On November 24, 1859, Charles Darwin published a book commonly referred to as “The Origin of Species.” Immediately, a controversy began to rage concerning both the biological and ethical implications of the theory of evolution. Part of the problem was the full title of the book, “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.” Darwin himself explained what this meant in “The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex” in 1871. “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.”
Darwinism offered a secular answer to death. “Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of higher animals, directly follows.” Von Gruber, a professor in Munich, stated in 1909, that, “The never-ceasing struggle is, according to Darwin, not useless. It constantly clears away the malformed, the weak, and the inferior among the generations and thus secures the future for the fit. Thus only through the inexorable extermination of the negative variants does it provide living space for the strong and its strong offspring, and keeps the species healthy, strong, and able to live.”
Thus we come to the Holocaust. It is intellectually dishonest to simply dismiss Hitler as “evil” and fail to recognize that he was pursuing a coherent set of Darwinist ethics. Widespread among the German academic, medical and literary elites of the early 20th century was the Darwinian notion that racial inequality, competition and extermination was an inevitable process that ultimately benefitted humanity.
For Hitler, as for Darwin, the struggle for existence, especially between races, was the sole arbiter for morality. The highest good was to cooperate with the evolutionary process. Why not improve humanity by speeding up the destruction of the disabled and the “inferior” races? According to Darwinian logic, Hitler’s “Final Solution” was not only morally justified, but morally praiseworthy.
Today, across the West, children are indoctrinated in evolutionary theory in public schools, and our communities struggle under the racism that is its direct and inevitable social consequence. How do we as Adventists respond as we share the Three Angels’ Message? First, we reject out of hand the evolutionary worldview of the West together with the accompanying race-hatred and denial of the sanctity of all human life. In affirming the truth of the Biblical account of earth’s origins in a recent six-day creation by worshipping on the Sabbath, we stand for racial reconciliation, justice and harmony, and upholding the sanctity of life (Ex. 20.8-11). This is the core of the work AFM missionaries are doing around the world in cultures that do not highly value human life because they do not know the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
Second, we recognize that in a world where the Roman Catholic Church has accepted the theory of evolution, Sabbath-keepers may be viewed as among the “inferiors” whose elimination will serve the common good of humanity. Thus the global death penalty for those who refuse the Mark of the Beast will be considered morally praiseworthy due to the acceptance of Darwinist philosophy by both the global secular elites and the Roman Catholic hierarchy (Rev. 13.11-15).
In the final analysis, this is a struggle between life and death. That we all live and die is a given, but the solution to this trans-generational struggle is not found in “The Origin of Species,” but in the Word of God. Not in Auschwitz, but at Calvary. “And the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me” (Gal. 2.20, NRSV).
