A Critical Review of:Ian A. McFarland's In Adam's Fall: A Meditation on the Christian Doctrine of Original Sin, Part 2. A Misinterpretation of modern culture.

In the preface to the book, McFarland sums up the general attitude toward the doctrine of original sin among contemporary North Americans as follows: "The idea that we are all guilty because of an ancestor's misdeed is viewed as morally outrageous and historically incredible, summing for many everything that is wrong with Christianity." (p ix.) I couldn't have put it better. McFarland is not deterred. The aim of the book, he says, is to challenge that perception.

In order to do so, however, he must also clear some ground. The tradition of the church has left us with a "Hobson's choice" in its teaching on original sin. On traditional understandings, no matter which we favor, we are stuck in a dilemma of having to choose between a fundamental equality of all humans at the cost of whitewashing crucial differences or focusing on human difference at the cost of denying human equality. He proposes a solution to the dilemma and a challenge to the negative perception of the doctrine of original sin:

The chapters that follow are my attempt to examine this dimension of human equality before God, in the conviction that the doctrine of original sin, though one of the most unsettling aspects of Christian teaching, is also stimulating and productive for the life of faith. In reaction to a wide range of criticisms leveled against the idea of original sin, a number of Christian theologians in the modern period have attempted to develop a doctrine of sin in which the idea of original sin is heavily qualified or even rejected. Against these perspectives, I will argue that it is not only theologically defensible, but inseparable from the confession of Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. Indeed, I will defend the doctrine in what is arguably its most extreme form, as developed by Augustine and later defended in the Reformed theological tradition under the designation of "total depravity" -- the claim that no aspect of our humanity is untouched by sin. Yet what follows is not simply a restatement of earlier positions, because modern critics raise questions that cannot be ignored about how the doctrine has been defended and deployed in the past, even if (as I shall try to show) these questions can be answered in ways that confirm the place of original sin within the logic of Christian faith.(pp. x-xi)

No one can fault McFarland for a lack of courage. He is prepared to take on not only a modern consensus but also his own forebears and mentors in the faith. I intend to show that his challenge to the modern perception fails. His own explication of the doctrine of original sin, though clearly different from and in some ways better than traditional formulations, remains both morally outrageous and incredible. My basic approach will be to show that his characterization of "modern perception" is oversimplified. Furthermore, he appears to be largely unaware of the progress made by sociobiologists, evolutionary psychologists and brain scientists at unlocking the biological bases of human nature as shaped by evolution. These discoveries have huge implications for Christian doctrines about human nature, most of which McFarland apparently has not explored. I will show that they thoroughly undermine his reconstruction of original sin. The book maintains a laser focus on the issue of original sin. I will point out that McFarland's reconstruction raises serious questions about his conception of justice and his soteriology. His failure to address these issues leaves him open to misunderstanding. Or worse, I may understand him all too well. In that case his silence amounts to self-deception at best. Finally, I will show how McFarland, in an attempt to avoid the "Hobson's choice" he mentioned above, lands himself in contradictions.

The remainder of this post will focus on my first criticism of McFarland, that his characterization of "modern perception" is oversimplified. He presents the following summary on pp 5-6:

The consumerist anthropology that shapes so much of contemporary western culture is predicated on a model of freedom in which choice is determined exclusively by the will of the chooser. To be sure, possible objects of choice are constrained by material circumstances, (e.g., a person with neither money nor credit cannot buy a hat), and the choices one makes may entail consequences that are not themselves desired by the chooser (e.g., someone who steals a hat is subject to arrest); but the act of choosing itself is conceived as radically private and autonomous: the individual is finally responsible only to herself for what she chooses. Within the consumerist paradigm, a person's choices will certainly affect other people and will themselves be affected by other people's advice and opinions; but however much such relationships may impact the calculus of choice, they remain external to the act of choosing, which can always be abstracted from them as a decision that is essentially by and for the self. The moral character of an individual's acts is, correspondingly, determined by assessment of her capacities and intentions.

Huh? Huh? As I pointed out earlier, McFarland is by and large fair in his handling of the views of other authors. It is a shame that he did not select a specific representative of this "consumerist anthropology" to critique. Absent a face and name, McFarland's summary of this supposedly prevalent western consumerism generalizes to the point of uselessness. "Choice is determined exclusively by the will of the chooser." Later on, McFarland will contrast the Pelagian view of the will as an entity that somehow escapes the cause-effect relationships of the natural world with the Augustinian view, in which the will simply follows a person's desires. I suspect he is importing Pelagianism into the "consumerist" paradigm. But this is an unwarranted conclusion, at least if one goes by the messages embedded in modern advertisements (the presumed media through which this anthropology is presented). The freedom to "choose" presented to a modern consumer is simply the ability to find out in the market something she really likes. It says nothing about the ontological relationship between "will" and "desires." His statement of the limitations implied by consumerism is highly tendentious. As if the average person in a modern western culture really believed that the only constraints on personal choice are finances and "what I can get away with." "The act of choosing itself is conceived as radically private and autonomous: the individual is finally responsible only to herself for what she chooses." As a representation of the views of modern culture, this is just flat-out false. Only if we interviewed prison inmates this might be a majority view. I think it is generally true that moderns believe an individual is immediately responsible only to herself for her choices, but as the consequences of one's decisions spread out to affect other people so does her circle of responsibility. Finally, a person is responsible for the welfare of the people whose lives she affects with her decisions and can be called to account if she fails in her responsibility. I can find plenty of examples to support this view in all areas of popular culture. "Within the consumerist paradigm, a person's choices will certainly affect other people and will themselves be affected by other people's advice and opinions; but however much such relationships may impact the calculus of choice, they remain external to the act of choosing, which can always be abstracted from them as a decision that is essentially by and for the self." On the one hand, this is trivially correct, because it is inevitably true of any view of decision-making. If McFarland wishes to propose a theory of decision-making, as opposed to other types of "voluntary" action, in which it is impossible to abstract a person's act of choosing from external influences, I wish him well. He certainly doesn't do so in this book. On the other hand, his concluding comment that on the consumerist anthropology all decisions are "by and for the self" is so prejudicial it takes my breath away. Seriously, no collective decision-making? No extra-personal considerations (like, say, my own family)? What was he thinking? Now McFarland might respond to this criticism by crediting Christianity's continuing influence on our culture for these remnants of social conscientiousness. At heart, he may argue, consumerism wants to banish all considerations except the needs and desires of the imperial self. Again, this is an overgeneralization. Not all products will sell if promoted with this type of message. Not all consumers will buy when confronted with this type of message. People, after all, are people. Even advertising copywriters realize that encouraging self-indulgence can be taken only so far before it backfires.

This leads me to the one point about which McFarland is glancingly correct. The consumerist anthropology values human freedom of choice. Leave out the Pelagian/Augustinian disputes for a moment to consider the nature of this freedom. Consumers have needs and desires and buy goods and services to satisfy them. Since people have many different needs and desires, the markets adjust their offerings to match what customers are willing to buy. I go to the store looking for a blue hat and find only red ones. The salesperson tells me, "We don't carry blue hats, nobody else wants them." I go home frustrated by my lack of options, until I find a store online that carries blue hats. I place the order and bless our consumer-oriented economy that gives me the freedom to find and buy something that I want. When the market operates this way, it shows respect for consumers as human beings with legitimate desires that may differ from those of other people. Even more fundamentally, it respects the consumer as a person capable of recognizing and pursuing her own well-being. This kind of freedom, the freedom to pursue one's vision of the good, is no invention of modern consumerism. There is good evidence to suggest that a self-perception of being free to pursue options has been selected for over the long course of human prehistory. Therefore, anybody who attempts to rob other human beings of this freedom or even of the sense that they have this freedom, risks serious backlash. For that reason respect for human freedom can be found in all cultures, including the Bible. Consider Paul's teaching on slavery to sin. This slavery robbed Paul of the ability to pursue the good he saw in the law. But in Christ, he was set free from the "law of sin and death." Yes, set free to serve a new master, but in this case, the master commands only what Paul already wants to do, because the Spirit sheds the love of God abroad in the hearts of his people. Granted, Paul's gospel is not "giving people what they want." Nevertheless, by promising "freedom" in Christ, Paul provides an inherently appealing solution to the inherently appalling dilemma of being enslaved to the evil masters sin, death, and the devil.

Likewise, when the market tries to manipulate the consumer to buy things she doesn't really want or need, or squeeze her into a mold in order to suit the convenience of the providers of goods and services, the consumer feels robbed of freedom and resists. It is in this arena that a battle for the consumer's freedom rages. Providers of goods and services will sometimes lie or use various subtle, emotionally-manipulative techniques to encourage consumers to buy. Sometimes, even while the ostensive message is flattering the consumer about her sovereign wisdom to choose for herself, a second, subtler message is appealing to her emotions. The combined message amounts to a deception, undermining the person's normal decision-making capabilities. People are generally appalled when they suspect that they are being manipulated in this way. A general suspicion of manipulative salesmanship is the kiss of death for a product or producer, which explains the great lengths to which they will go to hide or deny manipulative practices. All of this underscores the importance of human beings' sense of their own freedom to act in their self interest. They will fight hard to preserve this freedom. I submit Dostoyevsky's "The Underground Man" as exhibit 1. He was willing to fight for his freedom to destroy himself, if necessary, simply to prove that he didn't fit into someone else's theories of what made people tick. Now, it may very well be that this freedom is at least partly illusory. In one sense, it doesn't matter. The point I want to make here is that this freedom, real or not, is what really lies at the heart of modern western culture's values.

In conclusion, McFarland's initial foray into cultural analysis is troubling, to say the least. I'm sure he could have done better; that he did not should make you wonder how well-attuned he will be to the bases for modern objections to the doctrine of original sin.

A Critical Review of Ian A. McFarland's In Adam's Fall: A Meditation on the Christian Doctrine of Original Sin

Without intending to do so, I've ended up creating a mini-series of posts on misconceived or downright wicked attempts by Christians to defend their beliefs. This third post in the series leaves me ambivalent. The author of this book is a professional theologian. His work is more carefully thought-out and balanced, handles other texts more responsibly, whether they happen to support his own views or not, and makes significant advances over some of the traditional views he critiques. In the end, despite all these positives, Dr. McFarland's commitment to an unsustainable theology leads him to defend patent falsehoods. I genuinely believe Dr. McFarland is a better man than his theology allows, and for that reason alone it is worthwhile to me to present his work as a cautionary tale of what happens when a Christian fails to carry out a complete reconstruction of "Christian faith" from the ground up.

You might wonder how I happened on this book. It was lying around the house and I just picked it up and start reading it, even though it isn't on my "list of things I plan to read." You may ask how it is that a book like this is just "lying around the house," but never you mind. Don't worry, I didn't do anything illegal or immoral to get my hands on it. Call it God's providence, if you prefer.

This book is difficult. I hope to keep my comments as brief as possible, but it will probably require a series of short posts to cover everything. Let's start with the positives. The book is written to defend and update the Augustinian doctrine of Original Sin. As part of his defense, McFarland endorses a classical form of compatibilism. As I will argue later, this combination is fatal to his argument. On the other hand, he handles the views of Augustine and supporters of Pelagius fairly, as far as I can tell. He points out strengths, weaknesses and problems in both views.

This even-handedness and care in dealing with other writers continued throughout the book. To the extent that I was already familiar or could double-check, I found McFarland basically accurate in his summaries of others' views. Compared to the authors in my other recent "Liars for Jesus" posts, this is a huge improvement. It is nice to be able to trust an author. McFarland deserves a hearty thanks for this.

McFarland points out that given our inevitably distorted view of ourselves and our actions, individually and collectively, we need to listen carefully to people who complain that they are being hurt by our behavior. He stresses the importance of communities listening to their weakest and most vulnerable members. Even though their views are also inevitably distorted only by considering them can we avoid the danger of deceiving ourselves that great injustices are actually virtues.

On the way to reconstructing the doctrine of Original Sin, McFarland exposes fallacies in all the traditional accounts of the transmission of Adam's sin to his descendants, including Augustine's relatively undeveloped traducianism, William G. T. Shedd's realism, and classic, Reformed federalism.

McFarland accepts the current scientific consensus that human beings evolved and that the origin of the species cannot be traced to a single ancestral couple. He spends some time discussing how other modern theologians have attempted to reconceive Original Sin in light of our evolutionary history and spends a good deal of time developing his own reconception. Although he retains entirely too much of traditional Christian orthodoxy, his willingness to rethink the doctrine in light of settled science is a vast improvement over the existing Fundamentalist or Evangelical approaches.

McFarland appears to be a universalist. He does not provide a soteriology, even in outline, but it is comforting to hear someone so insistent that we are all condemned sinners also insisting that God intends to and will save every last one of us.

Unfortunately, McFarland's exposition of original sin presents us with nothing more than a new variation on God as moral monster. In the next post I will start demonstrating why this is so

Liars for Jesus: Peter Leithart in Deep Exegesis: The Mystery of Reading Scripture

The other day I was asked to read a 4-page excerpt from Peter Leithart's Deep Exegesis: The Mystery of Reading Scriptureabout the historical consequences of Darwinism in Nazi Germany. The request was motivated by the desire that I reconsider whether it is a good thing to accept Darwinian evolution, in light of the terrible things people have done with Darwin's theory. As I read the pages (68-71) I almost fell off my chair in disbelief. Leithart not only accepts the idea that Nazism's doctrine of racial purification via forced sterilization and mass murder is a logical application of evolutionary theory, he even presents three quotes from Darwin that he says prove the point.

I've never read any of Darwin's works extensively. My knowledge of evolutionary theory comes from contemporary scientists and science writers, some of whom summarize and quote from Darwin's works from time to time and deal with objections to Darwin's ideas in abbreviated form. I recall rebuttals of the accusation that Darwinism led to Nazism by Jerry Coyne, Robert Wright, and Steven Jay Gould. Wright in particular warns that Darwin himself was a racist of sorts, but compared to most of his peers was already shedding Eurocentrism. With all that, the excerpts provided by Leithart were a bit unnerving.

I wanted to check out the passages in their original context to see how badly Darwin came off, so I looked up the citations Leithart provided. That's where things got interesting. Over the span of 4 pages discussing Darwin, Earnest Haeckel and Nazism, Leithart cites Richard Weikart, Benjamin Wiker, and Marilynne Robinson. Darwin? Not directly cited. Haeckel? Nada. Any secondary source that is not written by a committed orthodox Christian? Nope. Citing the secondary sources rather than the subjects' own works is a minor but irritating inconvenience for the reader and sloppy scholarship. I smelled a rat. I already know about Robinson. She is about as qualified to critique evolution scientifically as she is the IEEE 802.11i standard. I quickly discovered that Wiker is a member of the Discovery Institute and Weikart's book, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, was sponsored by the Discovery Institute. Publications sponsored by the Discovery Institute or written by its members have an extensive track record of scientific incompetence and/or dishonesty. Turns out that Leithart cites all his Darwin quotes from Robinson's essay, "Darwinism" in The Death of Adam. I read her novel Gilead and enjoyed it. Her nonfiction -- not so much. She has an annoying tendency to misrepresent ideas she doesn't like. Demonstrating this would take another post or series of them, for which I have no time right now. Nonetheless, you would like to think a credentialed scholar would be cautious enough, knowing the tendencies of these authors, to double-check them. Leithart apparently didn't bother.

I pulled up a copy of The Descent of Man and began reading. It didn't take long to find out that Leithart -- I hesitate to accuse Robinson of this without direct evidence -- has quote-mined Darwin badly. He strings together excerpts provided by Robinson without checking the larger context. This is unbelievably bad scholarship. And this guy is a Cambridge Ph.D. Worse, he's also a graduate of Westminster Theological Seminary, my own alma mater! We might have had classes together at some point. Sheesh.

OK, time to lower the boom on Leithart in some detail. His discussion of Darwin occurs in the chapter "Texts as Events" in a section entitled "Texts and their Fruits." At the beginning he poses a question like so: "Take Darwin: should Darwin be read in the light of what Darwinians have dpne with his theories? Do his texts mean something different now than [sic] they did then?" (p. 68) Right off we run into problems. Who decides what makes a "Darwinian" and on what basis? Leithart attempts to skip over that problem and immediately steps in it by using Earnest Haeckel as his first example of a "Darwinian." While Haeckel was an evolutionist, he mixed up Lamarckism (the inheritance of acquired characteristics) with natural selection as the mechanism for evolutionary change and rejected Darwin's theory that humans of whatever race were members of the same species in favor of a theory that modern humankind consists of several different more or less advanced species that can be identified based on the pedigree of their languages. Leithart goes on, "Darwin admiringly quotes Haeckel a number of times in his own work." (p. 68) Indeed he did, because Haeckel, among other things, discovered Monerans, was an early proponent of sexual selection, produced useful illustrations of many embryonic forms, and developed the outlines of the human lineage from old-world monkeys. Darwin nowhere praises Haeckel for his Lamarckism, his theories of the human races or his applications of evolutionary theory to social problems. I found this by simply searching for every mention of Haeckel in The Descent of Man.

Leithart continues, "[Haekel] was an avowed Darwinian who pressed the social and political implications of Darwinism more vigorously than Darwin himself. Societies, he insisted, could not rely on natural selection, but had to engage in artificial selection to ensure the health and fitness of the nation. 'In the same way as by careful rooting out of weeds, light, air, and ground is gained for good and useful plants, in like manner, by the indiscriminate destruction of all incorrigible criminals, not only would the struggle for life among the better portion of mankind be made easier, but also an advantageous artificial process of selection would be set in practice, since the possibility of transmitting their injurious qualities by inheritance would be taken from those degenerate outcasts.'" Leithart does not consider the possibility that Haeckel was not pressing the social and political implications of Darwinism at all, but rather the implications of his own modified evolutionary views. When Haeckel urges the execution of "incorrigible criminals" to prevent the transmission of their bad qualities to descendants, his Lamarckism lends an urgency to the matter that is missing in Darwin, as we shall see later. For Haeckel, the learned, habitual behavior of a career criminal becomes a biologically-transmissible trait. Leithart finds Haeckel's advocacy of execution "chilling," but this is surely insincere. For one thing, had Leithart read the context of Haeckel's quote, he would have seen that Haeckel was not advocating for an extension of the death penalty to petty thieves, prostitutes, Jews, or the mentally disabled. He was urging the social utility of the death penalty for career felons against those who were agitating in his day for the elimination of the death penalty. (See The History of Creation: Or, The Development of the Earth and Its Inhabitants by the Action of Natural Causes. A Popular Exposition of the Doctrine of Evolution in General, and of that of Darwin, Goethe, and Lamarck in Particular. eighth German edition, translation Rev. by Sir E. Ray Lankester, p. 178) Leithart would probably make the same kind of argument against contemporary opponents of the death penalty, minus the evolutionary trappings and probably would not want to wait until the criminal has been proven "incorrigible." If Leithart had read the context of Haeckel's comments more fully, however, he would have picked up something far more damning, for Haeckel appears to approve of the ancient Spartan practice of killing newborns with signs of sickness or infirmity. (pp. 170-1) This is no one-off comment either. Haeckel repeated this position in other publications, just as he consistently defended the use of capital punishment in the case of "incorrigible criminals." Where did Haeckel's ruthlessness come from, his Darwinism? Not likely, since, as we shall see, Darwin explicitly rejects the intentional destruction of human lives in order to further the evolutionary progress of the human species and argues for his position on the basis of his own theory!

Leithart then provides three quotes from Hitler that express what Leithart considers "Darwinian" ideas that probably came to him from Haeckel or other "Darwinians." In these quotes Hitler urges that to enforce the right requires power, because the strong always gain mastery over the weak. Furthermore, nature promotes human welfare by eliminating the weak to make way for the strong. Finally, "humaneness" that protects vulnerable members of society is actually cruel to the human race because it reduces the fitness for survival of the population as a whole. (p. 69) Leithart then raises some "hermeneutical" questions: "Assuming that we can make the historical connections, is it eisegesis to read Darwin in the light of the Darwinian echoes in Haeckel and Hitler? ... Is it legitimate to to interpret Darwin's texts as seeds of Nazism and the Holocaust?" (p. 70) Anticipating objections like those I will raise below, Leithart lays down some constraints for answering these questions: "Traditions of interpretation can be traditions of misinterpretation.... An interpretive tradition can belie its source, and the tradition should be tested against the source text. Readers may misconstrue a text and read it in away that not only goes beyond the author's intention but also direcly contradicts the text and its author." (p. 70) Leithart says we must go back to Darwin's text. Yes, he really said that even though, amazingly enough, he failed to do so himself!

In advance of providing what he regards as the clincher excerpts, he asserts, "In this case, the original does not belie the interpretive tradition but confirms it. Examined in the aftermath of the Nazi regime, Darwin's notorious comments on breeding, human evolution, and racial/national superiority are horrifying." (p. 70) Unlike Leithart, we are going to take a close look at each of the quotes he provides in context, and in each case we will find that Darwin meant something other than what Leithart supposes and that Darwin's ideas are not at all horrifying because the "chilling" applications proposed by Haeckel and Hitler are not logical implications of Darwinism.

Here is the first excerpt. It is taken from chapter 6 of The Origin of Species

Natural selection in each well-stocked country, must act chiefly through the competition of the inhabitants one with another, and consequently will produce perfection, or strength in the battle for life, only according to the standard of that country. Hence the inhabitants of one country, generally the smaller one, will often yield, as we see they do yield, to the inhabitants of another and generally larger country. For in the larger country there will have existed more individuals, and more diversified forms, and the competition will have been severer, and thus the standard of perfection will have been rendered higher.

This excerpt is part of Darwin's summary of the chapter. It restates the following, more detailed argument:

Natural selection tends only to make each organic being as perfect as, or slightly more perfect than, the other inhabitants of the same country with which it has to struggle for existence. And we see that this is the degree of perfection attained under nature. The endemic productions of New Zealand, for instance, are perfect one compared with another; but they are now rapidly yielding before the advancing legions of plants and animals introduced from Europe. Natural selection will not produce absolute perfection, nor do we always meet, as far as we can judge, with this high standard under nature. The correction for the aberration of light is said, on high authority, not to be perfect even in that most perfect organ, the eye. If our reason leads us to admire with enthusiasm a multitude of inimitable contrivances in nature, this same reason tells us, though we may easily err on both sides, that some other contrivances are less perfect. Can we consider the sting of the wasp or of the bee as perfect, which, when used against many attacking animals, cannot be withdrawn, owing to the backward serratures, and so inevitably causes the death of the insect by tearing out its viscera?

Whatever Leithart thinks the text means, Darwin is clearly attempting to explain the economy of natural selection. During the course of "competition" between individuals adaptations to a particular organ or body part that provide a reproductive advantage accumulate until competetive pressure drops off, and no further. Thus, a prey species that has never encountered a predator faster than a snake will not develop the speed and endurance of a rabbit. When foxes invade the prey species's habitat, it will likely become extinct. This is not a prescription for any particular social policy, it is simply a description of what takes place in the natural world. I suspect that Leithart is bothered by this excerpt because he assumes an underlying commitment to the "naturalistic fallacy" on the part of Darwinians. Admittedly I'm speculating here, but Leithart seems to be thinking, "Hey, if Darwin says it's natural for one species to overpower another, then he must think it's the right thing to do. Haeckel seems to be making that type of argument. Why not suspect Darwin of the same?" As it turns out, Leithart is at least partly correct about Darwin. He does appear to approve of the outcome of human evolution, but in a sense far different from what Leithart fears. Darwin believed that humans had evolved a profound sense of sympathy and compassion for the weak and vulnerable as a result of natural selection! and that not only is this a good thing, but it is part of the reason that civilized societies have and will continue to outcompete "savage" societies. I will demonstrate that point in my comments on the last excerpt.

Here is the second excerpt. It appears in Chapter 7 in the section "On the Birthplace and Antiquity of Man" as part of a discussion as to why there are not not more species similar to humans in existence now. Darwin has been pointing out that there is no continuous gradation in the amount of variation between species making up a larger grouping, such as a family or order. Instead, some species appear to be outliers in the larger group to which they belong. He explains this as a consequence of differential rates of extinction between similar species in a given group. In some situations, not only the directly-ancestral species, but also all the other closely-related species except for one have perished, leaving the surviving species without apparent near relatives. It is at this point that he says,

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.

Right off, note that Darwin's statement is a prediction, not a prescription. Nonetheless, there are a few apparently troubling aspects to this comment. First, what are we to make of Darwin's prediction that the civilized human races will "exterminate" the savage races? To modern ears "exterminate" sounds like genocide. This is a misunderstanding. Darwin uses that word repeatedly in The Origin of Species to refer to one species' success in outcompeting another and in so doing driving it toward extinction. But obviously this is not a result of a purposeful attempt to rid the earth of the competing species. European rats did not "exterminate" Kiore rats in much of New Zealand by gassing them, shooting them, or eating them. Neither does Darwin conceive of this process in the case of humans as calculated mass murder on the part of civilized societies. Darwin does not leave us to guess at what he intends by "extermination." It is worth quoting him at length to understand what he is driving at:

Seeing how general is this law of the susceptibility of the reproductive system to changed conditions of life, and that it holds good with our nearest allies, the Quadrumana, I can hardly doubt that it applies to man in his primeval state. Hence if savages of any race are induced suddenly to change their habits of life, they become more or less sterile, and their young offspring suffer in health, in the same manner and from the same cause, as do the elephant and hunting-leopard in India, many monkeys in America, and a host of animals of all kinds, on removal from their natural conditions. We can see why it is that aborigines, who have long inhabited islands, and who must have been long exposed to nearly uniform conditions, should be specially affected by any change in their habits, as seems to be the case. Civilised races can certainly resist changes of all kinds far better than savages; and in this respect they resemble domesticated animals, for though the latter sometimes suffer in health (for instance European dogs in India), yet they are rarely rendered sterile, though a few such instances have been recorded.* The immunity of civilised races and domesticated animals is probably due to their having been subjected to a greater extent, and therefore having grown somewhat more accustomed, to diversified or varying conditions, than the majority of wild animals; and to their having formerly immigrated or been carried from country to country, and to different families or subraces having inter-crossed. It appears that a cross with civilised races at once gives to an aboriginal race an immunity from the evil consequences of changed conditions. Thus the crossed offspring from the Tahitians and English, when settled in Pitcairn Island, increased so rapidly that the island was soon overstocked; and in June 1856 they were removed to Norfolk Island. They then consisted of 60 married persons and 134 children, making a total of 194. Here they likewise increased so rapidly, that although sixteen of them returned to Pitcairn Island in 1859, they numbered in January 1868, 300 souls; the males and females being in exactly equal numbers. What a contrast does this case present with that of the Tasmanians; the Norfolk Islanders increased in only twelve and a half years from 194 to 300; whereas the Tasmanians decreased during fifteen years from 120 to 46, of which latter number only ten were children.

So again in the interval between the census of 1866 and 1872 the natives of full blood in the Sandwich Islands decreased by 8081, whilst the half-castes, who are believed to be healthier, increased by 847; but I do not know whether the latter number includes the offspring from the half-castes, or only the half-castes of the first generation. The cases which I have here given all relate to aborigines, who have been subjected to new conditions as the result of the immigration of civilised men. But sterility and ill-health would probably follow, if savages were compelled by any cause, such as the inroad of a conquering tribe, to desert their homes and to change their habits. It is an interesting circumstance that the chief check to wild animals becoming domesticated, which implies the power of their breeding freely when first captured, and one chief check to wild men, when brought into contact with civilisation, surviving to form a civilised race, is the same, namely, sterility from changed conditions of life. Finally, although the gradual decrease and ultimate extinction of the races of man is a highly complex problem, depending on many causes which differ in different places and at different times; it is the same problem as that presented by the extinction of one of the higher animals- of the fossil horse, for instance, which disappeared from South America, soon afterwards to be replaced, within the same districts, by countless troups of the Spanish horse. The New Zealander seems conscious of this parallelism, for he compares his future fate with that of the native rat now almost exterminated by the European rat. Though the difficulty is great to our imagination, and really great, if we wish to ascertain the precise causes and their manner of action, it ought not to be so to our reason, as long as we keep steadily in mind that the increase of each species and each race is constantly checked in various ways; so that if any new check, even a slight one, be superadded, the race will surely decrease in number; and decreasing numbers will sooner or later lead to extinction; the end, in most cases, being promptly determined by the inroads of conquering tribes. (pp. 189-192)

OK, so Darwin is not advocating genocide, but he still ranks "savage races" as somehow biologically inferior to "civilized races," right? This apparent problem is magnified when one considers that in Darwin the word "race" is a bit fuzzy. Sometimes it appears to mean "species" in a way similar to what we would understand by species. Other times it appears to refer to a sub-population within a species. Either way, it indicates a group of organisms that share unique biological traits inherited from a common ancestor. There are some contexts, such as Leithart's second excerpt above, in which we would like Darwin to mean "society" or "culture," because it would more accurately describe what has actually happened. It is certainly true that some native populations have been decimated by contact with Europeans, mostly due to susceptibility to newly-introduced infectious diseases, which Darwin also discusses at length earlier in the same chapter. But over the long term, it appears that most isolated human populations have already gone through this stage, and most have left survivors, many of whom have successfully assimilated into majority cultures and populations, despite Darwin's objections about the sterility and biological inflexibility of "savage" populations. What appears to be going "extinct" is not so much a set of individuals but the genetic and cultural isolation that marked off some native populations. This is distinctly different from the extinction of a species, and it is a shame Darwin did not frame his prediction in these terms. Nevertheless, we need to keep in mind that Darwin is making a prediction and that the process he is describing will take place even if civilized societies take active steps to counteract it. Nowhere does he encourage anyone to speed along this process.

We move now to Leithart's last and most inflammatory excerpt from Darwin. This excerpt is taken from the section "Natural Selection as affecting Civilised Nations" in Chapter 5 of The Descent of Man:

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed. (Part I, p. 134, 2nd edition, 1874)

Well, now Leithart has caught the true Darwin, the ruthless, bloodthirsty murderer of the weak and vulnerable, someone worthy to have Adolf Hitler as an intellectual protege. Although Darwin doesn't come right out and say it here, isn't he implying that "the imbecile, maimed, and sick" are the "worst animals" that even the most ignorant breeder would eliminate from his herd? So, it would seem, if you failed to read the very next paragraph! Darwin goes on to say

The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil. We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely that the weaker and inferior members of society do not marry so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage, though this is more to be hoped for than expected.

In case someone is still determined to get Darwin signed off on the "final solution," let me call attention to the following words in particular: "... if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil. We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind ...." Darwin calls even "neglecting" the weak and helpless an "overwhelming present evil." Furthermore, the long-term evolutionary good for the species resulting from their elimination is a "contingent benefit," i.e., their elimination may or may not actually do any good in the long run. His conclusion? We "must" -- that is "should," "ought to," "are morally obligated to" -- protect the weak and helpless and live with the possible long-term bad evolutionary consequences of doing so.

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Lest someone suppose that this paragraph is just a weak moment, consider the following comment made in the section "Concluding Remarks" of chapter 4in The Descent of Man:

Our great philosopher, Herbert Spencer, has recently explained his views on the moral sense. He says, "I believe that the experiences of utility organised and consolidated through all past generations of the human race, have been producing corresponding modifications, which, by continued transmission and accumulation, have become in us certain faculties of moral intuition- certain emotions responding to right and wrong conduct, which have no apparent basis in the individual experiences of utility." There is not the least inherent improbability, as it seems to me, in virtuous tendencies being more or less strongly inherited; for, not to mention the various dispositions and habits transmitted by many of our domestic animals to their offspring, I have heard of authentic cases in which a desire to steal and a tendency to lie appeared to run in families of the upper ranks; and as stealing is a rare crime in the wealthy classes, we can hardly account by accidental coincidence for the tendency occurring in two or three members of the same family. If bad tendencies are transmitted, it is probable that good ones are likewise transmitted. That the state of the body by affecting the brain, has great influence on the moral tendencies is known to most of those who have suffered from chronic derangements of the digestion or liver. The same fact is likewise shewn by the "perversion or destruction of the moral sense being often one of the earliest symptoms of mental derangement"; and insanity is notoriously often inherited. Except through the principle of the transmission of moral tendencies, we cannot understand the differences believed to exist in this respect between the various races of mankind.

Even the partial transmission of virtuous tendencies would be an immense assistance to the primary impulse derived directly and indirectly from the social instincts. Admitting for a moment that virtuous tendencies are inherited, it appears probable, at least in such cases as chastity, temperance, humanity to animals, &c., that they become first impressed on the mental organization through habit, instruction and example, continued during several generations in the same family, and in a quite subordinate degree, or not at all, by the individuals possessing such virtues having succeeded best in the struggle for life. My chief source of doubt with respect to any such inheritance, is that senseless customs, superstitions, and tastes, such as the horror of a Hindoo for unclean food, ought on the same principle to be transmitted. I have not met with any evidence in support of the transmission of superstitious customs or senseless habits, although in itself it is perhaps not less probable than that animals should acquire inherited tastes for certain kinds of food or fear of certain foes.

Finally the social instincts, which no doubt were acquired by man as by the lower animals for the good of the community, will from the first have given to him some wish to aid his fellows, some feeling of sympathy, and have compelled him to regard their approbation and disapprobation. Such impulses will have served him at a very early period as a rude rule of right and wrong. But as man gradually advanced in intellectual power, and was enabled to trace the more remote consequences of his actions; as he aequired sufficient knowledge to reject baneful customs and superstitions; as he regarded more and more, not only the welfare, but the happiness of his fellow-men; as from habit, following on beneficial experience, instruction and example, his sympathies became more tender and widely diffused, extending to men of all races, to the imbecile, maimed, and other useless members of society, and finally to the lower animals,- so would the standard of his morality rise higher and higher. And it is admitted by moralists of the derivative school and by some intuitionists, that the standard of morality has risen since an early period in the history of man.

As a struggle may sometimes be seen going on between the various instincts of the lower animals, it is not surprising that there should be a struggle in man between his social instincts, with their derived virtues, and his lower, though momentarily stronger impulses or desires. This, as Mr. Galton has remarked, is all the less surprising, as man has emerged from a state of barbarism within a comparatively recent period. After having yielded to some temptation we feel a sense of dissatisfaction, shame, repentance, or remorse, analogous to the feelings caused by other powerful instincts or desires, when left unsatisfied or baulked. We compare the weakened impression of a past temptation with the ever present social instincts, or with habits, gained in early youth and strengthened during our whole lives, until they have become almost as strong as instincts. If with the temptation still before us we do not yield, it is because either the social instinct or some custom is at the moment predominant, or because we have learnt that it will appear to us hereafter the stronger, when compared with the weakened impression of the temptation, and we realise that its violation would cause us suffering. Looking to future generations, there is no cause to fear that the social instincts will grow weaker, and we may expect that virtuous habits will grow stronger, becoming perhaps fixed by inheritance. In this case the struggle between our higher and lower impulses will be less severe, and virtue will be triumphant.

This excerpt by itself should put to rest finally the slanderous, dishonorable, and downright wicked claim that Nazism derived its social policies regarding Jews and the mentally and physically disabled from Darwin's theory of evolution. Leithart should be ashamed of himself for perpetrating this idiocy and doubly ashamed for failing to do his scholarly duty and finding out what I've posted here himself.

I conclude with my reasons for styling Leithart a "liar for Jesus." On the surface it appears that he is only guilty of gullibility. But when one considers his prior theological commitments, it is clear that he picks Charles Darwin for the topic of a text's "fruits" intentionally. Darwinism is a threat to evangelical Christianity, because if it is correct, evangelical Christianity is false. Obviously there are "evangelicals" who believe in Darwinian evolution and Christianity. IMHO they are attempting to hold two fundamentally inconsistent beliefs at the same time. Leithart is not one of these. He sees the threat and thinks he has found a way to help turn it aside with this 4-page "expose" of the dangers of Darwinism. He is certainly welcome to attempt this; he is not welcome to misrepresent Darwin's views and quote-mine his writings in order to accomplish his goals. For this reason, I refuse to grant him any extenuating considerations. He lied.