Why Jesus Apologetics

The Moral Contradiction of Modern Secularism

In today’s moral climate, few things are condemned as fiercely as racism. Across media, politics, and education, the insistence that all humans are equal in value has become a moral absolute. Yet, in a striking irony, many of the same voices who denounce racism also uphold Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution as the scientific explanation for human origins — a theory historically and philosophically built on the assumption of racial inequality. If we follow Darwinian evolution to its logical end, it does not lead to human equality, but to racial hierarchy.

The tension is obvious: modern secularists celebrate human rights and equality while denying the very foundation that makes those values rational — the imago Dei (the image of God). Without God, the concept of human equality collapses into sentiment. Evolution by natural selection assumes differential survival: some species — and some humans — are “more fit” than others. Darwin’s followers, from anthropologists to social theorists, took this as a license to claim that some races were biologically superior. What began as a biological hypothesis became a moral justification for racism, colonialism, and eugenics.

Even prominent atheists have struggled to reconcile this contradiction. If nature’s law is survival of the fittest, then moral equality is a violation of natural order, not an extension of it. As philosopher Richard Weikart observes,

“Darwinism by its very nature undermined the sanctity of human life, and with it, the moral foundation for human equality.”

Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 6.

Without a transcendent Creator, there is no rational reason to treat the weak, the disabled, or the “less evolved” as possessing equal worth.

This article will expose that uncomfortable truth. We will show that Darwin’s own writings, the early applications of his theory, and its inevitable philosophical implications all point to one conclusion: to believe in Darwinian evolution consistently is to accept racism as natural and moral. In contrast, the Christian worldview, grounded in divine creation, gives the only consistent basis for the equality and dignity of every human being.

“Either man is the image of God, or he is a highly developed animal. If the latter, then ethics has no absolute meaning and equality no rational ground.”

D. James Kennedy, What If Jesus Had Never Been Born?

Darwin’s Own Words Were Racist

Defenders of Darwinian evolution often insist that racism was merely a social misuse of Darwin’s theory — a tragic but separate matter. Yet that claim collapses the moment one opens The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin’s own extended application of evolutionary ideas to humanity. There, he makes unmistakably clear that he saw humanity divided into “races” at different stages of evolutionary advancement, and that “civilized” Europeans were destined to replace “savage” peoples through natural selection. His racism was not incidental; it was integral to his biological reasoning.

In The Descent of Man, Darwin wrote:

“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world.”

Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John Murray, 1871), 201.

Here Darwin was not describing genocide as immoral — he was predicting it as inevitable evolutionary progress. He viewed the “savage races” (non-European, tribal, or colonized peoples) as remnants of earlier stages of human development, closer to animals than to Europeans. He continued:

“The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state… than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”

Ibid., 201–202.

These words cannot be dismissed as a product of Victorian culture. They express Darwin’s scientific interpretation of human diversity through the lens of evolution. The “civilized” races had, in his theory, evolved higher mental faculties, while “savages” had stagnated. To him, their extinction was not tragedy but biological destiny, an evolutionary “improvement” of the species.

Darwin’s private correspondence confirms that he held such views consistently. In an 1856 letter to Charles Lyell, he spoke of the “negro or Australian” as being

“in a transitional stage between man and beast”

Charles Darwin, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin (London: John Murray, 1887), 288.

Even his humanist defenders admit this element of his thought. The philosopher Adrian Desmond, one of Darwin’s biographers, concedes:

“Darwin believed that the races were not equally evolved, that the white races were at the top of the evolutionary tree.”

Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution (London: Penguin, 2009), 387.

Darwin’s followers applied his racial logic with ruthless consistency. Anthropologists classified skulls, measured nose angles, and arranged human populations on evolutionary ladders. Colonialists and imperial governments seized upon his writings as moral justification for subjugation — after all, if the “fit” naturally survive and the “unfit” die out, then racial domination was simply nature’s law.

“Darwin not only provided a biological theory; he provided a worldview — one in which racial inequality was not a social prejudice, but a scientific necessity.”

Thus, it is not an exaggeration but a sober statement of fact: Darwin’s evolutionary theory was born in racial hierarchy. It provided the so-called scientific legitimacy for centuries of racism that followed — from European imperialism to the eugenics movements of the early twentieth century.

The tragedy is not merely historical. Many modern defenders of evolution still revere Darwin without confronting the moral rot at the foundation of his theory. They want the prestige of “science” without the shame of its consequences. But historical honesty demands otherwise.

Evolutionary Theory Was Built on Racial Hierarchy

Darwinian evolution did not emerge in a vacuum. It developed in a 19th-century world obsessed with race, empire, and hierarchy. European intellectuals were already speculating that humanity could be arranged on a ladder of progress — with whites at the top and Africans and Indigenous peoples at the bottom. What Darwin did was to give this prejudice scientific respectability. His idea of “natural selection” provided a biological framework that seemed to explain — and justify — these racial differences as products of evolution rather than social injustice.

The concept of “natural selection,” as Darwin himself admitted, came directly from Thomas Malthus’s population theories. Malthus argued that famine and poverty were nature’s way of controlling the “unfit.” Darwin applied this logic to species — and, inevitably, to human beings. If only the fittest survive, then it follows that the extinction or domination of “inferior races” is not immoral but “natural.” Historian Stephen Jay Gould acknowledged this grim truth:

“Biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1859, but they increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory.”

Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 127.

Darwin’s own followers made the racial implications explicit. In 1865, German zoologist Ernst Haeckel, a devout Darwinist, argued that

human races represented different evolutionary levels, even claiming that “woolly-haired men” (Africans) were closer to apes than to Europeans.

Ernst Haeckel, The History of Creation, trans. E. Ray Lankester (London: Henry S. King, 1876), 515.

Haeckel’s work would later inspire Nazi racial science. Similarly, Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” used Darwin’s ideas to defend colonial conquest, arguing that stronger nations had the evolutionary right to dominate weaker ones.

Across Europe and America, so-called “scientific racism” flourished. Anthropologists measured skulls, noses, and foreheads in the pseudoscience of craniometry, claiming that these features proved intellectual superiority of whites. The French anthropologist Arthur de Gobineau blended Darwinian and social theories to argue that

the “Aryan race” was biologically destined to rule.

Arthur de Gobineau, The Inequality of the Human Races (Paris: Librairie de Firmin-Didot, 1855).

Museums even displayed African and Indigenous human remains as evolutionary “missing links” between apes and civilized Europeans.

Darwinism provided the moral anesthesia that allowed colonial empires to view genocide and exploitation as progress. If evolution was true, then wiping out “primitive” peoples was simply nature’s way of advancing civilization. Historian Richard Weikart observes:

“Once Darwin convinced the scientific community that humans were products of natural selection, the door was opened to apply this same principle to human society… leading directly to eugenics, racial struggle, and genocide.”

Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 32.

Even in America, textbooks and university lectures taught racial hierarchy as a biological fact until well into the 20th century. The “science” of evolution validated what racism had long assumed — that some humans are more advanced than others.

The moral implications are unavoidable. If evolution describes human origin without divine purpose, then hierarchy replaces equality, and strength replaces morality. The strong dominate because that is how life progresses. The weak perish because they are “less fit.” This is not a moral system; it is a justification of oppression disguised as biology.

So, Darwin’s theory did not arise in a moral vacuum. It emerged within a culture already steeped in colonial ambition and scientific racism, giving “natural selection” a moral cover for oppression. We have shown that the seeds of racial hierarchy were not accidental by-products of Darwinian thought but natural consequences of its core logic: that life’s progress depends on the elimination of the weak by the strong.

The disturbing truth is that evolutionary reasoning—when applied to humanity—inevitably produces inequality, domination, and justification for cruelty. Science, detached from moral revelation, cannot tell us that racism is evil; it can only describe what happens when the powerful prevail.

But history did not end with Darwin. A far greater narrative—one rooted in divine creation rather than blind evolution—was already proclaiming the true origin and worth of humanity.

In Part 2, we will expose how Darwinism directly shaped racist movements and how Christian theism alone provides the solid foundation for equality and human dignity. We will move from the theory’s historical fruit to its moral and theological contrast with biblical truth.