Eminentoes
William Jennings Bryan Redux
In attacking Darwinism, liberal evangelist Tony Campolo risks obloquy.
Liberal evangelist Tony Campolo, a prominent Obama supporter, is challenging Darwinism and discomfiting traditional allies on the left. Campolo served on the Democratic Party platform committee last year, amending the party’s abortion language slightly to assuage pro-life evangelicals. In the 1990s, Campolo was arrested in the Capitol Rotunda in protest against the new Republican Congress. A prominent defender of Bill Clinton before and after Monicagate, Campolo served as one of Clinton’s three advertised spiritual counselors.
So left-wing bloggers feel somewhat betrayed that Campolo has challenged orthodox Darwinism in a recent column published in Britain, which also appeared last year in the Philadelphia Inquirer. ”Darwin’s writings, when actually read, express the prevalent racism of the nineteenth century, and endorse an extreme laissez faire political ideology that legitimates the neglect of the suffering poor by the ruling elite,” Campolo opined.
Campolo’s critique that hard-line Darwinism exposes the poor and weak to exploitation echoes another dome-headed liberal evangelical, William Jennings Bryan. The Democrats’ thrice presidential standard-bearer, Bryan is most recalled as the public relations disaster of the 1926 Scopes-Monkey trial, where he defended Tennessee’s prohibition against teaching evolution in public schools. Wary of his Christian “fundamentalism,” most modern Democrats prefer to forget that Bryan transformed the Democratic Party into the party of liberalism. Bryan’s populism touted state control of the economy beyond what even the New Deal later would propose.
A not insincere champion of the downtrodden, Bryan opposed Darwinism not so much on scientific as moral grounds. Like Campolo, he expected that doctrinaire Darwinism, in its social ramifications, would diminish the humanity of persons already vulnerable because of poverty or physical weakness. Unlike Campolo, Bryan did not critique Darwinism as racist. Although probably not personally racist, Bryan’s populist coalition and the Democratic Party included the segregated South, so blacks were omitted in his appeal to the common man. Sadly, Bryan’s final great political act was urging the 1924 Democratic Convention, successfully, to table an anti-Klan resolution.
Not similarly constrained, and frequently the pastor of a black congregation, Campolo condemned Darwin as a racist, asserting that Darwin advocated the elimination of “savage races whose continued survival was hindering the progress of civilization.” Campolo claimed that Darwin’s classic The Descent of Man (1871) ranks ostensibly lower races in proximity to gorillas. And Darwin, according to Campolo, warned that the higher birth rates of supposedly inferior races would potentially exhaust “the resources needed for the survival of better people, and eventually dragging down all of civilization.” Campolo also has Darwin dismissing the insane and the deformed as not worthy of survival. Darwin’s dismissive views on “inferior” people make him sound like a Nazi, Campolo surmised, and eventually inspired Nazi theorists who orchestrated the Holocaust.
Campolo urged that creationists who fear Darwin’s refutation of a literal biblical creation should instead rebut Darwinism’s “ethical implications” and its “great threat to the dignity of our humanity that they suppose.” Whatever “science discovers about our biological origins,” Campolo concluded, humans retain a “mystical quality” that “makes each of us sacred and of infinite worth.” There is an “infinite qualitative difference between the most highly developed ape and each and every human being,” Campolo insisted. Darwin never recognized this distinction, which is why “his theories are dangerous.”
Angry blogging responses to Campolo, while admitting that he has traditionally been a friend in common battles against the Religious Right, vow that Campolo has misunderstood Darwin. After all, they say, Darwin opposed slavery, and his overall racial views were no worse than was a common in the 19th century. They contend that Campolo confused Darwin with Herbert Spencer’s extreme view of laissez faire expressed through “survival of the fittest.” And they aver that Nazism exploited and misconstrued Darwinism, and that Darwin is no more responsible for Hitler than is the Bible responsible for slavery proponents who cherry picked Scripture for support.
Although a long-time sociologist at Eastern University, Campolo is more an impulsive pulpiteer than a careful scholar. An aging survivor of the protest generation, he remains naively wedded to the 1960s era belief that the Great Society can be achieved by government fiat. Campolo’s Red Letter Christians, which is both a book and a movement for liberal religionists, superficially ascribes elevated importance to the red-lettered, Jesus-originated words of some Bibles. This Jesus-only emphasis among some evangelicals falsely pits Scripture against itself, minimizes Christian moral traditions, and ends up posing absurd questions for political effect, such as “Who would Jesus bomb?”
But give Campolo some credit for his Darwin op-ed. He commendably risked the irritation of his liberal allies by openly wondering how to protect vulnerable persons, ostensibly liberalism’s goal, against a worldview that, in its strictest form, views human life as accidental and utilitarian. Campolo, at times, may be as bumbling and wrong-headed as William Jennings Bryan often was. The modern welfare state that Campolo acclaims no more ensures human justice than would Bryan’s proposed nationalization of the railroads. Yet Campolo, like Bryan, proclaims a transcendent and unique moral purpose for humanity that their secularist critics never could.
About the Author
Mark Tooley is president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, D.C. and author of Methodism and Politics in the Twentieth Century. You can follow him on Twitter @markdtooley.
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R. Trotter| 3.10.09 @ 10:15AM
Great article. Thank you for it.
Alan Brooks| 3.10.09 @ 10:57AM
ditto.
shows how powerfully deluded the well intentioned, but naive, left is in thinking they can bring about heaven on earth. Now we can see what will happen; the economy will grow eventually, but the left will remain childlike in head yet not in heart,
building a stairway to an imaginary utopia that can only end in tears.
"Through the labyrinths of self deception
afraid of death
and afraid of the dead who walk"
Nick| 3.10.09 @ 11:22AM
The non-progressive movement began America's downfall. What we call "liberal" today is actually a satanic perversion of Christianity. Satan always tries to ape God, no pun intended. Liberals believe they can be more Christian than Christ.
Bryan and his liberal brethren didn't approve of God not forcing "goodness" on man and giving us all free will. And it is too hard to pray and work for conversions of the heart. So they figured out the easiest way to MAKE all people do good, i.e. help the poor, was to use the heavy hand of government. They were going to do it their way, not God's.
Christ preached to His disciples: "YOU feed the hungry, YOU clothe the naked, YOU help the poor." His teaching wasn't: "Demand that Ceasar tax you more so he can give it to the poor."
That would be the "gospel" of B.O., Shrillary the Hut, and San Fran Nan.
Rich| 3.10.09 @ 11:42AM
Creationsists do not "fear Darwin's refutation of a literal biblical creation". Origin of the Species in fact doesn't address origins but rather natural selection, which creationists do not dispute. Micro evolution says a lion became a tiger became a leopard. A cat is a cat is a cat. Macro evolution says a primordial ooze became a living something that became an amoeba that became a fish that became a reptile that becme a bird and so on. That is a crock. You couch your article in qualifiers of what Campolo says Darwin wrote as if what he wrote isn't clear. Campolo is a Leftist first, last and always and has customized and subordinated his 'christianity' to fit his true religion, Leftism.
Marc Jeric| 3.10.09 @ 11:49AM
It is useless to argue against evolution - man can engineer new species by various means: interbreeding, bio-engineering, stem cell combinations, etc. There are logical non sequiturs in the theory of evolution, for example 1) spontaneous mutations happen (why?); 2) such a mutation survived because it was stronger, or alternatively, mutation was stronger because it survived, which is logically an example of circular reasoning against which Aristotle cautioned us.
A real problem is the creation of the first living cell, so let us simplify this problem as follows:
1) let us assume that the entire known universe, all 10 to the power of 80 molecules, is that "primordial soup" with agreeable temperature conducive to life;
2) let us then assume that this entire mass consists of only two types of molecules, say black and white, instead of an enormous variety of them;
3) let us make a further assumption, however incredible, that the first living cell consists of only these two types of molecules - black and white - instead of huge variety of them, and that these are lined up in a simplest order possible, say one black then one white, and so on;
4) let us then assume that a first living cell has only 2,000 such molecules arranged in a line, which is another huge simplification; and
5) let us calculate the time necessary for a chance that such molecule is created in that primordial soup;
6) statistical calculation gives us the result: such a vastly simplified living cell will happen by chance once every 15 billion years.
Another way of stating this result is that sponateous creation of that enormously simplified living cell in that enormously simplified cosmos IS IMPOSSIBLE!
I am an agnostic if not an atheist but this calculation performed some 100 years ago by a French mathematician made me very sceptical of the darwinist theory of creation.
Russ| 3.10.09 @ 1:31PM
Religious comparison:
Christianity - Father, Son, Holy Spirit
Liberalism - Marx, Darwin, Sanger
No one can convince me that liberalism isn't a religion. They have different sects - abortion, socialism, environmentalism, etc - but it always comes down to THAT trinity... Question any of the three, and their response is swift and shrill, even against "members" of their "faith". So sad.
R. Trotter| 3.10.09 @ 2:51PM
Nick, hear, hear!
Rich, this creationist (me) will certainly dispute that "...a lion became a tiger became a leopard."
Marc Jeric, man can't "...engineer new species." We can breed new subspecies, but we can never produce something that wasn't already there. That is, any characteristic of an offspring must have been contained within the genes of one or more of the parent.
Vern Crisler | 3.10.09 @ 3:44PM
Campolo says, "Those creationists who fear Darwin because his theories contradict their literal Biblical belief that creation occurred in six 24-hour days, do not get at the real dangers of Darwinism. They do not realise that an explanation of the development of biological organisms over eons of time really does not pose the great threat to the dignity of our humanity that they suppose. Instead, they, along with the rest of us, should really fear the ethical implications of Darwinism."
This is absurd. Almost every creationist I've ever read discusses the "ethical implications" of Darwinism. Campolo's reading of creationist literature -- if he has ever read any -- is very superficial if he can come up with such mistatements of fact.
Campolo's view about man as qualitatively different from the lower creation is similar to the view of Lyell, who argued that "improvable reason" was man's endowment and could not be achieved without a great leap in being, thus leaving room for divine design.
Liberal churchmen are always attacking Darwinism, trying to compare it with capitalism or some other thing they hate. But they never question whether the theory itself has any scientific validity. Thus Campolo's complaints are old hat, and he still leaves Darwinism unchallenged at its essence -- it's naturalistic and unscientific basis.
Nate| 3.10.09 @ 4:08PM
Vern (and others), the term "Darwinism" is a bit confusing to me. Is it shorthand for the theory of evolution? If so, how is it unscientific? No, we obviously can't go back billions of years to empirically observe the entirety of earth's history, but evolutionary theory does generate testable hypotheses. For instance, we can observe reproductive isolation between present-day sister taxa, both in the lab and in wild populations.
Alan Brooks| 3.10.09 @ 6:23PM
the future of transhumanism concerns me more than The Creation or macroevolution.
I'm curious about what the future holds but not looking forward to it.
Alan Brooks| 3.10.09 @ 6:25PM
...the omega is more awesome than the Alpha, but more unsettling:
I prefer the terrors of the past to the horrors of the future.
R. Trotter| 3.10.09 @ 6:35PM
Nate, neither in the lab nor in nature do offspring contain traits that aren't within the parent's genes. Offspring never possess new genetic information.
Nate| 3.10.09 @ 7:19PM
R Trotter are you saying that mutation does not occur? It surely does. But I also think you're talking about an extremely limited scope of generational time. Two parents do not just give birth to a new species (except very rarely in plants, which are genetically mind-boggling). There are many scenarios that can result in speciation, the simplest of which being:
A population of animals, when split in two and subjected to different ecolgical pressures, gradually accumulates different alleles to the point that if/when the populations re-establish contact, they are reproductively incompatible.
Vern Crisler| 3.10.09 @ 9:21PM
Nate, nobody denies speciation. Breeders knew about it long before Darwin concocted his theory, but Darwinism is a lot more than that. There isn't the slightest bit of evidence that natural selection, mutations, and chance can produce higher orders of complexity unless, as R Trotter pointed out, the information was already there potentially.
Vern Crisler| 3.10.09 @ 9:23PM
Nate, reproductive isolation can give rise to speciation, change within basic types. It cannot give rise to basic types of a higher order of complexity or information content.
Nate| 3.10.09 @ 9:50PM
On the contrary, I think that plenty of people, including some in this thread, deny that speciation occurs. Do you consider humans and great apes to be of the same "basic type"? If not, why? We are no more genetically distant from chimps than many species of felines are from each other. I guess I'm not sure what constitutes a basic type.
On that note, it seems like a lot of people object to the idea of evolution merely because of what it says about human origins. If, for some reason, evolution made no claims about human origins, I don't think many outside the scientific community would raise much of a fuss over it.
I don't think either of us will change our minds so I'm not sure how fruitful this discussion will be.
Vern Crisler| 3.10.09 @ 10:30PM
Hi Nate,
The problem is that you and your Darwinian colleagues confuse Darwinian evolution (molecules to man) with speciation (variation within basic type). These two are NOT the same. No informed creationist denies speciation; they simply deny that it can do all the Darwin wanted it to do. As far as genetics, I do not deny continuity of being, that there are genetic and structural similiarities between living things. But since I believe in creation and the fixity of basic types, I also believe in a discontuinity of being.
True, many creationists and people like Campolo object to human evolution. But many also object to Darwin's theory because there is no real evidence for it. That is what Campolo and liberal churchmen do no understand.
Nate| 3.10.09 @ 11:47PM
Hey Vern,
I guess this is one of those agree-to-disagree situations. I'm very glad to be able to have civilized conversations on the topic though, as it can be very contentious.
You're right that Darwin certainly didn't have all the answers. Not even close. He laid a foundation though, and evolutionary theory has come a long way since 1859. To me, phylogenetic relationships illustrate that taxa are hierarchically nested within one another (e.g., birds within "reptiles"), suggesting patterns of shared ancestry. But you're right, nobody is going to be able to go into a lab and recreate evolutionary history, from molecules to man (or invent a time machine), so differences of opinion will persist.
I do agree with you about this Campolo guy, however.
Roy| 3.11.09 @ 1:26AM
If "Darwinism" means a scientific theory it can be argued scientifically. If it means a politico/philisophical/religious worldview then I see no reason to attach any more significance to Darwin's opinions than anyone else's.
It is perfectly possible to believe in " a worldview that, in its strictest form, views human life as accidental and utilitarian" without believing exactly what Darwin believed. Heck, Voltaire believed that(or at least approvingly quoted people who did) and he wasn't even a strict atheist - just figured God might exist but he clearly didn't give a hoot about us.
Nate| 3.11.09 @ 8:08AM
Hi Roy,
Points we taken, especially regarding Voltaire. I would just put in that modern evolutionary biologists do not believe exactly what Darwin believed, so I'm not sure to whom the "Darwinism" label currently applies. I don't know anyone who identifies him/herself as a Darwinist.
Take care,
Nate
R. Trotter| 3.11.09 @ 10:30AM
Nate, Vern provided a better answer than I could have. As for mutations occurring, well, I’ve never heard of one that was beneficial to the species. On the contrary, when it happens to us we usually call it cancer. The idea that such a observably destructive thing would lead to the creation of beneficial traits is, to me, implausible. Further, the idea that mutations could be beneficial - and on a statistical basis, no less - is inconsistent with the principle of entropy, that is, that nature “unwinds”; it doesn’t “wind itself up.”
Marc Jeric, I reread your post. In my opinion it was brilliant, and, even more important, intellectually honest. Thank you for it.
Steven Yoder| 3.11.09 @ 12:08PM
This is one of the few times I have ever agreed with Campolo. Darwinism is racist and the logical extension of it led to Social Darwinism and Nazism.
Nate| 3.11.09 @ 12:16PM
Hi R Trotter,
Whether or not a mutation is beneficial depends upon the context. In the bacteria Streptotoccus pneumoniae, a spontaneous point mutation confers resistance to the drug streptomycin. When streptomycin is not present, this mutation is less advantageous because it makes the ribosome less efficient. But when gentamicin is there, the benefits are obvious. That's a specific example, but the same can be said of virtually all other cases of bacterial drug resistance . In humans, the allele that causes sickle cell anemia also confers protection against malaria. Is this "beneficial"? In areas where malaria is common, the benefits clearly outweigh the costs, because the allele is more prevalent in those areas.
The overwhelming majority physicists agree that evolution does not contradict the second law of thermodynamics. If it did, it would be major news.
Nate| 3.11.09 @ 12:17PM
Oops, in my last post I said gentamicin when I meant streptomycin.
R. Trotter| 3.11.09 @ 2:31PM
Nate, Count me among the minority of physicists who believe that the theory of evolution does indeed contradict the second law of thermodynamics.
I won’t claim to have knowledge of those bacteria or how they multiply, but it seems to me that what’s going on is simply a weeding out of the less robust specimens. Again, there is no new information provided; everything the descendents require was contained within the ancestors. The descendants don’t need all of the ancestors’ traits, only some of them. But never do the descendents get traits the ancestors never had.
As an aside it strikes me how pleasant and respectful discussions are on this site. It’s quite a refreshing change from what is to be expected elsewhere.
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poptropica | 4.9.10 @ 9:39PM
I’ll have a Poptropica full written walkthrough very soon, but in the meantime, here are some answers to some of the frequently asked questions about Mythology Island. Having trouble? Post a question in the comments and I’ll try to answer it!
Getting Hercules to Help You Poptropica
Hercules won’t help you until you have all five items from Zeus’ quest. Once you have the five items, bring them to Athena. Zeus will appear and steal them. The big jerk! Once this happens, talk to Athena and she will tell you that Hercules will help you. You’ll need to have the magic mirror from Aphrodite because Hercules doesn’t want to have to walk. He’s so lazy!
Getting the Hydra Scale poptropica
You can see how to do this in the videos, but basically you need to jump up when the Hydra is about to strike. He will rear one of his heads back to attack and his eyes will bulge out. poptropica
When this happens, jump up in the air and then try to land on top of his head. That head will get knocked out. When all five heads get knocked out, the Hydra will be asleep and you can click on him to get one of the scales. poptropica
I’ll have a full written walkthrough very soon, but in the meantime, here are some answers to some of the frequently asked questions about Mythology Island. Having trouble? Post a question in the comments and I’ll try to answer it!poptropica