Did Richard Dawkins ask us to rethink Hitler’s eugenics?
“If you can breed cattle for milk yield, horses for running speed, and dogs for herding skill, why on Earth should it be impossible to breed humans for mathematical, musical or athletic ability? Objections such as “these are not one-dimensional abilities” apply equally to cows, horses and dogs and never stopped anybody in practice. I wonder whether, some 60 years after Hitler’s death, we might at least venture to ask what the moral difference is between breeding for musical ability and forcing a child to take music lessons. Or why it is acceptable to train fast runners and high jumpers but not to breed them. I can think of some answers, and they are good ones, which would probably end up persuading me. But hasn’t the time come when we should stop being frightened even to put the question?”
Richard Dawkins, From the Afterword, The Herald Scotland, (November 20, 2006)
This “Evolutionary Biologist” may have forgotten that Eugenics was coined in 1883 by Francis Galton, who was a cousin of Darwin’s. The desire to “improve” the human stock was frequently related to pseudo-scientific theories put forward by those who wish to demonstrate the “superiority” of a particular group—race, nation, social class, or sex, in terms of blood or “good breeding” – just as Dawkins reasoned it is nigh time we breed human stock just as we train them!
What caused the Holocaust? Surely, it was Hitler’s racist social policies based on Darwinian Eugenics that made him consider Jews and non-Europeans as “sub-human” and “inferior” to the master “Aryan” race, for which reason he went to great lengths in trying to “clean and preserve” the “great” Aryan race.
Richard Dawkins, is therefore, an Evolutionary Extremist.
The last time I heard him speak, he was attacking the Intelligent Design theory in his withering manner, that the human body isn’t intelligently designed at all, and that there was a certain vein in the human body that was totally confused – it took a route around the body that Dawkins doesn’t like or doesn’t understand – and considers it stupid.
Maybe Dawkins already knows how to breed better humans. His pseudo-debility in asserting he has infinite and infallible knowledge of everything – he says it’s a “fact” that the universe was born out of literally nothing (maybe he saw it happen?) – is as self-evident as the maturing nature of scientific discovery that not only heralds in new ages but replace what we once took for gospel. Was it not just a few centuries ago that we thought the world was flat? Weren’t football players advised to smoke during half-time for better physical performance? The list is almost endless but the point is simple; we do not hold absolute knowledge. Just yesterday, for the first time in human history, we have learnt that mammalian lungs produce blood – something that would be considered “stupid” by Dawkins had this scientific discovery not been “scientific” at all. The point being made is the very one he tackles in his God Delusion in which he asserts that if we are to conclude that God exists due to the lack of proof of His absence, then surely tooth fairies also exist, thereby inferring (incorrectly) that we cannot prove the existence of a being by the lack of evidence for its absence.
I ask my readers, is Richard Dawkins not a victim of his own argument?
Let me explain.
The case in hand is the theory of ID. It postulates that the intelligent design in nature can only prove the existence of a Designer; a supreme being. Dawkins argues that the appendix has no purpose, therefore, ID is false, therefore, God doesn’t exist. Let’s break that down.
Appendix is useless.
The body is designed non-intelligently.
Therefore, it came about by chance and chaos.
This at first sight, seems plausible. But let us see what we are missing.
The first predicate asserts grand and absolute knowledge of the purposes of the appendix. When we say absolute knowledge, we mean not only knowledge that can be discovered, but every thing about that subject in question that could ever be knowable for it isn’t a rule of physics that the human civilisation will eventually learn every single thing about the appendix. It may be wiped out by the emergence of the flying teapot (assuming it isn’t friendly as we don’t like aliens) or the advent of Singularity; it may be replaced by an artificial intelligence more clever than one with a ghost in its shell. Hence, some knowledge of the appendix may never be discovered even if the aforementioned beings decide to research and master human physiology much like our endeavours with sentient beings of the past.
Thus, when Dawkins argues “The appendix is useless”, he must have absolute knowledge of it in order to discount it as an organ without function and purpose. Dawkins does not believe in any such powers from the school of Hogwarts or any other Nubiculia. Therefore, this is his first fallacy.
For him, you are either somebody who has witnessed the beginning of creation and therefore considers it a fact – that the universe came out of nothing because surely you must have been there to witness it – or “you are stupid, ignorant, or insane.”
By considering those that are creationists or theists as intellectually inferior, he has once again expressed a patronisingly Hitler-like dehumanization.
The ridiculous irony in all of this, of course, is the fact that Dawkins in his contempt and disdain, in his pseudo-debility, fails to acknowledge any and all arguments for the required case of the source of all energy; a Supreme Being beyond our finite dimension that must exist beyond the cycle of creation, reproduction and space-time itself in order to cause it to come into existence.
If we are to assume that all energy started from the Big Bang, then the Big Bang must be energy itself, becoming God. For every effect requires a cause and there must be an origin, a starting point, an initial inertia that pushed the very first domino piece, starting a chain of events that orchestrated the cosmos into a very specific order, whose calculation according to leading astrophysicists, is infinitesimal.
Not only the position of the celestial bodies were placed into an exact distance to one another, but also that this Big Bang carved out such beautiful spherical bodies with such fine proportions that during an eclipse, the apparent discs of both the moon and the sun appear exactly the same. The math required for this phenomenon to take place must be the same exact multitude as that of the diameter of the Sun to the diameter of the Moon! Or else, there will not occur a total eclipse. The answer is a multitude of 400.5 exactly, in both cases, causing the apparent (visible from Earth) size of the discs of both the Sun and the Moon to be a mind-boggling identical 31.7 arcminutes.
“The Sun and the Moon are in perfect reckoning” (Qur’an 55:5)