You obviously havent studied theology. Augustine said it years ago, the six days of Genesis are open to a wide range of interpretation.

I believe the Christian is in a good position to follow the evidence wherever it leads. The atheist has no other choice, He must find a way to explain how life could arise from purely naturalistic processes.

Darwin had no clue how truly complex the living cell is.

I am saying there are some major problems.

Inability to explain the coming of existence of the first cell present major problems.

I know.

I would not call it mythical, you now have people like Anthony Flew urging for intelligent design.

The idea that man is created in Gods image is the highest value you can put on life. Christianity has a sad history. I will not run from that. We must be careful that we do not lay these atrocities at the feet of Christ though. Jesus said my kingdom is not of this world that men should fight over it. We need to look at his teachings and his life if we are going to find out what Christianity really is.

Ben stein does make them look pretty silly. Some of them do say some fantastic stuff though. I want to make clear that Ben Stein is no Christian. I believe he is agnostic.

Peter Singer, the bioethicist at Princeton University who supports infanticide and euthanasia for the disabled, for instance, admits that Darwinism underpins his dismissal of the sanctity of human life. Richard Dawkins likewise claims Darwinian support for euthanasia.

I agree with Ruse that Hitler’s ideology was not built solely on Darwinism. Nonetheless, Ruse does not seem to realize that Darwinism was a central, guiding principle of Nazi ideology, especially of Hitler’s own world view. Richard Evans, historian at Cambridge University, has explained, "The real core of Nazi beliefs lay in the faith Hitler proclaimed in his speech of September 1938 in science—a Nazi view of science—as the basis for action. Science demanded the furtherance of the interests not of God but of the human race, and above all the German race and its future in a world ruled by ineluctable laws of Darwinian competition between races and between individuals." This is not a controversial claim by anti-evolutionists, but it is commonly recognized by scholars who study Nazism.


Richard Weikart is professor of history at California State University, Stanislaus, and author of From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany.

I will say this, I don't believe Darwinism leads one to be Nazi, but I do now believe there is a definite link btw. Nazi ideology and Darwin. I also believe Darwinism was not the only factor motivating the Nazi's to commit the atrocities that happened. I am going to get this book to investigate this further.



"Richard Weikart's outstanding book shows in sober and convincing detail how Darwinist thinkers in Germany had developed an amoral attitude to human society," says Dr. Richard Evans, Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge, and author of "The Coming of the Third Reich." "This provided Hitler and the Nazis with a scientific justification for the policies they pursued once they came to power."

Weikart explains the revolutionary impact Darwinism had on ethics and morality. He demonstrates that many leading Darwinian biologists and social thinkers in Germany believed that Darwinism overturned traditional Judeo-Christian and Enlightenment ethics, especially those pertaining to the sacredness of human life. Many of these thinkers supported moral relativism, yet simultaneously exalted evolutionary "fitness" (especially in terms of intelligence and health) as the highest arbiter of morality. Weikart concludes that Darwinism played a key role not only in the rise of eugenics, but also in euthanasia, infanticide, abortion, and racial extermination, all ultimately embraced by the Nazis.

"From Darwin to Hitler" is a challenging yet balanced work that should encourage a rethinking of the historical impact that Darwinism had on the course of events in the twentieth century.

Richard Weikart earned his Ph.D. in Modern European History from the University of Iowa and is an Assoc. Professor at California State University, Stanislaus focusing on German and European intellectual history. He was a Fullbright Fellowship participant in 1992-93, doing research at the University of Bonn, Germany. His articles have appeared in numerous journals and publications including: German Studies Review, Journal of the History of Ideas, Books and Culture, The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition: An Encyclopedia, and the Encyclopedia of Science and Religion.

"This book will prove to be an invaluable source for anyone wondering how closely linked Social Darwinism and Nazi ideologies, especially as uttered by Hitler, really were." --German Studies Review

That may be, that doesnt discredit His information. Its the book I am most interested in.

There is a good book out Called From Darwin to Hitler.

"Richard Weikart's outstanding book shows in sober and convincing detail how Darwinist thinkers in Germany had developed an amoral attitude to human society by the time of the First World War, in which the supposed good of the race was applied as the sole criterion of public policy and 'racial hygiene'. Without over-simplifying the lines that connected this body of thought to Hitler, he demonstrates with chilling clarity how policies such as infanticide, assisted suicide, marriage prohibitions and much else were being proposed for those considered racially or eugenically inferior by a variety of Darwinist writers and scientists, providing Hitler and the Nazis with a scientific justification for the policies they pursued once they came to power." -- Richard Evans, Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge, and author of The Coming of the Third Reich

As David Berlinski recently noted, “the thesis that there is a connection between Darwin and Hitler is widely considered a profanation.” But striking an indignant pose – feathers in full ruffle – is not an answer to such a serious charge, especially when the words of both Darwin and Hitler speak otherwise.

Those defending Darwin cannot have read his Descent of Man, wherein he applies the principles of natural selection to human beings – a thing he prudently avoided in his earlier Origin of Species. In the Descent, the eugenic and racial inferences are clearly and startlingly drawn by Darwin himself.

Darwin understood the eugenic implications of his own theory, and warned his readers against imminent evolutionary backsliding. “It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.” Insert a few terms like “Aryan” or “Jew” and that could be in any Nazi screed.

“If … various checks … do not prevent the reckless, the vicious and otherwise inferior members of society from increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of men, the nation will retrograde, as has occurred too often in the history of the world. We must remember that progress is no invariable rule.”

While Darwin tried to soften the hard implications (by suggesting that we not kill the rogues; rather, we should just keep them from breeding), the eugenic edifice was his.

And the racial thing? Evolution is driven by competition, and competition brings extinction. Darwin notes, matter-of-factly in the Descent, that one tribe extinguishing another is the very engine of human evolution. In his words, “extinction follows chiefly from the competition of tribe with tribe, race with race,” allowing the victorious tribe or race to pass on their superior endowments.

That is not a moral complaint; it is a detached scientific description uttered by Darwin entirely without angst. As the engine of evolution is never idle, it is also a prophecy. Again, his own words:

“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous [i.e., most human-looking] apes … will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”

Get it? Ranking the human races, we find the Caucasian at top, and down at the bottom, dangling at the edge of humanity, “the negro or Australian” who is just an evolutionary hair’s-breadth away from the anthropomorphous gorilla. In pushing upwards to the �ber-Caucasian, evolution also exterminates all the “intermediate species,” so that natural selection will do away with the Negro, the aboriginal Australian, and the gorilla.

Like it or not, Darwin’s eugenic and racial ideas spread from him, and infected both Europe and America.

Now for Adolf. I suspect that, just as a lot of folks haven’t read Darwin’s execrable Descent of Man, so also they feel free to enter the debate without having read Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

It is inaccurate to blame the entire of Hitler’s evil on anti-Semitism precisely because his anti-Semitism was part of a larger biological vision. “National Socialism is nothing but applied biology,” said the deputy Party leader of the Nazis, Rudolf Hess.

As Hitler made clear in Mein Kampf, the fundamental political category is biological. Consequently, “the highest aim of human existence is not the maintenance of a State or Government but rather the conservation of the race.” This aim accords with Hitler’s larger Darwinian view of the cosmos, wherein the “fundamental law of necessity” reigning “throughout the realm of Nature” is that “existence is subject to the law of eternal struggle and strife….where the strong are always the masters of the weak and where those subject to such laws must obey them or be destroyed.” Survival of the fittest.

Hence Hitler’s creation of a kind of “folk” religion, that is, a religion of the racially defined Volk. Worship was directed to the Germanic race as the only one capable of eliminating the weak and bringing the �bermensch – “superman” – into existence in accordance with the cruelties of Nature. Hitler’s words all too clearly portend the atrocities to come when the Nazis gained power:

“[T]he v�lkisch concept of the world recognizes that the primordial racial elements are of the greatest significance for mankind. In principle, the State is looked upon only as a means to an end and this end is the conservation of the racial characteristics of mankind. Therefore on the v�lkisch principle we cannot admit that one race is equal to another. By recognizing that they are different, the v�lkisch concept separates mankind into races of superior and inferior quality. On the basis of this recognition it feels bound, in conformity with the eternal Will that dominates the universe, to postulate the victory of the better and stronger and the subordination of the inferior and weaker…. For in a world which would be composed of mongrels and negroids all ideals of human beauty and nobility and all hopes of an idealized future for our humanity would be lost for ever.”

Hence the folk concept of the world is in profound accord with Nature’s will; because it restores the free play of the forces which will lead the race through stages of sustained reciprocal education towards a higher type, until finally the best portion of mankind will possess the earth and will be free to work in every domain all over the world and even reach spheres that lie outside the earth.

According to Hitler, the Jews threatened the superior race with degradation, but so did the “mongrels and negroids,” the Slavs, the Gypsies, the handicapped, the retarded, and all the other inferior biological misfits.

All this doesn’t mean that Darwinism was the sole cause of Hitler’s barbarism. But it does make clear that Darwinism must shoulder its share of the moral burden, because the connection is undeniable.

Krimsa can you give me the site where you got that info.

It was the Darwinistic theory that motivated Hitler.

Some times you have to wipe the dust off your feet Aqua.

Yes it should. A persons worldview has alot to do with there politics.