Ken Ham, the Anti-Scientist

Much of this critique will be based on the content of the Ham v. Nye debate, although virtually everything Ham said is simply what he's been saying for decades.  Throughout this post, I'll be providing direct links to the relevant parts of the debate.

Ham opens by noting that our culture does not consider creationists to be scientists, using language like "scientists v. creationists." In this post, I will be arguing that Ham's views are anti-science. I mean this not as (just) an insult, but as a factually accurate description. Thus, Ham provides a perfect example of why drawing a dichotomy between scientists and creationists is entirely justified.

Ham counters the dichotomy with an example of a creationist who is also a scientist. I'm not familiar with the particular example, but I agree that people like this exist. One could have an anti-science view of origins while fully deserving the title of scientist in another area, simply by taking a scientific approach to only the latter. Similarly, someone could axiomatically assume that the Roman Empire never existed, and still do excellent historical work on ancient Egypt. It may seem surprising that someone could refuse to use reason regarding one topic while being quite skilled at using reason in another, but this happens regularly, and to far more than just creationists.

Next, Ham makes a distinction between historical science and observational science. "Historical science" and "non-historical science" sound like accurate phrases to me. "Observational science," on the other hand, carries a false assumption. The implication is that questions of historical science cannot be settled via observation. This is equivalent to saying that the scientific method is not a useful tool for learning about the past, which is precisely what it means to be anti-science on questions of historical science. It's quite ironic that moments after Ham criticizes the language "scientists v. creationists" for bringing in an assumption, he shows the assumption to be true by defining terms in a way that bring in his own anti-science assumptions.

There is a very good reason both historical and non-historical science are lumped together as simply science. In both cases, theories are tested based on their ability to make true predictions. Many data points are desired, and the more the better. If a theory makes many true predictions but then several false ones, we go back to the drawing board, and see if the theory needs to be modified slightly, or even fully replaced by a more accurate one. When the predictions are consistently right (or at least close), we have strong evidence that the theory is at least very close to accurate. No step of this reasoning is affected by the theory dealing with a historical question – with both historical and non-historical theories, all we need is sufficient data. This is simply the scientific method. I've explicitly explained something so basic because a grade school understanding of the scientific method is sufficient to expose the error in Ken Ham's anti-science views.

With a particular historical question, we may have enough clear evidence to settle it by means of the scientific method, or we may not. Ham assumes axiomatically that we do not. This is distinctly different from claiming that, in this particular case, we lack sufficient information. To know that the evidence cannot exist without looking is equivalent to saying that the scientific method does not help us figure out what is true. When a theory makes testable predictions, the results of the test give us evidence one way or the other. To disagree with this statement, as Ken Ham does, is to be anti-science.

Ham admits that his view of historical science is based on the Bible. So both sides agree that creation is not based on evidence – I'm glad he cleared this part up. He claims that mainstream science is similarly not based on evidence, but again, he's forgotten about the scientific method.

But then he further explains an already explained position and seems to contradict himself: "creation is ... confirmed by observational science." What role is left for evidence? Ham has systematically ruled out any way that evidence could influence his beliefs. The Bible is sufficient for him to be certain, and he cannot even imagine hypothetical evidence that could change this. Ham is talking out of both sides of his mouth, momentarily playing lip service to the idea of supporting a historical claim using evidence, despite the fact that his worldview provides no room for something so rational.

Ham claims the debate isn't evidence for evolution versus evidence for creation, but rather dueling interpretations using the same evidence. Ham seems to be thinking in terms of a static set of facts that both sides are trying to explain. What he's forgotten, again, is none other than the scientific method. A theory makes a prediction regarding currently unavailable data, and then scientists proactively search for new data to either confirm or disprove the prediction. The results of the experiment are quite likely to produce strong evidence for or against the theory. Denial of this fact is not merely anti-science, it is anti-math. Furthermore, as a couple examples will show, Ham does seem to think in terms of some facts being evidence for creation, and others as evidence for evolution, despite his assertions to the contrary.

Ham showed some charts that illustrate how species vary within a "kind" as would be predicted by creation. The question is, does Ken Ham think the data behind these charts are evidence for creation? If no, then how can he claim that this data confirms his creation model? If yes, then why claim that evidence can't support one side or the other? It seems that Ham wants people to think "there's no such thing as objective evidence" when looking at evidence for evolution, while applying ordinary scientific reasoning when looking at evidence for creation.

Of course, Ham doesn't even hint at how his "orchard of kinds" differs from looking at the branches of the evolutionary tree with the trunk not pictured. Perhaps the goal was to give us an example of an invalid evidence-based argument in the hopes of persuading us that all evidence-based arguments are invalid?

Most blatantly of all, Ham pulls up a chart titled "hundred of physical processes set limits on the age of the universe" proudly asserting, "more than 90% of these processes give an age less than billions of years." There you have it. According to Ham, we have more than 90% of the pieces of evidence supporting a young(ish) universe on one side and less than 10% supporting an old universe. So the debate really is about comparing evidence for evolution against evidence for creation. (Although, I wonder what Ham thinks we should conclude if, hypothetically, all the valid techniques give an old age?  Never mind, he's already answered that. If all the dating methods all said 4.5 billion years, we should trust the Bible and conclude that reality is in error.)

I'm overwhelmed by the audacity of this snake oil salesman maneuver. He puts up the slide, claims huge amounts of evidence against an old universe, and then moves on in 11 seconds before anyone has had a chance to read it. If this slide is what he says it is, it should have been a focal point of his opening speech. Ham does not name a single process giving a young age, but instead uses a bare assertion of lots of evidence as a throwaway line. After all, evidence is boring and the real point is the Bible anyway, so let's talk about something else.

But I'm not bored by the evidence! In fact, I find the list to be absolutely fascinating!  "5. Human population." But the universe is older than the human race. My understanding was that this is actually a point of agreement between scientists and Ham. "22. Oldest living plants." Similarly, the oldest living person limits the age of the universe to an absolute maximum of 115 years old. What's going on there, Ken? Are you assuming that plants never die? Did you move on so quickly because the arguments for creation make the most sense when thought about for only a fraction of a second? (Or better yet, don't think at all, and just believe the Bible.) This slide doesn't give us evidence that mainstream dating methods are unreliable. It gives us evidence that Ken Ham is a pathological liar.

Think about the outrageousness of this error a bit longer. Creationists have presented scientists with their champion, and their champion thinks mainstream science's methods of dating are unreliable because there aren't any plants that are billions of years old. The remaining question is if the debate is "scientist versus creationist" or if it's really "scientist versus liar." In principle, we could have enough evidence to decide between the two, although I'm not persuaded that we do.

When Ken Ham is called anti-science, this is not merely an indictment of Ham's conclusions. This is not simply defining scientist as "someone who agrees with me." Ham is an anti-scientist because Ham teaches people to distrust evidence and to reject the scientific method in favor of the Bible. Ham is an anti-scientist because he uses lies as a substitute for evidence.

The Role of Evolution in my Deconversion

Perhaps the most common reason people reject Christianity is evolution, and I am no exception. However, the way it influenced me was very different from the usual way that learning Genesis is not historically reliable leads to learning the rest is not historically reliable either. For me, the primary effect was sociological – it changed my social standing within [evangelical] Christianity and this caused me to see how Christians think about the rest of their faith as well.

It's hardly a revolutionary observation to notice that if Christians thought about Christianity with the same critical thinking they use when approaching the evidence for any other religion, then most of them would stop believing. But as a bare claim, this is something anyone could say about anything. An argument that can refute anything refutes nothing. (See Romans 1:22.)

The fact that Christians believe in Yahweh but not the other deities of antiquity is, in and of itself, no more reason to suspect Christians are wrong than the bare fact that scientifically minded people usually believe in the theory of relativity but not in UFOs. What is needed are the particulars of how the “problems” with and evidence for every other religion are similar to the “mysteries” inside one's own religion that are just accepted. It is only with these particulars that either side can justify the comparison.

Once I became a theistic evolutionist (TE), my Christianity became one of the positions to which young-earth creationists (YEC) apply critical thinking. And consequently, claims about the consistency of evolution and Christianity were both essential to my faith and rejected by most Christians. To understand their position was to view my faith as an outsider.

While the emotional fallout of this situation should not be dismissed, it was also a fundamentally intellectual struggle that could not be wished, tolerated, or loved away. First, a lot of the theological arguments against TE make sense. Second, most of these arguments have a twin argument which is against Christianity as a whole. Most seriously, the arguments against Christianity as a whole are equal to or stronger than the arguments against TE. But these claims are only as strong as my examples:

The Ten Commandments

While supposedly the entire Bible is God-breathed in some sense, with a few parts, more is claimed. Perhaps most dramatically, with the ten commandments, God didn't just work through the historical process of the recording of events. These words were written with by the finger of God. In the Exodus version, right after the specifics of the commandment about the Sabbath, God's finger wrote in 20:11, “For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and made it holy. ”

However, Deuteronomy 5 disagrees regard precisely what God's finger wrote. In that version, the fourth commandment is followed in verse 15 by “You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out of there by a mighty hand and by an outstretched arm; therefore the LORD your God commanded you to observe the sabbath day.”

Even ignoring the question of the degree of similarity and differences, which version did God's finger write? I don't typically hear the phrase “written by God in stone” and think of it as something quite so flexible. As is so often the case, there is an enormous difference between having actual reasons to think that God's finger wrote something, and having a book that claims God helped write it. To outsiders, it can be a bit strange that this isn't thought of more often, but we don't know that God really wrote the ten commandments just because the Bible tells us so. In fact, the Bible itself accidentally testifies that God's finger probably didn't write some or all of the ten commandments.

This is a sticky enough of a question that I was not willing to charge ahead and draw deep theological conclusions out of a trouble text. Another way of saying this is that what the Bible says is so unclear, that even if it is true, trusting what one thinks it says would be unwise.

Genealogies

Luke traces Jesus' genealogies all the way back to Adam. My half-answer was that I still believed in a literal Adam and a literal Fall about which all we know is myth. The reason this only halfway works is that I accepted science's dating of early civilizations that are older than the Bible suggests Adam to be by means of genealogies. However, before I was willing to trust the minute details of biblical genealogies, there were some major issues that had to be dealt with that are internal to the Bible.

First off, Luke and Matthew's genealogies clash. Before giving a rehearsed answer of one being Mary's and the other being Joseph's, look them up. “Jacob the father of Joseph” is clear in Matthew 1:16, and everyone agrees with this. Luke 3:23-24 says “[Jesus] was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph, the son of Heli, the son of Matthat, ...” This communicates with great clarity that Heli was Joseph's father.

The best inerrantist answer I've seen to this is that the repetitions of “the son” are not present in the original – they are incorrectly added words in English to smooth out the grammar. The literal translation is then “[Jesus] was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph, of Heli, of Matthat ...” where the implication is “Jesus son of Heli, Jesus son of Matthat, ...” And then the way this is consistent with Matthew is that this is merely a list of Jesus' ancestors without implications of their relationships to each other, and thus Heli could be Mary's father.

This is quite strained, but I accepted the explanation for quite a while. However, notice that it means that Luke failed to communicate clearly. You must twist the text to even get to the point where Heli could be Mary's father. What we know with certainty is that Luke didn't tell us that Heli is Mary's father. Telling us that Heli is related to Jesus because he's Mary's father is, in fact, precisely the sort of thing that genealogies are supposed to communicate. If you just read Luke and trust it to be reliable, you will conclude that Heli is Joseph's father. Perhaps the genealogies in Genesis are the same, and they need to be viewed with a grain of salt – meaning science.

Also, in several places Matthew's genealogy skips generations that appear in the OT. He doesn't tell us why, but presumably, his reason for doing this is to turn it into a clever 14-14-14 pattern. He also fails to make to 14-14-14 pattern work by only coming up with 14+14+13=41 names. If you double-count one name it works out. But there is a commonly accepted term for counting something twice: a mistake. I just don't see why I should take the OT genealogies more seriously than the NT writers took them.

Furthermore, the Bible is consistently quite bad at getting numbers right. Jesus died on Friday and rose on Sunday, and yet Matthew 12:40 says Jesus was dead for three days and three nights. I'm very curious about which three nights these might have been. While I'm sure Matthew knew how to count, the point is that to think the numbers in the Bible are mathematically accurate is, at best, to misunderstand the Bible. To argue against evolution based on the genealogies is to assume their mathematical accuracy.

Evolution leads to the Holocaust

Suppose for the sake of argument that it does. God told Moses to slaughter the Midianites, including the male children. (The soldiers were commanded to save the girls “for themselves.”) What would become of society if everyone believed in a ideology that condones genocide?

The ease with which Christians see the depravity of the Holocaust is the ease with which I see the depravity of the Bible.

Problem of Pain

Not accepting YEC certainly makes the problem of pain more difficult. Instead of physical death being something that followed the curse of sin, it's present as part of the original creation. But if you believe in hell as I did, this objection is bizarre. The majority of humanity is supposedly going to be tortured for eternity because God didn't call them. And yet if God's plan involves animals living finite and painful lives this is supposed to be something that indicts God as cruel and unloving.

What's going on is very simple. When God's the sadistic keeper of a medieval torture chamber filled with heretics and it's part of my theology, it's just something that I'm supposed to struggle with until I can train myself to realize that it's what justice really means – if I don't accept the answer, then my sin is causing me to have a warped understanding of what a loving God is really like. But think of the bunnies! Look at them! A loving God wouldn't design a system where mean coyotes eat cute little bunny rabbits. If your theology says that God created lots of bunnies to die for no reason better than lunch, that means you are calling God evil. Is seems as though the YEC God is one of the founding members of PETA.

Of course, that's not to say the problem of animal pain is trivial. But it seems more like a concern for a universalist, an annihilationist, or at least someone who thinks God was genuinely surprised by Adam's rebellion and the necessity for hell. Otherwise, it's like a vegan wanting to venerate Stalin for being so loving but first stopping to ponder the moral implications of his occasional steak.

There is actually is a way that an evolutionary story of life can fit with the YEC doctrine of the physical death of animals being due to sin. Maybe God created the first bacterium to live forever. But before he had a chance to split, it rebelled and ate of the forbidden lactose. And then animals inherited its sin, for which they are personally (animally?) responsible, and that's why animals deserved to die for billions of years. I may not have evidence showing it actually happened, but you don't have evidence saying it didn't happen. It also may not make a lot of sense to one's mind, but maybe it's just the kind of thing that should be accepted by faith and believed in one's heart. (By the way, Pascal's wager calls for the baptizing of your pets.)

Why did God take so long?

This is a really good question. It doesn't make much sense for God to create billions of years of existence for the cosmos when the center of his attention is alive for only thousands of years. But similarly, why did God created billions of light years and billions of stars most of which no person will ever see? As a theistic evolution, I thought it was weird that creationists ask only the first. While I appreciate the consistency of asking neither, I now ask both.

Similarly, why did God wait so long after the Fall to send Jesus? Why make so many animals die as pointless sacrifices? Why spent so much time between Abraham and Jesus with only the Jews and a scattering of Gentiles having a real chance to know him? Christians' reaction to this is fairly predictable. God has a plan. We don't always understand it, but it's quite presumptuous for us to think we could have done better than him. This is precisely how I hope creationist readers react to these questions. Here's the kicker: why not give theistic evolutionists/old earth creationists the same leniency? Maybe God made the universe old for a similar “reason” – it's part of his plan that we can't understand.

Paul's use of Genesis

When talking about the Fall, Paul says that death entered the world through one man's sin. While this isn't clear at all, especially because Adam didn't physically die on the day he ate the fruit, I'll suppose for the sake of argument that we know that Paul is talking about not just spiritual death and not just about human death, but physical death and animal death as well.

But since when have the NT authors been a valid source concerning what the OT actually says? When God makes a promise to Abraham's seed, is seed singular or plural? If singular, I would like to know the verse of Genesis that helped you reach this conclusion. If plural, then Paul was not only wrong about what the OT says, but this faulty understanding was his basis for a theological argument about the promise to the Jews being transferred to Christians.

So maybe Paul was a young-earth creationist, Paul was wrong, and Paul tangentially communicated these false ideas in the process of communicating true theological ideas about Jesus' death. And we're still supposed to believe these theological truths even after learning the debunking of the argument for these theological truths. The ease with which YECists see the weakness in this position is the ease with which I look at Galatians 3 and see that it is false.

Blurring the Line Between Man and Animals

Another problem is that evolution blurs the line between man and animals. And it certainly does. This means “human” is not a yes/no question, but rather a question of degree. There are ways around this like believing that in a certain moment in time, God gave an animal that looked like an ape-man a soul, but this isn't as clean of an answer as the one provided by creationism.

Consider embryonic development. The same problem appears. We have a smooth transition between non-human sperm and egg to a fully human baby. This cannot be evaded by just “believing” God creates a soul at conception. Theistic evolutionists believe that God created the first human soul at some point in the evolution process, and YECists don't let them get away with this equally evidence-free claim. Here, the problem is even worse. At least with evolution, you could go back 40,000 years and look at a child and say it is human while the parents were animals – while the line may be arbitrary, at least the line can't be blurred further by looking at the generation between the child and the parents. But with embryonic development, it's a fully smooth transition. YECists easily see that a mostly smooth transition from animal to human suggests that talk of a soul or being created in the image of God doesn't make sense. With the same ease, I see that embryonic development shows the concept of a soul to be nonsensical.

Randomness

In Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology, on page 276 he writes “The fundamental difference between a biblical view of creation and theistic evolution lies here: the driving force … is randomness.” This is tangential, but this is a common misconception about evolution. Evolution is like the weather – it's a process involving randomness. Due to the randomness of weather I can only guess within ten or twenty degrees what the temperature will be in a week. But I could guess the average temperature for 2010 within a degree or two (and without knowing about global warming.) Due to random effects averaging out, a process that looks chaotic on a small scale is often one that behaves predictably on a larger scale. Evolution says that changes are the predictable long-term result.

But theologically speaking, the misunderstanding doesn't change the implications. In theistic evolution, God's guidance of evolution looks precisely the way it would look if it looked like he stopped caring billions of years ago.

However, the same issue of randomness appears when thinking through the implications of actuarial science. If you know the rate at which heart attacks occur, and you know the size of the population, you can make a very good guess about how many people in the population will have heart attacks. For a more precise prediction, you don't pray to learn the will of God. You learn more about the population, like their age distribution. Actuarial science requires thinking about death in terms of the naturalistic cause and effect that comes from supposing death is left up to chance. And it works. This means that the way in which God takes away life looks precisely the way it would look if it looked like God doesn't care. There are less fatalist ways of saying this, but it's no different than the spin creationists universally give to evolution. Personally, I find the threat actuarial science and statistics pose to believing God still cares about death to be far more severe than the threat evolution poses to believing God cared while creating.

YECists show the proper approach to theistic evolution – skepticism toward the meaningfulness of talking about a creator who is indistinguishable from no creator at all. With the same ease, I apply this same skepticism to Christianity and see that the reasoning behind actuarial science supports the conclusion that God doesn't exist or doesn't care.

Problems in the Local Flood

Most old earth creationists and theistic evolutionists believe that Noah's flood was a local flood (a myth is the alternative.) The Bible talks about the whole world as a hyperbole in many places, so perhaps here as well. To this position, YECists have an excellent response. Why didn't Noah just migrate several hundred miles? Why not just have the birds fly a few hundred miles away? Noah had a hundred years to kill, so I don't suppose finding the time to pack would have been too burdensome.

I really like this objection. It's an excellent reason to not believe in the local flood. What I like so much about it is the underlying assumption that if a plan is completely illogical, then an omniscient God probably didn't come up with it. This assumption comes as naturally as the basic rules of logic – unless one's own beliefs are under the microscope.

So here's my question: Why didn't God just smite everyone and skip the whole flood thing entirely? This would have saved so much trouble for everyone. Noah could have preached about coming judgment for years and he could have shown he believed his own message by making provisions for surviving on his own. I would be interested in hearing if there are any reasons to send a flood at all that don't also defend the idea of having Noah build an ark for a local flood. Maybe there are reasons, but I could throw in an extra miracle or two if they are needed for the practicality of my smiting proposal.

With the local flood, YECists show the proper way of thinking about dramatic claims about what God did. If the story has God commanding a lot of pointless milling about, this should count strongly against its chance of being true. By applying the same skepticism to the global flood that creationists apply to the local flood, I reject the story of Noah even without the scientific and biblical cases against it.

Reconciling the Bible with evolution is really quite easy compared to reconciling the Bible with the Bible and other realities in the here and now. Creationists' ability to see the problems in my answers to comparably easy questions helped me see how contrived both our answers were to the hard questions.

Failing The Insider Test

Small step at a time, I moved my theology a bit while staying inside what I thought was inside. I would wait a bit, and my idea of “inside” would be stretched with me. After moving a moderate distance, I thought that where I came from was inside while the painful truth is that where I came from thought I was outside. This placed me in a curious position: YEC was still inside to me, YEC viewed me as an outsider, I was seeking to fully understand different positions within my idea of orthodoxy, and therefore the logically inevitable result was viewing my faith as an outsider.

I don't remember if anyone ever told me that I would reject Christianity if I used the same skepticism toward it that I use toward every other religion. If so, I don't remember it because it made no impact on my thinking. But eventually, I found myself looking at creationists and seeing that if they were to apply the same critical thinking to their own beliefs that they apply to mine, they would stop being Christians. Conversely, if I thought about my own faith the way other Christians thought about my faith, I would stop being a Christian.

While I thought my way out of many aspects of faith, here I simply got lucky. The desire and ability to think critically about my own beliefs was a very small part of the final step out. Thinking critically about my own beliefs was forced upon me as an unintended consequence of other decisions that were much easier to make. Perhaps this is the difference between me and Christians smarter than I am.

While many of the arguments against Christianity work just fine as academic arguments, I doubt this can be written so that readers will feel the weight of the argument as I did. It took the grind of over two years of not only trying to fit evolution in with Christianity, but trying to fit evolution in with the Christian community to see the blatant inconsistencies on both sides. It's not a matter of people being dogmatic or whatever negative adjective you want to throw in. It's simply the predictable clash of incompatible beliefs – or rather, different Christianities.

My YEC and inerrantist Christianity failed the insider test because the arguments against it are so solid that any perspective save for closing one's eyes is sufficient to see it. My TE Christianity failed the insider test because even the very idea of an insider test failed the insider test. To define “inside” as bigger than “me” was to include people who don't agree on everything. To be willing to have candid conversations with other Christians who believed a bit differently and to honestly seek to understand where they were coming from was to look at many of my own beliefs and critically think through if I had reasons for believing them or not. Sociological circumstances turned this into looking at all of my beliefs with skepticism.

Few faiths, if any, can survive under the scrutiny that everyone applies to everyone else's faith. Truth has nothing to fear from inspection and Christianity should be terrified. My mortally wounded faith staggered on for a while, but my fate had been sealed. I had escaped.

Evolution and the Holocaust

One argument against evolution that comes up exasperating often is that evolution taken to its logical conclusion resulted in the Holocaust. This is rather like a gay person deciding to reject electromagnetic theory because they dislike the cultural impact of laws like “opposite charges attract.” It's only funny until millions of people believe it and vote accordingly.

This is such an inflammatory argument that it is rarely is given a passionless rebuttal. Shouting back at it is an enormous rhetorical mistake. All you have to blow on it a bit and the whole thing collapses marvelously.

To justify the Holocaust with evolution requires four different conclusions. First, it is logically possible that some races are better or more fit than other races. Second, Aryans are in fact superior and Jews are in fact inferior. Third, eugenics could effectively be used to advance evolution. Fourth, doing so is morally right. The Theory of Evolution fails to be at fault in all four steps.

Are Some Races Inferior?

The first issue is whether or not evolution creates a basis for racism by providing a basis for the possibility of one race being better than another. And it certainly does. It is logically possible that one race is more fit than another due to evolution.

However, different races are all part of the same species. So we're talking about microevolution. Creationists accept microevolution, so it makes absolutely no difference which view of origins you accept. Poodles and wolves are part of the same species and differ only due to microevolution – one certainty need not believe in their equality. Similarly, it might be the case that one race has better genes than another regardless of your theory of origins.

Which Races Are Inferior?

Evolutionary theory does not tell us which race is superior, or even if a superior race exists at all. If someone wants to argue that evolution led to the Holocaust, the least they could do is explain how evolution leads to a negative view of Jews or any of the other races that were targeted.

The hatred of the Jews had nothing to do with Darwin. It goes back to at least the Middle Ages and is due in large part to religious differences and anti-Jewish propaganda spread by the church. This component of the case for the Holocaust comes not from a distortion of evolution, but a distortion of Christianity.

Is Eugenics Effective?

How do you get rid of Jews? You kill them, or otherwise prevent them from reproducing. Any view of science sufficiently advanced to realize that Jewish children typically come from Jewish parents will reach this conclusion. Of course, I'm not talking about ethics, I'm only asking if a worldwide Holocaust would have accomplished Hitler's goal. The answer is yes. This hardly shows us the evils of believing that children usually look like their parents.

A harder question is if killing the weak and disabled would have a noticeable effect upon improving the human race's gene pool. Would it take three generations to see a difference? One thousand? Would it never help at all? But notice that the question here is about the effectiveness of a particular means of reducing the frequency of particular alleles so that a less fit homo sapiens population can become a more fit homo sapiens population. Or in other words, eugenics deals with microevolution, which is kind of funny, because creationists accept microevolution. Thus, it is not defenders of macroevolution who are inadvertently making the case for eugenics – we explicitly argue that evolution doesn't imply eugenics. The people whose rhetoric makes the case for eugenics are creationists.

Is Eugenics Morally Acceptable?

The alleged reason that evolution defends the morality of eugenics is that in evolution, life progresses through struggle and death. While there are some awkward moral issues if you believe that a loving God set it up to work this way, evolution itself does not say anything about the morality of the process. Evolution is a description of how the process works.

To argue that the efficacy of survival of the fittest somehow implies that a Darwinian society should be our goal is the “is-ought” fallacy. This is rather like telling the child of a rape victim that because their existence is good, they must believe rape to be morally acceptable. Or rather, it is like the child concluding that he wasn't conceived by means of rape because the moral implications of this would just be too terrible to be true. Evolution is merely a theory about the manner in which it happened – this isn't a moral claim, and only the barest amount of common sense is needed to see this.

Conclusion

I don't reject Christianity because Hitler also used religious language to defend hatred of the Jews. I don't even fault religion for Hitler's use of religious language – this would only be relevant if the Bible actually taught people to hate the Jews. The question is if Hitler's evolutionary case for the Holocaust was valid.

It is difficult to overstate just how bad the case for evolution leading to the Holocaust is, or just how badly it reflects on creationists' integrity. Ignorance is no excuse for falsely accusing others of harboring mass murderers. All you have to know to see through the argument is that different races are part of the same species, and thus the origin and extent of racial differences are questions for microevolution. I can more easily forgive the good-faith mistake of accepting many of creationists' other arguments, as they at least require some level of scientific knowledge to be refuted. But this takes next to nothing to be refuted and still it is a mainstream creationist argument. Just how gullible do creationists have to be for their leaders to be able to get away with this kind of thing for decades on end without an enormous backlash from within? Well, there actually is a backlash from within. We, the former creationists, are vilified for “trusting the reasoning of man.” When a group has catchphrases that antagonize people for the sin of thinking, there is no limit to what they will believe.