Richard Weikart on Racism, Darwinism and Christianity

Intelligent Design the Future

Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture

Science, Philosophy, Astronomy, Society & Culture, Life Sciences

4 • 993 Ratings

🗓️ 21 July 2023

⏱️ 13 minutes

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Summary

If living things are only the result of chance processes, does human life have any intrinsic value? On this episode of ID the Future from the archive, California State University history professor Richard Weikart, author of several books, including The Death of Humanity and the Case for Life, talks racism past and present, in both Christian and “scientific” secular history. Racism can be found in both arenas, Weikart notes, but Charles Darwin made racial variation — and the claim that certain races were inferior — a key plank in his case for evolution by random variation and natural selection. As a result, many in the 19th century and early 20th century concluded with Darwin that perceived differences between the races were biological, an idea that opened the door more widely to the continued exploitation of human beings. Weikart goes on to suggest that materialistic Darwinism provides precious little support to ground the idea of universal human dignity and rights, ideas with a strong grounding in the Judeo-Christian tradition. MORE RESOURCES Listen to Richard Weikart's 2016 debate with Peter Singer on Justin Brierley's Unbelievable radio show by searching the title at Spotify: Is Human Life Intrinsically Valuable?

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0:00.0	Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.
0:17.0	Welcome, I'm your host today, Mike Keys. We have with us again Richard We're
0:20.0	professor of history in the Cal State System.
0:23.0	And I've mentioned a couple of books that he's published.
0:26.0	There's one more recent book that I haven't mentioned.
0:29.0	It came out in the year 2016, and it's a book that's very accessible. It deals more with the
0:36.7	contemporary debate in light of the history of science and the history of Darwinism
0:42.3	in particular and that book is of history but also with philosophical questions as well, right?
0:54.0	Yes, I do talk about a lot of contemporary thinkers, Darwinists, scientists,
1:00.0	also philosophers and such embracing ideas that I see is dehumanizing.
1:07.0	Right, so this would be a good book to enter into, okay, given what we know about the history of these ideas, what can we say about the contemporary
1:16.6	debate in light of that history? Is that fair to say that your book does that?
1:20.1	Sure. Okay. So I mentioned in a previous podcast that there was this email conversation among some colleagues interested in the history of ideas, Darwinism and racism in particular, and one of the things that was pointed out in that conversation was that
1:36.2	there were of course unsurprisingly pre-Darlinian racist views both among
1:42.2	Christians or so-called Christians and among those who
1:46.2	you know atheists and agnostics who claim to have some some kind of scientific
1:51.4	justification for racism.
1:52.8	But what would you say, Richard,
1:55.3	is the main difference between, let's just start
1:57.7	with alleged scientific rationales for racism.
2:01.2	What's the main difference between pre-Darwinian racist ideology and Darwinian
2:06.3	racist ideology as based on science, regardless of how legitimate that science actually is, but the claim is it's based on science.
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