Creationism - National Center for Science Education
Creationism - National Center for Science Education
Creationism - National Center for Science Education
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
This is the disheartening kind of argument that I faced at Headquarters; argument logically constructed on<br />
premises chosen by the other fellow. Add to these assumed premises of the Allmacht of struggle and<br />
selection based on it, and the contemplation of mankind as a congeries of different, mutually irreconcilable<br />
kinds, like the different ant species, the additional assumption that the Germans are the chosen race, and<br />
German social and political organization the chosen type of human community life, and you have a wall of<br />
logic and conviction that you can break your head against but can never shatter—by headwork. You long<br />
<strong>for</strong> the muscles of Samson. [1917:29-30]<br />
Previously a pacifist, Kellogg became convinced that Germany had to be defeated totally<br />
in order to eradicate this rapacious militarism. His book was widely cited by<br />
fundamentalists as proof that evolutionism leads inexorably to “might makes right”<br />
militarism. But Kellogg himself emphasized—and this, significantly, the fundamentalists<br />
never mentioned—that the “struggle <strong>for</strong> existence” of natural selection is only one aspect<br />
of biological evolution, and that the German officers, by worshiping this one aspect as the<br />
whole of evolution and as the basis <strong>for</strong> their social and moral philosophy, were not doing<br />
justice to biological evolution. For instance:<br />
Altruism—or mutual aid, as the biologists prefer to call it, to escape the implication of assuming too much<br />
consciousness in it—is just as truly a fundamental biologic factor of evolution as is the cruel, strictly selfregarding,<br />
exterminating kind of struggle <strong>for</strong> existence with which the Neo-Darwinists try to fill our eyes<br />
and ears, to the exclusion of the recognition of all other factors. [1917:27-28]<br />
And Kellogg, in many other works, repeatedly emphasized the “limitations of science,”<br />
and that, contra the fundamentalists and many others, morality and philosophy were not<br />
derivable from science. Nevertheless, the fundamentalists who appealed to Kellogg’s<br />
Headquarters Nights were correct in that this Allmacht version of evolutionism and<br />
invocation of inexorable biological law was indeed how these German officers—and a<br />
great many others in other nations—interpreted evolutionary theory and its implications<br />
regarding society, politics, morals and religion. William Jennings Bryan echoed<br />
widespread fundamentalist belief when he asserted that “Darwin’s doctrine leads<br />
logically to war,” and that it laid the foundations <strong>for</strong> the World War, the “bloodiest war in<br />
history” (1922:133, 125). Germany’s appalling condition was caused by infection by<br />
evolution: a fate which the fundamentalists were determined to prevent in America.<br />
Be<strong>for</strong>e the Great War, Bryan doubted evolution, but hardly made an issue of it; after the<br />
war, he campaigned indefatigably against it, preaching that it destroyed Christianity and<br />
justified war.<br />
T.T. Martin, in Hell and the High Schools, said:<br />
We gave our sons to save the world from being crushed by the Germans, and we did well; but they had<br />
already stealthily crept in and captured our citadels of learning, and now they and their dupes are damning<br />
our children. The soul of one high school boy or girl sent to hell by your German evolution is worth more<br />
than the bodies of all our brave boys killed in the great war in Europe. But they are being sent to hell by<br />
the thousands, as I shall show. [Quoted in Gatewood 1969:241]<br />
“It has been asked,” wrote Alexander Hardie in Evolution: Is It Philosophical,<br />
Scientific or Scriptural?:<br />
Where do theories go when they die in Germany? It is answered: They go to England. And when they die<br />
in England, where do they go? They go to America. And when they die in America, where do they go?<br />
Well, it appears to some that they are smuggled into our institutions of learning and that the carrion is fed to