March 3, 2008 by Jeffrey Overstreet
I’ve been getting email from readers asking my opinion of Ben Stein’s Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. And, well… I haven’t seen it yet. Sorry.
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For the past two years, I’ve worked on and off on Expelled. Back in the fall I saw an early cut of the film and thought it did a very good job putting the issue in frame.
I disagree with Bret, however, when he says the Nazi parallel takes it too far. What else was Dachau (and there is a pretty powerful interview which takes place in the ruins of the prison camp’s barracks) but the ultimate outworking of survival of the fittest? It doesn’t take too great an imaginative leap to see the ‘master race’, red in tooth and claw, attempting to rid the gene pool of what it considers weak and substandard in light of Darwin/neo-Darwinist theory.
Of course, the fact that Nazism died such a quick death can *also* be interpreted as an expression of “survival of the fittest”. The Nazi ideology, and the belligerence that went with it, simply were not “fit” enough to survive. Ditto Marxism, which took longer to die, but still died — except, of course, in universities and similar environments.
And that leads to another problem with making a simple equation between evolutionary theory and Nazism: It is false to suggest that any one “race” is fitter than all the others, full stop. Instead, each race or species adapts to its particular environment, and so each race or species performs better and, yes, has a better chance of survival in some environments than in others. So if the Nazis thought they were superior to all other races, period, then they simply did not understand how evolution works; by eliminating an entire gene pool, they would have been reducing the genetic diversity of the human race and, thus, reducing the human race’s chances of long-term survival.
We tend to protest when people condemn all of Christianity based on the actions of extremists who take one aspect of the faith way, way, way out of context, so I think it’s fair to say that it would be equally wrong to condemn all of evolutionary theory based on the actions of Nazis and others who didn’t understand the theory very well, or who used the theory to justify their own evil intentions.
(Note: this is not a comment on the film, in any way; nor is it a comment on Brett’s piece, which I have not yet read. It’s just a comment on the notion that the concentration camps were the “ultimate” outworking of Darwinian theory.)
One could just as easily (and just as falsely) argue that Dachau was the “ultimate” outworking of Lutheranism. It’s a terrible argument, and one that Christians should avoid making.