Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.

Hello again. This is Tom Gilson, bringing you the concluding half of a powerful lecture given at the 2020 Dallas Conference

on Science and Faith. Political scientist John West is the speaker and the subject of his

talk, Darwin's corrosive idea. We join him near the 19-minute mark of his talk.

Ideas do have consequences.

A second impact of Darwin's theory that has had on our view of human beings has been in the

area of morality.

In his book, The Descent of Man, Darwin depicted morality not as something permanent or transcendent, but simply as

those behaviors and beliefs favored by natural selection because they promoted physical

survival under a given set of circumstances.

In the Darwinian view of ethics, morality radically changes over time based on changing

conditions for physical survival. So if parental love promotes survival,

then that becomes moral. But if selective infanticide promotes survival better in your situation,

then that becomes moral. Darwin's reductionistic account of the development of morality leaves

very little room for objectively preferring one society's morality

over another. Because according to the Darwinian framework, every behavior that occurs regularly

in at least some subpopulation is normal almost by definition. Moral and immoral behaviors

developed for the same reason to promote biological survival.

For the most part, Darwin himself didn't press this relativistic analysis of morality to its logical conclusion,

but he certainly laid the groundwork for others who came after, and again, it's had an impact on our culture.

In the United States, some 55% of adults now believe that, quote, evolution shows that moral

beliefs evolve over time based on their survival value in various times and places, unquote.

...