Dispatches from the Creation Wars

Well I watched about half of the abominable D. James Kennedy special about Darwin and Hitler last night, about as much as I could stomach. It was every bit as bad as I imagined, perhaps even worse. The dishonesty absolutely leapt off the screen. At one point they present noted paleontological scholar Ann Coulter claiming that “all animal phyla” appeared in the Cambrian “in the blink of an eye” – yes, she actually said that. Apparently in Coulter’s world, 70 or 80 million years is “the blink of an eye”.

Most galling, I thought, was that they invoked Hitler’s book Mein Kampf as being laced with evolution, but in fact that book clearly shows that Hitler was a creationist (or at least that he used creationist arguments for his position). The full text of the book is available online and it’s not hard to find the evidence of this. To wit:

Everybody who has the right kind of feeling for his country is solemnly bound, each within his own
denomination, to see to it that he is not constantly talking about the Will of God merely from the lips but that in actual fact he fulfils the Will of God and does not allow God’s handiwork to be debased. For it was by the Will of God that men were made of a certain bodily shape, were given their natures and their faculties. Whoever destroys His work wages war against God’s Creation and God’s Will.

He explicitly says that we are made in the image of God (well, some of us, of course, by his reasoning):

And, further, they ought to be brought to realize that it is their bounden duty to give to the Almighty Creator beings such as He himself made to His own image.

He endorses the common creationist argument about change being fixed within a “kind”:

Walking about in the garden of Nature, most men have the self-conceit to think that they know everything; yet almost all are blind to one of the outstanding principles that Nature employs in her work. This principle may be called the inner isolation which characterizes each and every living species on this earth.

Even a superficial glance is sufficient to show that all the innumerable forms in which the life-urge of Nature manifests itself are subject to a fundamental law–one may call it an iron law of Nature–which compels the various species to keep within the definite limits of their own life-forms when propagating and multiplying their kind. Each animal mates only with one of its own species. The titmouse cohabits only with the titmouse, the finch with the finch, the stork with the stork, the field-mouse with the field-mouse, the house-mouse with the house-mouse, the wolf with the she-wolf, etc.

And to top it off, he says that humans did not evolve from apes:

From where do we get the right to believe, that from the very beginning Man was not what he is today? Looking at Nature tells us that in the realm of plants and animals changes and developments happen. But nowhere inside a kind shows such a development as the breadth of the jump, as Man must supposedly have made, if he has developed from an ape-like state to what he is today.

All of this, of course, is completely ignored by Kennedy and the others making this idiotic argument. Because it’s inconvenient and it contradicts their hypothesis. So they do the same thing with historical evidence that they do with scientific evidence, distort it and ignore all contrary evidence in order to make reality appear to be something other than it is.

Daniel Morgan has a post with links to all of the previous posts on this subject here and at other blogs.

Comments

#1 Bobz
August 28, 2006

I belive you meant to say Mein Kampf “clearly shows that [Hitler] was a creationist”?
#2 Alejandro
August 28, 2006

Ed, you made a typo in the second paragraph. You wrote:

“but in fact that book clearly shows that Darwin was a creationist…”

where I am pretty sure you meant Hitler instead of Darwin . Correct it quickly before some creationist quote-mines it!
#3 jpf
August 28, 2006

Some more telling bits, for any fence-sitters or honest Creationists reading:

In short, the results of miscegenation are always the following:

(a) The level of the superior race becomes lowered;

(b) physical and mental degeneration sets in, thus leading slowly but steadily towards a progressive drying up of the vital sap.

The act which brings about such a development is a sin against the will of the Eternal Creator. And as a sin this act will be avenged.

…

Whoever would dare to raise a profane hand against that highest image of God among His creatures [the Aryans] would sin against the bountiful Creator of this marvel and would collaborate in the expulsion from Paradise.

…

And, further, they [the Aryans] ought to be brought to realize that it is their bounden duty to give to the Almighty Creator beings such as He himself made to His own image.

Hitler’s eugenic ideas are based on animal husbandry, not evolution:

The WELTANSCHAUUNG which bases the State on the racial idea must finally succeed in bringing about a nobler era, in which men will no longer pay exclusive attention to breeding and rearing pedigree dogs and horses and cats, but will endeavour to improve the breed of the human race itself.

Eugenicists, Hitler included, consistently express the idea that Darwinian evolution (i.e. the agentless process of Natural Selection) is incapable of producing anything but degeneration and thus an outside agent — a.k.a. an “Intelligent Designer” — is needed to create, fix, or maintain a level of superiority. Eugenics is an anti-Darwinian (or at the very least, counter-Darwinian) concept.

What’s depressing is that even if a TV show was made explaining all this and showing the pure bizarro-world nature of the Darwin=Hitler position, no TV station would air it — yet two stations in my relatively Godless state of Washington (a Christian one and a “secular” one on Sunday morning) aired that Kennedy abomination.
#4 Daniel Morgan
August 28, 2006

Great work on those quotes from Mein Kampf. Thanks for the link. The thing that always saddens me is that shows like this only further the cause for the sorts of persons who will never bother to research it out for themselves — the types who would refuse to believe Hitler was not an atheist, despite evidence piled in front of them contrariwise.
#5 Ed Brayton
August 28, 2006

I did, of course, intend to say that Hitler was a creationist, not Darwin. I corrected the text.
#6 Chuckles
August 28, 2006

There was an article in the March/April issue of Archeaology Magazine that dealt with the Ahnenerbe’s archeaology corps. It seems that Himmler basically informed them that the idea of human evolution, at least, was anathema to the Reich, because it implied that their fictional ‘Aryan’ race shared common ancestry with other, ‘inferior’ races, such a Semitic peoples.

The abstract is at http://www.archaeology.org/0603/abstracts/nazis.html

Regretably, I don’t have the actual text describing the above stand: I no longer posess the issue.
#7 Adam Ierymenko
August 28, 2006

Mein Kampf should be required reading in grade school for exactly this reason.
#8 Skemono
August 29, 2006

Chuckles, I have access to an on-line version of that article, so I could e-mail it to you (or anyone else who wants to read). I think you may be remembering wrongly, though; just skimming the article and searching it for “evolution” only gets me this:

Himmler also found time to take Bohmers aside at a gathering to convey his personal views on the subject of human evolution. It must have been an instructive conversation. As Bohmers later reported, Himmler dismissed outright the notion that the human race was closely related to primates. He was also outraged by an idea proposed by another German researcher that the Cro-Magnon arose from the Neandertal. To Himmler, both these hypotheses were “scientifically totally false.” They were also “quite insulting to humans.”
#9 Steven Carr
August 29, 2006

One of those quotes is my translation from Picker’s German of his ‘Hitlers Tischgespraeche’ , rather than from Mein Kampf.
#10 Steven Carr
August 29, 2006

Here is the original German that I translated from :-

From Hitler’s Tischgespraeche for the night of the 25th to 26th 1942 ‘Woher nehmen wir das Recht zu glauben, der Mensch sei nicht von Uranfaengen das gewesen , was er heute ist? Der Blick in die Natur zeigt uns, dass im Bereich der Pflanzen und Tiere Veraenderungen und Weiterbildungen vorkommen. Aber nirgends zeigt sich innherhalb einer Gattung eine Entwicklung von der Weite des Sprungs, den der Mensch gemacht haben muesste, sollte er sich aus einem affenartigen Zustand zu dem, was er ist, fortgebildet haben.’