Evolutionist: “Jesus had nothing to say about … abortion”

And So This Is Christmas

On this 2017 Christmas holiday an evolutionist has proclaimed that the man whose birthday is celebrated today did not come out against abortion. She wrote:

Jesus had nothing to say about … abortion … He did have quite a lot to say about the poor and the vulnerable, and maybe that’s a good place to start.

Readers shouldn’t need a lengthy explanation of the problem here. Theologians refer to this as imposing an idea onto Scripture rather than reading it out of Scripture. To say that Jesus said nothing about abortion but—in the very next breath—admit that He did instruct us to protect the vulnerable, does not make sense.

It would be like saying Jesus said nothing about stabbing people in the back, though he did admonish us not to murder, but that’s different.

Or again, it would be like saying Jesus said nothing about being nice to people, though he did tell us to do to others as we would have them do to us. But that’s different.

No, it isn’t different.

The problem here is that babies are, if anything, “vulnerable.” One need not stretch definitions to see the problem. One does not need an imagination here to get it.

Babies. Are. Vulnerable.

It is not that this writer made a minor slip here. This assertion is nothing short of absurd.

In fact, the claim is so silly and ridiculous, I would not normally bring it to the attention of readers. If you showed me this quote, I would assume it is from some phony troll or chatroom.

But it isn’t, and this is where the problem becomes more important. The quote is from a newspaper article. And it is not from just any old newspaper. It is from, err, the top newspaper in the world—The New York Times.

Nor is the article deeply buried somewhere. It is prominently displayed above the fold, top right on the website.

Nor is the author someone who accidently slipped a piece into The Gray Lady. In fact, the piece was written by, err, Contributing Op-Ed writer Margaret Renkl.

Renkl’s point is that followers of Jesus need to get with the program, and drop the whole pro life thing. After all, Jesus had nothing to say about abortion.

Right?

The argument isn’t even wrong, and yet there it is. Complete absurdity parading as words of wisdom, as if in some Hans Christian Andersen story.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

What Does Abortion Portend For Evolution?

An Unsolved Puzzle

While much has been said about the link between evolution and abortion, and how the former sanctions the latter, little has been said about the reverse. If evolution supports abortion, what does abortion say about evolution?

To appreciate fully what we can learn about evolution from abortion, we first need to understand the evolution of behavior. In the past half century evolutionists have elucidated how complex behaviors, such as altruism, evolved. A key concept is kin selection, and much of the early theoretical work was done by William Hamilton in the early 1960s.

For our purposes here, what is important is that studies in the evolution of behavior have been forced to resort to enormous levels of complexity, nuance and precision. Somehow unguided genetic modifications must have resulted in genes for a wide range of attitudes and behaviors. The list is staggering. There are of course the obvious behaviors such as love, hate, guilt, retribution, social tendencies and habits, friendship, empathy, gratitude, trustworthiness, a sense of fulfillment at giving aid and guilt at not giving aid, high and low self-esteem, competition, and so forth.

These behaviors are supposed to have evolved according to the kin selection criteria, along with many more nuanced behaviors. For instance, love not only evolved, but in varying degrees depending on the degree of shared genes. It is weaker within the extended family than within the family. Low self-esteem behavior not only evolved, but the art of not hiding it can be advantageous and so also evolved. Sibling rivalries evolved, but only to a limited degree. In wealthy families, it is more advantageous for siblings to favor sisters while in poor families siblings ought to favor brothers. So those behaviors evolved. Mothers in poor physical condition ought to treat daughters as more valuable than sons. Likewise, socially or materially disadvantaged parents ought to treat daughters as more valuable than sons.

We’ll stop here but the list of incredibly detailed, subtle behaviors that evolution must have precisely crafted goes on and on. Evolution must have an incredible ability to produce finely tuned and highly specific behaviors.

With that understanding, we are now ready to consider abortion. The question is: how and why did evolution produce such a behavior? What fitness calculation is satisfied by terminating the life of your own child?

I can just imagine evolutionist’s contriving just-so stories to justify such an absurdity. Killing your own child would, after all, allow one to avoid the costly physical and emotional investment of raising a child. One would be better off, and so better prepared to … To do what?

To have another child.

The whole point of “fitness,” in an evolutionary context, is reproduction. One has higher “fitness” if one can have more offspring. Fitness does not refer to physical fitness in the colloquial sense. It does not refer to financial fitness. It refers to having babies. Lots of babies.

That’s what evolutionary theory is based on. Reproductive advantage. Not physical, spiritual, emotional, or financial advantage, but reproductive advantage.

Abortion as a behavior is a flat contradiction and falsification of evolutionary expectations. It makes no sense.

If I can't run very fast for some reason, then that indirectly reduces my fitness as it may impact my survivability or otherwise my reproductive abilities (or it may not). But if I kill my child, that directly deducts from my evolutionary fitness. Abortion is a much bigger, more direct, fitness penalty.

Indeed, abortion is the ultimate fitness penalty. All the positive fitness attributes I may have are instantly and completely wiped out if I engage in abortion. Selection would weed it out immediately.

Under evolution abortion would be rapidly eliminated. Remember, in the past half century evolutionists have insisted that evolution must have crafted our many nuanced behaviors with incredible precision and specificity. Abortion would not have accidentally evolved.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

The Fruit of Evolution: Abortion

I Feel Sorry For Her Child

Ideas have consequences and to see the fruit of evolution we need look no further than abortion. If we were not created by God—if life arose by chance—then why should there be a right to life? But as the truth about evolution and abortion becomes more apparent, evolutionists become increasingly ugly. In this video, a hostile crowd expresses righteous indignation at the passage of laws making it less convenient to murder babies. A young lady sparks the anger with a question for her elected representative about why he thinks he has the right to abridge her right to murder. This is the fruit of evolution.

I feel sorry for her child.

Life Begins With a Dramatic Burst of Light

The Light That Was Dark

Researchers studying the fertilization of human eggs are barred by federal law from using actual sperm. Federal law rightly imposes particularly strong restrictions on experiments on humans. Nonetheless, using sperm enzymes researchers have confirmed that at the moment of fertilization the human egg, as with other species, emits a dramatic burst of light. As one newspaper put it, “Bright flash of light marks incredible moment life begins when sperm meets egg.” And:

Human life begins in bright flash of light as a sperm meets an egg, scientists have shown for the first time, after capturing the astonishing “fireworks” on film.

One of the researchers described the burst of light as “breathtaking.”

All of this reminds us of something we already knew. In spite of evolutionist’s attempts to hide the science, the light shines through. Even federal law testifies to the fact—the scientific fact—that life begins, not at birth, not at some arbitrarily and conveniently selected point in development, but at conception. That is not a political argument or a religious belief. It simply is the science.

Planned Parenthood Launches Counter Attack With Ersatz Apology

Fork Tongue

In this video Cecile Richards, President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, “personally apologizes for the tone and statements” of “one of our staff members.” That “staff member” happens to be Dr. Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood’s senior director of medical services and those “statements” happen to be about the on-going practice of killing babies before they have a chance to see the light of day, turning the mother’s womb into the most dangerous place in America. But Richards is not apologizing for the mass murder she presides over. After all, she promotes it. In fact, the video is not really an apology at all. It is an attack that is full of lies. Richards states that Planned Parenthood “follows all laws and ethical guidelines,” has as a top priority “the compassionate care that we provide,” and is committed  “to life-saving research.”

Ethical guidelines? Compassionate care? Life-saving research? In fact, Planned Parenthood has failed in its ethics and care. Its work is to end, not save, lives.

The Day the Music Died

We Are Now Without Excuse

In the age of on-line entertainment and instant information it was, perhaps, possible to live without knowing about the carnage going on around us, but the video of evolutionist Deborah Nucatola casually and callously explaining the crushing of innocent babies and harvesting their young bodies leaves us forever without excuse. Between gulps of red wine and bites of salad we learn that “a lot of people want liver” and that “We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver …” We are also told how to play games with the law so the harvesting of human body parts can proceed efficiently:

The Federal Abortion Ban is a law, and laws are up to interpretation. So if I say on day One, I do not intend to do this, what ultimately happens doesn’t matter. … If you maintain enough of a dialogue with the person who’s actually doing the procedures, so they understand what the end-game is, there are little things, changes they can make in their technique to increase your success. … For example, so I had eight cases yesterday. And I knew exactly what we needed, and I kind of looked at the list and I said alright, this 17-weeker has eight lams, and this one—so I knew which were the cases that were probably more likely to yield what we needed, and I made my decisions according to that too, so it’s worth having a huddle at the beginning of the day, and that’s what I do.

That 17-weeker never had a chance—she never even saw the light of day. We now know the unthinkable and our response is telling.

Did we look at each other in horror? Did we stop everything? Were we angry? Were we sad? Did we cry?

No, we shot the messenger.

Surely this is all a false manipulation of the facts by those with nefarious and ulterior motives. After all, as the nightly news points out, the good doctor made it clear that this was not about the profit.

So it’s all good, right?

To avoid the obvious we strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel. We celebrate that thirty pieces of silver was not excessive while innocent babies are murdered in cold blood.

We can try to look the other way but we are a deeply sick society. And now we know it.

Lunch with Dr. Nucatola Fallout—Here Come the Attacks

How Do You Justify Murder?

As predicted, evolutionists are desperately attempting to dismiss and delegitimize a several-hour long video of an evolutionist discussing the routine practice of crushing live babies to murder them in cold blood. Business Insider, for example, leads with an absurd headline labelling the video as “false.” No the video is not false. What is false is the evolutionist’s claims that humanity, and everything else for that matter, arose from a series of random chance events—what their Epicurean forefathers referred to as swerving atoms. And, as William Jennings Bryan foresaw, if the world is nothing but a happenstance accident, then what does it matter if we kill? And kill they do. In our country alone evolutionists have murdered more than 50 million babies. It is Bryan’s worst nightmare come true. Evolutionists have brought us this nightmare, and they will insist that it continues. What we are now seeing is how evolutionists conduct business—lies, more lies, and blackballing and delegitimization of anyone who points it out.

Lunch with Dr. Nucatola

The Killing Fields

Evolutionary thought’s insistence that the world arose spontaneously is our modern-day version of Epicureanism. The idea was then, and continues to be today, motivated by metaphysics, not science. From a scientific perspective the idea is clearly false. That was understood by philosophers of antiquity, but it is understood all the more clearly today. Simply put, modern science has demolished Epicureanism. But ideas die hard, especially ideas that are driven by metaphysical ideas we believe must be true. Overturning Epicureanism and modern day evolutionary thought requires overturning the foundational metaphysics—and that is much more difficult than solving a scientific problem. And so in spite of the science, evolution continues to be a very popular and influential idea. In fact evolution has been tremendously influential in a broad range of political, public policy and social issues. These include wars, holocausts, and abortion. The above video is a good example. It shows evolutionist Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood’s senior director of medical research, explaining how they murder unborn babies and harvest the tissue. Nucatola describes crushing techniques they use to preserve valuable body parts while murdering the baby in cold blood:

We’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part, I’m gonna basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact.

The level of cruelty is astonishing, yet most likely will go ignored or dismissed by evolutionists. Already the Washington Post has made the absurd suggestion that the almost three hour video may have been doctored in some way. The article concludes:

It’s hard to assess exactly what happened at the lunch with Nucatola.

Hard to assess? Do they also question the holocaust? Do journalists have difficulty determining just exactly what happened in Nazi Germany?

It would be difficult to imagine a more misleading conclusion. An abortionist discussed techniques for murdering babies. How can that possibly be “Hard to assess”?

But this is how evolutionists will frame this event.

Evolutionist: Abortion Can Improve Life and Prevent Harm

Newspeak

So much of our mythology, as George Orwell pointed out, relies on the creative use of language in order to fool ourselves into believing. Evolution is said to “find” biological solutions, as though the evolutionary process is an intelligent agent. The new law that forces consumers to make purchases is called the “affordable” care act. And abortion is said to help people. An article published this week by an abortion “doctor” provides yet more examples of such Orwellian newspeak. She wrote that “Abortion can improve life and prevent harm; pro-choice, to me, does not mean anti-life.” How is it that the killing of innocent babies serves to “improve life and prevent harm”? And if this is not “anti-life,” then what is? Of course it is anti-life, but it is precisely this sort of upside down, euphemistic terminology that allows us to continue in the myth.

Federal Court Rejects Law Limiting Abortion

We only whisper it

On Friday judges in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down an Idaho law banning abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy. The judges argued that the law is unconstitutional because it “categorically bans some abortions before viability.”

Unfortunately abortion is one of the many horrifying fruits of evolutionary thought and this ruling demonstrates how such thought continues to influence American jurisprudence. How, for example, can a law that bans murder be unconstitutional?

The evolutionary justification—that murder is constitutional when the victim is not “viable”—is not true nor is it ethical. With evolution the engine of progress is death, and evolutionary thinking has spawned such horrors as eugenics and abortion. It became fashionable to see the weak, the sick, and the non viable as not worthy of the same rights everyone else enjoys, even the very right to life. In short, it is OK to kill them (see here, here, here, here, here, and here).

As Nietzsche put it, it is the weak “who most undermine life among human beings.” Today we celebrate the murder of the most weak of all—the unborn, for they are a threat to our well-being. As Roe v. Wade lawyer Ron Weddington explained to the newly elected President Bill Clinton, “You can start immediately to eliminate [with inexpensive abortifacients] the barely educated, unhealthy, and poor segment of our country.” For Weddington it makes sense to murder such babies but, he explained, “we only whisper it.”

This is evolutionary logic at work. The problem here is the Constitution nowhere tells us that one’s rights are contingent on one’s viability. The right to life does not fade with strength, health, wealth or any other status. It would be difficult to imagine a greater perversion of ethics. It is precisely the weak, the powerless and, yes, the non "viable" who need special protections.

The problem is not with our judges. They work hard and do their best to make our system work. The problem is with evolutionary thought.

No Anesthesia Allowed For a Child

Junk Science

Advocates of legalized abortion are now arguing that new legislation in several states, restricting abortion access, is based on junk science. To be fair, the new legislation does not actually restrict access but rather adds an additional step to the process. And what is that step? Simply to make available anesthesia to the soon to be aborted unborn child.

The problem, as the Los Angeles Times reported this week, is the scientific evidence for the capacity of the unborn to feel pain is not settled. As a 2005 paper stated, the evidence is “limited,” but it is “unlikely” that the child perceives pain prior to the third trimester.

One might think that if the scientific evidence is limited and uncertain, then debate would cease. Would we not all agree that such anesthesia should be made available?

No, evolutionists insist that such relief not even be an option. It is reminiscent of laws that deny rights to children who survive abortion attempts. As advocate Elizabeth Nash put it, “We’re seeing more unsubstantiated science. The problem is that legislators are buying into it and using it.”

It is difficult to fathom this level of cruelty. And as always, the perpetrators are certain of their righteousness.

It is equally difficult to fathom this level of absurdity. Unsubstantiated science? The premise that an unborn child is not a human being is the height of unsubstantiated science. Of course such children are human beings—from a scientific perspective that is beyond question.

William Jennings Bryan famously opposed evolution in the Scopes Monkey Trial. He was concerned that evolution was dehumanizing and was undermining morality. Unfortunately he seems to have been correct.

Evolution: Garbage In, Garbage Out

Man’s Imagination

Evolutionary thinking did not begin with Darwin, but it did receive a substantial boost when the Sage of Kent published his theory in 1859. It is often said that evolution is the most influential scientific theory in areas outside of science. That certainly is true, though with the caveat that evolution is hardly a scientific theory. Demarcating just what is and isn’t science is notoriously difficult, but when advocates are dead certain their idea is an undeniable fact because their metaphysics requires it, in spite of overwhelming empirical contradictions, you can be sure we are nowhere close to that Baconian ideal of natural philosophy. Evolution isn’t merely about mutations and fossils. It is an overarching creation story with deep metaphysics that has spread throughout the world. As such it has enormous influence.

Evolutionary thinking goes back centuries and it deals with the fundamental question of origins. Tell me where you think you came from, it is said, and I’ll tell you everything else you believe—at least everything that is important. The answer for evolutionists is that we are the product of happenstance. The world arose by itself, the result of chance and necessity—random events driven by blind natural laws while the Creator, like Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, meditates on a distant Mount Olympus.

That idea, in the history of thought, is highly unfortunate. Yes it is scientifically unlikely (I’m being kind), but that is only the beginning. Ideas have consequences and in a chilling anticipation of what was to come, the early critic Adam Sedgwick lamented to Darwin that with evolution humanity would suffer damage that “might brutalize it” and sink the human race “into a lower grade of degradation than any into which it has fallen”:

Were it possible (which thank God it is not) to break it, humanity in my mind, would suffer a damage that might brutalize it—& sink the human race into a lower grade of degradation than any into which it has fallen since its written records tell us of its history.

If only Sedgwick could have read Nietzsche’s warning that it was the sick, the oppressed, the broken and the weak, rather than evil men, who were the greatest threat to humanity. If only Sedgwick could have seen the onset of eugenics, the Holocaust, abortion, and other forms of genocide. Sedgwick correctly foresaw the terrible consequences of the modern day resurrection of the Epicurean idea that something, and in fact everything, came from nothing.

Unfortunately these are hardly the only influences of evolutionary thought. We are, for example, awash in pornography which is incredibly demeaning of women. No, pornography is not a healthy, artful expression as many evolutionists argue.

The evolutionist’s support of such ills as eugenics, abortion and pornography is telling. It reveals once again that ideas have consequences. Not only did evolutionary thought lead historically to a host of downfalls, today’s evolutionists readily confirm the link.

Sedgwick warned that Darwin had made claims well beyond the limits of science. Darwin had issued truths that were not likely ever to be found anywhere “but in the fertile womb of man’s imagination.” Unfortunately that is precisely where it counts.

Workshop on Scientific Imperialism

An Abundance of Material

Don’t miss the Workshop on Scientific Imperialism in Helsinki next April where attendees will consider whether “conventions and procedures of one discipline or field are imposed on other fields, or more weakly when a scientific discipline seeks to explain phenomena that are traditionally considered proper of another discipline’s domain.” Keynote Speaker Stephen Downes will ask  “Is the Appeal to Evolution in Explanations of Human Behavior a Case of Scientific Imperialism?”

The answer is “yes,” but human behavior is only the beginning of a long list. Evolution is by far the most influential theory in the history of science and its influence spreads not only to other areas of science, but well outside of science as well.

One of evolution’s early moves outside of science was in historiography where Darwin’s friend and champion Thomas Huxley began the construction of the history of thought from an evolutionary perspective. Evolutionary theory was motivated and mandated by religious premises, but Huxley reversed the roles and cast evolution as objective, truth-seeking science and the opposition as misguided religious believers. Thus, in this Warfare Thesis, science was opposed by religion, rather than informed and constrained by religion.

An important tool that was instrumental in spreading the Warfare Thesis far beyond evolutionary studies and into the broader culture was the play and movie Inherit the Wind. The Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee script was all that Huxley could have dreamt of, casting the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial as a conflict between the rational evolutionists and the irrational faithful.

Inherit the Wind is fictional propaganda that evolutionists continue to use to this day and remains widely influential. As Judge John Jones astonishingly explained, he wanted to see Inherit the Wind a second time in preparation for the 2005 Dover case, over which he presided, because the film puts the origins debate into its proper “historical context.” Jones later reminisced about the trial, explaining that “I understood the general theme. I’d seen Inherit the Wind.” The federal judge’s over-the-top naiveté was a manifestation of evolution’s anti-intellectualism.

Another important early evolutionary spinoff was eugenics “science” and abortion. Nietzsche proclaimed that it was the sick, the oppressed, the broken and the weak, rather than evil men, who were the greatest threat to humanity. And Margaret Sanger promoted her racism and sexual immorality in what would become the abortion movement. The American eugenics movement and both World War I and later the horrors of the German Nazis were all influenced by evolution’s pseudo science.

More recently the abortion movement has grown and eugenics continues to be advocated. Lawlessness and immorality escalated with the legalization of abortion in the Roe v. Wade decision and its inherent racism. As Roe v. Wade lawyer Ron Weddington explained to the newly elected President Bill Clinton, “You can start immediately to eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy, and poor segment of our country,” with inexpensive abortifacients. Weddington explained that he was not advocating mass extinction of these unfortunate people because “Crime, drugs and disease are already doing that. The problem is that their numbers are not only replaced but increased by the birth of millions of babies to people who can’t afford to have babies. There, I’ve said it. It’s what we all know is true, but we only whisper it, because as liberals who believe in individual rights, we view any program which might treat the disadvantaged differently as discriminatory, mean-spirited and … well … so Republican.”

Likewise Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg described Roe v. Wade as intended to control population growth, “particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.” And you know what that means. And restrictions on abortion simply exacerbate the problem because “the impact of all these restrictions is on poor women,” and “It makes no sense as a national policy to promote birth only among poor people.”

It is little wonder that University of Texas evolutionist Eric Pianka receives standing ovations and awards for his advocacy of the elimination of 90% of the human population.

Eugenics, abortion and population control are, unfortunately, by no means the end of evolution’s deconstructionism. Evolution does away with law, common sense and morality. Scientific laws, as evolutionists explain, are not appropriate when explaining the creation of the world. For despite appearances and the hard scientific evidence, the world must have arisen spontaneously. It is a narrative of sheer absurdity. But we control it, and one consequence is moral relativism. Morality is seen as the result of evolutionary history. Right and wrong are determined by the haphazard configurations of molecules in our head.

Yes, there is plenty of material for Workshop on Scientific Imperialism in Helsinki next April.

Professor Proposes Dystopia Where Climate Deniers Bold Enough to Talk Face Incarceration

It’s All About Control

Ground crews around the country are battling permafrost for the upcoming baseball season, the Coast Guard is dealing with 30 inch ice on Lake Superior and another major snow storm just put Philadelphia over 67 inches of snow making this winter the second snowiest on record there while another major Nor’Easter appears to be shaping up. March certainly isn’t going out like a lamb and all of this is merely an exclamation point on the frigid cold from earlier in the season. From the snow in Cairo to the coldest football game ever played, the weather has not cooperated with the so-called AGW (anthropogenic, or man-made, global warming) theory. AGW has a trail of failed predictions and years ago leaked emails revealed a massive effort to manipulate and control the science by AGW proponents. So it was already clear that AGW did not come from unbiased, objective truth-seeking scientists in their clean white lab coats. And their recruitment of Al Gore to shout-out the message further demonstrated AGW was about more than “just science.” Of course none of this necessarily means AGW is incorrect. It is possible that politics, abuse of science, manipulation and theoretical failures are just accidentally tainting what at the core is legitimate and thoughtful science. It does however reveal the dogmatic AGW truth claims for what they are. As the old saying goes, it’s not what they don’t know that scares me, but what they know for sure. AGW may well be true, it may be false, or it may be somewhere in between. We just don’t know for sure. But that’s the point—we don’t know, and what we need are thoughtful minds to come forward on this important issue. Instead AGW proponents are doubling down.

This month Lawrence Torcello, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology, asks the question, “Is misinformation about the climate criminally negligent?” Torcello’s use of the term “climate denial” foreshadows his answer. This question of climate change is too important and too complicated for such overreach, but for Torcello if you do not support AGW then you are in “climate denial” and if you talk about it then your next stop should be jail.

Torcello thinks the government should enact laws enabling the incarceration of climate denialists who, after all, are “not only corrupt and deceitful, but criminally negligent in their willful disregard for human life.” It is time for modern societies, Torcello concludes ominously, to “update their legal systems accordingly.”

Torcello’s concern for human life stands in contrast to his advocacy of the termination of unborn human beings, for elsewhere he “promotes completely the permissive position on abortion from conception to birth.” According to Torcello, murder of the unborn should be legal but questioning AGW should be illegal because, after all, it demonstrates a “willful disregard for human life.”

And does anyone believe that in such a perverse world the inquisition will stop with climate deniers? Certainly evolution denial is at least as dangerous.

While one would hope that Torcello is an academic anomaly, the fact is he is not alone and his new found interest in criminal justice will likely help to earn him tenure. There was, for example, University of Texas evolutionist Eric Pianka who advocated the elimination of 90% of the human population (deadly viruses were his weapons of choice) and received standing ovations, and an award from his peers at the Texas Academy of Science.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

The Kermit Gosnell Trial is Finishing Up

But the Media is Avoiding it

Ideas have consequences and evolution, the most influential theory in the history of science, has plenty of them. In addition to science, evolution influences such fields as public policy, media, education, history, philosophy, law, medicine and health care. Evolutionary thought is ubiquitous and underlies assumptions that may seem to be completely unrelated to the origin of species. On the other hand the path to evolution is sometimes easier to trace. For example, evolution encourages a reductionist, materialistic view of life. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” proclaims the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” But with evolution the Creator is distant and aloof, more like Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover whose main function is simply to initiate motion so we can avoid the problem of an infinite regress. Life just happened to happen. It seems there is no divine spark and consequently life loses an inherent and important property—those God-given unalienable Rights. So not surprisingly it was only a few short decades after Darwin that evolutionists were ramping up the modern eugenics movement. And not long behind was the abortion movement. When I explained the link between evolution and today’s abortion movement evolutionists had two responses. First, they vigorously denied any such link. Second, they vigorously defended abortion. It was another example of an internal contradiction within evolutionary thought which this week is on display in the final phases of the trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell.

It had all the making of the Trial of the Century. Gruesome and gory murders of innocent babies that are alleged to have been done over many years and with the full knowledge of assistants, peers and even government regulators. The implications are staggering and the trial provided a stream of increasingly shocking daily updates to keep the story alive. It is the kind of trial the media loves. There was only one problem: it was all about abortion.

You may not have heard much about Kermit Gosnell and his murder trial, for the media coverage has been spotty at best. And what coverage there has been has often been more euphemistic than factual. Consider Vivian Yee’s piece for last Sunday’s New York Times which described Gosnell as a doctor charged with killing “viable fetuses.”

For most people what Yee refers to as “viable fetuses” are simply “babies.” But evolutionists use euphemistic terminology to avoid the problem that abortion is a violation of the right to life. In fact the concept of viability is a long-standing attempt to rationalize abortion. Viability refers to the ability of a baby to survive outside the mother’s body. If the baby cannot survive then, so goes the argument, it has no right to life.

You can see the connection with evolution for which death and survival are key. It is natural selection and the survival of the fittest as those that are strong live and participate in evolution, whereas those that are weak die off. Jesus said “Blessed are the meek” but evolution celebrates the strong. As Nietzsche warned, it is the weak “who most undermine life among human beings.” If the baby cannot survive on its own, then it has no right to life.

The Gosnell trial reveals fundamental problems with evolutionary thought. Don’t count on hearing about it on the nightly news.

Forty Years On, Concerns Linger

Safe, Legal and Rare Accessible

On this 40th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, while many Americans are delighted that infanticide is legal, there remain lingering concerns. Probably most pressing is the fact that since most infanticides are paid for out of pocket, it is more difficult for poor people to murder their children than for rich people. And while, as the evolutionists at the Guttmacher Institute remind us, infanticide is now safer for all involved (except for the child of course), nonetheless some women must travel 50 miles or more to murder their baby. Clearly there remain many barriers to infanticide which must be overcome. For as the evolutionists conclude, keeping murder legal, safe and accessible “is and must always remain an urgent national priority.” Indeed, this certainly is an urgent national priority.

An Early Critique of Darwin Warned of a Lower Grade of Degradation

And a Whole List of Other Things That Came True

Adam Sedgwick was a class act and his November 24, 1859 letter to Charles Darwin is a classic. In the 1128 word missive the aging professor of geology at Cambridge University—after reading Darwin’s massive work in less than a week amidst his many other duties—managed to pack several cogent criticisms and profound observations of evolutionary thought.

Sedgwick began his review by explaining that he had read the younger Darwin’s manuscript “with more pain than pleasure.” For while parts were admirable and other parts humorous, there nonetheless were so many passages that Sedgwick read “with absolute sorrow; because I think them utterly false & grievously mischievous.”

For Darwin, it seemed to Sedgwick, had abandoned the tried and true method of empirically-based scientific induction and substituted for it his own baseless assumptions:

Many of your wide conclusions are based upon assumptions which can neither be proved nor disproved. Why then express them in the language & arrangements of philosophical induction?

Neither proved nor disproved? What a prophecy of the evolutionary just-so stories to come.

And as for Darwin’s grand principle, natural selection, “what is it but a secondary consequence of supposed, or known, primary facts.” Yet Darwin had smuggled in teleological language to avoid the absurdity and make it acceptable. For Darwin had written of natural selection “as if it were done consciously by the selecting agent.” Yet again, this criticism is cogent today. Teleological language is rampant in the evolutionary literature.

And anticipating the fixity-of-species strawman, Sedgwick explained to the Sage of Kent that he had conflated the observable fact of change over time (development) with the explanation of how it came about. Everyone agreed on development, but the key question of its causes and mechanisms remained. Darwin had used the former as a sort of proof of a particular explanation for the latter. “We all admit development as a fact of history;” explained Sedgwick, “but how came it about?”

Again, how cogent. Even to this day evolutionists continue to trumpet the fact of evolution because moths change color or viruses mutate, as though that somehow proves the spontaneous origin of all of biology.

Now the foundation had been laid and Sedgwick was ready to make his thesis point: “There is a moral or metaphysical part of nature as well as a physical. A man who denies this is deep in the mire of folly.” Yet again what an incredible prophecy of things to come. Evolutionary thought since Darwin extrapolated wildly on his vacuous thought experiments with so many just-so stories which tell us nothing about the actual science.

But that is not all. Sedgwick continued with his observation that the life sciences (organic science) holds a unique position within the sciences because its province includes sentient creatures and all that that entails, even consciousness and morality:

Tis the crown & glory of organic science that it does thro’ final cause, link material to moral; & yet does not allow us to mingle them in our first conception of laws, & our classification of such laws whether we consider one side of nature or the other— You have ignored this link; &, if I do not mistake your meaning, you have done your best in one or two pregnant cases to break it.

Darwin had broken the sacred trust entrusted to the life scientist with his cavalier and even presumptuous conclusions. But Sedgwick, in a chilling anticipation of the coming eugenics and abortion movements, believed such ignorance could never propagate:

Were it possible (which thank God it is not) to break it, humanity in my mind, would suffer a damage that might brutalize it—& sink the human race into a lower grade of degradation than any into which it has fallen since its written records tell us of its history.

Sedgwick correctly foresaw the terrible consequences of the modern day resurrection of the Epicurean idea that something, and in fact everything, came from nothing. Humanity would suffer damage that “might brutalize it” and sink the human race “into a lower grade of degradation than any into which it has fallen.” Today we witness a never-ending road of killing and destruction.

If only Sedgwick could have read Nietzsche when the German polymath proclaimed that it was the sick, the oppressed, the broken and the weak, rather than evil men, who were the greatest threat to humanity:

Sick people are the greatest danger for healthy people. …

The invalids are the great danger to humanity: not the evil men, not the “predatory animals.” Those people who are, from the outset, failures, oppressed, broken— they are the ones, the weakest, who most undermine life among human beings, who in the most perilous way poison and question our trust in life, in humanity, in ourselves. Where can we escape it, that downcast glance with which people carry a deep sorrow, that reversed gaze of the man originally born to fail which betrays how such a man speaks to himself—that gaze which is a sigh. “I wish I could be someone else!”— that’s what this glance sighs. “But there is no hope here. I am who I am. How could I detach myself from myself? And yet—I’ve had enough of myself!”. . . On such a ground of contempt for oneself, a truly swampy ground, grows every weed, every poisonous growth, and all of them so small, so hidden, so dishonest, so sweet. Here the worms of angry and resentful feelings swarm; here the air stinks of secrets and duplicity; here are constantly spun the nets of the most malicious conspiracies—the plotting of suffering people against the successful and victorious; here the appearance of the victor is despised. And what dishonesty not to acknowledge this hatred as hatred! …

Take a look into the background of every family, every corporation, every community: everywhere you see the struggle of the sick against the healthy—a quiet struggle, for the most part …

Sedgwick’s unfortunate vision was not long in its fulfillment.

Next Sedgwick again sensed a trend that would extrapolate beyond Darwin when he warned the younger Darwin about his “tone of triumphant confidence.” If ever there was a consistent thread amongst evolutionists, aside from their metaphysics, it would be their incredible “tone of triumphant confidence” when proclaiming that the world came from nothing. The more absurd the theory, the greater the sound and fury with which it is proclaimed.

For Darwin, warned Sedgwick, had made claims well beyond the limits of science. Darwin issued truths that were not likely ever to be found anywhere “but in the fertile womb of man’s imagination.”

The fertile womb of man’s imagination. What a cogent summary of evolutionary theory. Sedgwick made more correct predictions in his short letter than all the volumes of evolutionary literature to come.

But Sedgwick would not sign off before offering his friendship and good will. It was in the “spirit of brotherly love” that Sedgwick wrote and he asked forgiveness for any sore points he may have left. Sedgwick spoke the truth as he saw it, but at the same time held no grudges.

That Silly Belief That Life is Sacred and Inviolable

The twentieth century’s eugenics movement was eventually discarded, but eugenics did not go away entirely. Today eugenics continues, but it is a much more diverse and technologically sophisticated. There are the so-called eugenic abortions where the unborn with higher disease risks are “terminated.” And today’s technology allows for specific embryos, and even genes, to be selected. There seems to be, as Nathaniel Comfort observed this month, a eugenic impulse that drives us to seek a better human race. Underlying such health concerns, however, are the usual less benevolent motivations. In addition to the promised health benefits, Comfort explains that eugenics offers an intellectual thrill, and the profits of genetic biomedicine. Such lures are, explains Comfort, “too great for us to do otherwise. Resistance would be ill-advised and futile.”

Nonetheless there are those who warn against this new eugenics. Will not parents face enormous pressure to adopt the new technologies and create designer babies? But for eugenics proponent Jon Entine, such complaints are “just another iteration of the anti-abortionist (and far left) belief that life is ‘sacred’ and ‘inviolable’”

“Sacred” and “inviolable”? Apparently for Entine such sentiment is old-fashioned.

Evolution gave us chance origins and led to the modern eugenics and abortion movements. Not surprisingly, life no longer is considered sacred or inviolable. After all, life arose spontaneously from a series of random events.

Ideas have consequences.

The Silent Yawn

A culture’s creation narrative is foundational, for it forms the template for everything else. One of the consequences of evolution—the belief that the world spontaneously arose by itself—is that it underwrites moral relativism, which is not to say there is no right and wrong but rather that right and wrong is something that we decide. And since evolution is true, it is to evolution that we go for our rights. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” proclaims the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” But with evolution there is no such endowment, for there is no such Creator. Not that evolution derives from atheism, it does not. Evolution derives from a different kind of theism, a kind where we decide what is right.

One of the rights evolutionists decided we did not have is the right to Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. In the twentieth century eugenics movement evolutionary science was used to mutilate and institutionalize those whom evolutionists decided were not deserving of these rights. This was no backwater operation. It was a nationwide movement backed up by Supreme Court decisions. Next came the right to Life which evolutionists decided also is not universal, and should not be granted to the unborn. So the unborn do not have a right to life in our culture and now tens of millions have been “aborted.”

This holocaust makes no scientific sense (both eugenics and abortion are based on pseudo science), but then again our creation narrative comes from evolution. Religion drives science and it matters.

There is a Big Misconception Right Now About the Impact of Evolution

Ideas have consequences. Over the past century evolutionary thought has become dominant in much more than just the historical sciences. Other branches of science as well as education, law, history, public policy and media have increasingly been influenced by the idea that the world arose spontaneously. This tremendous influence of evolutionary thought has consequences that are largely misunderstood. The misconception is that, while there have been some missteps along the way such as in the twentieth century’s eugenics movement, those are both minor and largely behind us now and the greater and lasting consequences of evolution have been positive. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Evolution’s influence

An obvious example of evolution’s influence can be seen in the popular misconceptions held by those in positions of power. After the 2005 Dover trial, Judge John Jones, who ruled that evolution must be taught in our schools, recalled that he “was taken to school” by the evolutionists. It was, Jones recalled, “the equivalent of a degree in this area.” Unfortunately what evolutionists such as Ken Miller “taught” Jones was a series of scientific misrepresentations.

But these were not the only misrepresentations that made their way into American jurisprudence in the Dover trial. For the judge did not enter into his new training as a complete novice. As Jones later explained, “I understood the general theme. I’d seen Inherit the Wind.”

But the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, upon which the play is based, was a show trial used to promote evolution. The entire event was cleverly orchestrated by the ACLU to advance evolutionary thought and disparage skeptics.

For instance, the famed statesman and politician William Jennings Bryan was added to the prosecution team. Bryan had a good understanding of evolution and was concerned with the undefendable claim of evolution as fact. He was particularly concerned with evolution’s degraded view of humanity. The left-leaning pacifist was concerned with evolution’s racism, eugenics, social Darwinism and economic laissez faire implications.

Bryan’s role on the team was to deliver the final summation. That would have been important for Bryan would have provided a much needed corrective to the ACLU’s evolutionary propaganda. The ACLU needed to avoid any such exposure so they used a clever legal trick to deny any closing arguments.

But the fact that the Scopes Monkey Trial was a manipulated show trial is only the beginning of the problem with Judge Jones relying on Inherit the Wind as a source. For its authors Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee added yet more manipulation to the truth. In their fictionalized account of the trial they did what even the ACLU could not do—they rewrote history as evolutionists would have it. The result was a two-dimensional and grossly misleading rendition of the Scopes Monkey Trial. And yet to this day evolutionists use this play and film to misrepresent evolution. It is this script that is informing the public consciousness of the origins debate. This is an example the power of evolution’s influence.

A consequence of evolution

One of the earliest examples of evolution’s consequences is the modern eugenics movement, a term coined by Darwin’s half cousin, Sir Francis Galton. Eugenics was a natural extension of evolution, which explained that all life just happened to arise by random chance and the survival of the fittest in resource-limited environments. Nietzsche proclaimed that it was the sick, the oppressed, the broken and the weak, rather than evil men, who were the greatest threat to humanity.

From scientists such as Charles Davenport (Director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) to elites such as Theodore Roosevelt and Oliver Wendell Holmes, eugenics was well accepted, and all with the best of intentions no doubt.

Evolutionist Henry Goddard identified a particular family as having inferior genetics on one side, making for a classic case study of good genes versus bad genes. According to this phony evolutionary science, those on the “bad” side were diagnosed as “feeble-minded,” a vague category into which anyone on the wrong side of an evolutionist could be cast. Their penalties included forced sterilization and a life sentence in an institution.

And the great Nikola Tesla warned of humanity’s “new sense of pity” which interfered with evolution’s law of the survival of the fittest:

The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man’s new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit. The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct. Several European countries and a number of states of the American Union sterilize the criminal and the insane. This is not sufficient. The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.

Evolutionist Hermann Muller wrote a letter to Joseph Stalin imploring the communist dictator to implement the “conscious control of human biological evolution.” And laws across America and even Supreme Court rulings turned against those who evolutionists pronounced to have the wrong genes. Meanwhile evolutionist’s such as Goddard enjoyed success and reputation while their victims were mutilated and imprisoned.

A big misconception

But aren’t such crude ideas as eugenics behind us now? That was then and this is now, and now we are all fixed, right? As Forbes’ Alex Knapp put it this week, “as we’ve advanced scientifically, we’ve also advanced morally.” This is a common view amongst evolutionists. They either ignore evolution’s role in the eugenics movement (Knapp puts the blame on physics), or they view it as an anomaly—the exception rather than the rule.

It would be difficult to imagine a bigger misconception. It is true that the eugenics movement has waned, but it has been replaced by something far more effective: worldwide abortion at levels the most extreme eugenicist could only have dreamed of.

No, today’s evolutionists are no different than yesterday’s evolutionists. They haven’t gotten better. Today’s evolutionists would have staunchly backed eugenics every bit as much as did Galton, Nietzsche, Davenport, Goddard, Tesla, Muller and the rest of them. Or they at least would have politely stood by in silent assent.

How do I know this? Because today they do the same with abortion. It is safe for evolutionists to look back at those who came before them and scrutinize their failings as a thing of past. Unfortunately this is a myth. Those failings are by no means a thing of past.

The theory that speaks of “the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life” has not set us on the path to utopia. Today infanticide and slavery are at levels never before seen in history while evolutionists pat themselves on the back for undermining science and teaching the world that humans are animals.

Evolutionists dogmatically proclaim they have the truth. They blackball and defame anyone who even so much as questions their phony science and absurd truth claims. And all the while they insist they hold the moral high ground while their world descends into yet more death and destruction.

Ideas have consequences.