Further to “How the Nazis mandated and used evolution and Darwin in the textbooks”:
Nothing sets off the followers of Darwin in our midst more reliably than the simple fact that the Nazis liked neo-Darwinian theory. They behave as if their outrage against anyone bringing the fact up counts as an argument against it. Burt then Darwinists are people who believe that their theory, which predicts anything and everything, predicts something instead of nothing, so …
Anyway, a friend lobbed into the ol’ mailbox a link to A.N. Wilson’s 2009 explanation of why he stopped aspiring to be an unbeliever, including the following:
I haven’t mentioned morality, but one thing that finally put the tin hat on any aspirations to be an unbeliever was writing a book about the Wagner family and Nazi Germany, and realising how utterly incoherent were Hitler’s neo-Darwinian ravings, and how potent was the opposition, much of it from Christians; paid for, not with clear intellectual victory, but in blood. Read Pastor Bonhoeffer’s book Ethics, and ask yourself what sort of mad world is created by those who think that ethics are a purely human construct. Think of Bonhoeffer’s serenity before he was hanged, even though he was in love and had everything to look forward to.
Wilson read what he read, and he assumed it was written to describe what happened. And that is what it described. As do the exhaustively many primary sources scholar Richard Weikart consulted.
It’s the sort of fact people can get past if they decide to, but not if they are stuck in it.
Now that Wilson mentions it, how come almost all the books claiming that morality is just a human construct that evolved from our being a social species are in fact written by Darwin’s followers. And none by Bonhoeffer’s? That must mean something. Not nothing.