Inhuman Atheism | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 9, 1873

Inhuman Atheism.

Some of Mr. Darwin’s disciples are carrying out his doctrine of Natural Selection to the bitter end of its logical conclusions with remorseless severity. A recent American writer in the Galaxy assumes that the same theory of the struggle for life and the survival of the fittest, by which Darwin accounts for the origin of species, applies with equal force to the human race and to the vegetable and animal kingdoms. He therefore concludes that any human interference with this law of “Natural Selection” is utterly wrong. If but one blade of grass, a single acorn, or one rare plant, survive in the struggle for existence, it is that we may have a stronger, healthier, more productive, and every way a more valuable specimen of each kind preserved and multiplied. The rest are not worth saving, and therefore perish by their own inherent weaknesses.

But rising to the human sphere, this writer boldly takes the position that the very sanctity which Christianity gives to human life, and the means by which it has taught us to save, purify, and ennoble it, are only so many direct interferences with the law which Providence intends to thin out and so elevate the stock of the race. He affirms that each succeeding generation would be wiser and better, until social evils would be lost in the perfection of the species, if only civilization, philanthropy, and Christianity, would keep their hands off, and let the struggle for life go on, the weak perishing and the strong alone triumphing in the end. Hence, in obedience to the inexorable logic of his atheistic theory, this philosopher (?) asserts that the Christian view of the value of life, which is now a part of the law of nations, “is in large part mistaken, leads to some very great annoyances, and stands directly in the way of the most important of possible reforms.”

He complains that “the competitive struggle for life is now a far different thing from what it was during the Middle Ages. The struggle for life, in the strict sense of the word, has almost ceased among the people of Christendom.” The poor “are not often starved to death in famines or by improvidence, as of old. The enormous charities of Christendom reach, in one form or another, a majority of those who are in danger of starving, and prolong lives which, at best, are shortened by suffering.” These sentiments are repeated in various forms, in all of which he attacks not only Christianity, but “the democratic idea of equal political rights,” which he rightly declares could not exist “unless they had been born under a system of thought which declares all souls to be of infinite and equal value; a mathematical misconception!” We quote a single passage more, that we may not be charged with unfairness:

“Nature strives to refine us, to purge out the dross by the action of penal fires. Man laboriously obstructs her attempt; he picks up the rejected refuse, casts it back again into the crucible, and calls the act philanthropy. If natural selection were allowed to have its way, there would be more hope of human improvement. But the most earnest work of our day is to secure the survival of the unfit.”

According to this teaching, the efforts of two continents to relieve the Irish during the potato famine were unfortunate violations of the human law of natural selection; and the unrelieved woes of the late horrible Persian famine were a great gain to the human race in the stricken dominions of the Shah. To satisfy the demands of this new school of philanthropists, the medical profession and hospitals for the sick, asylums for the deaf and dumb and blind, for the insane and the crippled, for old men and women, and for little children, should be abandoned. Mr. Brace and the Children’s Aid Society, the Howard Mission, the Magdalen Asylums, and those for inebriates, should at once cease their malevolent hindrances to the ceaseless struggle for life. Institutions might be formed to encourage poverty, starvation, drunkenness, debauchery, and suicide; or, at least, let the weak and the strong, the poor and the rich, the old and the young, the wretched and the happy, the mighty and the helpless, fight out their grand battle. Let the strongest and fittest alone survive. Perish Christianity, perish philanthropy, perish civilization, perish every one and everything that “weakens the body of humanity,” and so let the human race grow strong unto perfection.

And this is science! this its plan for the regeneration of the nations! this is its highway to the millennium! We do not believe that Mr. Darwin has taught or would teach what his bolder and more shameless American disciple has thus put forth in the columns of a respectable popular monthly magazine. But the cruel conclusion is perfectly legitimate, and apparently is necessary to the materialistic premises. Humanity and Christianity instinctively shrink back from the horrible coolness with which this brutal theory is advocated by its author. If the Bible were a lie, and the Christian religion a delusion ten thousand times rather would we believe the lie and hug the delusion till our last breath, than resign ourselves and our race to the more than pagan terrors of this heartless atheism. It fairly shows how inhuman the atheistic materialism of our own times dares to be, violating every noble human instinct and destroying all faith in God and in man. But it is well that it shall voluntarily unrobe itself of its garments of light, and tell us what it is and what its purposes are.

Perhaps we ought not to be surprised at its new light upon the problem of human destiny; for if there is no personal God, no providence, no immaterial and immortal soul; if we are simply the subjects of natural law and the victims of the “persistency of force,” there is no room left for religion of any kind. The fatal error of the scheme which this author has set forth lies in his attempt to apply the law of natural selection in all its manifestations to the human race. We are not plants nor animals. We are men, women, children, human beings. We live under the higher law which binds us to two worlds. There lies the hindrance to the operation of a merely material natural law. The theory which ignores the Creator cannot possibly know any Redeemer. It is a pitiless creed, indeed, which in the honored name of science propounds as its only remedy for human woes the most merciless of destructions, and which finds its last resort in assaulting Christianity for its spirit of love and its institutions and deeds of charity. With what unalloyed delight and increasing faith may the poor, the helpless sufferers, sinners and saints, turn to the words and to the arms of Him who said, “I am come, not to destroy men’s lives, but to save them.” The parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son, are the sweet evangel of the lost world.—Christian Intelligencer.