Historically, it has been a battle of secularism vs. religion, law vs. the fabled “separation of church and state,” and often, in political contexts, left vs. right. The newest battles pit advocates of “intelligent design” — a scientific view of creationism — against steadfast defenders of Darwin’s evolution theory, a belief mischaracterized by its believers as objective science.

Professor Richard Weikart, chairman of the Department of History at California State University-Stanislaus, may be on the verge of changing the entire debate, and he moved a step closer Oct. 13 when he addressed a full house at the John Paul II Center’s Bonfils Hall.

Based on Weikart’s work, Catholics and other Christians may begin viewing the “evolution-only” approach to science education as an elitist affront to the sanctity of life and a not just a theory opposing creation.

Weikart, author of the book “From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany,” spent more than an hour sharing historical research and exhibits that link Darwinian theory to what he calls the “culture of death” — a devaluation and destruction of human lives not believed to improve the human race through evolution.
Francis Maier, chancellor of the Archdiocese of Denver, said it’s not counter to Catholic beliefs to accept some aspects of evolution theory presented in proper context.

“There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the idea of evolution, and that goes all the way back to popular articles written in Our Sunday Visitor (a Catholic newspaper) as early as 1928,” Maier told the audience, before Weikart spoke.

“It depends on what one means by evolution. The issue is not the process, so much as whether you’re going to freight it with a lot of radical materialist philosophy or whether you’re going to allow God as having an active role in the process. Dr. Weikart bypasses that discussion, and focuses on the ethical impact of Darwinian thought and its implications of how we think of the nature of the human person and the value of human life.”

Weikart, a non-Catholic Christian, quoted Pope Benedict XVI from a speech he gave as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in 1999.

“This evolutionary ethic that inevitably takes as its key concept the model of selectivity, that is, the struggle for survival, the victory of the fittest, successful adaptation, has little comfort to offer. Even when people try to make it more attractive in various ways, it ultimately remains a bloodthirsty ethic.”

Darwin and early followers, including 19th and 20th century scientist Earnst Haeckel, claimed that the descent of humans from animals overthrew what they called the “anthropocentric fable.” They denied that humans have souls and rejected the Judeo-Christian sanctity-of-human-life ethic. Haeckel’s quote “politics is applied biology” became a favorite phrase of Nazi propagandists, who also used Haeckel’s justifications for racism, nationalism and social Darwinism to further their justification for mass human extermination and experimentation.

“German biologists, anthropologists, physicians, and other scholars used Darwinian theory to promote eugenics, euthanasia, infanticide, abortion and racial extermination long before Hitler arrived on the scene,” Weikart said. “Many of these thinkers would have been aghast at the Holocaust, since few were as rabidly anti-Semitic as Hitler, and some were even Jews themselves. Nonetheless, their philosophy of death for the ‘unfit’ had a strong influence on Hitler’s ideology.”

The culture of death is obvious when it comes to Hitler’s Holocaust, or dozens of other well-known genocide, infanticide and ethnic cleansing atrocities. But Weikart explained that we see the culture of death in everyday life. Popular culture, through radical environmentalism, tells humankind that it’s a “blight species” with a superiority complex, teaching us that fewer humans and less reproduction is good and that humans are expendable.

“Many of you may have seen in the news recently that the London Zoo put humans on display, locking them in cages,” Weikart said. “The message was that humans are not special, they’re just like other animals.”

Taking questions from the audience, Weikart was asked how Christians should respond to the teaching of evolution in public schools, knowing that the theory may have led to genocide racism, eugenics and abortion. Weikart said he home schools his own children — in order to safeguard them from dangerous beliefs presented as fact — but he doesn’t advocate full-scale rejection of evolution theory.

“The short-term answer is that people should be presenting evolution in such a way as to understand that it is not as iron-clad as experimental science,” Weikart said. “There is a big gap between epistemology, which is the theory of knowledge relating to historical sciences, and experimental sciences. Unfortunately, historical sciences have piggybacked off the successes of experimental sciences, and have thus claimed that if you oppose a historical science you’re anti-scientific. But there’s a big difference between historical and experimental science.”

Weikart said the key to acknowledging the theory of evolution in a safer context is to understand and educate people about its links to a wide-scale devaluation of human life that’s at the core of most human-caused tragedy.

“Wherever one stands on Darwinism, it is certainly safe to say that Darwinism has had tremendous impact on ethical and moral thought in the modern world, and specifically it has contributed mightily to the erosion of the sanctity of life ethic,” Weikart said. “Darwinism really is a matter of life and death.”