I received the book “Dominion” on Christmas day 2022. I finished it on Christmas day 2023. One reason is that I’m a slow reader. The other is that it’s 614 pages long!
In an earlier article I tried to summarize the book’s main thesis. Its subtitle is helpful – “How the Christian Revolution Remade the World”. It was a daunting challenge for author, Tom Holland, to summarize over two millennia. But his three sections (Antiquity, Christendom and Modernitas) were an admirable attempt. One section caught my eye as particularly insightful. It was about evolution.
Charles Darwin
Holland recognizes the impact that Charles Darwin had on the world since he wrote “On the Origin of Species” in 1859. Most of his chapter entitled “Science” is about the famous author and his theory. Holland calls the theory a “profoundly unsettling one” in its teaching on the survival of the fittest and natural selection. “Let the strongest live and the weakest die” was a major conclusion of Darwin’s research.
Holland concludes that if Darwin’s theory is true, then there seemed to be “no need for God at all”. And in the realm of morality, Dostoyevsky warned “If there is no God, then everything is permitted”. The implications and applications of Darwin’s theory were frightening.
Holland states that Darwin himself was “perturbed” by this and had affirmed that any attempt to abandon the weak, poor or unfortunate was “evil”. Unfortunately, others would not be so morally sensitive as they applied evolutionary understanding to their fields of endeavor. The results would also be “profoundly unsettling” and eventually dangerous and fatal for millions.
Karl Marx
Marx was a Jewish German economist who immigrated to England in 1849. Just as Darwin is best known for his book on the origin of species, so Marx is remembered for his tome called “Das Kapital” (Capital). When he died in London in 1883, one of the mourners eulogized, “Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution as it applies to organic matter, so Marx discovered the law of evolution as it applies to human history.”
Marx taught that capitalism and its hierarchical society was doomed and destined to be replaced by communism and a classless society. Religion was the “opium of the people” used to numb them into submission so they could be better exploited. Science was the only sure guide and evolution was the foundation of the new coming social order.
Communist leaders who followed Marx, such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao (and many others) zealously and ruthlessly applied his teaching. The result is well-known – the death of millions. And, sadly, most of these were their leaders’ own countrymen. The strong and powerful survived and the weak (and those who resisted) perished. The law of the jungle prevailed.
Adolf Hitler
Hitler rose to power through his oratorical skills, effective (but violent) strategies, and the desperate state of post-World War I Germany. Holland writes that Hitler’s policies were rooted in “the clinical formulations of evolutionary theory”. The only way that the “superior master race” (Germanic-Nordic) could be strengthened and purified was for “inferior people” (Jews, gypsies, sexual deviants) to be eliminated.
“What is valid for monkeys must be all the more valid for humans,” Hitler believed. He defined his Nazi movement in Darwinian terms as a “cool doctrine of reality based on the most incisive scientific knowledge and its theoretical elucidation.” In this way, Hitler used evolution to justify his nationalistic aggression and murderous ethnic cleansing. Millions would perish as a result. It was “the survival of the fittest” applied to politics.
Of course, Charles Darwin would not have approved of these applications of his theory by communists or fascists. But his theory had opened a Pandora’s Box of grief and misery that could not be closed. And as Dostoyevsky had warned – “If there is no God, then everything is permitted.”
Rob Weatherby is a retired pastor.
