Here Chuck Colson
blames it all on Darwin:
Because of Darwin’s theories, leading scientists in the early part of the twentieth century felt emboldened to propose radical ideas about how the sick or members of other races should be treated....Those ideas are still with us today
This is a tired old argument ("evolution led to eugenics, Nazism and communism") that has not gotten better with age. This irrational, intellectually dishonest, rant is not a credit to Colson, who has done much
good in the past 30 years.
Perfectly good scientific theories can be misapplied to ethics or philosophy (e.g., relativity) with bad results. Is that the fault of the theory? Yes, the Nazis appealed to Darwinism to justify much of their terror. It was more a sign of their irrationality than anything having to do with the scientific merits of the theory.
Was the
White Album responsible for the Manson murders?
Look at what happened to Terri Schiavo a week ago. It’s a good time for us to remind people of the social consequences of Darwinism as Weikart so well documents.
I am mystified to the relevance of the Schiavo case, unless Colson is just acting as a propagandist, using it to bring emotional support to his opinion. Some may use evolution to support arguments that people and animals are of equal worth, but that's not why Terri Schiavo was killed. No one would be allowed to treat an animal the way she was treated (and I don't mean just her last 2 weeks). If you want to blame it on the abortion culture, I'll listen, but evolution had nothing to do with this.
It’s bad enough to teach flawed theories in a classroom, but it gets downright dangerous when we let such theories lead us to a diminished view of human life and dignity.
I wonder what theory Colson thinks is "unflawed?" To my knowledge, there are (perhaps even widening) gaps in the understanding of the mechanisms of evolution. For instance, no one knows how, or even if, genetic codes (which are primarily protein recipes) are translated into physical morphologies. So what?
If we require complete understanding of all underlying mechanisms before we accept a theory as useful (and worthy of being taught), science courses will be very short.
