Episode Transcript
Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
Just recently I saw an article in the newspaper where the journal us was commenting on the Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, referring to another person as a brother, and this was another political associate sort of thing. And I guess my take on the way the article was written was that this whole concept of Scott Morrison talking about other people as brothers and sisters that weren't really his brothers and sisters. But of course, this is a common practise within the christian church, where those of us who believe that Jesus was God and believe that through Jesus we are all brothers and sisters in Christ, we are born again through Jesus, and through Jesus giving as we choose to believe Jesus is God, that he came and took our place, died in our place, so that we might have eternal life.
And he demonstrated that he was God through his resurrection, which was attested to, and is attested to historically. And hence this is the strength and the faith of Christianity and the hope that we have and the message that christians have to take to the world. And it seems, though, that my take, as I said on this article, was that the journalists didn't realise this.
And coming from a secular view, what is this talking to some political friend as his brother and this sort of thing? And this is a real shame, because Christianity is, as God has pointed out through the message that Jesus came. And the early christian writers understood this, such as Paul, that there's no difference between the races. And this was emphasised, there's neither jew nor know, everyone was equal, all the different races.
God wanted his message of love to go out to all the world. And, of course, the Bible has this record, too, how we all are descendants of Adam and Eve. And those listeners may be interested in the book called after the flood.
Its subtitle is the early post flood history of Europe, traced back to Noah. And it's by Bill Cooper. And it's a fascinating book where Bill Cooper has actually traced the history of Europe back as far as records go, and how it matches the biblical history from the flood and the separation of the nations after the Tower of Babel.
And, of course, this should make us all realise that we are all literally distant brothers and sisters. And again, as we come and accept Jesus, our saviour and Lord, and we take on Jesus' commandment to love God and to love each other. This is the basis of the christian principle.
But the counter to this, of course, is Darwinism, and in particular, social Darwinism. And it's interesting, this whole concept that was coined by Herbert Spencer, a British philosopher of the 19th century, in the mid 18 hundreds there, Herbert Spencer actually coined the phrase survival of the fittest, coined this term, survival of the fittest. And Spencer was a proponent of, and probably the originator of, social Darwinism.
And this social darwinism was a product of Herbert Spencer's loosely based interpretation of Darwin's theory of natural selection. Spencer believed that species have an innate tendency to strive for self preservation, which leads to competition, and ultimately the winner, whose strength indicates they are best suited for survival. And Taylor, who was a commentator on this, Carol Taylor, he wrote a very interesting article back in the early 1980s in the Journal of Black Studies, volume eleven, pages 449 to 460.
And he points out that if biological. Spencer point out that biological organisms evolve gradually by eliminating those individuals least fitted for survival, it was then sought that social organisms must evolve at the same geological rate by the same process of elimination. And so when this theory was applied by imperialistic societies, this concept asserts that groups that are more economically or technologically or politically advanced than neighbouring groups will naturally dominate and conquer.
And, of course, we saw that this has happened in the past. And this theory, this evolutionary type theory, was used to promote and validate this superiority of one race over another. The theory of evolution states that there are inherent limitations on species improvement and that species eventually encounter a predetermined point that they are unable to progress beyond.
So this concept was applied in social Darwinism to actually prevent social mobility, and that led to the belief that a group or a species imposition in society is fixed or has minimal capacity for improvement. And it's very interesting that Lindsay Pressman has published an article on this titled how evolution was used to support scientific racism. And if any of the listeners want to look it up, just google how evolution was used to support scientific racism.
And Lindsay, her essay makes a number of important observations, and one of those is that the principle of social darwinism was used to label particular people as being unfit or inferior. And it's interesting that back in 1884, Harvard University dean Nathan Nathaniel Shaler claimed that blacks were becoming extinct. And this became a popular argument used to demonstrate black inferiority as a result of natural order.
Again, those people who want to read up on this, that's in Carroll's article as well, in Carol Taylor's article as well. So this whole idea of racial domination was sustained through social darwinistic principles. And these principles actually came to be perpetrated by political and economic gains of the dominant groups, of course.
So it's very interesting how evolution and this whole concept of evolution and the term survival of the fittest was used to promote within society this whole concept of racism. And it's interesting, through the application of weak research methodologies, any evidence contradicting the societal preconceived racist convictions was manipulated or suppressed in the past. And so this led to the development of scientific racism, which provide the justification for the domination of one group of people over another group of people that were regarded as being inferior.
One of the aspects that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, how it was used to support scientific racism, was this whole concept of instinctive disgust. So under Darwin's theory, members of a species will have an inherent feeling of repulsion and a tendency to avoid anything that could be harmful or a threat to their survival. So scientists promoting scientific racism use this theory to validate implicit abhorrence towards these inferior beings, claiming that it must be due to evolutionary means.
And so by presenting certain groups of people as inferior beings, as something of a deleterious nature to the dominant group and even a threat to their survival, other particular race groups, dominant race groups, were able to provide a scientific basis for the practise of racial exclusion. And the thing was that this particular mindset negated the idea that this racial hatred could be learned, or that it's derived from environmental factors, and instead presented racial hatred as something natural and biological as part of evolution. And so this was a very, very subtle and very sinister point that was raised.
In other words, this whole concept evolved from Darwin's theory, or came out of Darwin's theory of evolution, that racial hatred was something natural and biological and something essential for the survival of then of that race compared to another race. And we can see how this sort of thinking has underpinned a lot of sociology theories and so forth, and is definitely so opposed to the biblical teaching that Jesus came and gave. There's an interesting theory, of course, that was developed in the early 19 hundreds that presented the idea that civilisation, including political and social order, is based on race.
And one of the very strong proponents of this was Joseph Arthur deg Gobineau, and he published a piece called Essay on the inequality of the races, in which he declared that there were divisions of races into white, black and yellow. So again, people want to look that up. Essay on the inequality of the races.
And this led to a supremacy or Nordism, which is the idea that there are these superior races. And this led to the nordic supremacy, the belief that the Aryans or whites were the only ones capable of creating thinking and civilisation building, which is a crazy idea, really, when we think of the amazing achievements and buildings historically of other groups of people. And there are some amazing crazy ideas that came out of this whole concept of ideas that were developed in universities, in philosophy schools, sociological schools and so forth, where they assumed the theory of evolution and based on evolution, evolutionary concepts.
Because this whole idea of the theory of evolution then replaced the Bible, replaced the whole christian value system to love one another, that we are all created in the image of God. And this is a very important point that the Bible brings out that mankind, humans are created in the image of God. And that's why we're all equal.
We're all created in that image. But theory of evolution states that there are inherent limitations on species improvement. And this led to sort of amazing, this whole concept of racial domination, which was sustained through social darwinist principles and was then perpetrated by political and economic gains.
Another movement that essentially developed out of the concept of the theory of evolution was the eugenics movement. And this was essentially developed by Francis Galton. And it's the theory that character, qualities of people determines.
The innate character of people, determines hereditary ability. And this ideology, of course, completely disregarded the influence of an individual's environment or poverty and so forth, and declared that criminality and laziness were heritable traits and they were associated with certain racial groups. And so the whole idea was that races vary intellectually and morally, just as they do physically.
And this led to the idea that the human race could be improved through selective breeding, and that in turn then provide even stronger foundation for acts of racial domination. And we know some of the terrible consequences of eugenics. Galton believed that Negroes were at least two grades below Anglo Saxons in mental ability.
The whole idea was he was motivated to help guide society to achieving its superior race by promoting breeding between superior groups and discouraging genetic mixing. And according to Darwin's theory of evolution, species members seek certain traits in their mates, those that will ultimately pass down the most favourable and advantaged features to their offspring. And so this purposeful mating concept was manipulated by scientists to support scientific racism and utilised to promote racial exclusivism.
So Lindsay Pressman just brings these points out all through her essay. I think it's a very, very powerful essay. Again, how evolution was used to support scientific racism.
It's really sad to think that we continue to promote evolution in schools. It's so sad. And of course, today probably people want to sort. They all know evolution isn't responsible for racism. There are other factors, but really, when we look at the history of it, evolution provided the academic climate for all these ideas to grow, survival of the fittest, superior of one race over the other, that members would, of a race would seek to mate with someone that's going to give them the most dominant features. And hence, if a particular so called race had inferior characteristics, well, you wouldn't want to mate with them. This sort of thing. And this is so, so sad, and it's so opposite to what the Bible teaches, that we are all made in the image of God. We are all equally endowed with ability.
And I think this has been demonstrated by the illustration that great scientists, doctors, artists and so forth have come back from all the races, from all the race groups in terms of that and athletic prowess. All these aspects are there, we're equal. But it's very difficult for people who grow up in poverty to get the same advantage, to get the same education and to be able to demonstrate their God given abilities.
And I guess what concerns me most is too that there's this subtle movement to remove the Bible from schools, to remove education about the Bible from schools. We're all willing to teach people about evolution. And of course it was evolutionary principles that led to the development of the IQ test and all these sort of things.
And IQ tests are things that rank people according to a perceived so called inability. I can remember talking to one friend I know, and that person was saying that when they did their IQ test, the end of primary school, when they went into high school, they were put in a class. And remember the classes used to be arranged ABCD in some schools, they went down to J.
Well, just about. Just imagine how you felt if you were allocated into a class J and this person was allocated into one of the lower class and they felt so bad about that and it drove them to work really hard to get into a class with a higher rating. And they eventually got into a B class.
But the thing was that those IQ tests were, as I recall, were heavily biassed towards people who had, for example, a strong ability in maths and that sort of thinking and being able to recognise geometric properties and these sort of things. And they were allocated into the senior classes. But this was all the sort of thing that was happening when I was at school in the 1950s.
And we can see this evolutionary basis and it's led to so many wrong things and this whole concept of racism, the inferiority of one race to another and so forth, is one of the products that has evolved out of this teaching of evolution and evolution, dominating the theory of evolution, dominating in our academic academies and replacing the biblical principles and I think this should be a really clear warning message to us of the importance of the biblical scriptures that teach, we are all made in the image of God. There is neither from God's perspective, there's neither jew nor greek or any particular race. There's no race.
We're all equal before God. We're all equally loved before God. And the important message of Christianity is that we love all people, everybody.
We're all equal. We are all like brothers and sisters. Like the Australian prime minister was talking and using those terms in reference at that time.
And I think also this should ring the alarm bells. How many other errors is the teaching of evolution, which is a false teaching? It's a false theory. As I've talked many times on this programme before, there's no scientific basis for the theory of evolution.
Scientists have tried to demonstrate evolution in the laboratory by breeding bacteria. It doesn't happen. We look in the fossil record for evidence of evolution.
We just see clearly defined species. They're there and then they're not there. They become extinct.
We don't see them gradually evolving. Sure, you can sort species out and produce some sort of chain and say, oh, well, look, there's a higher organism there, but there's not a progressive link of intermediates showing this. They're just individual creatures.
And you think if there was a flood and things had to get buried, certain creatures would end up down at the bottom and other creatures would end up higher up in the mess that followed because of different abilities to survive, different places where they were in their natural environment and so forth. And the flood makes so much sense, the geologic column makes so much sense that that's what actually happened. And when we look at the long ages and time frames that they claim we know, we do the radiometric dating on rocks that we actually know, and the age is only hundreds or thousand years or so, and we still get millions of years.
And so we have so much evidence that the theory of evolution doesn't work. But when we look at the Bible, we have evidence it does work. I was talking with a group of Christians and I said, you know, one of the things is that when we accept Jesus as our saviour and truly believe in God, the creator God who made us, and ideally made a planet that was meant to be free from sin and evil, and when we see and look at our own behaviour and the behaviour of humans, it fits exactly what the Bible describes and changes in people make when they accept Jesus and they turn away from evil.
The wonderful changes, the wonderful, positive changes that are made are powerful evidence that Christianity, the message of Christianity is real, that God is real, that the Holy Spirit is real. And to me, this is just so important that young people know this. And this is something that really should be still taught in our schools.
Evolution was an interesting theory, but led to major disasters, it's led to totalitarian regimes, it's led to mass killings of people, can be traced to the theory of evolution. The book The Devil's Delusion clearly elucidates the evidence for that. And we have this evidence around us of the negative impact of the teaching of the theory of evolution.
You've been listening to Faith and Science. And remember, if you want to listen to any of these programmes, just Google 3abnaustralia.org.au and click on the listen button.
And if you're interested, you find these programmes helpful, please mention them on your social media sites.
Refer people to the 3ABN programmes on the 3ABN television. There's also a programme looking at the different chapters in my book Evolution Impossible.
So again, if you go to 3abnaustralia.org.au and go onto the television, catch up, watch there's Evolution Impossible there. There's also conversations where I go through systematically, chapter by chapter, my book Evolution Impossible, and that's in Science Conversations on the radio programme there.
And remember, there's a massive amount of information on the website creation.com. If you google that, there are many, many answers to different creation questions.
I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day. You've been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia radio.
