"Exterminating The Inferior Australian and Maori Races"

Eugenics: The Disturbing Skeleton in the Secular Closet

Akos Balogh 

Gospel Coalition Australia

It ain’t pretty having a skeleton in your closet. You hide it. You keep it out of sight. The last thing you want is for it to be exposed.

But skeletons are often better exposed and dealt with openly, than covered up. Exposing skeletons can teach us things we might not otherwise know.

Recently I stumbled across a disturbing skeleton in the secular closet. I’ve rarely if ever heard it talked about by secular authors. Like many a skeleton it’s a source of shame and regret.

What is this skeleton? It’s eugenics: the selective breeding of human populations (including forced sterilisations) to improve the gene-pool. This was advocated by many secular thinkers in the name of science, reason, and progress.

So lets have a close look at this skeleton, before seeing what it can teach us.

Mistakes We Christians Have Made

Calling Out the Dumbcluck

In the conflict between Christian faith and dogmatic secularist science, Christians are often at the mercy of their own credulity.  They are far too willing to believe consensus science to be the truth, based on hard, established fact.  Therefore, when science and the Bible appear to be in conflict, the text of scripture must be adjusted to accommodate hard science.

However, the more one becomes aware of the assumptions and presuppositions of science, the more one becomes familiar with scientific internal debates, the less one is impressed by consensus science.  Science is a helpful servant.  It makes an exceedingly poor master.

The Enlightenment rationalist argued as follows: if a religious doctrine cannot be established by Reason and/or Empirical Inquiry (science) then it must be dismissed as myth or baseless speculation.  On this basis Christianity, the Gospel, and the Bible become discredited and were eventually rejected by Western society in general--which is where we are today.

Unfortunately, far too many of us Christians are willing to concede to the authority of science over the Bible.

Vast Edifices of Unbelief Are Crumbling to Powder

Useful Idiots

All Unbelieving thought ultimately operates in vicious circles.  Post-modern philosophers and theorists have done us great service in pointing this out.  The Modern era has made its fortune in the world by both assuming and asserting that human reason is both objective and definitive.  We call this view Rationalism, because it posits the ultimacy of human reason.

Man is the master of all things, and reason rules them all.  Gone is God, revelation, miracles, the supernatural.  None pass the bar of human reason.  None are rational.  They are all myths and vain imaginations of the primitive, untutored mind.  Reason is sovereign.

Unfortunately, this is no longer tenable--even amongst Unbelievers.  Reason now sits as an emperor unclothed.  Enter the post-modernist who irritatingly points out that every rationalist clutches to his bosom a cluster of pre-commitments, assumptions, and values which cannot be established by reason.  The most obvious is the pre-commitment that human reason is the ultimate authority in the universe--a belief that can only be propounded, propagated, and argued for by recourse to reason.  In other words, the reasoning is circular.  It assumes what it needs to prove, and it "proves" by resorting to what it has assumed.

J. Judd Owen, professor of political science at Emory University, has felt this attack upon rationalism keenly.

Chesterton Explains How Unbelief Drove Him to Belief

The Absurdity of the Rationalist Mind

In a delightful essay entitled, "The Paradoxes of Christianity", G. K. Chesterton describes how he was provoked into becoming a Christian by reading the rationalist attacks upon it.

I read the scientific and sceptical literature of my time--all of it, at least, that I could find written in English and lying about; . . . .  I never read a line of Christian apologetics. I read as little as I can of them now. . . . Our grandmothers were quite right when they said that Tom Paine and the freethinkers unsettled the mind.  They do.  They unsettled mine horribly.  The rationalist made me question whether reason was of any use whatever; and when I had finished reading Herbert Spencer I had got as far as doubting (for the first time) whether evolution had occurred at all.  As I laid down the last of Colonel Ingersoll's atheistic lectures the dreadful thought  broke across my mind, "Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian."  I was in a dreadful way.  [G. K. Chesterton, "The Paradoxes of Christianity,"  Collected Works, Volume I (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), p. 288.]

Evolutionism

The Suicide of Thought

G. K. Chesterton

Evolution is a good example of that modern intelligence which, if it destroys anything, destroys itself.  Evolution is either an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about; or, if it is anything more than this, is an attack upon thought itself.  If evolution destroys anything, it does not destroy religion but rationalism. . . . It means there is no such thing as a thing.  At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and anything.  This is an attack not upon faith, but upon the mind; you cannot think if there are no things to think about.  You cannot think is you are not separate from the subject of thought.

Descartes said, "I think; therefore I am."  The philosophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the epigram.  He says, "I am not; therefore I cannot think."  [G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works. Volume I: Heretics, Orthodoxy, The Blatchford Controversies.  (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), p. 239f.]

Rational Irrationalism

Quantum Mechanics and the Big Bang

The reviewer for the Dallas Morning News must have been having a bad hair day.  He or she declared that Leon Lederman's The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question (New York: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006) was "the funniest book about physics ever written."  If that were true, physics must be world's apart from sophisticated humour.  Closer to the truth is Lederman's penchant for geeky humour, which often falls flat and is overdone.  Hardly humorous, unless the author was engaged in self-parody, which would be another matter entirely. 

But, humour aside, as a book about particle physics, Lederman's The God Particle is pretty good.  It covers all the usual "stuff".  The micro-world of the atom is counter-intuitive and abnormal (as far as our human experience is concerned).  Federman writes

So forget about normal; expect shock, disbelief.  Niels Bohr, one of the founders, said that anyone who isn't shocked by quantum theory doesn't understand it.  Richard Feynman asserted that no one understands quantum theory.  (Op cit., p. 143f)

 The overwhelming impression for the non-specialist lay reader is of extreme complexity in the micro-world of matter.

Unbelief's Best Shot

The Mother of Invention

We recently began perusing The God Particle by Leon Lederman.  The author is a Nobel winning particle physicist with a gift for whimsical prose.  The intent of the author is to provide the lay person with a rough  general knowledge of arcane particle physics.  The book consists of a journey through the history of physics in general and particle physics in particular.

Lederman is a materialist.  All that exists is atomic particles and space.  So far, so good.  Below is his description for the layman of how it all began.

Supercilious Schtick

Hegemonic Liberals

The New Zealand Labour leader, David Shearer has been getting a lot of schtick.  He has confirmed his belief that New Zealand needs to take taniwha seriously.  For our non-Kiwi readers, taniwha are, according to Maori, mythical spirit monster which dwell in the lands, seas, and rivers.  They need to be placated at appropriate times and places, lest they become angry and do damage. 

This from Patrick Gower at TV3 News:

Fly, You Fools!

 Unbelief's Dirty Little Secrets

The Bible says that the fool is one who denies God's existence: "the fool says in his heart, 'there is no God'."  (Psalm 14:1).  At first glance this statement on its own does not allow us to declare with certainty that all Unbelievers are therefore fools.  To draw that conclusion would entail us falling into the fourth form logical fallacy of affirming the consequent.  The subsequent declarations in Psalm 14, however, put the matter beyond dispute: all Unbelievers are indeed fools.

1 The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”
    They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds,
    there is none who does good.

² The Lord looks down from heaven on the children of man,
    to see if there are any who understand,
    who seek after God.

³ They have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt;
    there is none who does good,
    not even one. (Psalm 14: 1-3)

On the other hand, Unbelief confronts us with an array of arguments to the opposite: it is the Believer who is foolish and ignorant. Is Belief and Unbelief destined, then, to pass like ships in the night.  Not really.  Unbelief at its most honest candidly acknowledges its own foolishness.

Universal Acid

Explanations Come to an End--Somewhere

One commentator animadverting upon the post entitled The Unintended Consequences of Homosexual "Marriage" had this to say, after quoting from the post:

"The endgame is that only Christians and the Christian faith have certain and solid foundations for knowing anything. Only Christian epistemology is rational and coherent and true. Everything else is sinking sand."

Thats (sic) a conceit of enormous proportions John. Besides, putting the words "rational" and "coherent" any where (sic) near the bible or the word "faith" is oxymoronic.

Our trusty commentator, xchequer is naturally talking up his own book here.   He alleges that the "Bible" and "faith" represent a contradiction in terms with "rational" and "coherent".  Alleges, mind you.  Not argues.  Nevertheless what he says is a helpful illustration of the all-to-common mindset of Unbelief: shout loudly, slur your opponents, and never go near a rational argument. 

We, for our part, have alleged that all non-Christian epistemologies are sinking sand; only Christian epistemology is rational, coherent, and true.  It's a strong claim.  Nevertheless, it's one we are prepared to argue for.  Rationally.