I am James Hong and welcome to the Surpassing Value Podcast. The fuel and desire for this podcast was born out of a compulsion to flesh out what's been going on in the midst of an ocean of megaphones that may not actually withstand the test of scrutiny. As a signpost theologian, I will do my best to filter out the impurities and point people in the right direction.

For episode number three, I wanted to talk about Darwinian evolution and how it relates to scientifically validated racism. With the topic of race and social justice, I think it's important to recall and even take to task a Darwinian evolution for the reason I just stated and for several others I will make explicit in the course of this episode.

Just to save some energy and breath, throughout this episode I'll be referring to Darwinian evolution as DE because it will, frankly, save me a couple of joules of energy. DE supposedly gave us our origins and by extension of that our morality and meaning, at least according to the intelligentsia, namely, that there really isn't any objective morality or any meaning, except the ones we make for ourselves or the social contract that we enter into.

DE, being the mainstay in intellectual thought, also permeated outside of the hard sciences. DE didn't just stay put within biology. For example, you had social Darwinism where we had people who were justifying the stamping out of the "weaker" or "less fit" since that supposedly mirrors what happened to bring about current day mankind.

But most relevant and directly interconnected with the idea of social Darwinism, DE needs to be taken to task since it provided a framework for a scientific validation for racism. To begin with, let's start off and define DE according to live science. Live science says, and I quote, "The theory of evolution by natural selection first formulated in Darwin's book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life in 1859 is a process by which organisms change over time as a result of changes in inheritable physical or behavioral traits.

Changes that allow an organism to better adapt to its environment will help it survive and have more offspring." Over millennia, these changes will eventually produce a completely different species. Now I quoted the entire book title of Charles Darwin's book because what I've noticed is the book entitled "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life" is typically truncated on "The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin" mostly because can you imagine a title called "The Preservation of Favored Races" surviving in our culture today?

It is called Darwinian evolution because Charles Darwin was the author of this thought. As the definition implies, species develop into different species and over millennia humans are the product of evolved apes. Humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor. In this worldview, there is no first man in a distinct sense.

There are gradually formulated beast-men wherein differing races evolved from different creatures. And since differing races evolved from different beasts, you could begin to see how easy scientifically validated racism could begin to take shape. Disdain and hate are much easier to practice if you believe it to be intellectually proven.

To put it another way, there is a pool of blob and in that pool of blob over time you have complex cellular machinery that develops and over time you have multicellular organisms. The tadpole jumped out of the pool and over time it turned into another creature and over enough time we had an ape and over enough time we have humans.

As I say that, I'm not trying to caricature the theory. I don't believe in that. Truth claims should stand on their own two legs and insulting an idea without discussing the merits is not something I'm going to engage in. That is not something I'm going to do. Much of our culture does it, but that is not something that I find favor with.

If an idea is ridiculous, it should be revealed on its own claims and not swept away by disparaging it. I'm only trying to give it to you in a nutshell. Ravi Zacharias stated it like this, "It is time plus matter plus chance." It is time plus matter plus chance.

Let's ask a couple of fair questions and state some fair observations here. Natural selection, which is the mechanism for evolution, states that nature will always retain the good mutations and allow the others to pass. That's natural selection. If you have a mutation that is harmful to you, that species will eventually be wiped out.

It is the good mutations that will be allowed to pass by process of natural selection. Problem is, nobody has ever observed a genuine genetic mutation occurring in the natural environment which was beneficial. Nothing goes from disorder to order. Everything goes from order to disorder, which in thermodynamics is called entropy.

This should be differentiated with microevolution, which is observable, which has been observed. And microevolution is the change in allele frequencies that occurs over time within a population. That should be distinguished from macroevolution. Microevolution is observed, but for DE to occur, something much more profound and impacted needs to occur than mere microevolution.

So despite the fact that what I just stated has never been observed, let's just say for a moment that I concede macroevolution occurring. Another fair question would be, what is the probability for random mutations, the beneficial ones, to compile and develop into a brand new species? To ask it another way, what is the mathematical probability of DE actually occurring if I give the Darwinian evolutionist all their claims?

If I concede their claims to be true, what is the probability of it actually occurring? This is important because if you knew that the likelihood of an event occurring is let's say 50/50, then you might be more inclined to believe that an event actually occurred as opposed to saying that the probability of that same event occurring is 1 in a trillion.

Assuming the Darwinian evolutionist's ideal conditions and understanding there are at least 200 integrated and functioning parts in an organism, the probability of success for each mutation is 1/10^60. According to mathematician Emil Borel, any odds beyond 1/10^50 should be considered a mathematical impossibility. So already, for DE to be accepted, I have to accept it despite it never being observed in nature and also it being a statistical impossibility.

I could go on and further lay some challenges to Darwinian evolution, but I think you get the picture. If you're interested in further reading, I would recommend Darwin's Black Box by Michael Behe, he's a professor over at Lehigh University, Darwin on Trial by Philip E. Johnson, and The Creation Hypothesis by J.P.

Moreland. I do have an undergraduate degree in biological sciences from UCI, and I can tell you I didn't need my undergraduate degree to understand the books that I just recommended. It aided in understanding those books, but I don't think looking back that it was required for me to understand those books.

So today, Darwinian evolution is still the accepted cultural definition of the origins of life on earth, and the only real accepted worldview in academia. Anyone not accepting of this view in academia would be considered a neanderthal. As stated earlier, there are many implications if you hold to a DE worldview, but I'll tackle only the few mentioned in the beginning.

The first is that life has no real meaning. There really is no objective morality, no real good and bad, no real right and wrong. There is only the social contract, and social contracts are inherently arbitrary, and they differ amongst different people groups over different ranges of time. To illustrate this point, let's take a look at some of our genetic cousins according to DE.

Let's take a look at the lion. Nobody looks at the lion in disdain because they eat antelopes, they eat zebras, buffaloes, and the like. Nobody believes what the lion is doing is wrong. If the lion ate another lion, nobody would think it was doing anything wrong. You might think it's out of the ordinary, but no one would accuse it of a moral violation.

We feel the same way about monkeys, and some monkeys, unbeknownst to myself at least, some monkeys will actually eat the young of other monkeys. Matt Geo published an article called "Chimps Eat Baby Monkey Brains First, A Clue to Human Evolution." "Chimps Eat Baby Monkey Brains First, A Clue to Human Evolution." This was on April 11th of 2018.

Live Science also quotes on the same topic the following, and I quote, "Chimpanzees are primarily plant eaters, though they enthusiastically eat animals when they catch them, and monkeys are an especially desirable treat. But once the snack is in hand, and with so many delicious body parts to choose from, which do the predatory primates eat first?

Wonder no longer. Scientists have discovered that it all depends on the age of the unfortunate prey. Researchers recently filmed chimpanzees in Tanzania's Gombe National Park excitedly munching on monkeys, hoping to learn more about the chimps' carnivorous eating habits. Whenever older monkeys were on the menu, chimps tended to initially harvest the organs, particularly the liver, which is rich in fat, the scientists reported in a new study.

But if a chimp was lucky enough to catch a youngster, they were almost certain to go straight for the tender, savory, and nutrient-packed brain, biting right through the fragile skulls and devouring the juvenile monkeys headfirst." According to DE, those are our genetic cousins. This raises my next question, do you think there would be any societal repercussions, any wide-ranging ripple effects, from believing in something so inane, inane, I-N-A-N-E?

And by inane, I mean that these are our actual genetic cousins, according to DE. Romans 121-125 states the following, "For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God, or give thanks; but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man, and of birds, and four-footed animals, and crawling creatures.

Therefore, God gave them over in the lusts of their heart to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them, for they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen." Despite this being a statistical impossibility, and never being actually observed in nature, this theory has been taught in our schools, in our universities, and the vast majority of us accepted it as benign.

If we go ahead and teach our children that life intrinsically has no meaning on a fundamental level, and that objective morality does not exist, there is no logical consistency in being outraged by anything that happens in this world. Who cares about sex trafficking, abortion, broken families, or even racism?

And then when we marry this with existentialism, when you've taken scientific naturalism, and then you marry that with philosophical existentialism to its logical conclusion, the only thing you have left to live for are momentary pleasures. And momentary pleasures, by definition, are fleeting. The moment they fade, you need to look for the next fix, all the while your soul is decaying from the lack of any real substance.

Because make no mistake about it, whether one believes it or not, we are all embodied souls. My next question is this, on top of defining life as having no intrinsic meaning, have there been any other practical outcomes from the world incorporating DE? The term "Social Darwinism" was coined not too long after Darwin's origin of species by means of natural selection or the preservation of favorite races in the struggle for life.

This concept was of particular importance to Hitler's war machine in Nazi Germany. Nazi propaganda films were quick to use this ideology to promote a "unity of hatred, anyone not of the Aryan race." In All Life is Struggle, a Nazi propaganda film, the film depicted how the disabled needed to be wiped out via forced sterilization.

Much like how children with Down syndrome are systematically aborted, at least in Iceland and now in other parts of the world. In All Life is Struggle, that's only one film. The German Reich used this concept of Social Darwinism to justify a racism that ended with eugenics, this eugenic cleansing as they called it, was their mechanism for genocide.

Upon this road is what led to the extermination, the mass murder of 6 million Jews, maybe more, that accounted for two-thirds of all European Jews at the time. That means if you were a Jew living in Europe at the time, you had a 67% chance of dying. This theory doesn't seem so benign now, does it?

"Wait, we can't blame this on Darwin," you say? Let me quote to you Charles Darwin in his book, The Descent of Man. The Descent of Man is a follow-up to his book, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favorite Races in the Struggle for Life.

He says this and I quote, "At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time, the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Shroffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated.

The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state as we may hope, than the Caucasian and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the (insert archaic word for a black person here) or Australian and the gorilla." At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.

At the same time, the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Shroffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state as we may hope, than the Caucasian and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the (insert archaic word for a black person here) or Australian and the gorilla." The founder of the eugenics movement was Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton.

Francis Galton and Charles Darwin loved and supported each other dearly. Let me quote to you Francis Galton directly from his book, Inquiries into the Human Faculty and its Development. He says, "We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognizance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than the otherwise would have had." You really want to talk about evil lunacy?

Don't for a second think that Darwin and his cousin were the only villains during this time. As inane as all of this sounds, this is what drove the entire culture. I want to quote to you an article written by Angela Saini and the Guardian, October 3rd, 2019, "Francis Galton is rightly criticized for advancing this immoral, racist non-science, but remember, his ideas were mainstream.

We tend to associate eugenics with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, but it was in fact developed in London. Its founder was Francis Galton, who established a laboratory at UCL in 1904. Already some students and staff have called on the university to rename its Galton Lecture Theater. Galton's seductive promise was of a bold new world filled only with beautiful, intelligent, productive people.

The scientists, in its thrall, claimed this could be achieved by controlling reproduction, policing borders to prevent certain types of immigrants, and locking away undesirables, including disabled people. This was an age in which it was not unusual for scientists to believe that humans were divided into different species, some more advanced than others.

Biologists proclaimed that it would be better for society if disabled and mentally feeble people hadn't been born. Eugenics made it into government policy. The Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 institutionally separated those whom the state considered mentally feeble or morally defective from the rest of society, effectively preventing them from having children." But Darwin's theory didn't just stay in the Western world and in Europe, it came to the US as well.

I want to give a huge shout out to the guys over at the Just Thinking Podcast for unearthing this article. This is a long quote, but stay with me here. Nat Geo had an article entitled, "There's no scientific basis for race. It's a made-up label. There's no scientific basis for race.

It's a made-up label." This was published on March 12th of 2018. Elizabeth Colbert writes, and I quote, "In the first half of the 19th century, one of America's most prominent scientists was a doctor named Samuel Morton. Morton lived in Philadelphia and he collected skulls. He wasn't choosy about his suppliers.

He accepted skulls scavenged from battlefields and snatched from catacombs. One of his most famous craniums belonged to an Irishman who had been sent as a convict to Tasmania and ultimately hanged for killing and eating other convicts. With each skull, Morton performed the same procedure. He stuffed it with pepper seeds.

Later he switched to lead shot, which he then decanted to ascertain the volume of the brain case. Morton believed that people could be divided into five races and that these represented separate acts of creation. The races had distinct characters, which correspond to their place in a divinely determined hierarchy.

Morton's craniometry showed he claimed that whites or Caucasians were the most intelligent of the races. East Asians, Morton used the term Mongolian, though indigenous and susceptible of cultivation were one step down. Next came Southeast Asians, followed by Native Americans. Blacks or Ethiopians were at the bottom. In the decades before the Civil War, Morton's ideas were quickly taken up by the defenders of slavery.

He had a lot of influence, particularly in the South, says Paul Wolfe Mitchell, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania, who is showing me the skull collection now housed at the Penn Museum. We're standing over the brain case of a particularly large headed Dutchman who helped inflate Morton's estimate of Caucasian capacities.

When Morton died in 1851, the Charleston Medical Journal in South Carolina praised him for giving to the, insert archaic word for black person, his true position as an inferior race. Today, Morton is known as the father of scientific racism. So many of the horrors of the past few centuries can be traced to the idea that one race is inferior to another, that a tour of his collection is a haunting experience.

To an uncomfortable degree, we still live with Morton's legacy. Political distinctions continue to shape our politics, our neighborhoods, and our sense of self." So this is the case. Even though what science actually has to tell us about race is just the opposite of what Morton contended. Wow. Wow. Let me quote to you another portion from the same article.

Morton thought he'd identified immutable and inherited differences among people. But at the time he was working, shortly before Charles Doran put forth his theory of evolution and long before the discovery of DNA, scientists had no idea how traits were passed on. Researchers who have since looked at people at the genetic level now say that the whole category of race is misconceived.

Indeed, when scientists set out to assemble the first complete human genome, which was a composite of several individuals, they deliberately gathered samples from people who self-identified as members of different races. In June of 2000, when the results were announced at a White House ceremony, Craig Venter, a pioneer of DNA sequencing, observed, "The concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis.

The grotesque institution of slavery was in part able to endure for as long as it did because of validation it received from the scientific community and public consensus." Illegitimate science spills over, infiltrates an entire generation. That is what happened. Are vestiges of it still alive today? I want to quote to you Margaret Sanger.

She is the founder of Planned Parenthood. This isn't meant to be a political hit. I'm giving you facts. I am quoting to you Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. "We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the (insert archaic word for black person here) population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members." We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the black population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.

Did you know that the founder of Planned Parenthood was a frequent speaker for the KKK? Did you know that? Race is a synthetic, man-made social construct. I'm not saying there is no such thing as people groups. I'm talking about race. I'm talking about the amount of melanin, or lack thereof.

What does the Bible say about race? I want to quote to you Paul as he is speaking to a group of amateur philosophers on Mars Hill. Acts 17, 22-28 says this, "So Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus and said, 'Men of Athens, I observe that you are very religious in all respects.

For while I was passing through and examining the objects of your worship, I also found an altar with this inscription, 'To an unknown God.' Therefore what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and all things in it, since he is the Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands.

Nor is he served by human hands as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all people life and breath in all things. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation, that they would seek God, if perhaps they might grope for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.

For in him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, for we also are his children." I'm not saying that everyone who believes in the theory of evolution is a racist. What I am saying, though, is that DE does indeed validate and has validated the concept of racism.

Moreover, racism was espoused by the very author of this theory and its adherents followed that theory to its logical conclusion, which is seeing other races as inferior and ultimately justifying heinous and unspeakable acts based on that same theory. So if you claim that others are anti-intellectual for not believing in evolution, there are two things you have to contend with.

You have to contend with the lack of merits of the claims of the argument. Number two, you have to admit that the theory you hold to is intrinsically racist. Those are two honest intellectual extensions of DE. You could deny those extensions, but your denial does not change reality. As we look back upon history and as we have the luxury of seeing how these ideas played out and what the consequences were, we should pause for a moment and understand that ideas do indeed have consequences.

I said in the previous episode, all of life corresponds to truth. The lack of any truth convictions about abstract principles of life matters immensely. To say the same thing yet another way, theology is immensely practical. If your theology posits that humans descended from apes, or your philosophy, or your worldview, or whatever else you want to call it, by extension, there is going to be wiggle room for these other abhorrent atrocities.

If you don't know who Richard Weaver is, he wrote a book called Ideas Have Consequences, and I'm purposely alluding to that book every time I bring up that term. I'm thankful for the book because it's important that we, like I said earlier, take to task these unproven fads that were passed up as intellectual prowess because they have wreaked havoc on society while the intelligentsia themselves typically have escaped via a golden parachute.

After all, what other unproven fads that the intelligentsia have decreed do we just accept like sheep? No doubt Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher and his idea of the Superman or the Ubermensch contributed to the decaying moral tender that helped spur the acceptance of the Nazi Holocaust. So you have science at the time espousing that we evolved from apes and that some races are more superior than others.

Then you have philosophers at the time prescribing the idea of a Superman, and in case you don't know what I'm referring to, Britannica states in relation to Superman, and I'm not talking about the comic book, I'm talking about the philosophy, Superman or in German, Ubermensch in philosophy is the superior man who justifies the existence of the human race.

Superman is a term significantly used by Friedrich Nietzsche, particularly in Also Spoke Zarathustra, although it had been employed by J. W. von Goethe and others. This superior man would not be a product of long evolution, rather, he would emerge when any man with superior potential completely masters himself and strikes off conventional Christian herd morality to create his own values, which are completely rooted in life on this earth.

This is the same philosopher who wrote in his book On the Genealogy of Morals, On the Genealogy of Morals, how the greatest impediment to human progress in history were the Jews and the Jew Jesus of Nazareth. In the final section of that same book, Nietzsche goes on to describe how there's a certain satisfaction that is derived from inflicting pain on another, and that cruelty goes hand in hand with festivities.

He goes on to explain that although that might sound like a bitter pill for the civilized to swallow, it is only because the civilized are entrenched in slave morality, and that slave morality was brought upon by the priestly Jews and the Jew Jesus who must be thrown off. Going back to Richard Weaver's book, Ideas Have Consequences, because these were the ideas right before World War II, he wrote this book, Ideas Have Consequences, after World War II in order to describe how the world could have arrived at such dire circumstances.

I know there are some of you who aren't history buffs, so I'm going to give you a quick summary of World War II. World War II, also known as the Second World War, was a war fought from 1939 to 1945 in Europe and during much of the 1930s and 40s in Asia.

The war in Europe began in earnest on September 1, 1939, with the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and concluded on September 2, 1945, with the official surrender of the last Axis nation, Japan. However, in Asia, the war began earlier with the Japanese interventions in China, and in Europe, the war ended earlier with the unconditional surrender of Germany on May 8, 1945.

The conflict spilled over into Africa, included a handful of incidents in the Americas, and a series of major naval battles. It was the largest armed conflict in history, spanning the entire world and involving more countries than any other war, as well as introducing powerful new weapons, culminating the first use of nuclear weapons.

However, despite the name, not all countries of the world were involved. Some through neutrality, such as the Irish, supplied some important secret information to the Allies. D-Day's date was decided on the basis of the incoming Atlantic weather information supplied from Ireland, Sweden, and Switzerland, others through strategic insignificance. The war ravaged civilians more severely than any previous conflict and served as a backdrop for genocidal killings by Nazi Germany, as well as several other mass slaughters of civilians, which, although not technically genocidal, were significant.

These included the massacre of millions of Chinese and Korean nationals by Japan, internal mass killings in the Soviet Union, and the bombing of civilian targets in German and Japanese cities by the Allies, in total, World War II produced about 50 million deaths, more than any other war to date.

I took that from a history website, just to give you a summary of World War II. Right after that, that is the backdrop of "Ideas Have Consequences." Richard Weaver states in his book, "When 'Ideas Have Consequences' was published in 1948, it met a response far beyond anything anticipated by the author.

The book was written in the period immediately following the Second World War, and it was, in a way, a reaction to that war, to its immense destructiveness, to the strain it placed upon ethical principles, and to the tensions it left in the place of the peace and order that were professedly sought." Richard Weaver goes on to state, "In considering the world to which these matters are addressed, I have been chiefly impressed by the difficulty of getting certain initial facts admitted.

This difficulty is due in part to the widely prevailing Whig Theory of History, with its belief that the most advanced point in time represents the point of highest development, aided, no doubt, by theories of evolution which suggest to the uncritical a kind of necessary passage from simple to complex.

Yet the real trouble is found to lie deeper than this. It is the appalling problem, when one comes to actual cases, of getting men to distinguish between better and worse. Are people today provided with a sufficiently rational scale of values to attach these predicates with intelligence? There is ground for declaring that modern man has become a moral idiot.

So few are those who care to examine their lives, or to accept the rebuke which comes of admitting that our present state may be a fallen state, that one questions whether people now understand what is meant by the superiority of an ideal. One might expect abstract reasoning to be lost upon them.

But what is he to think when attestations of the most concrete kind are set before them and they are still powerless to mark a difference or to draw a lesson? For four centuries every man has been not only his own priest, but his own professor of ethics, and the consequence is an anarchy which threatens even that minimum consensus of value necessary to the political state.

Do you know what this parallels so acutely? In the book of Judges, we see what happens when in man's heart God is taken off his throne. Nobody is able to discern and apply what God has said and man is left to his own devices. And all that is left is murder and destruction that leads to anarchy and rubble.

Judges 21-25 states, "In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes." Do you just do what is right in your own eyes? Let me posit to you another theory. This other theory is that we were all made in the image of God and that all human beings have the same ancestor.

In this worldview, no matter the people, group, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, political affiliation or even ideology, we are all genetic brothers and sisters. And based on that alone, we afford one another a level of human dignity that corresponds to the Creator who made each and every one of us.

That is what I believe in. And if we're going to talk about this issue in a dispassionate, on an intellectually and logically consistent manner, then we are going to have to face some implications that perhaps you and I do not like. And if you're listening to this and you are a Christian, and there is nothing I said that is controversial, this is what I want to say to you.

This theory was espoused by the intelligentsia. What other theories espoused by today's intelligentsia do you just blindly accept as true? That you yourself do not have a justification for, nor can you really articulate, but you accept it and ridicule others who do not believe it? The intelligentsia do not have a great history for truth-telling.

And I'm going to devote another episode to just that. But for now, I wanted to talk about Darwinian evolution, the scientific validation for racism, and the vestiges it has left on us today. Thanks for making it to the end. I will continue to try and make the journey worth it.

To him, the honor, glory, and eternal demeanor, James Hall. (upbeat music)