PETA can rightly say, “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy,” because there’s no real difference at the bottom of it all, no ontological difference.

I do not think it’s prostituting the Holocaust to draw this lesson from it: that which dehumanizes, points us toward Auschwitz and Dachau.

Conclusion

None of this has a lot to do with the manner in which Nazism was portrayed in Expelled. It couldn’t–I haven’t seen the movie yet. I hope, though, that it will help bring understanding to both sides: that supporters of Darwin will recognize there’s an actual historical basis for linking Darwin to Hitler, and it’s not wrong to say so. I hope others who disagree with evolution will be aware of the emotions we may stir up by saying so. I hope we can reason together on these things, learning from the facts, recognizing the real feelings, learning for the future.

I’ll be on an airplane this evening, so I won’t see Expelled until sometime later this weekend. But I’ll be eager to read the reports tomorrow morning.

Here is what I hope not to see on the ID/Christian blogs: “We’re right! They’re idiots!” Panda’s Thumb has been saying that kind of thing all along from its anti-ID perspective, and other media are tending to pick up that theme.

I’m calling on ID and Christian bloggers to watch the film with careful discernment. I don’t know how well the film will prove its intended point and I don’t know how well its dramatic construction will be. I do know this: if we love the way it’s presented (or not), and if we agree with most of what it says (or not), we do not have to take a unidimensional, black/white stance that says it’s all good or all bad. We can be watching for points where we can agree strongly, while staying alert for possible weak points or errors.

I hope to see thoughtful responses in the blogs. I hope also to see gracious ones as well, no matter how you good or bad you think the film proves to be.

Two articles of mine posted on other websites today:

On BreakPoint.com: Handling a Hot Topic (how Christians ought to engage in controversies like the one over Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed).

And on the website for the Center for a Just Society, the first of two articles on the whether there was some connection between Darwinism and Nazism, as the movie claims. This first one looks at Richard Dawkins’s to the matter in his review of the movie Expelled. The second one, to be published around Monday, acknowledges that no legitimate philosophical link can be drawn from Darwinism to Hitler’s ethics. There’s another question, though: was there an historical connection regardless?

I must refer you also to Richard Weikart’s expert article on that topic, published yesterday.

Roger Moore asks,

What is Ben Stein afraid of?

That’s his headline for a column in today’s Orlando Sentinel.

It’s funny, really. Ben Stein knew going into this that there would be controversy, antagonism, even ridicule. That’s what Expelled is about. Does Moore think he just suddenly, at this late date, discovered there might be some opposition out there? When he signed up for this was he acting like someone controlled by fear?

Moore said the press conference call last week was “over-controlled.” I have no experience with other press conference calls. I do know that if all callers had been able to speak, it would have been nothing but noise and a complete waste of time. Could they have invited a handful of reporters to speak? I don’t know. Maybe. Would P.Z. Myers have been a good choice as an impartial representative of the press? You can answer that as well as I.

Moore links to Ned Potter’s ABC Science and Society report on the press conference. Potter links to the invitation Myers received for the press conference–the Panda’s Thumb version, that is, the one that completely misrepresents the invitation. Potter also links to Myers’s version of the call. Nice, balanced coverage represented there.

What is Ben Stein afraid of? He’s not afraid of the controversy, that’s for sure. Unbalanced reporting like this has characterized this debate for years, and he knew it going in.

Inside Higher Ed has a “Quick Take” today on PZ Myers jumping in uninvited on a conference call last week. Scroll down the page for the paragraph beginning:

A tightly managed conference call with Ben Stein and producers of the upcoming documentary “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” became the scene of yet another clash between proponents of intelligent design and defenders of evolutionary theory….

It’s a well balanced summary of the event. “Tightly managed” could have all kinds of connotations. The call was set up so that all participants would be muted except the interviewees and the moderator. Questions were taken by email. As one of very many participants on the call, I took it to mean that the interviewees would be permitted to speak without dozens of interruptions coming after each sentence. It would have been nothing but noise were it not “tightly managed.”

The report closes by calling Ben Stein’s academic qualifications into question. No surprise there–he’s calling academia into question.

Blogspotted by Panda’s Thumb! I’m so excited! What more could a blogger ask?

Here’s what they said:

Today we sat in on a conference call with the Expelled frauds. PZ has his story up, and others will probably follow. However, some people, including the producers of Expelled, have already taken to accuse us of crashing their call, much like the lies about PZ crashing the Expelled screening.This is false. We got an explicit invitation yesterday from Expelled‘s media relations firm to participate, note to whom the invitation is addressed.

Seriously, now: I didn’t accuse anybody of sneaking in to listen. As far as I know the film’s producers wanted them to be there. But the call was designed for attendees to be muted, to let the interviewees and the moderator speak. Questions were taken by email. There were a lot of people on the call and it would have been impossible to proceed any other way.

P.Z. Myers crashed the call by interrupting. Not by listening, but by speaking. And he knows it. I could get nasty with PT for calling me a liar, when the facts are so clearly and obviously otherwise. But I’ll leave it at this, for now.

Comments will be closed on this post, mostly for reasons stated like those stated here, and also because they’re not such a fun group to play with. Experience with my previous post showed that some of that crowd are just not very observant of the discussion policies here.

Update 8:45 pm: regarding accusations from Panda’s Thumb that this is a lie, please see here.

At this moment there is a telephone conference call underway with Ben Stein and the producers of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. It is an invitation-only conference. The call was interrupted by someone representing himself as P.Z. Myers, a Minnesota scientist and strident opponent of religion and of Intelligent Design. This person broke in and interrupted the call and accused the movie-makers of lying. This was about 40 minutes into a 60 minute conference. Others on the call included producers Mark Mathis, Logan Craft, and Walt Ruloff.

Just last week Myers also tried to crash an invitation-only screening of the film in Minneapolis. He claims he went to an open RSVP website to get himself signed up to come. That claim is undermined in that the screening was quite clearly by invitation, “RSVP” means “please respond to this invitation,” and he knew he was not invited.

He has apparently just now done it again.

But clearly the ruckus he and others have raised is far off the real point, which is the content of the film.

Expelled producer Mark Mathis said near the end:

“If this debate were really just about scientific ideas–when was the last time you heard about people getting together to have a passionate exchange about gravity or entropy? But you do get it with this one. The biggest part of this argument is about a worldview. If you acknowledge that design can be discovered scientifically, then the whole worldview of atheism crashes down around you. So they defend evolution with incredible vigor. And on the flip side, people ask, “Why is this being suppressed? Why do they have such a stranglehold on the science departments?”

“Even just now on the phone P.Z. went to the Holocaust footage and misrepresented what has been said about it–which we just explained again a few moments before on this phone call….

“But the core content of the film is that there are scientists being persecuted, and it needs to stop.”

I have not seen the film, but I have noticed, as the producers and Ben Stein noted, that all the controversy in the blogosphere has been over peripheral issues: who got invited into a showing, for example. The complaints haven’t been about the substance. It’s not that ID antagonists have not had opportunity to see it. Richard Dawkins was admitted to the same showing that P.Z. Myers was excluded from. (The producers maintain that they knew he was entering, by the way.) Last week in Nashville, they say, they took initiative to call ID antagonist Michael Shermer and ask him to attend a screening.

This, by the way, demonstrates it wasn’t some kind of paranoia that led them to exclude P.Z. Myers. Frankly, in view of the way Myers speaks about his opponents on his blog, I would be inclined not to invite him in to a private discussion too. That same angry tone was evident in the person on the phone just now. It makes perfectly good sense that they would have admitted Dawkins and not Myers–for Dawkins, for all his anti-religious rhetoric, at least maintains a much more courteous tone.

Paul Lauer, the moderator, handled it graciously in my opinion, given that the call had been crashed. I wonder how the caller got on the conference with voice capabilities–everyone else on the call except the moderator and interviewees was muted (press questions were taken by email).

I’m more interested now than ever to see the film.

Note on comments, added at 6:05 pm. I’ve already deleted one obscenity posted here. This is not Pharyngula, and this blog has discussion standards. This is the weekend, and I do not intend to babysit commenters. I’m going to close comments intermittently as needed when I’m not available to keep an eye on it. I’ll close them completely if needed.

See also Barry Carey on this topic.