Darwin at 200: A Liberator Like Lincoln

The Atlas Society - The Center for Objectivism ^ | 2/12/2009 | Edward Hudgins

[Ed Hudgins]

by Edward Hudgins

February 12, 2009 -- Of the two famous men born on February 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln is the one known as a political liberator.

But the other man, Charles Darwin, also deserves recognition on the bicentennial of his birth for his own form of Emancipation Proclamation.

Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in 1859 and set forth the thesis that the various kinds of living organisms were not fixed and eternal but, rather, evolved from other, often less complex organisms over millions of years. In the century and a half that followed, this discovery has had a truly liberating effect on humanity.

We Want to Know

Understanding evolution has helped us satisfy that quintessential human longing expressed by Aristotle: “All men, by nature, desire to know.” As self-conscious beings, we have a thirst to know the deepest truths about the world around us, its origin and ours, and our place in it. We are pattern-seeking animals who delight in discovery. Such understanding and, indeed, our very survival require us to exercise our rational capacity, the attribute that most distinguishes us from the lower life forms from which we evolved.

Observations, conceptual thinking and critical analysis have, over the centuries, allowed us to replace primitive superstitions with knowledge of objective reality. Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and Einstein have helped us understand the physical realm: that it operates with regularity in accordance with causal laws; that it is composed of infinitesimal atoms; that it is vast and includes planets, stars and galaxies; that it is billions of years old. And, of course, knowledge gained through this rational approach allows us to create all of the technologies needed for our survival and flourishing.

Darwin helped us understand the biological realm. He showed how small variations that naturally occur in living …

[IbJensen]

I thought the other one named wouldn’t be St. Charles Darwin, but President Barack Hussein Obomba.

[fishtank]

Darwin - the grandfather of eugenics and racism, spawning among other things communism and the abortion sub-culture ........

[Ed Hudgins]

Obama will be remembered as the anti-Lincoln. He will enslave all Americans, black and white, without regard to racial differences, in socialism with overseer bureaucrats using government whips to keep us in line.

[varmintman]

Garbage science with evil consequences ping.....

[Ed Hudgins]

I will also post twice my comment from the News Items side for those reading on the religion part of the site:

I call the readers’ attention to the examples on this thread of blatant irrationality on the subject of evolution. One of my key points is that Creationists and most I.D. believers abandon the critical approach to knowledge or intentionally distort that approach in order to hold their beliefs. This is bad enough in an individual. It’s worse when that sort of irrationality is spread in the culture.

There are a lot of open questions concerning evolution, human consciousness, morality and the like that deserve serious, honest and critical examination. We should apply a rational methodology in all cases and to all questions. After all, socialists will not be able to uphold their beliefs if this method is applied. But when religious conservatives abandon it in favor of faith on an issue like evolution, they perpetuate the irrationality that harms the culture and allows bad guys on the left to make headway.

[RandReagan]

Rand has said that Aristiotle is the only philospher to influence her so what about this makes you think its turing people away from Ayn Rand?

[Religion Moderator]

Do not use potty language - or references to potty language - on the Religion Forum.

[Ed Hudgins]

FYI, a Library of Congress survey found Atlas Shrugged voted the was the second most influential book in the US, after the Bible. It’s still a bestseller. So people have been turning to Rand’s ideas for quite a while.

Rand was influenced by Aristotle. (So was I; I studied his works at Catholic University.) Rand also liked other thinkers, including Aquinas and many Enlightenment thinkers.

[RandReagan]

How do you possibly justify your role as an objectionist with being Catholic?

[Ed Hudgins]

I'm not a Catholic. I did a Ph.D. in political philosophy at Catholic U. because it was an excellent school with scholars—including priests—from whom I could learn a lot and because they took value questions seriously. Also they tended to be in the Thomist tradition which is not that uncomfortable for an Objectivist.

[Ed Hudgins]

We at the Atlas Society are Objectivists who do believe in civility, so I thank you for upholding that standard!

[P-Marlowe]

Legal scholar Dr Augusto Zimmermann writes: ‘Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime are the perfect illustration of what might occur when a civil government declares itself to be completely independent of God’s law. The Nazis believed that humans were not created by God but rather descended from the animal kingdom, an idea they adopted from Darwin. They believed that “superior” humans had the “right” to eliminate the “inferior” ones, for the same reasons that lions eat antelopes. A “master morality” therefore prevailed, and it became meaningless to appeal to any higher law as a defence against such brutal tyranny.’

• Zimmermann, A., The Darwinian roots of the Nazi legal system, Journal of Creation, 22(3):109–114, 2008. Dr Zimmerman is currently Lecturer in Law at Murdoch University, Western Australia.

[Ed Hudgins]

Zimmerman's wrong.

First, whatever misuse individuals make of facts do not negate the facts. “Did life evolve over long periods of time through genetic mutation and natural selection?” is a question that has been answered in the affirmative over the past century and a half and in many scientific disciplines.

Second, the fact that some Nazis misapplied (I would say intentionally distorted) Darwin does not mean the principles of evolution are less true any more than the fact that a lot of Nazis liked Wagner and Beethoven made their music any less beautiful.

Third, the facts of evolution in no way support and justify Nazi policies. If biology teaches us anything it is how fundamentally similar we are within the human species, in spite of superficial differences such as skin color and the like.

Fourth, as you know I'm sure, arbitrarily declaring that pronouncements from any particular book held to holy—the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Koran, the Baghavad Gita—does not make such pronouncements the essence of morality. Rather, they beg a question that must be explored through reasoning, introspection, and critical examination, not by blind faith. Indeed, on various matters the Nazis simply shut off their minds in order to protect their unjustified or dishonestly rationalized beliefs and act in the immoral—by an objective defintion—way that they did.

[P-Marlowe]

The underlying theme of Darwinism is not necessarily "natural selection" but the survival of the fittest. In that sense, if Darwinism is taken as a social philosophy, which in many ways it has been even in scientific circles, then if a nation or a race has determined that in order to preserve that nation or race, it becomes necessary to eliminate other nations or races, then the ends justify the means, and in an atheistic world view, the elimination of that nation or race becomes a moral imperative. In other words, as Adolf Eichmann noted, he did nothing for which he had reason to repent. Killing Jews, who were an inferior race in his mind and who stood as a roadblock to Aryan supremacy was, in his Darwinist philosophy, a courageous moral act.

It is not necessarily the pseudo-science of Darwinism that concerns me as a Christian or as an American. It is the underlying philosophy of Darwinism that should concern all of us.

If our schools are going to refuse to teach Christian philosophy and the truth about the development of our Christian heritage and the religious foundations of Western Civilization, then they should likewise be prohibited from teaching Darwinism (even as science) and promulgating the idea that a secular state devoid of any mention of God will somehow produce a nation of people who are in any way more civilized or morally superior than that the secular states of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Communist China, etc.