Adolf Hitler and Charles Darwin

Last updated on: September 5, 2018 at 9:52 am by Dan Peterson

Adolf Hitler and Charles Darwin 2018-09-05T09:52:56-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Charles Darwin, in 1881
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

The most recent iteration of the bi-weekly column that Bill Hamblin and I write for the Deseret News was published on 20 July 2018. Titled “Was Hitler Religious?” and following Richard Weikart’s book Hitler’s Religion: The Twisted Beliefs that Drove the Third Reich (Regnery History, 2016), we set forth the claim that Hitler was neither an atheist nor a Christian but, almost certainly, a pantheist who deified Nature and who derived his ethical views from what is commonly referred to as “social Darwinism.”

A few of our critics have claimed in response that, in that column, Dr. Hamblin and I were blaming Charles Darwin for the Nazi Holocaust. We are, they suggest, at war with BYU’s geology and biology faculty.

However, if we had wanted to make such an accusation, we would have made it.

A word, first of all, about Dr. Hamblin’s background, which would make him — if he were such — a very unlikely crusader against Darwinism or evolution or a very ancient Earth: He is a son of the longtime BYU geology professor W. Kenneth Hamblin (d. 2009; Ph.D., University of Michigan), who specialized in the study of the tectonic geomorphology of the Colorado Plateau and the Grand Canyon and who was, among other things, the author or co-author of such books as Exploring the Planets: An Introduction to Planetary Geology, which went through at least twelve editions; Earth’s Dynamic Systems, which was published in at least ten editions; Recognition of Ancient Sedimentary Environments; Anatomy of the Grand Canyon; Beyond the Visible Landscape: Aerial Panoramas of Utah’s Geology; and Cambrian Sandstones of Northern Michigan. I’ve never heard either of the Drs. Hamblin express any sentiment against evolution. Quite the contrary, in fact.

Nor, for that matter, am I myself an avowed enemy of evolution.

These critics need to read more carefully and respond with few jerks of the knee, and perhaps they need to know a bit more about English intellectual history and/or the history of science and philosophy.

The term social Darwinism wasn’t coined by Charles Darwin (d. 1882), and Mr. Darwin didn’t advocate the doctrine known under that rubric. (It must be admitted, however, that his half-cousin Sir Francis Galton [d. 1911], heavily influenced by the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, was an early and energetic proponent of eugenics.) Rather, it was the English philosopher, biologist, and sociologist Herbert Spencer (d. 1903), who is little read today but who was extremely popular during his lifetime, who elaborated what came to be known as “social Darwinism” — and who, along the way, also coined the phrase survival of the fittest, which is often falsely attributed to Darwin.

So Dr. Hamblin and I weren’t blaming Charles Darwin for the horrors of Nazism. We weren’t even blaming Herbert Spencer, who, I’m confident, would have been horrified by the Third Reich. Darwinism, as such, isn’t responsible for Hitler and the Holocaust. Nor, even, is social Darwinism. But social Darwinism is, quite indisputably, an extrapolation from Darwinism, and, to a significant degree, Nazi racial ideology was an extrapolation from social Darwinism. Does Darwinism entail social Darwinism? No. Does social Darwinism entail Nazism? No, it does not. But the blend of a social Darwinist ethic and a program of eugenics can, very plainly, be toxic.

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