Page 564 - Atlas of Creation Volume 3

INTRODUCTION

he twentieth century was one of the darkest and most deadly in all of human history. Vast

amounts of blood were spilled and people subjected to the most terrible fear and oppression.
T Such dictators as Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Idi Amin inflicted genocide on millions. Hitler had
those whom he regarded as "useless" exterminated in the gas chambers. Hundreds of thousands of peo-
ple in many Western countries—from Great Britain to Germany, from the USA to Sweden—were com-

pulsorily sterilized or left to die just for being sick, crippled or old. All over the world, people were op-
pressed and exploited because of ruthless competition. Racism became the ideology of certain states, and
some races were not even regarded as human at all. Because of the conflicts and hot and cold wars be-
tween East and West, the peoples of communist and capitalist countries, and even brothers, became one
another's enemies.

Not generally realized, however, is the nature of the ideological foundation that propelled the 20th
century towards such disruption, chaos, war and conflict, and gave rise to such hatred and enmity. The
groundwork of this ideological foundation was laid by the British economist Thomas Malthus. This

twisted concept, widely accepted by people far removed from religious moral values, was further
strengthened by another Briton, the sociologist Herbert Spencer, and disseminated by the theory of evo-
lution put forward by yet another Englishman, Charles Darwin.
These three figures entirely ignored such religious moral virtues as cooperation, altruism, protecting
the poor and weak, and regarding all human beings as equal. In contrast, they proposed the falsehood

that life is a battlefield, that the oppression and even extermination of the poor and those races whom
they regarded as "inferior" was justified; that as a result of that pitiless struggle, the "fittest" would sur-
vive and the rest would be eliminated—and that all this would lead to human "progress."

With his theory of evolution, Darwin sought to apply this philosophy of selfishness to the natural
sciences. Ignoring the examples of solidarity and cooperation created by God in nature, he maintained
that all living things were engaged in a ruthless struggle for survival. On the basis of no scientific evi-
dence whatsoever, he even claimed that this same ruthlessness applied to human societies. When his
theory of evolution was applied to human society, social Darwinism appeared on the scene.

Some people suggest that Social Darwinism was born in the second half of the 19th century and lost
its influence during the second half of the 20th. But this theory has had far more permanent and dam-
aging adverse effects. A twisted world view, in complete contradiction to religious moral values, has

spread, alleging that life is a "struggle for survival," and that people need to compete in order to succeed
in that struggle, or at the very least to survive. New lifestyles emerged that were the source of totalitar-
ian and bloody ideologies like communism and fascism, ferocious capitalism that ignores social justice;

562 Atlas of Creation Vol. 3