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00:00:00.000 | I am James Hong and welcome to the Surpassing Value Podcast.
00:00:15.620 | The fuel and desire for this podcast was born out of a compulsion to flesh out what's
00:00:19.740 | been going on in the midst of an ocean of megaphones that may not actually withstand
00:00:24.600 | the test of scrutiny.
00:00:26.620 | As a signpost theologian, I will do my best to filter out the impurities and point people
00:00:32.320 | in the right direction.
00:00:40.020 | For episode number three, I wanted to talk about Darwinian evolution and how it relates
00:00:46.800 | to scientifically validated racism.
00:00:50.920 | With the topic of race and social justice, I think it's important to recall and even
00:00:57.360 | take to task a Darwinian evolution for the reason I just stated and for several others
00:01:04.040 | I will make explicit in the course of this episode.
00:01:08.640 | Just to save some energy and breath, throughout this episode I'll be referring to Darwinian
00:01:14.960 | evolution as DE because it will, frankly, save me a couple of joules of energy.
00:01:24.500 | DE supposedly gave us our origins and by extension of that our morality and meaning, at least
00:01:35.360 | according to the intelligentsia, namely, that there really isn't any objective morality
00:01:42.880 | or any meaning, except the ones we make for ourselves or the social contract that we enter
00:01:50.560 | into.
00:01:51.560 | DE, being the mainstay in intellectual thought, also permeated outside of the hard sciences.
00:02:01.920 | DE didn't just stay put within biology.
00:02:06.320 | For example, you had social Darwinism where we had people who were justifying the stamping
00:02:14.580 | out of the "weaker" or "less fit" since that supposedly mirrors what happened to bring
00:02:23.340 | about current day mankind.
00:02:26.380 | But most relevant and directly interconnected with the idea of social Darwinism, DE needs
00:02:32.820 | to be taken to task since it provided a framework for a scientific validation for racism.
00:02:43.880 | To begin with, let's start off and define DE according to live science.
00:02:50.680 | Live science says, and I quote, "The theory of evolution by natural selection first formulated
00:02:58.760 | in Darwin's book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation
00:03:06.040 | of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life in 1859 is a process by which organisms change
00:03:13.400 | over time as a result of changes in inheritable physical or behavioral traits.
00:03:20.760 | Changes that allow an organism to better adapt to its environment will help it survive and
00:03:25.620 | have more offspring."
00:03:30.320 | Over millennia, these changes will eventually produce a completely different species.
00:03:35.320 | Now I quoted the entire book title of Charles Darwin's book because what I've noticed
00:03:46.760 | is the book entitled "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation
00:03:55.200 | of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life" is typically truncated on "The Origin of
00:04:02.680 | Species by Charles Darwin" mostly because can you imagine a title called "The Preservation
00:04:11.000 | of Favored Races" surviving in our culture today?
00:04:33.420 | It is called Darwinian evolution because Charles Darwin was the author of this thought.
00:04:57.640 | As the definition implies, species develop into different species and over millennia
00:05:08.040 | humans are the product of evolved apes.
00:05:13.580 | Humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor.
00:05:17.920 | In this worldview, there is no first man in a distinct sense.
00:05:23.160 | There are gradually formulated beast-men wherein differing races evolved from different creatures.
00:05:32.480 | And since differing races evolved from different beasts, you could begin to see how easy scientifically
00:05:39.200 | validated racism could begin to take shape.
00:05:44.200 | Disdain and hate are much easier to practice if you believe it to be intellectually proven.
00:05:51.400 | To put it another way, there is a pool of blob and in that pool of blob over time you
00:05:58.200 | have complex cellular machinery that develops and over time you have multicellular organisms.
00:06:07.120 | The tadpole jumped out of the pool and over time it turned into another creature and over
00:06:12.600 | enough time we had an ape and over enough time we have humans.
00:06:17.720 | As I say that, I'm not trying to caricature the theory.
00:06:23.080 | I don't believe in that.
00:06:24.640 | Truth claims should stand on their own two legs and insulting an idea without discussing
00:06:29.680 | the merits is not something I'm going to engage in.
00:06:32.600 | That is not something I'm going to do.
00:06:34.760 | Much of our culture does it, but that is not something that I find favor with.
00:06:39.440 | If an idea is ridiculous, it should be revealed on its own claims and not swept away by disparaging
00:06:45.120 | it.
00:06:46.120 | I'm only trying to give it to you in a nutshell.
00:06:49.760 | Ravi Zacharias stated it like this, "It is time plus matter plus chance."
00:06:56.640 | It is time plus matter plus chance.
00:06:59.920 | Let's ask a couple of fair questions and state some fair observations here.
00:07:05.520 | Natural selection, which is the mechanism for evolution, states that nature will always
00:07:10.920 | retain the good mutations and allow the others to pass.
00:07:15.720 | That's natural selection.
00:07:17.340 | If you have a mutation that is harmful to you, that species will eventually be wiped
00:07:23.960 | out.
00:07:25.020 | It is the good mutations that will be allowed to pass by process of natural selection.
00:07:32.540 | Problem is, nobody has ever observed a genuine genetic mutation occurring in the natural
00:07:42.120 | environment which was beneficial.
00:07:47.200 | Nothing goes from disorder to order.
00:07:51.120 | Everything goes from order to disorder, which in thermodynamics is called entropy.
00:07:58.220 | This should be differentiated with microevolution, which is observable, which has been observed.
00:08:04.820 | And microevolution is the change in allele frequencies that occurs over time within a
00:08:13.720 | population.
00:08:16.360 | That should be distinguished from macroevolution.
00:08:21.840 | Microevolution is observed, but for DE to occur, something much more profound and impacted
00:08:30.440 | needs to occur than mere microevolution.
00:08:35.400 | So despite the fact that what I just stated has never been observed, let's just say
00:08:40.380 | for a moment that I concede macroevolution occurring.
00:08:47.800 | Another fair question would be, what is the probability for random mutations, the beneficial
00:08:54.160 | ones, to compile and develop into a brand new species?
00:09:00.740 | To ask it another way, what is the mathematical probability of DE actually occurring if I
00:09:09.000 | give the Darwinian evolutionist all their claims?
00:09:14.320 | If I concede their claims to be true, what is the probability of it actually occurring?
00:09:19.720 | This is important because if you knew that the likelihood of an event occurring is let's
00:09:24.040 | say 50/50, then you might be more inclined to believe that an event actually occurred
00:09:30.040 | as opposed to saying that the probability of that same event occurring is 1 in a trillion.
00:09:40.120 | Assuming the Darwinian evolutionist's ideal conditions and understanding there are at
00:09:45.160 | least 200 integrated and functioning parts in an organism, the probability of success
00:09:51.040 | for each mutation is 1/10^60.
00:10:01.080 | According to mathematician Emil Borel, any odds beyond 1/10^50 should be considered a
00:10:11.700 | mathematical impossibility.
00:10:14.840 | So already, for DE to be accepted, I have to accept it despite it never being observed
00:10:23.680 | in nature and also it being a statistical impossibility.
00:10:31.480 | I could go on and further lay some challenges to Darwinian evolution, but I think you get
00:10:36.680 | the picture.
00:10:38.560 | If you're interested in further reading, I would recommend Darwin's Black Box by Michael
00:10:44.280 | Behe, he's a professor over at Lehigh University, Darwin on Trial by Philip E. Johnson, and
00:10:50.960 | The Creation Hypothesis by J.P. Moreland.
00:10:54.360 | I do have an undergraduate degree in biological sciences from UCI, and I can tell you I didn't
00:11:02.640 | need my undergraduate degree to understand the books that I just recommended.
00:11:10.960 | It aided in understanding those books, but I don't think looking back that it was required
00:11:16.680 | for me to understand those books.
00:11:19.680 | So today, Darwinian evolution is still the accepted cultural definition of the origins
00:11:24.200 | of life on earth, and the only real accepted worldview in academia.
00:11:32.600 | Anyone not accepting of this view in academia would be considered a neanderthal.
00:11:40.320 | As stated earlier, there are many implications if you hold to a DE worldview, but I'll tackle
00:11:47.880 | only the few mentioned in the beginning.
00:11:51.160 | The first is that life has no real meaning.
00:11:57.240 | There really is no objective morality, no real good and bad, no real right and wrong.
00:12:06.200 | There is only the social contract, and social contracts are inherently arbitrary, and they
00:12:13.320 | differ amongst different people groups over different ranges of time.
00:12:19.200 | To illustrate this point, let's take a look at some of our genetic cousins according to
00:12:23.320 | DE.
00:12:24.320 | Let's take a look at the lion.
00:12:27.520 | Nobody looks at the lion in disdain because they eat antelopes, they eat zebras, buffaloes,
00:12:35.160 | and the like.
00:12:37.140 | Nobody believes what the lion is doing is wrong.
00:12:41.720 | If the lion ate another lion, nobody would think it was doing anything wrong.
00:12:48.000 | You might think it's out of the ordinary, but no one would accuse it of a moral violation.
00:12:55.860 | We feel the same way about monkeys, and some monkeys, unbeknownst to myself at least, some
00:13:04.360 | monkeys will actually eat the young of other monkeys.
00:13:09.040 | Matt Geo published an article called "Chimps Eat Baby Monkey Brains First, A Clue to Human
00:13:15.440 | Evolution."
00:13:16.440 | "Chimps Eat Baby Monkey Brains First, A Clue to Human Evolution."
00:13:23.080 | This was on April 11th of 2018.
00:13:26.920 | Live Science also quotes on the same topic the following, and I quote, "Chimpanzees are
00:13:33.800 | primarily plant eaters, though they enthusiastically eat animals when they catch them, and monkeys
00:13:40.160 | are an especially desirable treat.
00:13:43.160 | But once the snack is in hand, and with so many delicious body parts to choose from,
00:13:48.480 | which do the predatory primates eat first?
00:13:51.720 | Wonder no longer.
00:13:53.720 | Scientists have discovered that it all depends on the age of the unfortunate prey.
00:13:58.800 | Researchers recently filmed chimpanzees in Tanzania's Gombe National Park excitedly munching
00:14:04.800 | on monkeys, hoping to learn more about the chimps' carnivorous eating habits.
00:14:10.120 | Whenever older monkeys were on the menu, chimps tended to initially harvest the organs, particularly
00:14:15.960 | the liver, which is rich in fat, the scientists reported in a new study.
00:14:20.740 | But if a chimp was lucky enough to catch a youngster, they were almost certain to go
00:14:25.240 | straight for the tender, savory, and nutrient-packed brain, biting right through the fragile skulls
00:14:34.400 | and devouring the juvenile monkeys headfirst."
00:14:40.960 | According to DE, those are our genetic cousins.
00:14:49.280 | This raises my next question, do you think there would be any societal repercussions,
00:14:59.040 | any wide-ranging ripple effects, from believing in something so inane, inane, I-N-A-N-E?
00:15:13.120 | And by inane, I mean that these are our actual genetic cousins, according to DE.
00:15:26.480 | Romans 121-125 states the following, "For even though they knew God, they did not honor
00:15:35.560 | Him as God, or give thanks; but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish
00:15:43.420 | heart was darkened.
00:15:45.960 | Professing to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible
00:15:51.840 | God for an image in the form of corruptible man, and of birds, and four-footed animals,
00:16:00.280 | and crawling creatures.
00:16:02.520 | Therefore, God gave them over in the lusts of their heart to impurity, so that their
00:16:07.920 | bodies would be dishonored among them, for they exchanged the truth of God for a lie,
00:16:14.040 | and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever.
00:16:20.400 | Amen."
00:16:22.840 | Despite this being a statistical impossibility, and never being actually observed in nature,
00:16:31.520 | this theory has been taught in our schools, in our universities, and the vast majority
00:16:38.960 | of us accepted it as benign.
00:16:44.000 | If we go ahead and teach our children that life intrinsically has no meaning on a fundamental
00:16:52.620 | level, and that objective morality does not exist, there is no logical consistency in
00:17:02.360 | being outraged by anything that happens in this world.
00:17:07.680 | Who cares about sex trafficking, abortion, broken families, or even racism?
00:17:17.320 | And then when we marry this with existentialism, when you've taken scientific naturalism,
00:17:24.960 | and then you marry that with philosophical existentialism to its logical conclusion,
00:17:29.880 | the only thing you have left to live for are momentary pleasures.
00:17:35.640 | And momentary pleasures, by definition, are fleeting.
00:17:41.240 | The moment they fade, you need to look for the next fix, all the while your soul is decaying
00:17:48.760 | from the lack of any real substance.
00:17:52.040 | Because make no mistake about it, whether one believes it or not, we are all embodied
00:17:58.440 | souls.
00:18:01.800 | My next question is this, on top of defining life as having no intrinsic meaning, have
00:18:10.840 | there been any other practical outcomes from the world incorporating DE?
00:18:18.000 | The term "Social Darwinism" was coined not too long after Darwin's origin of species
00:18:23.920 | by means of natural selection or the preservation of favorite races in the struggle for life.
00:18:29.600 | This concept was of particular importance to Hitler's war machine in Nazi Germany.
00:18:36.160 | Nazi propaganda films were quick to use this ideology to promote a "unity of hatred, anyone
00:18:42.960 | not of the Aryan race."
00:18:46.240 | In All Life is Struggle, a Nazi propaganda film, the film depicted how the disabled needed
00:18:52.760 | to be wiped out via forced sterilization.
00:18:58.400 | Much like how children with Down syndrome are systematically aborted, at least in Iceland
00:19:08.120 | and now in other parts of the world.
00:19:12.200 | In All Life is Struggle, that's only one film.
00:19:17.440 | The German Reich used this concept of Social Darwinism to justify a racism that ended with
00:19:23.920 | eugenics, this eugenic cleansing as they called it, was their mechanism for genocide.
00:19:34.320 | Upon this road is what led to the extermination, the mass murder of 6 million Jews, maybe more,
00:19:45.960 | that accounted for two-thirds of all European Jews at the time.
00:19:52.400 | That means if you were a Jew living in Europe at the time, you had a 67% chance of dying.
00:20:03.520 | This theory doesn't seem so benign now, does it?
00:20:10.800 | "Wait, we can't blame this on Darwin," you say?
00:20:15.000 | Let me quote to you Charles Darwin in his book, The Descent of Man.
00:20:18.920 | The Descent of Man is a follow-up to his book, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural
00:20:24.120 | Selection or the Preservation of Favorite Races in the Struggle for Life.
00:20:28.320 | He says this and I quote, "At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries,
00:20:34.480 | the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world
00:20:39.160 | the savage races.
00:20:41.040 | At the same time, the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Shroffhausen has remarked, will
00:20:47.720 | no doubt be exterminated.
00:20:50.440 | The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized
00:20:56.080 | state as we may hope, than the Caucasian and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as
00:21:03.040 | at present between the (insert archaic word for a black person here) or Australian and
00:21:10.280 | the gorilla."
00:21:18.200 | At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races
00:21:23.520 | of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.
00:21:29.280 | At the same time, the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Shroffhausen has remarked, will
00:21:34.760 | no doubt be exterminated.
00:21:36.680 | The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized
00:21:41.640 | state as we may hope, than the Caucasian and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as
00:21:47.920 | at present between the (insert archaic word for a black person here) or Australian and
00:21:54.840 | the gorilla."
00:21:55.840 | The founder of the eugenics movement was Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton.
00:22:04.200 | Francis Galton and Charles Darwin loved and supported each other dearly.
00:22:08.280 | Let me quote to you Francis Galton directly from his book, Inquiries into the Human Faculty
00:22:18.400 | and its Development.
00:22:19.400 | He says, "We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which
00:22:26.120 | is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case
00:22:31.200 | of man, takes cognizance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give
00:22:37.540 | to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over
00:22:44.200 | the less suitable than the otherwise would have had."
00:22:51.860 | You really want to talk about evil lunacy?
00:22:58.480 | Don't for a second think that Darwin and his cousin were the only villains during this
00:23:04.920 | time.
00:23:06.500 | As inane as all of this sounds, this is what drove the entire culture.
00:23:17.880 | I want to quote to you an article written by Angela Saini and the Guardian, October
00:23:27.660 | 3rd, 2019, "Francis Galton is rightly criticized for advancing this immoral, racist non-science,
00:23:37.520 | but remember, his ideas were mainstream.
00:23:40.960 | We tend to associate eugenics with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, but it was in fact developed
00:23:45.560 | in London.
00:23:46.720 | Its founder was Francis Galton, who established a laboratory at UCL in 1904.
00:23:52.080 | Already some students and staff have called on the university to rename its Galton Lecture
00:23:56.160 | Theater.
00:23:57.160 | Galton's seductive promise was of a bold new world filled only with beautiful, intelligent,
00:24:03.920 | productive people.
00:24:05.360 | The scientists, in its thrall, claimed this could be achieved by controlling reproduction,
00:24:11.680 | policing borders to prevent certain types of immigrants, and locking away undesirables,
00:24:17.860 | including disabled people.
00:24:19.800 | This was an age in which it was not unusual for scientists to believe that humans were
00:24:25.040 | divided into different species, some more advanced than others.
00:24:29.880 | Biologists proclaimed that it would be better for society if disabled and mentally feeble
00:24:35.080 | people hadn't been born.
00:24:38.000 | Eugenics made it into government policy.
00:24:40.240 | The Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 institutionally separated those whom the state considered
00:24:46.460 | mentally feeble or morally defective from the rest of society, effectively preventing
00:24:51.880 | them from having children."
00:24:58.880 | But Darwin's theory didn't just stay in the Western world and in Europe, it came to the
00:25:06.880 | US as well.
00:25:07.880 | I want to give a huge shout out to the guys over at the Just Thinking Podcast for unearthing
00:25:15.400 | this article.
00:25:17.020 | This is a long quote, but stay with me here.
00:25:21.040 | Nat Geo had an article entitled, "There's no scientific basis for race.
00:25:26.300 | It's a made-up label.
00:25:27.960 | There's no scientific basis for race.
00:25:30.200 | It's a made-up label."
00:25:31.640 | This was published on March 12th of 2018.
00:25:34.600 | Elizabeth Colbert writes, and I quote, "In the first half of the 19th century, one of
00:25:40.440 | America's most prominent scientists was a doctor named Samuel Morton.
00:25:45.320 | Morton lived in Philadelphia and he collected skulls.
00:25:48.680 | He wasn't choosy about his suppliers.
00:25:51.080 | He accepted skulls scavenged from battlefields and snatched from catacombs.
00:25:55.760 | One of his most famous craniums belonged to an Irishman who had been sent as a convict
00:26:01.360 | to Tasmania and ultimately hanged for killing and eating other convicts.
00:26:05.380 | With each skull, Morton performed the same procedure.
00:26:09.060 | He stuffed it with pepper seeds.
00:26:10.920 | Later he switched to lead shot, which he then decanted to ascertain the volume of the brain
00:26:16.280 | case.
00:26:17.280 | Morton believed that people could be divided into five races and that these represented
00:26:20.520 | separate acts of creation.
00:26:22.520 | The races had distinct characters, which correspond to their place in a divinely determined hierarchy.
00:26:28.320 | Morton's craniometry showed he claimed that whites or Caucasians were the most intelligent
00:26:33.880 | of the races.
00:26:34.880 | East Asians, Morton used the term Mongolian, though indigenous and susceptible of cultivation
00:26:39.760 | were one step down.
00:26:41.640 | Next came Southeast Asians, followed by Native Americans.
00:26:45.120 | Blacks or Ethiopians were at the bottom.
00:26:47.000 | In the decades before the Civil War, Morton's ideas were quickly taken up by the defenders
00:26:51.360 | of slavery.
00:26:52.800 | He had a lot of influence, particularly in the South, says Paul Wolfe Mitchell, an anthropologist
00:26:57.240 | at the University of Pennsylvania, who is showing me the skull collection now housed
00:27:01.440 | at the Penn Museum.
00:27:03.040 | We're standing over the brain case of a particularly large headed Dutchman who helped inflate Morton's
00:27:08.320 | estimate of Caucasian capacities.
00:27:11.040 | When Morton died in 1851, the Charleston Medical Journal in South Carolina praised him for
00:27:16.600 | giving to the, insert archaic word for black person, his true position as an inferior race.
00:27:24.440 | Today, Morton is known as the father of scientific racism.
00:27:30.160 | So many of the horrors of the past few centuries can be traced to the idea that one race is
00:27:34.760 | inferior to another, that a tour of his collection is a haunting experience.
00:27:40.080 | To an uncomfortable degree, we still live with Morton's legacy.
00:27:44.520 | Political distinctions continue to shape our politics, our neighborhoods, and our sense
00:27:50.000 | of self."
00:27:56.480 | So this is the case.
00:27:58.920 | Even though what science actually has to tell us about race is just the opposite of what
00:28:04.680 | Morton contended.
00:28:07.520 | Wow.
00:28:09.840 | Wow.
00:28:12.800 | Let me quote to you another portion from the same article.
00:28:15.760 | Morton thought he'd identified immutable and inherited differences among people.
00:28:21.200 | But at the time he was working, shortly before Charles Doran put forth his theory of evolution
00:28:26.040 | and long before the discovery of DNA, scientists had no idea how traits were passed on.
00:28:32.040 | Researchers who have since looked at people at the genetic level now say that the whole
00:28:36.000 | category of race is misconceived.
00:28:38.720 | Indeed, when scientists set out to assemble the first complete human genome, which was
00:28:45.160 | a composite of several individuals, they deliberately gathered samples from people who self-identified
00:28:51.160 | as members of different races.
00:28:53.280 | In June of 2000, when the results were announced at a White House ceremony, Craig Venter, a
00:28:59.960 | pioneer of DNA sequencing, observed, "The concept of race has no genetic or scientific
00:29:14.680 | basis.
00:29:16.360 | The grotesque institution of slavery was in part able to endure for as long as it did
00:29:22.080 | because of validation it received from the scientific community and public consensus."
00:29:33.680 | Illegitimate science spills over, infiltrates an entire generation.
00:29:44.240 | That is what happened.
00:29:47.360 | Are vestiges of it still alive today?
00:29:52.680 | I want to quote to you Margaret Sanger.
00:29:56.900 | She is the founder of Planned Parenthood.
00:29:59.560 | This isn't meant to be a political hit.
00:30:02.760 | I'm giving you facts.
00:30:04.280 | I am quoting to you Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood.
00:30:11.640 | "We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the (insert archaic word for
00:30:22.920 | black person here) population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea
00:30:31.840 | if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members."
00:30:42.060 | We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the black population, and the
00:30:57.400 | minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their
00:31:04.480 | more rebellious members.
00:31:07.720 | Did you know that the founder of Planned Parenthood was a frequent speaker for the KKK?
00:31:20.400 | Did you know that?
00:31:23.380 | Race is a synthetic, man-made social construct.
00:31:32.720 | I'm not saying there is no such thing as people groups.
00:31:37.960 | I'm talking about race.
00:31:41.440 | I'm talking about the amount of melanin, or lack thereof.
00:31:49.280 | What does the Bible say about race?
00:31:54.520 | I want to quote to you Paul as he is speaking to a group of amateur philosophers on Mars
00:32:01.400 | Hill.
00:32:02.400 | Acts 17, 22-28 says this, "So Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus and said, 'Men
00:32:11.880 | of Athens, I observe that you are very religious in all respects.
00:32:17.240 | For while I was passing through and examining the objects of your worship, I also found
00:32:22.440 | an altar with this inscription, 'To an unknown God.'
00:32:26.760 | Therefore what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you.
00:32:31.120 | The God who made the world and all things in it, since he is the Lord of heaven and
00:32:35.520 | earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands.
00:32:40.040 | Nor is he served by human hands as though he needed anything, since he himself gives
00:32:46.160 | to all people life and breath in all things.
00:32:50.820 | And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having
00:33:02.760 | determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation, that they would seek
00:33:07.680 | God, if perhaps they might grope for him and find him, though he is not far from each one
00:33:14.320 | of us.
00:33:15.840 | For in him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, for
00:33:23.480 | we also are his children."
00:33:29.720 | I'm not saying that everyone who believes in the theory of evolution is a racist.
00:33:37.760 | What I am saying, though, is that DE does indeed validate and has validated the concept
00:33:46.760 | of racism.
00:33:48.960 | Moreover, racism was espoused by the very author of this theory and its adherents followed
00:33:56.080 | that theory to its logical conclusion, which is seeing other races as inferior and ultimately
00:34:02.720 | justifying heinous and unspeakable acts based on that same theory.
00:34:09.600 | So if you claim that others are anti-intellectual for not believing in evolution, there are
00:34:17.240 | two things you have to contend with.
00:34:19.760 | You have to contend with the lack of merits of the claims of the argument.
00:34:23.900 | Number two, you have to admit that the theory you hold to is intrinsically racist.
00:34:30.680 | Those are two honest intellectual extensions of DE.
00:34:36.440 | You could deny those extensions, but your denial does not change reality.
00:34:44.400 | As we look back upon history and as we have the luxury of seeing how these ideas played
00:34:50.040 | out and what the consequences were, we should pause for a moment and understand that ideas
00:34:56.800 | do indeed have consequences.
00:35:00.800 | I said in the previous episode, all of life corresponds to truth.
00:35:05.320 | The lack of any truth convictions about abstract principles of life matters immensely.
00:35:10.420 | To say the same thing yet another way, theology is immensely practical.
00:35:15.520 | If your theology posits that humans descended from apes, or your philosophy, or your worldview,
00:35:21.200 | or whatever else you want to call it, by extension, there is going to be wiggle room for these
00:35:26.400 | other abhorrent atrocities.
00:35:29.800 | If you don't know who Richard Weaver is, he wrote a book called Ideas Have Consequences,
00:35:33.480 | and I'm purposely alluding to that book every time I bring up that term.
00:35:38.120 | I'm thankful for the book because it's important that we, like I said earlier, take to task
00:35:43.760 | these unproven fads that were passed up as intellectual prowess because they have wreaked
00:35:50.880 | havoc on society while the intelligentsia themselves typically have escaped via a golden
00:35:58.640 | parachute.
00:35:59.640 | After all, what other unproven fads that the intelligentsia have decreed do we just accept
00:36:08.660 | like sheep?
00:36:11.880 | No doubt Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher and his idea of the Superman or the Ubermensch
00:36:19.960 | contributed to the decaying moral tender that helped spur the acceptance of the Nazi Holocaust.
00:36:28.520 | So you have science at the time espousing that we evolved from apes and that some races
00:36:33.880 | are more superior than others.
00:36:35.880 | Then you have philosophers at the time prescribing the idea of a Superman, and in case you don't
00:36:43.440 | know what I'm referring to, Britannica states in relation to Superman, and I'm not talking
00:36:51.840 | about the comic book, I'm talking about the philosophy, Superman or in German, Ubermensch
00:36:58.200 | in philosophy is the superior man who justifies the existence of the human race.
00:37:05.480 | Superman is a term significantly used by Friedrich Nietzsche, particularly in Also Spoke Zarathustra,
00:37:13.600 | although it had been employed by J. W. von Goethe and others.
00:37:18.840 | This superior man would not be a product of long evolution, rather, he would emerge when
00:37:23.680 | any man with superior potential completely masters himself and strikes off conventional
00:37:30.200 | Christian herd morality to create his own values, which are completely rooted in life
00:37:37.380 | on this earth.
00:37:39.480 | This is the same philosopher who wrote in his book On the Genealogy of Morals, On the
00:37:46.240 | Genealogy of Morals, how the greatest impediment to human progress in history were the Jews
00:37:54.800 | and the Jew Jesus of Nazareth.
00:37:57.740 | In the final section of that same book, Nietzsche goes on to describe how there's a certain
00:38:03.360 | satisfaction that is derived from inflicting pain on another, and that cruelty goes hand
00:38:12.000 | in hand with festivities.
00:38:14.620 | He goes on to explain that although that might sound like a bitter pill for the civilized
00:38:21.600 | to swallow, it is only because the civilized are entrenched in slave morality, and that
00:38:28.640 | slave morality was brought upon by the priestly Jews and the Jew Jesus who must be thrown
00:38:36.920 | off.
00:38:40.800 | Going back to Richard Weaver's book, Ideas Have Consequences, because these were the
00:38:44.920 | ideas right before World War II, he wrote this book, Ideas Have Consequences, after
00:38:52.000 | World War II in order to describe how the world could have arrived at such dire circumstances.
00:39:03.240 | I know there are some of you who aren't history buffs, so I'm going to give you a quick summary
00:39:09.840 | of World War II.
00:39:13.140 | World War II, also known as the Second World War, was a war fought from 1939 to 1945 in
00:39:20.320 | Europe and during much of the 1930s and 40s in Asia.
00:39:24.080 | The war in Europe began in earnest on September 1, 1939, with the invasion of Poland by Nazi
00:39:29.280 | Germany and concluded on September 2, 1945, with the official surrender of the last Axis
00:39:34.680 | nation, Japan.
00:39:36.400 | However, in Asia, the war began earlier with the Japanese interventions in China, and in
00:39:41.520 | Europe, the war ended earlier with the unconditional surrender of Germany on May 8, 1945.
00:39:46.900 | The conflict spilled over into Africa, included a handful of incidents in the Americas, and
00:39:52.280 | a series of major naval battles.
00:39:54.400 | It was the largest armed conflict in history, spanning the entire world and involving more
00:40:00.920 | countries than any other war, as well as introducing powerful new weapons, culminating the first
00:40:07.080 | use of nuclear weapons.
00:40:09.280 | However, despite the name, not all countries of the world were involved.
00:40:14.880 | Some through neutrality, such as the Irish, supplied some important secret information
00:40:20.000 | to the Allies.
00:40:21.000 | D-Day's date was decided on the basis of the incoming Atlantic weather information
00:40:24.700 | supplied from Ireland, Sweden, and Switzerland, others through strategic insignificance.
00:40:31.680 | The war ravaged civilians more severely than any previous conflict and served as a backdrop
00:40:37.520 | for genocidal killings by Nazi Germany, as well as several other mass slaughters of civilians,
00:40:44.960 | which, although not technically genocidal, were significant.
00:40:52.040 | These included the massacre of millions of Chinese and Korean nationals by Japan, internal
00:40:56.600 | mass killings in the Soviet Union, and the bombing of civilian targets in German and
00:41:00.800 | Japanese cities by the Allies, in total, World War II produced about 50 million deaths, more
00:41:08.280 | than any other war to date.
00:41:12.180 | I took that from a history website, just to give you a summary of World War II.
00:41:20.880 | Right after that, that is the backdrop of "Ideas Have Consequences."
00:41:25.400 | Richard Weaver states in his book, "When 'Ideas Have Consequences' was published
00:41:31.760 | in 1948, it met a response far beyond anything anticipated by the author.
00:41:37.500 | The book was written in the period immediately following the Second World War, and it was,
00:41:42.080 | in a way, a reaction to that war, to its immense destructiveness, to the strain it placed upon
00:41:47.640 | ethical principles, and to the tensions it left in the place of the peace and order that
00:41:55.160 | were professedly sought."
00:41:58.920 | Richard Weaver goes on to state, "In considering the world to which these matters are addressed,
00:42:04.680 | I have been chiefly impressed by the difficulty of getting certain initial facts admitted.
00:42:10.040 | This difficulty is due in part to the widely prevailing Whig Theory of History, with its
00:42:17.480 | belief that the most advanced point in time represents the point of highest development,
00:42:22.160 | aided, no doubt, by theories of evolution which suggest to the uncritical a kind of
00:42:27.080 | necessary passage from simple to complex.
00:42:30.320 | Yet the real trouble is found to lie deeper than this.
00:42:33.880 | It is the appalling problem, when one comes to actual cases, of getting men to distinguish
00:42:38.640 | between better and worse.
00:42:41.320 | Are people today provided with a sufficiently rational scale of values to attach these predicates
00:42:46.240 | with intelligence?
00:42:48.200 | There is ground for declaring that modern man has become a moral idiot.
00:42:53.800 | So few are those who care to examine their lives, or to accept the rebuke which comes
00:42:58.880 | of admitting that our present state may be a fallen state, that one questions whether
00:43:03.920 | people now understand what is meant by the superiority of an ideal.
00:43:08.360 | One might expect abstract reasoning to be lost upon them.
00:43:13.760 | But what is he to think when attestations of the most concrete kind are set before them
00:43:20.000 | and they are still powerless to mark a difference or to draw a lesson?
00:43:24.960 | For four centuries every man has been not only his own priest, but his own professor
00:43:29.800 | of ethics, and the consequence is an anarchy which threatens even that minimum consensus
00:43:36.440 | of value necessary to the political state.
00:43:44.080 | Do you know what this parallels so acutely?
00:43:53.120 | In the book of Judges, we see what happens when in man's heart God is taken off his throne.
00:44:01.480 | Nobody is able to discern and apply what God has said and man is left to his own devices.
00:44:10.360 | And all that is left is murder and destruction that leads to anarchy and rubble.
00:44:21.720 | Judges 21-25 states, "In those days there was no king in Israel.
00:44:42.400 | Everyone did what was right in his own eyes."
00:44:48.080 | Do you just do what is right in your own eyes?
00:44:57.400 | Let me posit to you another theory.
00:45:02.300 | This other theory is that we were all made in the image of God and that all human beings
00:45:13.560 | have the same ancestor.
00:45:16.840 | In this worldview, no matter the people, group, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, political
00:45:22.440 | affiliation or even ideology, we are all genetic brothers and sisters.
00:45:31.720 | And based on that alone, we afford one another a level of human dignity that corresponds
00:45:43.440 | to the Creator who made each and every one of us.
00:45:51.760 | That is what I believe in.
00:45:55.760 | And if we're going to talk about this issue in a dispassionate, on an intellectually and
00:46:04.320 | logically consistent manner, then we are going to have to face some implications that perhaps
00:46:17.560 | you and I do not like.
00:46:21.720 | And if you're listening to this and you are a Christian, and there is nothing I said that
00:46:27.360 | is controversial, this is what I want to say to you.
00:46:32.200 | This theory was espoused by the intelligentsia.
00:46:38.280 | What other theories espoused by today's intelligentsia do you just blindly accept as true?
00:46:47.600 | That you yourself do not have a justification for, nor can you really articulate, but you
00:46:56.200 | accept it and ridicule others who do not believe it?
00:47:01.280 | The intelligentsia do not have a great history for truth-telling.
00:47:06.840 | And I'm going to devote another episode to just that.
00:47:10.560 | But for now, I wanted to talk about Darwinian evolution, the scientific validation for racism,
00:47:20.840 | and the vestiges it has left on us today.
00:47:27.080 | Thanks for making it to the end.
00:47:29.040 | I will continue to try and make the journey worth it.
00:47:34.200 | To him, the honor, glory, and eternal demeanor, James Hall.
00:48:02.040 | [MUSIC]
00:48:09.760 | (upbeat music)