Chapter 1: Does Darwinism Lead to Racism?

Fred
Dr. Weikart, welcome.

Dr. Weikart
Thanks for having me.

Fred
Absolutely. So for people who don’t know you, you’re an award-winning historian and emeritus professor of history at Cal State University, Stanislaus, a fellow at the Discovery Institute and the author of a number of thought-provoking books, including the controversial From Darwin to Hitler and the Death of Humanity. It’s an honor to have you here with me here today, sir.

Dr. Weikart
Yeah, It’s great to be with you.

Fred
Amazing. So you’ve dedicated a really significant part of your life and career, exploring this curious link between Darwinism and the theory of evolution on one hand, and racism, but also a lot of other dehumanizing ideas, like, you know, the eugenics movement, infanticide and so forth. And you argue there’s a strong link and connection there, both historically and philosophically. The first question I have for you is, you know, evolutionary theory is, of course, very popular today. It’s almost dominant in academia, among scientists, among historians. In fact, I think people don’t even see it as a theory. They just see it as fact. So it seems to me like you’ve spent your entire career almost swimming against the grain of mainstream academic thought. You seem to be clearly informed by a strong sense of ethics and morality, but there’s also a little bit of a rebellious edge in your writing and maybe in your life choices. And so I’m just wondering, when did you take on this interest, the strong interest in this topic, and how has it played out in your life and career?

Dr. Weikart
Well, interestingly, when I was thinking about what to do my doctoral dissertation on, I got directed to a historian of science at the University of Iowa, where I was doing my studies, named Mitchell Ash. And because I was going to be working as a historian of science, I thought, okay, I need to rework. I wasn’t even thinking necessarily about Darwinism or doing even anything related to the history of science. I was thinking more along the lines of looking at the issues of the history of ethics and morality in 19th-century Germany, and modern European intellectual history was my focus at the time. But since I was working under a historian of science, I decided to focus on Darwinism and the ethical implications of that. And so what I did my dissertation on was the way that Darwinism was interpreted and used and or misused, depending on your perspective, by socialists in the late 19th century. And so my dissertation was called “Socialist Darwinism Evolution in German Socialist Thought from Marx to Bernstein.” And so I looked at Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein, and other German Marxists, mostly Marxist thinkers, although I did have one chapter on non-Marxist socialists. But as I was doing that project, I became very interested in the way that some of the Darwinists of that time in the late 19th century were trying to use Darwinism to promote various ethical perspectives and theories. Ernst Haeckel, being one of the more prominent, he was the most prominent Darwinist in Germany at the time. And so, I started my second research project after my dissertation, that I started to look at evolutionary ethics and the way that evolutionary ethics had played out in late 19th century Germany. And interestingly, I wasn’t even thinking about that point of Nazism or in fact, I thought that enough had already been done about the Nazis. I really wasn’t that interested in doing the Nazis or 20th-century stuff. I was mainly focused on the 19th century. But what one thing that there were two things that sort of pushed me into my project or develop my project in a way that I hadn’t really expected initially. One was that I discovered that by the 1890 and early 1900s, most of the people who were promoting evolutionary ethics were also promoting eugenics, scientific racism and things like that. That’s one issue. The second issue that sort of colored my thinking was James Rachels, a philosopher at the University of Alabama Birmingham, published a book in the early 1990s called “Created from Animals: The Ethical Implications of Darwinism”. This is published by a major university press, Cambridge. If I recall correctly, it was either Cambridge or Oxford. I think it was Cambridge. But I read Rachel’s book and Rachels was arguing in his book that Darwinism undermines the Judeo-Christian sanctity of life ethic, thus legitimizing abortion, infanticide and euthanasia. And his, James, Rachels’, by the way, his ideas are very close to Peter Singer’s. Peter Singer’s ideas are very similar. In fact, they were close colleagues. So those two things got me thinking about the way that Darwinism impacted the value of human life. And so although you’re right in one sense that I’m swimming against the stream in some ways because, of course, not everyone who’s a Darwinist, you know, embraces these dehumanizing ideas. And I don’t claim that everyone does. Nonetheless, there are still a significant number of people who do use Darwinism to promote those kinds of ideas. And again, they’re overtly doing it themselves. I’m a historian. I’m not making a philosophical argument about these things. I’m saying that this is what people have actually done, and that’s how they’ve interpreted Darwinism.

Fred
Correct. So you situate yourself very clearly in the factual realm. It’s like, look, historically, the people that have made these arguments have connected Darwinism to their ideas, their racist ideas, and so on and so forth. You don’t, you do not claim, and this is before we get deeper into your ideas, I want to make it really clear that, you know, I kind of looked into not just your work but also the opinions about your work. And it’s clear to me that they’ve been, your ideas and your work has been criticized and sometimes misrepresented in academia. Some historians in major universities say, you know, that, you know, Hitler was not a Darwinian and that you’re just trying to undermine evolution and that you cherry pick your evidence and so on and so forth. And this point that you just made, I think is really, really critical is that I mean, you’ve written it verbatim that, you know, Darwinism does not always necessarily lead to racism or to these ideas. Right. I have a statement here very, very specifically. You write: “Many anti-racists are full-fledged adherence to Darwinism.” It almost seems to me, and I want to know your thoughts on this, that there’s a little bit of sometimes banding up among academics when they see an idea that they feel is threatening to maybe a historical figure that they hold dear or to an idea that they hold dear. What’s your perspective on these kinds of misrepresentations of your work that are out there? Clearly?

Dr. Weikart
Well, very often what they’re arguing is that these things that I’m talking about, the racism, the eugenics, the euthanasia movement, the other things, what they very often claim is that these people are misusing Darwinism because not all Darwinists agree with those particular perspectives, and as a historian, my perspective is, well, okay, if you think they’re misusing Darwinism and that’s a philosophical position that you’re taking about what Darwinism logically entails, and you can make that argument, but then you’re not arguing with me. You’re arguing with the people that I’m talking about. You’re arguing with the people in the eugenics movement. You’re arguing with the people in the euthanasia movement. You’re arguing with Peter Singer, you’re arguing with James Rachels. You’re not arguing with me. I’m just saying that these people, that many people have interpreted it in this way. When I say many, I’m not saying all, or I’m not even saying most. I’m just saying that there’s been a very significant number of people who have interpreted Darwinism and were dealing with the issue of racism. Darwin himself interpreted his theory as promoting racism, and he thought racism was a way of helping prove his theory, and many people coming after him agreed with that. So I’m not saying that, you know, Darwinism necessarily entails racism, although I think that there is a logical enough connection that lots of people have made that connection themselves.

Fred
Absolutely. And you really compiled very strong historical evidence on, you know, many Darwin thinkers and Darwin himself certainly holding views that would be considered today to be racist, without a doubt. I mean, especially as that line has become more and more sensitive. Right. In terms of the racism, very clearly, a lot of Darwin’s views, for example, I mean, he wrote openly about, you know, European extermination of the lower races and about, you know, how the difference is not slight between a barbarian or a savage who doesn’t use abstract terms, and a Newton or a Shakespeare. And he cited the evidence, of course, the discredited evidence on the crane sizes and how, to argue that, you know, Europeans are the more intelligent. So the historical record seems to be very strong. Your historical case is very well mapped out.

Fred
I see sort of, two overall interpretations of your work, and I want you to maybe clear that up for me. The first one is that the theory of evolution is factually incorrect, and there I think maybe some people could think and there’s at least the possibility for confusion that you’re making a factual statement based on a moral or a philosophical view. So that would be one potential interpretation. And I don’t know if that’s the correct one. I’m asking you to clear it up. The second one would be that even if there was something like evolution, factually speaking, there is a strong historical connection between many of the ideas that were associated to Darwinism, what people commonly call Social Darwinism. So, I mean, you know, survival of the fittest or, you know, that that the overall pattern of history is the strong dominating the weak and these sort of racist, dehumanizing ideas. Could you maybe clear that up for us?

Dr. Weikart
Well, I’m not making any statements in my historical work about whether or not evolution is true, whether it’s factually correct or anything like that. Now, I have my own opinions about that, and they’re not all that hidden about that. And I’m willing to lay those out. And that, I think, is what causes some of the problems because many people do know that based on scientific evidence, I don’t think it’s a strong, I don’t think there’s a strong case for Darwinism. So this, of course, then leads people to think that, okay, I’m just trying to undermine Darwinism in sort of a backhanded kind of way. But what I’m trying to do actually as an intellectual historian is I’m trying to show the impacts that ideas have actually had on society, on culture, and how they’ve influenced the way that we think. And so when I’m trying to look at the way that, say, Darwinism has impacted views about human life, you know, I’m trying to show the way that, you know, again, even philosophers like James Rachels himself have made that argument and said, you know, that Darwinism undermines a Judeo sanctity, Judeo-Christian excuse me, Judeo-Christian sanctity of life ethic. So what I’m trying to do is show that these ideas have actually led to the more problematic kind of ideas. And what I’m trying to do there is not to say that because of that Darwinism is necessarily wrong. But I am, and I want to be very clear, I am trying to say that ideas do have consequences. And if they’ve had these kinds of negative consequences, maybe that’s another reason to rethink these particular kinds of ideas. Now, when I say rethink, the rethinking has to take place on other levels than historical. I’m a historian. The rethinking has to take place on a scientific level if you’re dealing with a scientific theory. So, I am asking people to sort of take another look at Darwinism, certainly. But again, I’m not saying that the things that I have shown, the historical connections that I’ve shown necessarily undermine Darwinism or show that it’s necessarily wrong.

Fred
So, I’m going to press on one point that you mentioned when you said that there is no solid evidence for Darwinism, because just because it’s a view that is, as I said before, I don’t think people a lot of people don’t even see it as a theory. They just see it as an established fact. And there’s certainly a tremendous amount of consensus in the scientific community there. So I’d like to maybe expound on that. What do you mean by there’s no solid evidence there and maybe connected to that question is I know that you are associated to creationism or intelligent design, and I would like to know where on the spectrum you sort of place yourself, because I always felt that, you know, if there was a straw man or a steel man argument for creationism, it would be something like even if there has been, you know, a lengthy process from the big bang to today, let’s say billions of years, that the laws of nature themselves would have been designed or created by a higher power. Right. In other words, you don’t have to subscribe to the idea of creationism of the world, essentially as it is today from nothing, in order to be a creationist. You could also mostly agree to the facts that are laid out by, you know, the lengthy sort of the Big Bang evolutionary theory idea, but simply hold that the laws of nature have a source that is, you know, that has purpose, that has design, so on and so forth. So where would you situate yourself in that in that spectrum?

Dr. Weikart
Well, you know, there’s a lot of people in the intelligent design movement, which I’m a part of, who take a variety of positions on the different things that you’re laying out right here. And none of those positions that anyone would take would have any impact on the historical work that I’ve done in looking at the way that Darwinism has impacted ethics, morality, racism, eugenics, and anything like that. So, all of these considerations are important things for us to think about philosophically, for our life and other things, but they’re not going to impact, I don’t believe, the interpretation that I’ve brought forward in my historical work, and that’s why it concerns me that people, like you mentioned earlier, have sort of misrepresented some of my work. For example, one of the misrepresentations in my work is that I’ve laid out a moral causal argument in my book from Darwin to Hitler. That’s what Bob Richards at the University of Chicago has said about me. I actually use the word mono-causal in the introduction of my book, in which I say this is not a moral causal argument today. In getting back to your question, though, I did not say that there wasn’t any scientific evidence for evolution, but I don’t think it’s compelling that organisms have evolved from single cells to humans. I have a variety of reasons for that. I did actually a minor in biology when I was in my doing my undergraduate work. That doesn’t make me an expert in biology or evolution in the same way that someone with a PhD is or anything like that. But I’m not completely ignorant of it either. And all of my professors were evolutionists, and they taught evolution, and I had to learn about evolution in all the classes that I took in biology. I didn’t find the evidence compelling. I don’t believe the kind of mutations that they’re talking about having to take place on chance events can create the kinds of organs and organisms that we have. I mean, I find Michael Behe, and by the way, Michael Behe, who’s connected with the intelligent design movement, actually does believe in the descent, common descent of organisms. But he believes that there had to be a design in it. He doesn’t believe they could have come about by completely chance processes because they are simply too complex, and there are too many parts that have to be put together simultaneously in order for an organism to, different organisms and kinds to produce. Back then, and part of the reason that I am skeptical of the theory, by the way, is because of my work as a historian. I know historically how the theory of evolution came about. I know what kinds of things were impacting Darwin and some of the people in the 19th century who were promoting Darwinism. And I also know the power of the ideas behind it, such as positivism, the idea that there can be no interference with any kind of outside supernatural power force, that everything has to be able to be explained scientifically and such. And so there are all sorts of, there’s a whole set of ideas and worldviews that are feeding into the embracing of Darwinism in the 19th century. And so, yes, there is there’s evidence for it. I’m not saying there’s no evidence for it, but I don’t find it compelling. And I think it ultimately doesn’t explain the things that really need to be explained. It might be able to explain small differences within bacteria. So you get some bacteria that have that are immune to different antibiotics. You get antibiotic-resistant bacteria there, but they’re still bacteria. And to get the kind of major changes, I don’t believe there is evidence for that taking place.

Fred
How much do you think, and I’m asking for a personal opinion here, but I think if anybody’s qualified to give, you know, a personal opinion of, you know, Darwin’s own positions and why he took certain positions, and you certainly examined the historical record, you know, with a lot of detail, a lot of depth, clearly. How much do you think that Darwin’s own personal loss of faith impacted the development of his theory? So, you know, he struggled very openly. You write about it the problem of evil in the world. And I don’t think that a benevolent god would have created this insect just for this other insect that just eat it. He wrote very openly about these musings in his writings. How much do you think his personal loss of faith impacted the development of his theory of scientific theories?

Dr. Weikart
Well, interestingly, right after Darwin got back from his voyage of the Beagle, where he had gone and collected lots of biological and geological samples, he actually did as much geology as he did biology. There. When he came back, he was basically hanging around in circles with his older brother, who was a skeptic from the word go. His father, of course, had been a so-called free thinker and such. Darwin, after he came back from the voyage of the Beagle, began drifting further and further away from theism, which apparently he had embraced while he was going to Cambridge University. He basically slowly drifted in the course of the 1830s, 1840s, and before he published his Origin of Species to the point where by the time he published Origin of Species, it seems like he was a deist at best, he may have still believed in some kind of God, but not a God that could intervene or do any kind of miracles or anything like that. And then after that, he drifted further away toward agnosticism. And it’s again, it’s not exactly clear when you can when he reached these different stages, but somewhere between the 1830 and 1860, he drifted from theism to agnosticism, which is what he called himself toward the end of his life. He never actually embraced atheism. He claimed that he didn’t think we could know that. No, whether there was a God or not. But he embraced agnosticism. I think that drift did have something to do with his view of there not being any divine supernatural intervention in the world. Seems pretty clear. But you don’t have to be a complete atheist again to embrace that position. You could be a deist, which a lot of people were in the 18th and early 19th centuries as well, believing that there could be a God, but he doesn’t do anything. He doesn’t. He’s not anymore. He created things and set them in motion, but then he doesn’t intervene later on. And those ideas that were going to flow into then positivism, the idea, which is more agnostic, view that science is the only source of knowledge and that we can’t have any kind of intervention by any kind of divine being or anything. Those things were going to impact the way that Darwin thought about the world as well, and not just Darwin, but the people that influenced Darwin too, like Charles Lyell, for example, who was the key geologist who embraced what was called uniform material, that geology and Lyle’s ideas had a profound impact on Darwin. Darwin took Lyle’s Principles of Geology, which is a two-volume book. He took the first volume of it on his voyage of the Beagle, and then the second volume he got while he was on the voyage of the Beagle. And those ideas, which basically claim that all the processes that we see going on today are sufficient to occur, and the timeframes are sufficient to explain every geological thing that we have. And so Lyle was then going to posit that we had to have vast scale of time, what some historians refer to as deep time in order to bring about these evolutionary process. So yeah, all of those things were deeply influential on Darwin, the way that he formulated his theory.

Chapter 2: Is Morality Limited to In-Groups?
Fred
I feel like underlying your work is a strong, sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, emphasis on values and virtues. And clearly, you know, the connection of various Darwinist ideas with, with racism and sort of as justifying, you know, the exercise of power, of the strong over the weak and sort of losing a virtue like empathy or compassion is something that is very, very prevalent and very that you see coming up over and over again in your work. I wonder, you know, if we take some version of evolutionary theory, it’s not one theory. It’s a bunch of different theories that we put under that umbrella. If we’re going to take it for a fact. Let’s say that some version of evolutionary theory is factually correct. We don’t know which one exactly, But if we also are going to take seriously the evolution of human societies to a point where we do have fairly peaceful societies, when you compare with different with our closest genetic ancestors, for instance, the chimps, at least when it comes to reactive violence, as Richard Wrangham has written about, we seem to be far less violent. We do value things like human dignity and peace, and we do have empathy to varying degrees. If we’re going to take that fact seriously. I wonder if you’ve ever considered versions of evolutionary theory that do rationally, at least, that are rationally compatible with the evolution of virtues like compassion and empathy and protecting vulnerable peoples and so forth. So I’m thinking, for example, of group selection theory, that says that, hey, maybe in the world of individuals, there’s this kind of savage, you know, power struggle, where the strong sort of get the upper hand. But if you had a group where everybody cooperated, did that group would have a competitive advantage over a group of ruthless individuals where nobody cooperated. And so we have- I know that it’s not unanimous in the community. I know a lot of people, a lot of evolutionary thinkers don’t give a lot of weight to group selection theory. But have you ever looked for ways to sort of combine these things kind of rationally? So, for example, a group selection theory would explain, at least in theory, the evolution of traits like empathy and compassion and so forth.

Dr. Weikart
Sure. And of course, Darwin was wrestling with these very same ideas. In fact, Darwin writes quite extensively in his book The Descent of Man, about morality and the development of morality, because he knew this was going to be one of the things that he was going to be challenged on. Right. Well, if you know, how did morality get here, if, you know, everything just came about through these chance processes. So Darwin did believe in group selection, as you’re suggesting. And although that was pretty much supplanted in the middle part of the 20th century with W.D. Hamilton’s work, where individual selection came to the fore, it’s actually making a little bit of a comeback. There are a few thinkers today that are embracing group selection again. But one of the interesting things about group selection, though, and even in the way you framed it here, is that a lot of the thinkers who did embrace group selection, such as Darwin himself, argued that that did produce empathy within a particular group. And so Darwin actually said that the golden rule he thought was, a viable moral rule, you know, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Darwin thought that is what we’re programmed to do or think. However, Darwin also thought that groups that had this kind of empathy could outcompete other groups who didn’t. And one of those ways they out-competed them, there’s various ways they could do that, it’s not they could, maybe do better at gathering resources and finding food and other kinds of things like that, hunting or other things like that. But also another way that they could outcompete other peoples who had less empathy was by warfare. And so Darwin actually claimed that warfare was a way for people with more, with higher morality, higher levels of empathy and altruism to out-compete people who had less altruism. So you’ve got this problem of in-group versus outgroup competition here, too. And so racism could then be interpreted very easily also in the same kind of way that, okay, people within the race may have empathy for each other, but then they have this outgroup competition toward those that are lesser. So there’s a number of ways to interpret. You are right, though, that certainly there are a lot of evolutionists today who believe that empathy and altruism, usually altruism is the word that the evolutionary biologists like to use, that altruism has been developed. That’s an evolutionary process because it provides some kind of evolutionary advantage for those people. But I should remark that just because some particular traits, such as altruism, is an evolutionary advantage for some people does not mean that that excludes it from having been designed. Obviously, if it was designed by an intelligent designer, they would want it to it should have some advantage. So just to show that it has an advantage doesn’t necessarily slap down on intelligent design. It’s just to say that they’ve tried to propose a way that evolution could have could have produced it.

Fred
Right. And that distinction between in-group and outgroup, I think, to a large degree, would help explain, Richard Wrangham’s The Goodness Paradox that when it comes to reactive violence, like person-to-person violence in close proximity, we’re much less violent than our closest genetic ancestors. But when you look at large-scale war, we’re far more violent, right? There’s never been anything like the World Wars and so forth. So I think that in-group outgroup. Right. You could be super cooperative inside a group. In fact, who knows? Right? Inside of the Nazi Party, people are probably really nice to each other, right? Oh, yeah.

Dr. Weikart
And that’s yeah, the Nazis talked a lot about cooperation. They were building what they called the “Volksgemeinschaft”, which means the people’s community. They were very forthright about we’re trying to build we’re trying to erase the class struggle. We don’t want there to be a class struggle because we want to have unity among the German people. They were all about nationalism and national unity. Yeah.

Fred
Yeah. It’s interesting how like racism and all these different dehumanizing movements. It’s never in the name of something bad. It’s always in the name of something good, right? It’s always in the name of a better-functioning society, in the name of sort of brotherhood and cooperation and human progress. It’s we always use positive ideals to sort of justify the exercise of power against those that are sort of inconveniently, you know, not buying into the program. Right.

Dr. Weikart
Yeah, I think that’s right. Exactly. It’s – we try to justify based upon some ideals that we have, and we just ignore or forget or simply conveniently don’t want to accept the others that are outside of our realm or whatever, you know, the outsiders that whoever is painted as the outsiders.

Fred
And I guess the riddle there that would remain unexplained from Darwin’s perspective is the development of outgroup altruism or outgroup compassion. And like, why? Why does that exist? Right? If it doesn’t, if it’s not there to confer, I guess you could always explain it as, hey, you know, through trade, you know, we can get certain benefits by cooperating with other groups. But what’s your perspective? I know you come at this from a completely different perspective of, you know, you do believe that the universe is purposeful. You do believe that there’s been some kind of a design. You do believe in something like benevolent forces, you know, at the root of, correct me if I’m wrong. So from your perspective, how would you account for it? And do you feel that there’s like an irremediable gap there in Darwin’s theories when it comes to a sort of outgroup or a more generalized form of altruism and compassion and empathy.

Dr. Weikart
Let’s say, you know, in terms of Darwin himself, Darwin did actually claim that he thought that these altruistic tendencies were going to expand in human. He thought that they were increasing within the different groups that existed during his time. So in the 19th century, Darwin thought that the size of the ingroups were growing, and Darwin did actually profess optimism that it would grow until it finally expanded to all of humanity. So Darwin himself did believe that all humans would at some point be considered part of the community and to where we would be. However, at the same time, it’s unclear exactly what that how that would work itself out, because he also thought we were going exterminate people of the so-called lower races. So that may be part of the way that it was going to expand the in-group hostility. In terms of my own perspective, I don’t make any secret of the fact that I’m a Christian, and I believe in God, and I believe that the on the other, on the one hand, I believe that humans have capacities for love and empathy and altruism, but I also believe that humans are fundamentally sinners. And that’s where we get the evil in the world and the warfare and such. So I believe that can account and explain morality actually far better way than Darwinism can.

Fred
And I suppose, theoretically, it is possible that there’s been some historical process that led to the development of those kind of twin aspects that we have in our nature and that seem to be in opposition. So I’m always interested in seeing to what extent could we bridge the gap, could what extent could we rationally explain these things in a way, And as I said, I’ve always felt that the steel man version of creationism would be something like at the source of these laws, these laws would have to come, Rupert Sheldrake writes about how, you know, modern science tends to say, you know, spot me one miracle, and I’ll explain everything else. And the miracle is the sudden appearance of all of the laws of nature, perfectly designed and calibrated out of nowhere in one instant for no reason. So it seems still pretty extraordinary. The level of, and I’ve read, you know, scientists arguing this, that, you know, the statistical odds of getting to this level of carefully calibrated, and, you know, if the Big Bang were slightly a little bit faster, a little bit slower, we don’t have the universe that we have today. So at the very least, I think there’s an opportunity for a kind of intelligent creationism that would say, you know, these laws would have had to maybe there’s something like the design or something like intention behind these laws, and maybe then they played themselves out over, you know, billions of years. Right?

Dr. Weikart
Yeah, there’s a wide variety of views on that within the intelligent design community itself. And what you’re describing is usually called the fine-tuning argument, the idea that if you have the gravitational pull were slightly stronger, slightly weaker, if the speed of light were slightly faster or slightly slower, if the weak, if the strong and weak atomic forces were slightly different than they are today, then there’s a bunch of different constants, cosmic constants, that all have to be within certain specified parameters and lo and behold, they are so that this universe can exist and so that life can exist. So that’s called the fine-tuning argument. And there are many people within the intelligence community, the intelligent design community, that use that argument in relation to the cosmos then. And many people, for example, Steve Meyer, who’s the head of the Center for Science and Culture Discovery Institute, who’s written a number of books about intelligent design, he and many others are old Earth creationists who do believe that the Big Bang took place and that these fine-tuning things make sense and show design of the cosmos. But then it’s a separate question as to the fine-tuning of biological organisms. And Steve Meyer in his book The Signature in the Cell, focuses on DNA, in particular, and how DNA conveys information at such a level that, it could not have possibly been just the product of chance or events. It had to have been put there by an intelligent designer. So when we look at it in biological organisms, and there is this, then there’s another argument to be made about the levels of intelligence that would have been necessitated in order to bring those about.

Chapter 3: From Selfish Instincts to Group Agendas
Fred
Okay, let’s take the opposite perspective now for a second. And in the Death of Humanity, you sort of widen the scope of your critique to include, you know, ideas that are pretty mainstream. I think, among scientists, scientists, academics, that essentially there is nothing, it’s just randomness. Right? The random interplay of all these different laws would have created everything that we see here. And under the larger argument there, as far as humans are concerned, is, look, if we’re just the product of randomness and chance, then there’s really nothing very special about us, Right? Richard Dawkins writes about there’s no design, no purpose, nothing but pitiless indifference. Right. And so I wonder, you know, if we take these scientists and you’ve written about the selective skepticism of these scientists, they always do have certain values that they hold dear and that they don’t subject to this kind of skepticism based on the randomness of creation argument. But most, if not all, of these scientists, do believe in some version of, let’s say, let’s call it human rights, basic human dignity, and so forth in their personal lives and sometimes even in their political lives. And so do you think that their thinking is just inconsistent in this regard or that there’s a way that we get to human rights and dignity, even from a random universe perspective, through utilitarian arguments, like, for example, wanting to reduce suffering or increasing well-being or something like that?

Dr. Weikart
Well, even if you could use utilitarian arguments, you would still have to, as far as I can tell, be able to justify why happiness or pleasure or well-being or whatever you want to call it, why that has any significance, and why we should pursue that. You know, Michael, I recently watched a debate that Michael Ruse did. Michael Ruse is a prominent philosopher of science who defends Darwinian evolution and has written extensively about evolutionary ethics and other issues relating to these themes. And he argues that morality does exist. And so and in his debate, he actually was making a very strong case that, you know, Sophie Scholl, who was opposed to Nazism and who was executed for her role in opposing Nazism, was a hero, moral hero, and that Hitler was morally evil and such and he wanted to claim that those are really true morally. But on the other hand, Ruse has also argued, and he actually did in this debate, acknowledge this, that morality is, and here’s the exact words he said is, an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. And the way he squared those two things was by claiming that morality is an emotional part of our biological being. So it’s part of us. It’s not just something that’s completely, completely subjective, although there’s a subjective element to that actually kind of emotional. But he said it’s not completely subjective. It’s something that exists. But he said it doesn’t have any justification. And that’s the big problem that I have. If you’re saying that it exists, but it has no justification, what you’re saying is it exists only within us. And the problem with that is if you’re saying morality only exists within us and it doesn’t exist outside of us, there’s nothing outside of us. There’s no way to justify outside of ourselves. If you make that argument, then the problem is, if you want to confront someone like Hitler, for example, and say, Well, now Hitler, what you’re doing is evil. Hitler responds by saying, Wait a minute, my moral feelings tell me that Aryans are supreme and that the Jews are evil. And so we have every moral right to kill these Jews. So you actually have no moral leg to stand on in any kind of give-and-take with someone who simply doesn’t agree with your moral feelings.

Fred
So Hitler was a relativist. Like in other words, like if you’re going to make it, in a sense, you’re making morality purely subjective. In that sense, if it’s 100% inside of us and it doesn’t resonate with any broader sort of phenomenon in nature, then it becomes completely subjective. And then, hey, you know what my morality says that I have to eliminate your morality, right?

Dr. Weikart
Well, yeah, Most of the evolutionary biologists and I think Ruse would also take this approach, try to make the claim that the morality that they themselves embrace, they think that at least sort of the core of it is universal, that everyone has inherited that in their genes as a human being. I’m not sure that’s true. And again, when I look at Hitler himself, Hitler made overt statements claiming that his moral feelings led him to hate Jews and that that was part of his moral perspective. So I’m not sure that they are universal.

Fred
So Hitler was clearly a moral thinker. He was driven by a moral vision of the universe where the Aryan race had to be, you know, the ruling race. It was a moral claim that he got me and it justified it by appealing to certain values and the Nordic peoples and so on. And so like you’ve outlined in your book, so he clearly couched his argument in terms of morality. He wasn’t describing himself as a monster. Right? He was driven by a moral vision.

Dr. Weikart
Yeah. And many of his followers likewise are the same way. So the problem that I have with positions like that Ruse is taking is that they’re trying to claim that these moral, that morality, has some existence and it exists in us biologically. But then they assume that that means that it’s universal. Now, at the same time, Ruse also has another problem, I think, and that’s how to resolve the tension between our selfish instincts and our altruistic instincts, because he acknowledges that we have both. I mean, Ruse does make the claim, although he doesn’t really go he doesn’t really explain in any extent how this works itself out. But we have these selfish instincts, and we have the altruistic instincts. What I, as a Christian, call sin versus love and morality or conscience, maybe we say conscience versus a sinful nature. Okay, So and Ruse other evolution brothers understand that. I mean, they understand that people do things that are horrible. I mean, you know, you know, a number of years ago, a couple of evolutionary biologists put a book called The Natural History of Rape, in which they claimed that rape had been programmed into organisms biologically. Now, they’re not saying that rapes, okay, that it’s right or anything like that. They would still say it’s wrong. But they’re saying that there’s a biological basis for it. So they acknowledge these selfish instincts, and then there’s these altruistic instincts, and Ruse and others who embrace evolutionary ethics, as far as I can tell, don’t have any way to tell you when you should follow which one. You know, they say that both of these have been put upon us by evolution, because sometimes our selfish instincts help us to survive and reproduce, and sometimes our altruistic instincts help us to survive and reproduce. So how do you choose when you’re faced with an ethical dilemma? You know, I have an ethical dilemma here that I need to decide whether I should do a particular deed which will, in some ways, make my life easier, but society says it’s wrong, and my conscience tells me is wrong. What should I what should I do? Well, I should just try to do it secretly so societies wouldn’t find out, maybe that’ll be the best thing to do. So there’s no really weird way to morally decide these issues. Well, Judeo-Christian worldview, of course it has, I think, a better explanation, that is that there’s this sinful nature that’s warring against our knowledge of right and wrong. And that just and following that, when we know the right and wrong that you follow the right and wrong, what you know is right, you don’t give in to your selfish instincts.

Fred
Did you feel that we know what is right and wrong at an intuitive level? Because I know in the Old Testament there are many passages that imply, you know, God will punish people for violating a rule that he’s never given to them. And some people have made the argument that that means that inside of us, it’s an appeal to sort of natural instinct and natural law. It’s like things that intuitively you would know, or at least most people would know, would be wrong. That you’re violating something that you should know is wrong. Do you think that we also have to like we have this sort of, let’s call it sinful, sinful aspect inside of us. Do you think we also have a moral aspect inside of us that most of us can have access to morally and then and then and then? Do you think that because I’m always trying to sort of give the scientifically oriented thinkers their due in terms of ok like, there may be rational ways of explaining this, but then, as you’ve just mentioned, it’s very, very hard to get to a moral vision if you don’t establish some kind of a hierarchy in values. Right. So, so do you think that this is that the instinct for good or the instinct of the knowledge of right and wrong, is something that we readily have access to?

Dr. Weikart
I think in one sense, yes, I do think that every human has a conscience that gives them some information about what is right and what is wrong. Now, the problem is that, again, I also believe we have a sinful nature, so we often try to deceive ourselves, and we sometimes don’t like what our conscience tells us. So we simply ignore our conscience, or we talk ourselves out of it, or we try, or we simply suppress it until we just, until it’s basically calloused. And so we just ignore what’s going on in our conscience. So, on the one hand, yes, I think that all humans do have access to moral knowledge, and I think that’s why when we look cross-culturally, we can see that there are certain moral norms that are pretty universal, not murdering, not stealing. Now, again, there’s differences in societies as to what exactly that means and exactly how to imply that and, excuse me, how to interpret that and what exactly is included there. But there always there are within all societies, basic moral norms that do seem to be universal.

Chapter 4: Power Over Others
Fred
There’s also in your work the recurring theme of power, and particularly the notion of power unrestrained, and how this vision of like believing in a random universe or that human beings are just an animal or just, you know, a machine or, you know, this notion that in a sense would defeat any counterargument to the exercise of power. Because if we don’t have an inherent value in inherent dignity, then why wouldn’t it just be the exercise of power? And if there’s one big idea that unites, to me, in my opinion anyway, a Judeo-Christian, you know, the Judeo-Christian doctrine of intrinsic dignity and the secular tradition of civil and human rights, I’d argue it’s the notion that human beings who have too much power can, and if we look at it historically, we can make a very convincing case, it can exploit and degrade and manipulate human beings who don’t have power, and that it’s some way this power needs to be unrestrained. It needs to be restrained it needs to be contained. It needs to be limited in order to prevent these kinds of abuses. Did you feel that in this kind of this framework of the meaningless universe, the purposeless universe, the universe where human beings are just this or just that, they don’t have some kind of innate potential that we have to protect, that there’s a dangerous sort of precondition to the exercise of power, the unrestrained exercise of power? And you see the like versions of this on the left and on the right, on the right, typically you’re going to see a kind of a more like, you know, domination of the weak by the strong. And on the left, usually, you’ll see some kind of like, well, you know, like human beings just matter, and so we can get some kind of a rational cast of experts can be trusted to make all the moral decisions society, but still kind of arguing for that caste to have unrestrained power over all other human beings. So, do you feel there’s a danger there?

Dr. Weikart
Yeah, I clearly do. And I think what you’re saying is very astute there, that it’s both in the right and the left. This notion of exerting power over others, again, based on the view that humans are just something to be manipulated. Very often that’s usually sort of the way it gets put forward, and sometimes on the right, it gets put forward in a way that’s more focused on hierarchy in biology and such. Ironically, on the left. Very often the push for power is very often under the auspices of ending oppression, bringing liberation. But I mean, if you look at the way that people are talking about power, say, in the existentialist movement from Nietzsche to Sartre and to others and into the postmodern period in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, where they’re talking about everything’s about power, very often they’re reacting against what they see as authoritarianism, what they see as authority structures, and they’re trying to exert power to wrested away from the powers that be now, the status quo. But the irony is, then once they, if they are able to succeed in doing that and of course, we have some examples of this in a different way, we see the communists coming into power, say, in the Soviet Union, they were all about liberation. They were supposed to be setting up their dictatorship of the proletariat, which is an exercise of power by the proletariat to set up this place where there would be no oppression any longer. But what they ended up doing was setting up a system that was even more oppressive than what they had supplanted. And that’s one of my chief concerns that very often the goals of many of the people that are pressing for these kinds of ideas, sometimes their goals are wonderful, sometimes their goals are fantastic. They have these great ideals, and they’re wanting to see people have more freedom. They’re wanting to see an end to poverty. They’re wanting to see, you know, people reach the full the height of their fulfillment, you know, to fulfill their purpose and such. And many times, these are, to not be oppressed and to be have liberty to express themselves and all these other things that are very wonderful. But then they end up because of their false vision of humanity they end up putting into place systems that very often end up oppressing even worse than the ones that they overthrew.

Fred
And how would you suggest that we go about sort of discriminating? Because you’re right, the ideals are always good, right? The ideals that people use to sort of justify, let’s call it, you know, more government control or more control by big corporations or control by a cast of scientists, whatever it is, the ideals are always relatively progressive. They’re always about, you know, eradicating inequality. They’re always about bringing about a better functioning of society. It’s and even in the case of Hitler, Hitler even in the case of, you know, the communists during the Soviet era or fascism in Europe and so forth, it’s always based on a blinding, beautiful ideal. I’ve always felt like one of the ways that we can look, look at it is almost like not even sort of taking the ideas to the side and just looking at it functionally, like, what do these people want? Are they using these beautiful arguments to justify having more power over others ,or are they using these ideals to justify giving more freedom to people, more liberty to people? How would you recommend that we go about sort of discriminating and understanding what the real intentions of and you mentioned Foucault, for example, who talks about how they, you know, like when the proletariat are going to win, there’s a very good chance they’re going to do something really bloody and really violent. And there’s no reason to contest that you go to war to win. Right? So, there’s this notion of like, you know, once you’ve taken a cause and you’ve considered that it’s a good cause, it almost justifies any amount of exercise of power, any amount of cruelty in order to sort of materialize itself in the real world, How would you sort of discriminate between these different motivations?

Dr. Weikart
Well, I think that’s where we need to come out against the notion that the ends justify the means, because I think that’s one of the key things that’s being promoted here. And, you know, Vladimir Lenin, who I mentioned, the communists, Lenin, very forthrightly argued that the ends justify the means. But what happened was when Lenin took over Russia and turned it into the Soviet Union and then we had Stalin and then Khrushchev and others along the way. After that, the ends never came. The cruel means that were used was all we were left with. We never got to the ends that, you know, this glorious end that was supposed to be there. They’re supposed to justify all this horrible brutality never happened. And my own perspective, and I developed this in my book, The Death of Humanity, my own perspective, is that I think that the reason that they were not able to achieve their ends and by the way, I don’t think that they were – I don’t think that Lenin or even Stalin was being insincere. I don’t think that they were just, you know, just being completely egotistical in their perspectives. I think they really embraced these ideals sincerely, and that’s why they were so fanatical in applying them because they really, they were true believers. They believed that this was going to produce a better society, a classless society, that where everyone was going to live in bliss. And because they were so convinced of that, that’s really what drove them and drove them to commit the atrocities that they committed as well. Or Mao or others too, as well. So I think we need to dispense with the idea the ends justify the means because human beings are valuable, and every human being is valuable. And that’s what they lost sight of. I think they basically saw some human beings as being valuable and others not. And they different people have drawn the in and out groups different ways. Some, you know, the fascists, the Nazis drew the in and out groups based on race and biology. The communists, interpreted the in and out groups based on their economic status. So we have different ways of promoting in and out groups. But my own perspective is that we need to promote the idea that every human being has value and we should protect that right to life. We should protect their liberty of every single one in as much as we’re able to do that and not ever look upon any human being as a means to an end or as a someone that we need to get rid of in order to establish something higher or better.

Fred
Right. And it’s the strong moral vision that I feel is present throughout your work as a historian. And you’ve also written about in connection to this, a return to Christian values. And I think that’s what you refer to, is the doctrine of inherent, the inherent dignity of all human beings. And, you know, human beings should not be treated as, you know, they sort of Kantian vision of not treating human beings as a means to an end, but as ends in themselves. I’m curious also, and you’ve written about you’re aware also of, you know, Christianity’s history and how it can also be sort of transformed into a creed that sort of distinguishes between the in-group, the outgroup, and to justify the sort of like a more of a power agenda. Of course, other religions, too. I’m curious to know, do you feel that a creed that brings together reason and the best principles and values of religion is possible? And or another way to look at this is what does a return to Christian values mean for you in a world of, you know, religious diversity, where people will believe in all kinds of different creeds and including some individuals who don’t believe or who have no desire to believe in any kind of metaphysical beliefs or any kind of religious framework of life. What does a return to those values look like? Can we define those values, and can we sort of outline a moral agenda that’s more universal and more attached to reason? What do you think about that?

Dr. Weikart
Well, you know, you’re right that Christianity, or at least so-called Christianity, has produced some appalling things over its history. That’s I’m very aware of that. My own perspective on that is that when many forms of Christianity, especially once it became popular to become Christian in the fourth century A.D., in Rome, in the Roman Empire, and thereafter, many forms of Christianity basically moved away from the teachings of Jesus about turning the other cheek, about loving your enemy, about the other, the very fundamental things that he taught in the Sermon on the Mount. And instead, they began exercising power. We were talking earlier about power. Once they became in power politically, they became corrupted. And that’s always a temptation, and it’s a huge problem. And so, yeah, I acknowledge that Christianity, or at least what has gone by the name of Christianity, has done some pretty horrible things historically. And I’m one who’s willing to call them out and to say we need to move away from that or move back to the principles Jesus laid out in the Sermon on the Mount, which was Love your enemy. So my own perspective is that we as Christians need to be tolerant of people of other religions, not just tolerant, but loving them, you know, sacrificing for them, being a blessing to other people, whether they agree with us or not. No matter who they are, no matter what person they are, no matter what creed they believe that we need to be doing whatever we can to show love to them. So that’s my own perspective. As a Christian, I believe we should be tolerating other people and not even again, not just tolerating in the sense of, you know, you know, you’re right. You’re over there and I’m over here. But your sense of actively loving, sacrificing for other people, no matter who they are, no matter what religion they are about. I completely believe that we as Christians should be. And I say we, I’m not including you. I’m not at all where you stand, but that-

Fred
I’m Jewish, so technically, I fall into the Judeo Christian part of it.

Dr. Weikart
Okay. Okay. All right. So but that myself and other fellow Christians that we should be approaching people with peaceful persuasion. I do believe that, you know, we should be trying to persuade people of the truth of Christianity, because I believe it’s true. And I believe that it will change people’s lives. I believe it’ll bring us into a greater amount of love in our society. I believe that it will. I know it changed my life and brought my life into a different perspective where I was more loving, more considerate, more caring for people than I was before I was a Christian. I became a Christian when I was 16. Before I was a Christian, I was very selfish, egocentric, and such. And I’m not claiming I’ve completely overcome those things. I’m still a sinful man, but it did radically transform my life and brought more love into my life. So I do want to bring other people into that. But I believe in peaceful persuasion, talking it. If people don’t accept it, then we still love them. We still lay down our lives for them in whatever ways we can, and just go on living our lives the best we can, loving every person on the globe.

Fred
And do you think there’s a way of respecting those principles in a way that’s universal? In other words, like that would not require a formal conversion into a religious framework, but just simply living by the feeling that those principles are correct feeling regardless of what the source is. A lot of people like in the Jewish community, right? It’s like, oh, like we came up with this idea, we came up with that idea. Or you have people in different moral communities or religious communities that want to take credit and therefore argue that, hey, you know, like, well, in the Jewish case, it’s not it’s not a confessional religion. So we’re not looking for conversion necessarily. But a lot of times it’s an argument. It’s like, hey, you’ve got to be part of our group in order to sort of get the benefit of this principle. But if the principle of universal compassion, love, you know, respecting people, regardless of their creeds, are truly universal, do you think there’s a way for people to sort of identify those principles and abide to them, even if it doesn’t come with a formal sort of conversion into a religious framework?

Dr. Weikart
Yeah, I think that’s possible. And I mentioned earlier that I think everyone has a conscience and has access to moral truths. And so, you know, when I think about, say, the deists of the 18th century, Thomas Jefferson or people like that, many of them embraced a lot of the moral truths of Christianity but did not believe in Christianity and certainly the miraculous elements of Christianity. So, yeah, I think it’s partly it’s possible to embrace those kinds of ideas and to try to live according to those principles. However, there’s one thing about Christianity that, at least in my experience, gives it a leg up in this moral issue, and that is that Christianity is not just about moral principles. When Jesus comes and lives inside your life, he gives you the power to follow those moral principles that you may not have had and probably didn’t have, and at least in my case, didn’t have before that happened. So, I do think Christian conversion does have very often radical changes. I mean, I’ve met people who have had radical changes from being drug addicts to, you know, come to Christianity. That’s what’s given them the power to overcome their drug addiction, or they’ve been criminals before. And that’s what’s given them the power to overcome their idea. So I believe that Jesus is the power to overcome these sins and to bring us the love that we truly need. I mean, I think you’re right that a lot of the principles that are laid out, the moral principles that are laid out there, yeah, you might be able to ascertain them rationally and try to follow them best you can. The Apostle Paul said that, though, that the things that he tried to do that he knew were right, couldn’t do, and the things that he couldn’t do that excuse me, that he didn’t want to do that he ended up doing. And it was, and then that’s in the book of Romans and in that book, he also then right after that says that’s by the power of the Holy Spirit, that he was able then to overcome those sins and be able then to do the things that he knew were right in the first place.

Fred
So, I’m not going to convert on this call if that’s cool with you. No, but I love it. I love also like, because you also point to something that’s beyond just reason, right? That’s beyond just like understanding principles and abiding. But there’s also an in what I would call the power of faith, right? Or the power of, you need a positive force as well. And I would claim that there’s universal versions of that as well. Again, we’re just trying to take a world that is, I really feel in your work as very strong moral energy and concern that sort of suffuses the entire. And I do believe that Darwinism and evolutionary theory has not been scrutinized. And so, I really recommend your books to everybody because. The level of scrutiny that you bring and the level of historical accuracy that you bring. And a lot of the criticisms that are made of you, I find that you are overtly sort of, are very conscious of and avoid very carefully. And so I think it’s great because it enriches the whole conversation of around Darwinism. How do we separate fact from theory, How do we understand the impact of all these different ideas and how they can play out in the moral realm and you certainly see inside of the field of science, there’s a lot of confusion when it comes to morality. I find there’s a lot of description of a lot of different facts, and then certain moral views are going to be held to be self-evident, but then they don’t self-evidently flow from that dry description of the facts. So, I love the fact that you/re animated by this moral energy and this moral passion, and I think your work is a fantastic sort of enrichment to our conversations around evolution around morality, around and ultimately about like what principles do we want to base our human societies on and our human interactions on. And any final words that you’d like to share with us around this, this great vision that you have?

Dr. Weikart
Yeah, I appreciate your words, your kind words about my work. And I just invite people to go ahead and read it and find out, you know, again, I’ve had there are critics out there, and I’ve actually answered my critics in some of my later works, my book, Hitler’s Religion, and also my latest book, Darwinian Racism. I answer some of my critics that have tried to criticize my work and even if you don’t agree with my worldview, my Christianity, and such, I think my work still makes sense historically.

Fred
That’s right. And you’ve really always clearly separated these things. Right? Look, there’s the philosophical conversation, but then there’s also like the historical record that’s a lot less fuzzy and a lot more, you know, you’ve got to contend with certain views and quotes and actual views that you outline with a lot of detail.

Dr. Weikart
Yeah, It’s been great talking to you, Fred.

Fred
Great. Dr. Weikart, it’s been a real pleasure, and I hope to talk to you again soon.

Dr. Weikart
Okay, great.

Fred
Alright, take care!