The Cross vs. the Swastika

I vividly remember a high school conversation with a friend I’d known since we were eight. I’d pointed out that Hitler was essentially a pagan, not a Christian, but my friend absolutely refused to believe it. No matter how much evidence I presented, he kept insisting that Nazi Germany was an extension of Christianity, acting out its age-old vendetta against the Jews. Not that he spoke from any personal study of the subject; he just knew. He’d heard it so many times it’d become an article of faith — one of those things “everyone knows.”

Flash forward 25 years. A few weeks ago my last column (http://www.boundless.org/2001/regulars/kaufman/a0000528.html) refuted a number of familiar charges against Christianity, including the Christianity-created-Nazism shibboleth. Even though I only skimmed the subject, I thought the evidence I cited would’ve been hard to ignore; I quoted, for example, Hitler’s fond prediction that he would “destroy Christianity” and replace it with “a [pagan] religion rooted in nature and blood.” But sure enough, I still heard from people who couldn’t buy that.

Well, sometimes myths die hard. But this one took a hit in early January, at the hands of one Julie Seltzer Mandel, a Jewish law student at Rutgers whose grandmother survived internment at Auschwitz.

A couple of years ago Mandel read through 148 bound volumes of papers gathered by the American OSS (the World War II-era predecessor of the CIA) to build the case against Nazi leaders on trial at Nuremberg. Now she and some fellow students are publishing what they found in the journal Law and Religion(www.lawandreligion.com), which Mandel edits. The upshot: a ton of evidence that Hitler sought to wipe out Christianity just as surely as he sought to wipe out the Jews.

The first installment (the papers are being published in stages) includes a 108-page OSS outline, “The Persecution of the Christian Churches.” It’s not easy reading, but it’s an enlightening tale of how the Nazis — faced with a country where the overwhelming majority considered themselves Christians — built their power while plotting to undermine and eradicate the churches, and the people’s faith.

Before the Nazis came to power, the churches did hold some views that overlapped with the National Socialists — e.g., they opposed communism and resented the Versailles treaty that ended World War I by placing heavy burdens on defeated Germany. But, the OSS noted, the churches “could not be reconciled with the principle of racism, with a foreign policy of unlimited aggressive warfare, or with a domestic policy involving the complete subservience of Church to State.” Thus, “conflict was inevitable.”

From the start of the Nazi movement, “the destruction of Christianity was explicitly recognized as a purpose of the National Socialist movement,” said Baldur von Scvhirach, leader of the group that would come to be known as Hitler youth. But “explicitly” only within partly ranks: as the OSS stated, “considerations of expedience made it impossible” for the movement to make this public until it consolidated power.

So the Nazis lied to the churches, posing as a group with modest and agreeable goals like the restoration of social discipline in a country that was growing permissive. But as they gained power, they took advantage of the fact that many of the Protestant churches in the largest body (the German Evangelical Church) were government-financed and administered. This, the OSS reported, advanced the Nazi plan “to capture and use church organization for their own purposes” and “to secure the elimination of Christian influences in the German church by legal or quasi legal means.”

The Roman Catholic Church was another story; its administration came from Rome, not within German borders, and its relationship with the Nazis in the 1920s had been bitter. So Hitler lied again, offering a treaty pledging total freedom for the Catholic church, asking only that the church pledge loyalty to the civil government and emphasize citizens’ patriotic duties — principles which sounded a lot like what the church already promoted. Rome signed the treaty in 1933.

Only later, when Hitler assumed dictatorial powers, did his true policy toward both Catholics and Protestants become apparent. By 1937, Pope Pius XI denounced the Nazis for waging “a war of extermination” against the church, and dissidents like the Lutheran clergyman Martin Niemoller openly denounced state control of Protestant churches. The fiction of peaceful coexistence was rapidly fading: In the words of The New York Times (summarizing OSS conclusions), “Nazi street mobs, often in the company of the Gestapo, routinely stormed offices in Protestant and Catholic churches where clergymen were seen as lax in their support of the regime.”

The Nazis still paid enough attention to public perception to paint its church critics as traitors: the church “shall have not martyrs, but criminals,” an official said. But the campaign was increasingly unrestrained. Catholic priests found police snatching sermons out of their hands, often in mid-reading. Protestant churches issued a manifesto opposing Nazi practices, and in response 700 Protestant pastors were arrested. And so it went.

Not that Christians took this lying down; the OSS noted that despite this state terrorism, believers often acted with remarkable courage. The report tells, for example, of how massive public demonstrations protested the arrests of Lutheran pastors, and how individuals like pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer (hanged just days before the war ended) and Catholic lay official Josef Mueller joined German military intelligence because that group sought to undermine the Nazis from within.

There is, of course, plenty of room for legitimate criticism of church leaders and laymen alike for getting suckered early on, and for failing to put up enough of a fight later. Yet we should approach such judgments with due humility. As Vincent Carroll and David Shiflett write in their book Christianity on Trial (to repeat a quote used in my last column), “It is easy for those who do not live under a totalitarian regime to expect heroism from those who do, but it is an expectation that will often be disappointed. . . . it should be less surprising that the mass of Christians were silent than that some believed strongly enough to pay for their faith with their lives.”

At any rate, my point is hardly to defend every action (or inaction) on the part of German churches. In fact, I think their failures bring us valuable lessons, not least about the dangers of government involvement in — and thus power over — any churches.

But the notion that the church either gave birth to Hitler or walked hand-in-hand with him as a partner is, simply, slander. Hitler himself knew better. “One is either a Christian or a German,” he said. “You can’t be both.”

This is something to bear in mind when some folk on the left trot out their well-worn accusation that conservative Christians are “Nazis” or “fascists.” It’s also relevant to answering the charge made by the likes of liberal New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd: “History teaches that when religion is injected into politics — the Crusades, Henry VIII, Salem, Father Coughlin, Hitler, Kosovo — disaster follows.”

But it’s not Christianity that’s injected evil into the world. In fact, the worst massacres in history have been committed by atheists (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot) and virtual pagans (Hitler). Christians have amassed their share of sins over the past 2,000 years, but the great murderers have been the church’s enemies, especially in the past century. It’s long past time to set the historical record straight.

The complete text of this article is available at http://www.boundless.org/2001/regulars/kaufman/a0000541.html

The Second Law wasn't devised or discovered in the Apollo mission to the moon or through the land rover on mars. The Second Law was observed on and applies to THIS planet. If you're claiming this planet is decreasing in entropy, you are utter fool.

This planet is headed for maximun entropy. A hurricane does not result in an decrease in entropy on the planet or more order. Any decrease is at the expense of an increase in entropy in the surroundings of the hurricane. And that, in no one, takes away from the FACT, the earth is increasing in entropy. The net result of a hurricane -- anyone can see it -- is more disorder, BTW.

“...there are no known violations of the second law of thermodynamics. Ordinarily the second law is stated for isolated [closed] systems, but the second law applies equally well to open systems ... there is somehow associated with the field of far-from equilibrium phenomena the notion that the second law of thermodynamics fails for such systems. It is important to make sure that this error does not perpetuate itself.” [Dr. John Ross, Harvard scientist (evolutionist), Chemical and Engineering News, vol. 58, July 7, 1980, p. 40]

Creationist and author of the Second Law, Lord Kelvin is laughing is ass off in heaven at you and the pseudo-sceintists that are butchering his law.

Creationist and author of the Second Law, Lord Kelvin:

The Absolute Temperature Scale still bears Lord Kelvin's name, but other exploits in his day, like the submarine cable, revolutionary ship's compass and 69 other patented brainwaves, made him a household word. He died in 1907 with over 600 published scientific papers to his credit, 70 patented inventions and 21 honorary degrees. Elected unanimously at 22 as Glasgow University's youngest professor ever, he opened every lecture with prayer. "A firm believer in creation for his entire life he often insisted that the power to analyze, to look for causes, was itself a creation of God. He never ceased to look for causes, causes of causes, and for causes of these in return. Seeking a cause for the escape of heat from the Earth, he became in the end a founder of geophysics and the joint discoverer of the Second Law of Thermodynamics." He was 35 in 1859, when Darwin published his "Origin of the Species."

Could he have dreamed then that the Law he helped co-discover would today be one of the biggest headaches to Darwin's theory? "The sheer venturesomeness of Kelvin's speculations were possible only because of his underlying certainty that behind everything lay the power of the Creator God. Science, in his view, could never lead a man to disbelieve in God." Kelvin wouldn't buy today's notion that creation is somehow "unscientific." When his sister in later years read to him Darwin's early statement of "disbelief in Divine revelation and evidence of creative design in the Universe," Kelvin, "unhesitatingly denounced it as utterly unscientific."

Darwin apparently published his theory with much apprehension, fearing the scorn of fellow scientists; in the first edition of his "Origin," he prepared a line retreat along Lamark's ideas in case his theory of natural selection was found indefensible (Life & Letters of Charles Darwin - Ed. Francis Darwin, D. Appleton & Company, 1888, vol. 2, pp. 12-15). Professor C. D. Darlington was of the opinion that Darwinism began "as a theory that could be explained by natural selection; it ended as a theory that evolution could be explained just as you would like it to be explained" (Darlington: "The Origin of Darwinism," Scientific American, 200, 5:60; May 1959, pp. 60-61).

The evolutionist rationale is simply that life on earth is an “exception” because we live in an open system: “The sun provides more than enough energy to drive things.” This supply of available energy, we are assured, adequately satisfies any objection to evolution on the basis of the second law.

But simply adding energy to a system doesn’t automatically cause reduced entropy (i.e., increased organized complexity, or “build-up” rather than “break-down”). Raw solar energy alone does not decrease entropy—in fact, it increases entropy, speeding up the natural processes that cause break-down, disorder, and disorganization on earth (consider, for example, your car’s paint job, a wooden fence, or a decomposing animal carcass, both with and then without the addition of solar radiation).

Yes, sooooo strange, that the list just happens to include the Founders of the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics, including Lord Kelvin, who was 35 when Darwin wrote his theory:

Lord Kelvin's Second Law

How about Stephen J. Gould, who unlike the Darwinistic cultist here, admits Darwin's theory has real problems:

Tom Bethell held the most recent wake in a piece called "Darwin's Mistake" (Harper's, February 1976): "Darwin's theory, I believe, is on the verge of collapse.…Natural selection was quietly abandoned, even by his most ardent supporters, some years ago." News to me, and I, although I wear the Darwinian label with some pride, am not among the most ardent defenders of natural selection. I recall Mark Twain's famous response to a premature obituary: "The reports of death are greatly exaggerated."

Bethell's argument has a curious ring for most practicing scientists. We are always ready to watch a theory fall under the impact of new data, but we do not expect a great and influential theory to collapse from a logical error in its formulation. Virtually every empirical scientist has a touch of the Philistine. Scientists tend to ignore academic philosophy as an empty pursuit. Surely, any intelligent person can think straight by intuition. Yet Bethell cites no data at all in sealing the coffin of natural selection, only an error in Darwin's reasoning: "Darwin made a mistake sufficiently serious to undermine his theory. And that mistake has only recently been recognized as such.…At one point in his argument, Darwin was mislead."

Although I will try to refute Bethell, I also deplore the unwillingness of scientists to explore seriously the logical structure of arguments. Much of what passes for evolutionary theory is as vacuous as Bethell claims. Many great theories are held together by chains of dubious metaphor and analogy

The Second Law was almost exclusively devised based on observations ON THIS planet. The Second Law primarily applies to living things on this planet that use energy. The earth is headed for maximum entropy and entropy is increasing on the planet.

Evolutionists want to come up with unproven, illogical theories to refute this fact. No, the sun does not decrease entropy. Raw solar energy increases entropy.

But, there are NO known violations of the Second Law:

Stephen J. Gould, who unlike the Darwinistic cultist here, admits Darwin's theory has real problems:

No, YOU'VE been refuted by the fossil record. There are 250 million fossils and virtually no missing links. There aren't even enough fossils to complete evolutionary trees. The Cambrian is the last stratum of the descending levels that has any fossils in it. All the lower strata below the Cambrian have absolutely no fossil record of life other than some single-celled types such as bacteria and algae. Why not? The Cambrian layer is full of all the major kinds of animals found today except the vertebrates. In other words, there is nothing primitive about the structure of these most ancient fossils known to man.

"The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nods of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. Yet Darwin was so wedded to gradualism that he wagered his entire theory on a denial of this literal record." (Gould, Stephen J. "The Panda’s Thumb, 1980, p. 181)

"Fossil discoveries can muddle over attempts to construct simple evolutionary trees--fossils from key periods are often not intermediates, but rather hode podges of defining features of many different groups... Generally, it seems that major groups are not assembled in a simple linear or progressive manner--new features are often "cut and pasted" on different groups at different times." (Shubin, Neil, "Evolutionary Cut and Paste," Nature, vol. 349, 1998, p. 39.)

"The fossil record of evolutionary change within single evolutionary lineages is very poor. If evolution is true, species originate through changes of ancestral species: one might expect to be able to see this in the fossil record. In fact it can rarely be seen. In 1859 Darwin could not cite a single example." (Ridley, Mark, The Problems of Evolution, 1985, p. 11)

Well, we are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn’t changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time. By this I mean that some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information..." (Raup, David M., "Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology," Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin, vol. 50, 1979, p. 25.)

Yet, you blindly continue to believe fairy tales with no evidence....

Until in sinks in your thick skull. You DO deny the Second Law applies to the planet. You claim the earth is decreasing in entropy and that life forms are not becoming more disorderly. That is a denial of the Second Law in regard to the planet.

The hurricane example is silly. The sun does not decrease entropy, it increases entropy.

Being a generalization of experience, the second law could only be invalidated by an actual engine. In other words, the question,. "Can the second law of thermodynamics be circumvented?" is not well-worded and could be answered only if the model incorporated every feature of the real world. But an answer can readily be given to the question, "Has the second law of thermodynamics been circumvented?" Not yet. Frank A. Grew, "On the Second Law of Thermodynamics," American Laboratory (October 1982), p.88.

Henry Morris:

Of course, the fact that no exception to the law of increasing entropy has ever been observed does not prove such a thing never happened. It simply shows that such ideas are outside the scope of science. Evolutionists are free to believe in such "singularities" by faith, if they wish (e.g., the inflationary universe, hopeful monsters, etc.) but they have no right impose them on unsuspecting young minds in the name of science.

In the first place, the entropy principle applies at least as much to open systems as to closed systems. In an isolated real system, shut off from external energy, the entropy (or disorganization) will always increase. In an open system (such as the earth receiving an influx of heat energy from the sun), the entropy always tends to increase, and, as a matter of fact, will usually increase more rapidly than if the system remained closed!

That is utterly absurd. For living things to be exempt from the Second Law, you've have to rewrite the Second Law.

Like Don Quixote, you tilt at windmills, thinking they be giants.

Where, pray tell, did you fabricate the idea that I said living things are exempt form the 2LoT? Why are you misrepresenting what I wrote? Are you really unable to comprehend the words that I used, or do you not read them because it might lead to a "forbidden" thought entering your mind?

The Second Law's MAIN application is toward living things that use energy.

Then main application of the "Second Law of Thermodynamics" is ...... Thermodynamics!. It is not restricted to biology; it covers biology and MANY non-living systems, including, but not limited to, inert gases, inorganic chemical reactions, and processes in stellar interiors, to name but a few. BTW, are you suggesting that there are "living things" that DON'T use energy, or was that just another one of your grammatical errors?

The idea that living things are becoming more orderly and the rest of the earth more disorderly is absolutely brainless. [emphasis added to highlight your juvenile argumentation tactics]

But you already admitted in an earlier reply that localized entropy decreases were possible at the expense of the entropy increasing even more in the rest of the system and its surroundings. The living things concentrate energy (from the food they eat), build muscle, reproduce (if they're lucky), and die, and which point the energy concentrated in their bodies is diffused to the surroundings, increasing the entropy of the system and its environment, exactly as the 2LoT demands. Even while they are alive, the entropy decrease in the organism is bought and paid for at the expense of an even greater amount of entropy INCREASE in the organism's surroundings, as the organism diffuses waste heat throughout its environment. IF you think there is a violation of the 2LoT, please point out which step it occurred in.

You ought to ask you university for REFUND of your thermodynamics class.

Sparky, you sound JUST LIKE that guy earning a minimum wage who is STILL busing tables in the cafeteria at my Alma Mater. But then I can understand why he would make a statement like that -- he lacked the intellectual ability to make a coherent argument about just about anything. What's your excuse, Sparky? Oh, by the way, table seven needs to be cleared....

You admit Ross is an evolutionist. So is Gould. So is Asimov. All of them would consider you a witch-doctor trying to garb himself in a lab coat.

The sun's energy performs all sorts of actions upon the earth's surface. Many of them result in work. Many of them can be used to locally reverse entropy.

Let's go back to that water wheel I mentioned somewhere back there. A creationist might say that it does work useful to humans because it had a human designer. (Well, duh-uh!) But lots of work gets done by hurricanes, tornadoes, rain and wind without human agency. It may only randomly be useful to humans, but so what?

Let's suppose you wanted to build a water wheel where there was no natural stream. You want to divert some of your mill's output to pumping water back upstream to feed your mill continuously from an artificial reservoir which you will fill manually the first time, hauling the water by truck.

This scheme will not work. The first law of thermo (conservation of energy) says you can't win. The second law says you can't even break even; you're certain to come out behind with every cycle and rapidly grind to a halt. For all that this scheme has a Designer and lots of organizing input etc. etc. it can't work.

But when you site your mill on a natural stream, you have the sun raising your water back to the top of the mountains for you. Yes, your God would seem to be a Sun God here. Note that this version works because the earth is not a closed system.

It isn't having a Designer or an organizing principle or whatever that makes a difference, and no non-creationist version of the second law mentions any such thing ever. It's having an energy source to pay the entropy bill. The second law says you have to have that and we do. No miracles needed.

With long-winded propaganda, theory or cutting pasting, give me a reason why you believe entropy is decreasing on this planet (in contradiction to the Second Law).

I assume the planet is pretty much in equilibrium. We get energy in by day (half the planet at any given moment). We radiate it out by night (the other half). The thermodynamic entropy is pretty much the same but the sun runs down, losing potential all the time.

The hurricane example is lame and absurd. That does not result in a decrease in entropy on the planet or in the universe. Nor does the result of a hurricane lead to more order, rather disorder.

Still pretending you can't see what is in front of you. The hurricane is a local decrease. An organism is a local decrease. The earth is a local stasis. All allowed because the sun burns itself up and we live in the outflow like that paddle-wheeled mill on the stream between the mountain rainfall and the ocean.

That sun explanation is a theory NOT fact:

One problem biologists have faced is the apparent contradiction by evolution of the second law of thermodynamics. Systems should decay through time, giving less, not more, order. One legitimate response to this challenge is that life on earth is an open system with respect to energy and therefore the process of evolution sidesteps the law's demands for increasing disorder with timeRoger Lewin, "A Downward Slope to Greater Diversity," Science (Volume 217, Septernber 24, 1982) p. 1239.

In an open system (such as the earth receiving an influx of heat energy from the sun), the entropy always tends to increase, and, as a matter of fact, will usually increase more rapidly than if the system remained closed! An example would be a tornado sweeping through a decaying ghost town or a cast iron wrecking ball imposed on an abandoned building. Anyone familiar with the actual equations of heat flow will know that a simple influx of heat energy into a system increases the entropy of that system; it does not decrease it, as evolution would demand. Opening a system to external energy does not resolve the entropy problem at all, but rather makes it worse!

The statement in integral form, namely that the entropy in an isolated system cannot decrease, can be replaced by its corollary in differential form, which asserts that the quantity of entropy generated locally cannot he negative irrespective of whether the system is isolated or not, and irrespective of whether the process under consideration is irreversible or not.Arnold Sommerfeld, Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics (New York Academic Press, 1956), p. 155

Thus entropy in an open system always at least tends to increase, no matter how much external energy. is available to it from the sun or any other source. To offset this tendency, the external energy must somehow be supplied to it, not as raw energy (like a bull in a china shop) but as organizing information. If the energy of the sun somehow is going to transform the non-living molecules of the primeval soup into intricately complex, highly organized, replicating living cells, and then to transmute populations of simple organisms like worms into complex, thinking human beings, then that energy has to be stored and converted into an intricate array of sophisticated machinery by an intricate array of complex codes and programs. If such codes and mechanisms are not available on the earth, then the incoming heat energy will simply disintegrate any organized systems that might accidentally have shown up there.

Evolutionists have hardly even addressed this problem as yet, let alone solved it.

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