Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Tony Campolo Gets it Wrong

Another Christian, with little or no training to do so, tackles evolution and gets beat up pretty badly. Josh Rosenau is the one who takes him to the cleaners. In a column in the Philadelphia Enquirer's Currents, Tony Campolo makes some baldly wrong claims:

Those who argue at school board meetings that Darwin should be taught in public schools seldom have taken the time to read him. If they knew the full title of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life, they might have gained some inkling of the racism propagated by this controversial theorist.

Interestingly, Darwin only mentioned humans once in this entire book, and not in this context. As Rosenau notes, he clearly meant species when he used the term races. This is an elementary mistake on Campolo's part.

The second mistake is the classic "without Darwin, there is no Hitler." He writes about Ernst Haeckel, a naturalist of the late 1800s and early 1900s, who clearly did believe in biological determinism and eugenics as well as the anti-semitism of Heinrich von Treitschke. He then writes:

Although these men's lives much predated Hitler's rise to power, their ideas were very influential as he developed the racist ideas that led to the Holocaust. Konrad Lorenz, a biologist who belonged to the Nazi Office for Race Policy and whose work supported Nazi theories of "racial hygiene," made Darwin's theories the basis for his reasoning.

Nope. Hitler rejected evolution as it applied to humans. He felt that God had created humans separately and that the ascent of the Aryan nation was divine right. I have posted about this here and here. Hat tip to Josh Rosenau.

No comments:

Post a Comment