Commentary on creation/evolution headlines (September through December, 2006):

December 27, 2006

A good summary of the study of, and the controversy surrounding, the Hobbit of Flores (see my 11/7/06 post) can be found here.

December 21, 2006

The bones of a giant sauropod have been found in Spain, according to recent news stories.  At about five feet, ten inches long (179 centimeters), the thigh bone is as large as a human being.  The animal is estimated to have weighed 40 to 48 tons, and may have been the largest land animal to live in what is now Europe.

Top Ten "junk science" moments of 2006 listed here.  Among the interesting stories is this one:

8. Woodpecker Racket. The 2005 reported sighting of the thought-to-be-extinct Ivory-billed Woodpecker in eastern Arkansas raised hopes of bird-watchers everywhere. But a prominent bird expert cast serious doubt on the report in 2006, characterizing it as “faith-based” ornithology and “a disservice to science.” But the debunking may not matter. Environmental groups used the dubious sighting to convince a federal judge in July 2006 to stop a nearby $320 million Army Corps of Engineers irrigation project. Given that the anti-development Nature Conservancy funded the “search” for the woodpecker in the first place, the supposed “sighting” turned out to be quite convenient.

Another interesting story was this one:

6. Stem cell fraud and futility. Incoming Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi plans to introduce legislation lifting the limits on federal funding of embryonic stem cell (ESC) research. But she ought to pay attention to what did, and what did not happen, in ESC research during 2006. What did happen was the indictment of prominent South Korean ESC researcher Hwang Woo-suk for faking his research. What didn’t happen was any meaningful advance in ESC research. One alleged ESC research advance hyped in the journal Nature (harvesting of ESCs without destroying the embryos) had to be corrected to note that none of the embryos in question actually survived the procedure – oops.

Yes, woo-suk, indeed.

December 19, 2006

There has been a nasty feud, which only recently became public knowledge, within the "Answers in Genesis" organization, involving two of the prime movers, Ken Ham and Carl Wieland.  Apparently, it began in mid-2004 when Carl Wieland, who is based in Australia, suggested that changes be made to the organization of AIG-USA so that Ken Ham did not have near-absolute control over the U.S. organization.  Ham responded by trying to marginalize Wieland and assert control over the other branches of AIG, including the Australian branch.  Ham prevailed, as far as retaining control of the AIG "brand;" Wieland resigned from AIG-Australia and now conducts his ministry under the name "Creation Ministries International" and "creationontheweb.com"  It appears that several of the key AIG lecturers, including Jonathan Sarfati, Emil Silvestru, Gary Bates, Don Batten, and Tas Walker (all whom are Australian, except Silvestru, who is Romanian), have stayed with Carl Wieland and CMI.

Ken Ham remains in firm control of AIG-USA, including the $27 million dollar creation museum (floorplan) being built in northern Kentucky, near the Cincinnati airport.  (BBC News article here.)

As crucial as the creation ministry is, it would be surprising if Satan didn't pay special attention to creation ministries, and attack them with all means at his disposal.  This incident shows that he does.  It is very sad that a clash of egos between men who had once been the best of friends has led to the breakup of this ministry and the "divorce" of its leaders.  

December 18, 2006

Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement is Christine Rosen's monograph about how some American pastors got involved in the eugenics movement of the early 20th Century.  Eugenics (see my 11/26/06 post) was an offshoot of Darwinism that advocated improving the human race the same way you "improve" cows, horses, or corn: by selective breeding.  Essentially, the fit were to breed, and the unfit -- those deemed socially, racially, intellectually, or physically undesirable or unwanted--were to be sterilized, or worse. 

In her introduction, Rosen notes that the preachers who embraced eugenics:

embraced modern ideas first and adjusted their theologies later.  Theirs were the churches that had naves and transepts modeled after gothic European cathedrals--as well as bowling alleys.  And it was when these self-identified liberal and modernist religious men abandoned bedrock principles to seek relevance in modern debates that they were most likely to find themselves endorsing eugeneics.  Those who clung stubbornly to tradition, to doctrine, and to biblical infallibility opposed eugeneics and became, for a time, the objects of derision for their rejection of this most modern science. (p. 5)

The religious leaders who became involved in eugenics included Protestants of nearly every denomination, jews, and Catholics, and they overwhelmingly represented the liberal wings of their respective faiths.  Many of them ministered in large churches or synagogues in big city parishes and fit historian Stow Persons's description of these religious institutions as centered on "the resonant personality of a pulpit orator who blended the elements of  an innocuous theology with discussion of current interests."  They were the ministers, priests, and rabbis who were inspired by the developments of modern science and accepted much of the new historical criticism of the Bible.  These "modernistic liberals" wanted to reconcile what they identified as the enduring principles of Christianity with the vagaries of modern experience and culture. (p. 15)

In other words, when Christians wander away from biblical preaching and religion--as they inevitably do when they embrace "modern science" and the "new" historical criticism of the Bible--they are likely to embrace any nonsense the culture happens to be entertaining at the moment, no matter how vile it will seem to future generations. 

Those liberal pastors who embraced eugenics tended to also embrace the "social gospel," which was all about secular reform initiatives, and to be post-millennialists, believing that the millennium would be brought about through human effort, by creating the Kingdom of God on earth. 

Protestant supporters of Eugencis included John Harvey Kellogg, and the book reproduces a photograph (p. 89) of the delegates' banquet at the First National Conference on Race Betterment, held at the Battle Creek Sanitarium in 1914.  Rosen notes, however, that Dr. Kellogg's association with the Adventist Church ended in 1907 (and by 1914, Dr. Kellogg had wrested control of the San away from the Adventist Church). 

Just to drive her point home one more time, Rosen notes in her final chapter that:

The evidence yields a clear pattern about who elected to support eugenic-style 'reforms' and who did not.  Religious leaders pursued eugeneics precisely when they moved away from traditional religious tenets.  The liberals and modernists in their respective faiths--those who challenged their churches to conform to modern circumstances--became the eugeneics movement's most enthusiastic supporters.  (p. 184) 

This episode illustrates well why religious conservatives, like me, are so frustrated with, and baffled by the motivation of, religious liberals, like Mark F. Carr--see the previous two posts.  To me, religious liberalism seems like vandalism, like pointless destruction, destruction for its own sake.  Liberals seek to make the church conform to the world, but (1) the world does not need the church to conform: There are plenty of other sources of "science" and "modernity" (see Timothy Standish's piece), and (2) making the church conform to "modernity" and "science" may prevent the church from carrying out its true mission, which sometimes is to "stand athwart history yelling, 'STOP!'"  Sometimes, as with the eugenics movement, the church must oppose the larger culture, and if it has totally embibed the larger culture, it is useless.  "If the salt has lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted?  It is good for nothing, and is thrown out and trampled under foot."  Mat. 5:13

December 14, 2006

Here is Edward T. Oakes' review in "Christianity Today," of Richard Weikart's book, "From Darwin to Hitler."  This is by far the most extensive and thoughtful review I have seen of Weikart's important work.  Here are some of the good bits:

One of the most pernicious and widespread fictions ever foisted on an unsuspecting public claims that Charles Darwin was not a social Darwinist. Not so. For example, in a letter to one William Graham dated July 3, 1881, Darwin wrote:

I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilization than you seem inclined to admit. Remember what risk the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago, of being overwhelmed by the Turk, and how ridiculous such an idea now is! The more civilized so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.

As Richard Weikart proves in his magnificently written monograph From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection released a veritable Pandora's box of evil vapors and demonic spirits, which, once unleashed on an eager European public, poisoned discourse on war, race, sex, nationality, diplomacy, colonization, economy, and anthropology—especially, it would seem, in Germany. In a letter he wrote to the German Wilhelm Pryor in 1868, Darwin averred that "the support which I receive from Germany is my chief ground for hoping that our views will ultimately prevail," a line that could well serve as the epigraph to Weikart's riveting tale of how Germany led itself (and thereby the rest of the world) into the abyss of internecine war and savagely applied eugenics, naïvely thinking all the while that it was helping to produce Darwin's "higher animal" from his eagerly anticipated "war of nature."

What one learns from Weikart's monograph is that some of the most vicious Darwinian apologists were quite willing to declare war on Christianity precisely because of its total incompatibility with Darwinism.

In other words, William Jennings Bryan was right all along when he said that Darwinism helped "lay the foundation for the bloodiest war in history." He was obviously speaking of World War I, having no idea how much his words would be trumped by an even bloodier war between two camps of Darwinians, the Nazis and the Communists (one cannot stress enough that the word "Nazi" is a syncopation for "National Socialist Workers Party," which indicates Nazism's clear affinities with collectivist Bolshevism as well as anything). Imagine! That poor, maligned, "fundamentalist" lawyer, who argued for the state of Tennessee and against evolution in the Scopes trial—he was the real prophet.

If I have a criticism, it is that Oakes wanders off, halfway through his review, on a lengthy discussion of Nietzsche. 

Another of my favorite passages was this one:

Given the devastation that followed in the wake of Nazi ideology, contemporary advocates of "therapeutic" abortion, physician-assisted suicide, infanticide of babies with birth defects, and so forth, are far more circumspect in their rhetoric (with the possible exception of Peter Singer). But Weikart has caught them out: past and present eugenicists differ only in rhetoric, not in the deep structure of their commonly held philosophical presuppositions, which are shared by eugenicists across the board.

I found that passage interesting, because the topic of physician-assisted suicide is lately on my mind.  In the process of researching Mark F. Carr (see my previous post), I briefly reviewed what the "Center for Christian Bioethics" at LLU has been up to.  I discovered that earlier this year, it hosted a series of lectures on physician-assisted suicide.  In a March 2006 editorial in "Update", Carr reported that: 

ON Thurdsay, February 2, James W. Walters, Ph.D. (professor of ethics, Factulty of Reigion, Loma Linda University), presented his consciously Adventist perspective on this issue.  From an authentic Adventist perspective, he gently nudged our audience in the direction of considering PAS [physician-assisted suicide] a legitimate option for end-of-life care.

Great.  Now we have an Adventist "ethicist" "gently nudging" our doctors and medical students to consider giving their patients a gentle nudge into the next life.  Is this really an "authentic Adventist perspective" or a utilitarian, Darwinist perspective?  As Edward Oakes, in commenting on the terrible outworking of Darwinist eugenics under Nazism, writes: