re: “The term ‘Survival of the Fittest’ was coined by the British philosopher Herbert Spencer before Darwin published his own views on the matter. Darwin’s thesis that species who are not equipped to survive in a given climate will eventually die out and those who survive will necessarily be the best equipped...is the simple truth.”
I agree, but again, there is no moral basis for Darwinian naturalism to argue against eugenics advocates to “help” that process along. Eugenics obviously goes way beyond “climate survival” issues. You want to argue the point scientifically, which I understand, but what the eugenics advocates and “social Darwinists” do is also “scientific” in their mind, but this goes beyond science to morality.
You know as well as I that morality is a fuzzy subject within the naturalistic Darwinian community. Whether or not it is “wrong” to utilize eugenics on human beings based on the Darwinian view that human beings are simply another form of animal/organism that evolved from inorganic matter is a moral issue. Darwin, I’m sure, never in his wildest nightmares ever thought something like Nazi eugenics would be practiced in his name or Marxists using his views to extrapolate into the political realm either.
But, ideas have consequences. The idea that all that is was the result of a purposeless, random process - that human beings are no more special than any other organism that exists, that they have no more inherent value than any other organism, but are simply the evolutionary product of chance and mutation - this puts human value, purpose, morality all on very unstable ground. Nietzsche at least had the courage to face a purposeless universe and realize that every moral belief is a fraud and transient. He saw that Darwinian naturalism “killed” God and all morality. Many atheists and agnostics do not want to be as brave as Nietzsche. They want the cake and eat it too. They don’t want to admit that once God is removed, all transcendent morality is gone.
This doesn’t mean that atheists cannot be moral - many are and put some so-called “Christians” to shame. But, the problem is there is no compelling reason why one atheist’s morality is “right” and another atheist’s morality (or immorality) is “wrong”. Right and Wrong are in the perception of the beholder.
The Nazi’s and others merely acted on these Darwinian views of the universe and took them to a logical conclusion that many of us don’t like. We are repulsed by it.
But, again, ideas do have consequences, sometimes unintended consequences.
Describing the natural world has to be accurate and doesn’t involve value judgments. It’s like blaming Copernicus for the notion that we aren’t at the center of the universe (God’s attention). Blaming Darwin for the Nazis is like blaming Newton for the communists - the Utopian principles of engineering a perfect society can be vaguely traced right back to Newton’s vision of a clockwork, mechanistic universe. Same with Einstein and moral relativism. All are silly arguments.