Traditional Christianity and classical evolution involve very different conceptions of man’s nature. Christianity teaches that man is the culmination of God’s creation, His sixth-day triumph. Man is not merely a steppingstone on the way to some superior being but a finished product. Sure, he is fallen as well as finished and needs to be perfected, but this is not a matter of improving the flesh but of transcending it. And this is done with knowledge of what is good and the gift of God’s grace. Moreover, even if the flesh is broken, hampered by crippling limitation, the person’s soul bears the beauty of the Ultimate Beholder. The person is valuable not because of what he can do but because of what he is: a child of God with a soul from Heaven.
In contrast, evolution tells us that we are just one stage in a long line of creatures experiencing change in a process that is often, amusingly, called improvement, even though we’re moving toward we don’t know what without knowing why. But evolutionists take it as doctrine that it is improvement, and all people want to improve the human condition. For Christians, this means spreading the faith; for evolutionists, it means improving the genes. Ergo, eugenics.
Of course, many evolutionists will protest, saying that they find eugenics abhorrent. Yet the link between evolution and eugenics is undeniable, as it was made by none other than Sir Francis Galton himself. Galton only developed his eugenic principles after reading his cousin Charles Darwin’s work The Origin of Species, which inspired him to build on Darwin’s work. And this should surprise no one. Sure, today eugenics is thought ill-considered, but it is not illogical. If evolution is improvement and improvement is good, and if the good of the many outweighs the good of the few, it makes sense to facilitate evolution. And because it is logical, at least on the surface, it is necessary to look a little deeper.
Eugenics is an outgrowth of classical evolution, which presupposes that we are a cosmic accident and thus implies atheism. The problem with this worldview is that it makes many assumptions, fails to ask the most basic questions, and then contradicts itself. For one thing, if there is no God, no Truth — no standard for determining good that transcends man — on what basis can we determine what constitutes improvement? Why is it better for man to survive and “evolve” than to perish? After all, ask some of the nature-worshipping misanthropes amongst us, and they will tell you that the world would be better off if mankind disappeared entirely.
