Page 632 - Atlas of Creation Volume 3

fault of his, from the fertilized ovum – if, instead of the hoped-for good, there come only care and need, sickness

and misery of every kind – he has the unquestionable right to put an end to his sufferings by death. … The vol-
untary death by which a man puts an end to intolerable suffering is really an act of redemption. 8

However, human beings do not come into existence as the result of blind chance. God creates them,
and behind human creation there is a purpose that is revealed in the Qur'an:

I only created jinn and man to worship Me. (Surat adh-Dhariyat, 56)

Humans are responsible for every action they perform throughout the course of their lives, and will
have to account for every moment in the Hereafter. Those like Haeckel, who incite others to suicide
and murder, are doubtless assuming a grave responsibility for which they will be unable to account.

In his Wonders of Life, Haeckel claimed that newborn babies were deaf and devoid of consciousness
(which is not the case), and thus did not have a human soul. Based on that unscientific claim, he de-
fended the destruction of abnormal newborn infants and suggested that this cannot rationally be
classed as murder. As we have seen, Haeckel openly defended murder, and encouraged those around
him to murder. Haeckel was sufficiently heartless to support not only voluntary euthanasia, but its
compulsory equivalent. He expressed his anger on this subject in these terms: "hundreds of thousands

of incurables – lunatics, lepers, people with cancer, etc. are artificially kept alive … without the slight-
9
est profit to themselves or the general body." The solution that he proposed was this:

... the redemption from this evil should be accomplished by a dose of some painless and rapid poison … under
the control of an authoritative commission. 10

The savagery he supported had very damaging effects in Germany. Haeckel's research led the way to
the euthanasia program known as T4, under which some 300,000 mentally handicapped, those with
physical deformities, incurables and other "undesirables" were ruthlessly killed.

Haeckel's cruelty, and the killings Hitler encouraged and permitted, had but one source: Social
Darwinism.

The eugenics, euthanasia, forced sterilization, concentration camps, racial purity and gas chambers of
the mid-20th century emerged as a result of the Darwin-Haeckel-Hitler coalition, representing the
worst and most ruthless cruelty in the history of humanity.

1. Quoted in Daniel Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German
Monist League (London: MacDonald, 1971), p. 6.
2. Ernst Haeckel, The Wonders of Life: A Popular Study of Biological Philosophy, trans. Joseph McCabe (New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1905), pp. 390-91.
3. Ernst Haeckel, The History of Creation, trans. E.Ray Lankester (New York: D. Appleton, 1901), 1.23.
4. Ibid., 1.75-76.
5. Benjamin Wiker, Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists (Intervarsity Press, 2002), p. 260.
6. Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors (New York: Basic Books, 1986), pp. 441, 161.
7. Gasman, Scientific Origins, p.161.
8. Haeckel, Wonders of Life, pp. 112-14.
9. Ibid., pp. 118-19.
10. Ibid., p.119.

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