Darwinism’s Bitter Fruits
Commentary by Tom Flannery

What happens to a society when its children are taught they evolved from the slime of some pre-biotic soup through random chemical reactions in a chaotic, completely unsupervised universe that emerged from a chance explosion?

After decades of indoctrination into Darwin’s theory of evolution, this question is no longer an academic one. The fruits of this experiment are evident everywhere we look, from staggering increases in the homicide and suicide rates among young people to a total disdain for human life.

Evolution is not only junk science, it is a pernicious social doctrine which produces a bitter harvest in the hearts and minds of its adherents. When children are taught this theory as fact (as most are today), it affects their entire belief system and outlook on life. The implications are devastating for individuals as well as for society at large.

The first implication of accepting evolution as fact is hopelessness. There’s a scene in Woody Allen’s movie Annie Hall in which Allen’s character, comedian Alvin Singer, is recounting an episode from his childhood. In the flashback, little Alvy is refusing to return to school because he has learned in science class that the universe is expanding. He tells his mother this means the universe will one day explode and all life will cease to exist. His mother asks him what that has to do with the fact that he has stopped doing his homework, to which he replies: “What’s the point?”

The scene is played strictly for laughs, but at the same time it makes a very insightful point. If it’s true that we are living in a chaotic and completely unpredictable universe which will one day self-destruct, obliterating everyone and everything forever, then nothing we do or desire to accomplish has any meaning or purpose whatsoever. All we can hope is to live as long as we can and get as much as possible for ourselves out of life until we perish forever, along with everyone and everything else eventually. Hard to get happy after that one.

Indeed, in the new introduction to the 30th-anniversary edition of his book The Selfish Gene, evolutionist Richard Dawkins relates how that book’s dismissal of any higher purpose in nature has had harrowing consequences in the lives of its readers. He mentions one person who went into “a series of bouts of depression” which lasted for more than a decade after reading it. Another young student was driven to tears by its assertion that life is “empty and purposeless.”

Dawkins’ response to such reactions is to basically shrug them off, asking if “any of us really tie our life’s hopes to the ultimate fate of the cosmos” and answering, “of course we don’t, not if we are sane.”

Well, in fact, the two are inextricably linked. In a godless universe where nothing matters, or ever will, there is no place for hope or eternal love or lasting joy. We’re all on a cruise ship heading toward the falls, and it’s only a matter of time before we all go down together to an assured, irreversible and everlasting doom.

The best we can do, under those circumstances, is try to amuse ourselves as much as we can for the short amount of time we’re here - which, tragically, is the conclusion that Woody Allen’s death-obsessed character reaches at the end of another of his films, Hannah and Her Sisters.

The second implication is the loss of truth, since truth must be based on a fixed standard that transcends time and popular opinion. Truth is something that never changes; it remains constant even when everything else is in flux.

Yet in a generation raised to accept evolution as fact, there is no room for truth nor any basis for absolute virtues or values. Truth cannot possibly exist in a world that came about as a result of chance explosions and chemical reactions, where everyone and everything arrived on the scene accidentally.

That’s why modern society is doing everything it can to relegate the whole concept of truth to the dustbin of history. In our pluralistic, relativistic, multicultural, politically-correct age, holding to an authoritative standard of right and wrong is considered arcane. Thus, whenever someone promotes family values, for instance, he is barraged by a chorus of angry voices demanding of him contemptuously: “Whose family?” In our society, everyone is supposed to make it up for themselves as they go along.

Finally, the loss of truth leads inevitably to the removal of all moral restraints. In a godless universe, we are accountable only to ourselves and the loftiest goal to which we can aspire is our own pleasure. As Dostoyevsky reasoned, everything is then permissible. There is no such thing as sin, no final judgment to worry about, no heaven or hell, and no life beyond this one. Jesus Christ, who claimed to be “the way, the truth and the life” (John 14:6), was either a liar or a lunatic, and all religious endeavors are futile.

The first of the moral restraints to be disposed of is always the sanctity of human life. In a Darwinian world, natural selection is the ruling ethos and will always prevail, so the powerful must overwhelm and annihilate the powerless. We saw that clearly enough in the case of Terri Schiavo.

For as much fanfare as Darwin’s book The Origin of Species has received over the past century and a half, precious little notice has been paid to its subtitle: “The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.” The idea of a superior race eliminating all “inferiors” on the basis of evolutionary dogma originated not with Hitler, but with Darwin. Not surprisingly, this was an idea also enthusiastically embraced by the racist and eugenicist Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood.

Hitler was so enamored with Darwin’s work that he considered dedicating his own book, Mein Kampf, to him. His slaughter of six million Jews and millions of others in the death camps was a direct result of Darwin’s influence on him.

The philosophy of Social Darwinism is also at the root of communism and apartheid, and it is still wreaking havoc worldwide. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the abortion holocaust, the taking of the most powerless and vulnerable lives of all by the blood-for-money abortion industry. Before evolution permeated our culture, it would have been virtually impossible to enact a law legalizing the mass extermination of unborn children in America. But in 1973, after decades of evolutionary proselytizing, the U.S. Supreme Court gave us the inhumane and unconstitutional Roe vs. Wade decision. Thirty-three years and well over 40 million dead babies later, there’s still no end in sight to the carnage.

We’ve reached the point where partial-birth abortions continue unabated despite being opposed by a vast majority of Americans, and where Republicans in Congress had to struggle to pass a law banning the killing of live-born infants! Meanwhile, liberal politicians and media elites are pushing euthanasia and assisted suicide as the next steps down this slippery slope, hoping to rid society of more of those whom Hitler debased as the “useless eaters” (the elderly, disabled, etc.).

Call it the natural progression of natural selection.

Tom Flannery writes a weekly political column called “The Good Fight” and a continuing religious column called “Why Believe the Bible?” for a hometown newspaper in Pennsylvania. His opinion pieces have appeared in publications such as Newsday, the Los Angeles Times, and Christian Networks Journal. He is a past recipient of the Eric Breindel Award for Outstanding Opinion Journalism from News Corp/The New York Post, in addition to winning six Amy Awards from the Amy Foundation.