Full transcript:
We continue to venture into the dark side of Darwinism in this part 2 special edition of Genesis Week.
[music]
Welcome to this week’s show, I’m your host, Ian Juby. This week’s episode is part II of a special series investigating the dark side of Darwinism. We are taking a radical departure from our standard show today, picking up where we left off last week, as we have a lot to cover. I am honoured to have three guests join me again for our panel discussion:
Joseph Vaillancourt is a licensed minister with the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada, a developmental service worker working with Christian Horizons, and the founder of enABLE Faith Ministries in Toronto, a ministry reaching out to those of the disabled community to foster their involvement within the Christian community and in ministry. He joins me via skype from Toronto.
Dr. Jerry Bergman has 9 degrees in everything from biology to psychology, two of those degrees are a Phd. He is the author of the book “The Dark Side of Darwin,” and is himself a former atheist now turned young earth creationist and Christian. He has taught multiple disciplines at the college level and joins me by telephone from Ohio.
Paul Gosselin is an independent researcher specializing in ideologies,
belief systems and religion and holds a Masters degree in Social Anthropology. He is author of the two volume series with the title that I just love – “Flight from the Absolute.” He joins us via skype from Quebec City.
If you’ll recall last week, we were talking about Eugenics – the idea that we can direct our own evolution. A deliberate removal of the “less fit” from society, and the preservation of the “more fit.”
Even today – One subtle form of “disguised” modern day eugenics – Joseph, you work with people who have down’s syndrome for example, which provides a classic, modern day example of Eugenics – how many expecting couples have had those dreaded test results come back saying their unborn baby has down’s syndrome? And then the doctors pressure them to abort the child. Abortion, eugenics and evolution are holding each other’s hand.
And then how many of those couples say “no” only to give birth to a perfectly healthy child who did NOT have down’s syndrome even. So what of those who are born with disabilities like downs syndrome – aren’t they just a burden to society? Why is it wrong to remove them from society?
>>Well, first of all, that’s without the numbers – according to “modern medicine,” 90% of parents who get that test result – which I think is terrible, will abort their child. And you’re right – a lot of them end up being born without any problems, but even those who are born with down’s syndrome or autism, the question I would ask then “Is this really a disability per se?” Sure, it means they’re different – but we know that, I’ve read articles of people with autism for example, who are professors! They believe Abraham Lincoln may have had autism, Einstein is believed to have had Asperger’s syndrome, in our day and age they would’ve been aborted and we would not have nuclear power! Some people would be happy about that, haha, but the fact that he was a genius and changed the world, my favourite quote from Einstein is that everyone’s a genius, but ask a fish to climb a tree and he’ll think he’s stupid. And so, even recently I posted on my facebook channel of a woman with Down’s syndrome who is now, I believe, an elementary school teacher – a contributor to society. Abraham Lincoln – if it was true that he had autism, in our system today, he never would have become president. And the slaves would still be slaves – they never would have had the revolutionary war! Maybe they would, I don’t know, but it goes to show you how much potential a person with autism or down’s syndrome could have on society if given the opportunity to grow and develop. And that’s what I’m doing with enABLE, is I honestly believe you can either be an enabler person or a disabler person – whether you have a diagnosis or not. A person in mensa could be easily as disabled as somebody who has autism, or down’s syndrome, or in a wheel chair. It’s a social issue, not a medical issue, and I think we need to re-explore how the church understands as well as society understands the whole concept of disabilities in the 21st century. 90% of potential Abraham Lincolns, potential great leaders, great participants, great scientists are being aborted. A lot of autism communities I belong to like to put up little pictures, and one of them is “It takes a person with austism to make a scientific breakthrough.”
You think about it, a lot of the historical scientific discoveries were made by a lot of people who are now believed to have had autism. I won’t go through the list because we’d be here all day! But think about it – if race betterment is the goal of eugenics, and they’re aborting the potential next Einstein, the next potential great discoverer, the next great leader, the next great philosopher, or the next great theologian for us who are in the church world, are we really bettering society by doing that? I would say “no”, I think we’re hurting ourselves.
And again this goes back to how it changed the way we see humanity – we changed the way we see ourselves – our concepts of beauty, our concepts of intelligence, Binet, who came up with the IQ test – it was not meant to be used the way it is today, it was meant to be used to as a tool to help people learn, and nowadays it’s used to discriminate and to create a stratification of people who, on the basis of perceived intelligence on a test that is very subjective to start with and those who belong to the right “strata” of society would do far better than somebody who, even though may be incredibly intelligent, wouldn’t do so well. And there’s a lot of issues there, you brought up Buck vs. Bell. which made it constitutional to have sterilization, but you know what? The truth is they didn’t want to end at sterilization – they wanted to go the route of genocide, some of these guys. In Ontario, if it had not been for the mainstream church, chances are they would’ve had a mini-genocide here in Ontario where I am now.
Some of you may have heard of the 1917 movie “The Black Stork baby” -based on a real life story of Dr. Harry Haiselden. He convinced parents of children with disabilities not to take treatment that could save their lives. There are many articles like the New York times,
He said – this is from one of the articles, dated June 28, 1918, New York Times:
This is the message we still hear today – is that people who are born different are going to be a burden, therefore, let’s get rid of them.
>>And all of this comes back to morality and what is right or wrong, which I’m going to get to with Paul in just a minute here. But of course, if it’s legal to kill off an entire class of people, does that mean it’s morally okay? Does that make it right? If it’s LEGAL to perform medical experiments against people’s will, does that make it right? Dr. Bergman – the Nazis “legally” performed all kinds of horrific “medical research” Could you give us some details on what was done?
>>Some of the things that were done – Joseph Mengele is probably the most well known, infamous I should probably add, leader in this Nazi movement. And he was highly motivated by -his own words – by evolutionary biology; in fact he had an MD a nd a Phd, and his thesis for both of these degrees was in evolutionary biology, and what he was trying to do by his infamous twin studies was to determine the influence of race verses environment, and of course that’s done by twin studies. And some of the studies he did, would for example, inject Jews (primarily) with a variety of chemicals to try to determine how racial traits came about. He was trying to help those who had ambiguous racial traits become more Arian. For example, blue eyes were seen as the ideal eye colour, but many Germans had brown eyes. So how do you convert brown eyes to blue eyes? Well, he injected some of his subjects with dyes in their eyes to try to convert their eye colour so they would be closer to the superior race.
Well as you imagine, this failed totally, absolute fiasco, in fact, most of them what happened, is they became blind, or their eyesight was severely compromised.
Something else that he did which really bothered me, was he smeared phosphorous on Jews, then set the phosphorous on fire so he could get third degree burns, then he tried to come up with ways of dealing with this serious burn that he caused in the people that he injected this phosphorous into, and he was trying to come up with ways to treat German prisoners or soldiers that were injured in the war. And so, why not experiment on actual prisoners, or Germans that WERE injured in the war, and use that information? But no, he wanted to utilize Jews and others to find out this information to help the German race, which was the “superior race.”
And the ironic thing about this was that most of his experiments failed! They did not help one learn about medicine for many, many reasons. And uh another thing he did that I thought was pretty horrendous, is he would vacuum the subjects lungs until they ruptured, and then he would try to determine at what atmospheric pressure caused the rupturing. And he did that in order to help German pilots survive crashes.
Another he did was, determine how long it took to freeze someone, and so to the point where they would die. So he put his subjects in cold water baths, measure their temperature, measured their blood pressure, and other vital signs, and then determine at what temperature and how long it took the patients (which he called them patients) to die. And these studies, many of them were published in scientific journals, and ironically many of the fellow scientists felt very strongly that this is very important research. But today if we look back at this, we can see that some of these studies he did were absolutely IDIOTIC to say the least! Like injecting blue dyes in the eyes of his subjects.
>>Disturbing. Okay, we need to take a short break, we’ll be right back.
This show sponsored in part by Canada’s first permanent Creation Museum, in the heart of Alberta’s dinosaur beds, the Big Valley Creation Science Museum. bvcsm.com
And by Genesis Park.com where you can pre-order your own beautiful hard covered copy of the Chronicles of Dinosauria, the history and mystery of dinosaurs and man.
What does the Bible say about aliens? Is there life on other planets? What can science tell us about the possibility of aliens? Ian Juby gives answers to these and many more questions in this fascinating and highly disturbing subject.
Looking analytically at the subject, complete with testimonies of people who claim to have been abducted by aliens. The answers will probably surprise you. In this 1 and a half hour lecture, Ian shows that the alleged “aliens” are a problem, and that Jesus is the solution.
Order on line today at Ian’s bookstore.
Welcome back to Genesis Week where we’re discussing the “dark side” of Darwin with my three guests. Dr. Bergman, I’ve heard people point to quotes from Hitler that are very Christian.
>>Uh ya, there were many quotes that Hitler made – several reasons for that – one is that he was a politician! And politicians say what they have to in order to get votes! And it’s interesting that after he claimed he was a devout Christian, 20 minutes or an hour later, to his own men, he would say that he was going to destroy the Christian church! But the first step was, and he brought out, you can’t war against the whole world at once. We’ve got to worry about conquering the nations of Europe, then we have to worry about the Jews, then we have to worry about the Slovaks, then we have to worry about Russia, and later on – his plan was to worry about the Christians. But not now he said, we cannot have a war against, pretty much everybody at once – once we achieved our major military goals, then we can destroy Christianity. In the meantime though, he’s pretty clear in what he tried to do: Take the crosses out of churches, and put the swastikas in. Took the Bible out of churches – or, actually, re-wrote it, and then put it back in. He changed it in such a way to where he pulled out the objectionable parts, like for example we should help the weak and help the poor, and we should be charitable, and we should love our enemies, all of those were of course very opposed to Nazi ideology. So he pulled those out and then he put the Bible back in the churches. But he often, instead of putting the Bible back in, he put Mein Kampf in churches so that people could read it. And by the way, he became quite rich from the selling of Mein Kampf because the people were, in many ways strongly coerced to purchase the Mein Kampf book.
>>haha! Strongly suggested eh?
>>Ya, strongly suggested. And I can mention, since I mention that, a lot of people think that these doctors were coerced into doing these experiments. All the references that I checked made it very clearlthat they were not coerced. They could freely, willingly opt out of doing these experiments, etc. In fact, some did. “do you want to be part of these?” and some doctors said “no” and so his Nazis said “fine then you can go back into the town.”
>>Now Paul, in your book you cover a really wide range of subjects related to social issues, one main focus of your book was the rise of postmodernism; can you please define post modernism?
>>When you mention the word “post modern”, some people maybe thinking of architecture, but in this case we’re talking about world views, or more specifically, secular religions. Now, uh, to define post-modernism, as the name implies, it’s reaction to something: modernism. And so we need to do a, cover a bit of western cultural history to figure this out. Now one of the basic issues when we’re dealing with world views is “Where is truth? Where do you get truth?” and in the case of the Judeo-Christian world view, truth comes from the Bible for the most part. And during the middle ages, you had one first reaction to this dominant Christian world view, and that was the renaissance the renaissance was basically an attempt to develop an alternative, and one of the issues that they faced was “where do we get truth?” well, their basic view was from Greek philosophy, but as time went on, the renaissance apple cart was overturned by science because the pristige of the Greek philosophers uh, was being more and more criticized, their understanding of the material world was being overturned, and so the pristige of the Greek philosophers was on the way down, and so the people that were attempting to develop an alternative world view to the Judeo-Christian world view were finding that, “okay, we’ve been on the wrong horse.” basically. So from that point, then the “enlightenment” comes in, and the enlightenment – what they decided to do, was to develop science and the human reason as the source of truth. The first stages of this modern view, you have for example, people like Voltaire, who accepted God as a first cause, so there’s a very remote God. The mature stage, modernism has become purely materialistic: just, so people, humans live in a closed box, a small box. So today, convinced deists, people like Voltaire – well, you would only, there are very few of them, you would only find them in theological departments basically, which leads us of course to Darwin and other well-known atheists such as Stephen J. Gould, Richard Dawkins, and David Suzuki in Canada.
So, the humanist manifesto is an excellent example of uh, of a modern credo – in other words, modern world view. And so the post modern worldview is a reaction to the modern view – the enlightenment view. And one of the things that post-moderns believe is that they reject first of all Christianity of course, they also reject this view that science is somehow a source of truth, because they view this as some sort of western imperialism; it’s western arrogance, and actually would probably consider it a perverted hold over from Christian views.
>>Now one major point you brought out in your book which I really liked: the connection between biological determinism and evolution. For the sake of the viewers, Biological determinisim is The idea that your GENES control what you do and what you are. Your biology determines who and what you are. Even the famous evolutionist Steven J. Gould saw the implications of combining postmodernism, biological determinism and evolutionary thinking, referring to it all as a “Social weapon” – his words. I mean, really, that is what we’re talking about here – this MINDSET is used as a weapon.
>>Ya, he actually coined the term “Darwinian fundamentalists.” Basically it just means that some people take evolution too far. And further down the line, because he was heavily involved in the debate in the late 70’s about sociobiology which is basically the idea that our genes determine who we are. And applying this to, for example, male-female relations, and all kinds of areas, and uh, my impression – this is just my own impression, but I’m pretty sure there’s a link between his participation in this debate and later on his development of what he called the NOMA theory, the NOMA theory is basically Non-Overlapping Magesterial, so basically what he said is that, he recognized that science has its authority in the material world, but that religion has some validity or authority in the area of morality. So basically he was making a concession to religion that a lot of atheists would consider anathema; you know its not, recognizing religion in any shape or form like this is out of the question. So uh, Gould was taking a step that was a bit iffy, even from his own perspective, but he was forced to do this in my view, because of the moral implication of evolution, of which he had done a lot of research on uh, the early, the eugenics movement, the IQ tests, he’d done a lot of research on this, and of course being of a Jewish background, and realizing what happened to the Jews during the holocaust too, basically he would’ve agreed with what Dawkins said, when you apply evolution to a whole civilization, a whole society? The results can be pretty ugly! And it’s just logical – because if you believe humans are just leftovers from evolution, and uh – they may be replaced! For example, you have people in the artificial intelligence movement, you have people in that movement that man is not the summit of evolution – you know, man is just a stepping stone, and the next step maybe cyborgs or whatever, mix between man and machine, computers, and so you have people doing experiments on themselves, and implanting uh, computer parts and networking themselves in the computer networks. And in their view, man is just a step in evolution. There may be a next step, and man may find themselves replaced – by something “better” of course.
>>Interesting the attempts to “improve” humans. Dr. Bergman, you have taught genetics at the medical college. As I’ve said many times on this show, evolutionary theory does not explain biology, in fact evolutionary theory has HINDERED scientific progress and research – especially in biology and the medical field. How have you seen Darwinian evolution hinder medical research? [0:25]
>>Well, it hinders medical research in many, many ways and it’s hard to know where to begin. I guess some of my favourite and the most clear examples was, Darwin talked about in one of his books, organs that we today call “vestigial” – that either had less use, or no use whatsoever. And a good example – I just talked about this in my class the other day, was for years the tonsils were routinely removed. I had mine removed when I was five years old, and I asked “why?” and so the doctor said “well, you better have them out young rather than when you’re older, so let’s get’em out and we’ll take care of that.” I said “Why do they have to be removed? There’s nothing wrong with them!” and he said “well, cause they’re vestigial they have no function, therefore we get’em out cause all they do is cause problems.” In fact it was a joke in medical school that the purpose of the tonsils was to help the doctor pay for his new mercedes – which is partially true I suppose.
But nowadays it’s changed – we realize that tonsils have an important function, and instead of removing them, we treat them – in fact, I took surveys of my anatomy and physiology class the other day, about 75 students total that I surveyed, and almost none of them had their tonsils removed. Well my one class, out of 25 students, there was only two people who had their tonsils removed. So, that just illustrates the fact that they are not removed now unless you absolutely have to, if you have a swollen body part and its infected beyond salvation, then you have to remove it. So occasionally they are removed, but by and large medical practice has changed, and if you think about it, how many people have had tonsilectomies like me, no reason at all, and yet now we know they are important. Same thing is true with the appendix, the same thing was true with the thymus, the same thing was true with the splean, the same thing was true with the pituitary, the same thing was true with pineal gland. So we’ve had a lot of perfectly good organs taken out of our body for no reason at all, and now we realize that all of these cases can cause severe harm and it does! Studies have shown for example that people who have had an appendectomy are more prone to certain diseases and less able to deal with a certain condition unless they had an appendix in them – the appendix has a very important function, and it should be left there. One of the five functions it has is that it stores the good bacteria, and so if you get diarrhrea, you lose the bateria in your colon, the large intestine, and as a result this needs to be replaced with the good bacteria, which we now realize is very, very important. And the appendix stores the good bacteria so that when you have diarrhea, you lose the good bacteria coating of your colon, then it can be rapidly and effectively replaced by the good bacteria which is stored in the appendix.
>>Right. And let us not forget the “junk DNA” – you’ve taught genetics at the college level – this is a classic case of evolutionary assumptions hindering proper scientific research.
>>It clearly did, and that discouraged doing research on this “junk DNA” – “it has no function!” Now we realize it has many, many important functions, primarily for regulation, but for other reasons as well but they estimate now, at least 80% of the genome has a function, and probably almost all of it does, as we continue to do research in this area.
They used to think 98% of the genome is “junk – it’s functionless, it has no function,” so we’ve gone from 98% useless to only 20% useless – and my guess is, in fact already they’re finding that that 20 % has some use, or at least, did have some use because of course we are accumulating mutations in the genome because of the fact that each generation has about 100 to 200 more new mutations which are introduced as a result of mutants like, radiation, and chemicals which cause mutations, and so we realize the mutational load is increasing every generation – so we are going backward as I often stress – evolution is true, but we’re going the wrong way! We’re not going upwards, we’re not ascending, and Darwin was correct! He said in his 1871 book “Descent of man” and he’s right! We are descending – what he meant was ascent of man, but he didn’t say that. His title actually turned out to be true although at that time, he didn’t know it.
>>Thank you so much gentlemen for coming on the show, I know the viewers appreciated your expertise.
You can visit Joseph’s facebook page for EnABLE faith ministry at facebook.com/enablefaithministry
You can get a copy of Paul’s excellent book “Flight from the Absolute”, Volume 1 from Amazon.com, and Volume II is due out this summer.
And Dr. Bergman has several books related to the subject which are available on Amazon, such as “the Dark Side of Darwin” exploring Darwin’s troubled mind, as well as his highly disturbing and enlightening “Hitler and the Darwinian Worldview” where he methodically documents how Darwinian evolution influenced the attrocities of the holocaust.
Thanks for joining me, I’m your host Ian Juby, signing off for now. You can send in your comments, questions and feedback to us in a number of ways.
Remember those words of warning and comfort from our Creator, the Lord Jesus Christ, who said “I am the way, the truth and the life – no man comes to the Father except through me.” See you next week.
We need your support to keep this program on the air. Please pray for us, and if you wish to financially support the program, Canadians can make a tax-deductible donation to CORE Ottawa, Kanata North Post Office Box 72075, Ottawa, ON. Canada, K2K 2P4
[music]
