Why Jesus Apologetics

Part 2 begins where Part 1 left off — at the heart of the moral crisis Darwinism created.

If evolution’s logic is “survival of the fittest,” then the entire concept of human equality becomes irrational. In this section, we will trace how Darwinian ideology influenced racist systems, from colonialism to Nazi eugenics, and then contrast that darkness with the light of Christian revelation.

The Bible, long before modern politics or science, established a radically different anthropology: that every human being bears the image of God. We will show that Christian theism does not merely oppose racism; it destroys its roots by grounding dignity in divine creation, not in human evolution.

From Darwin to Eugenics — The Logical Outcome

If Darwinian thought supplied a descriptive account of biological change, the doctrine of eugenics supplied the prescriptive program that followed naturally: if species (including humans) were governed by heredity and differential survival, then humans could and should intervene to “improve” the stock. That interventionist logic — dressed up as social science — became one of the most dangerous practical outworkings of evolutionary thinking.

The intellectual father of eugenics was Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, who in 1883 coined the term and set the movement’s moral program. Galton defined the field bluntly:

“Eugenics is the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of human breeding; but which, so far as it relates to man, deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race.”

Francis Galton, “Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope, and Aims,” The American Journal of Sociology 10, no. 1 (1904): 1–20; see also Galton, Hereditary Genius (London: Macmillan, 1869).

This is not an incidental phrasing: Galton explicitly cast human reproduction as a matter of scientific management. Once heredity becomes the central value, the weak, disabled, or racially “inferior” are no longer persons to be protected but traits to be culled.

The practical implications followed quickly and broadly. In the United States, eugenics found institutional expression in state sterilization laws and public-health policies. Between the 1910s and 1970s, tens of thousands of Americans — the poor, those with disabilities, and people of color — were sterilized under ostensibly benevolent laws designed to prevent “unfit” reproduction. In the infamous Supreme Court decision Buck v. Bell (1927), Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote the chilling sentence:

“Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), opinion of the Court by Holmes, J.

That legal imprimatur normalized forced sterilization and lent democratic legitimacy to eugenic measures.

Eugenics was not an American aberration; it was international and transnational. German scientists and policymakers read Galton and Darwin and translated eugenic ideals into brutal state programs. The Nazi regime synthesized social-Darwinian themes with virulent racial ideology, producing sterilization laws, the T4 “euthanasia” program that murdered tens of thousands of disabled Germans, and ultimately the genocidal policies directed at Jews, Roma, and many others. Adolf Hitler himself echoed social-Darwinian fatalism in Mein Kampf, asserting that

“the stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker.”

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), 299.

Historians of science and morality have traced a clear intellectual line from evolutionary naturalism to eugenics and racial violence. Richard Weikart, for instance, argues that

once humans were seen as part of a blind, purposeless nature, moral constraints against killing or coercing the “unfit” lost their absolute force — and that this loss of moral foundation helped make eugenic programs possible.

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

Similarly, Edwin Black documents how American medical practitioners, philanthropies, and universities helped professionalize eugenics into public policy, not merely into fringe pseudo-science. (See Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003)).

The tragedy of eugenics is both moral and logical. Morally, it converted humans into biological variables to be optimized rather than persons with intrinsic worth. Logically, it was a straightforward application of the premises of consistent Darwinian materialism: if heredity and fitness determine value, then the “improvement” of the species is a moral imperative rather than a crime. The historical record shows that this application was not hypothetical: it led to real policies of sterilization, forced euthanasia, and, in the Nazi case, genocide. That historical fact should force every thoughtful reader to ask whether the metaphysical ground for those policies — a worldview that reduces persons to adaptive traits — is tenable.

The Philosophical Problem — Evolution Cannot Justify Equality

The ethical consequences of Darwinian evolution reach far beyond biology.  They strike at the root of morality itself.  If humanity is a product of blind natural processes with no divine origin or design, then there is no rational basis for affirming that every human life has equal value.  Equality becomes an emotional preference, not a moral fact.  The principle of survival of the fittest contradicts the principle of equal worth.

Darwin’s framework reduces human beings to complex animals competing for survival.  Natural selection rewards strength, speed, and adaptability; it has no concern for compassion or justice.  To insist that all humans are morally equal is to smuggle in a moral axiom foreign to evolution itself.  Evolution explains why we might feel empathy — perhaps as a cooperative survival mechanism — but it cannot explain why empathy should be morally binding or why cruelty should be objectively wrong.

The philosopher Arthur Leff captured this tension in his famous essay Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law:

“If there is no God, then everything is permitted. There is no way to get from an ‘is’ to an ‘ought.’”

Arthur A. Leff, “Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law,” Duke Law Journal 1979, no. 6 (December 1979): 1229–49.

Darwinism describes what is—how organisms change and compete—but it offers no grounding for what ought to be.  As soon as moral judgment enters the discussion, evolutionary naturalism has left its proper field.

This collapse of moral grounding is not merely theoretical.  Friedrich Nietzsche, taking Darwin’s implications seriously, rejected equality outright.  He called it a “Christian fiction,” suitable only for slaves who resent strength.  In The Antichrist he wrote,

“Equality before God is a denial of life.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, trans. H. L. Mencken (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1920), §62.

Nietzsche saw what modern secular humanists ignore: if natural selection governs existence, then power and domination are virtues, not vices.  To be consistent, an evolutionist cannot condemn the domination of the weak by the strong as “wrong”; it is simply nature’s way.

By contrast, the Christian worldview insists that every person possesses equal worth because every person is made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27).  Our dignity does not depend on ability, intelligence, or usefulness; it is intrinsic, bestowed by a Creator.  Remove that divine foundation, and “human rights” float in midair, untethered to any ultimate authority.  As C. S. Lewis warned in Mere Christianity:

“If the universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning; just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark.”

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperOne, 1952), 41.

In other words, our very capacity to recognize moral truth points beyond material nature to a moral Lawgiver.

Philosopher Alvin Plantinga similarly argues that

if our minds are the product of unguided evolution, we have no reason to trust them as truth-tracking instruments.  Evolution selects for survival, not for rationality or morality.

Alvin Plantinga, “Naturalism Defeated?” in Naturalism Defeated? Essays on Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, ed. James Beilby (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 1–12.

The assertion that “all humans are equal” therefore becomes a metaphysical orphan—a moral instinct that only makes sense if grounded in divine design.

Thus, the moral ideals secular society claims to cherish — equality, human rights, and compassion — cannot survive within a Darwinian worldview.  They are borrowed capital from Christianity.  Without the Creator, equality becomes an illusion; without the image of God, human dignity becomes sentiment; and without moral absolutes, racism becomes just another evolutionary strategy.  Only the Christian doctrine of creation provides the coherent foundation for saying, with conviction and consistency, that every person matters infinitely.

Christian Theism Alone Grounds Human Equality

The claim that “all men are created equal” is not a product of science, reason, or evolution — it is a theological truth.  The modern ideal of universal human rights rests squarely on the Christian doctrine of imago Dei — that every human being bears the image of God.  This single biblical truth has done more to advance equality, dignity, and compassion than any other worldview in history.  By contrast, Darwinian evolution, grounded in the logic of struggle and survival, cannot coherently affirm human equality.  Christianity begins where Darwinism ends — with the assertion that human life is sacred not because of its utility or strength, but because it reflects divine glory.

The foundational text is clear:

“So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” (Genesis 1:27, ESV)

From the first chapter of Scripture, human dignity is absolute, universal, and inherent.  It does not depend on intellect, race, age, or ability.  Every person, regardless of social or biological difference, shares the same divine image.  This theological truth provided the moral ammunition that eventually dismantled slavery and racism.  Abolitionists like William Wilberforce, John Newton, and Frederick Douglass appealed not to evolutionary biology but to divine revelation: all humans are of “one blood” (Acts 17:26).  As Wilberforce declared in his 1791 speech before Parliament, “You may choose to look the other way, but you can never again say that you did not know.”  His argument was not political convenience; it was Christian conviction.

Historians have consistently affirmed this link between Christianity and the birth of human rights.  Sociologist Rodney Stark notes:

“The abolition of slavery was due entirely to Christian theology — not Enlightenment philosophy, and certainly not evolutionary science.  It was Christians who declared slavery sin because they believed that all humans are made in the image of God.”

Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 291.

Even the language of “human rights” that pervades secular democracies has a theological DNA.  The historian Tom Holland, once an atheist, admits that his study of Western moral history led him to Christianity’s unavoidable influence:

“To live in a Western country is to live in a society still saturated by Christian assumptions — that the poor and weak have value, that all humans are equal, that the first shall be last.  These are not natural truths; they are theological ones.”

Tom Holland, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (London: Little, Brown, 2019), xxiii.

By contrast, where evolutionary or materialistic worldviews have dominated, the result has never been moral progress but moral catastrophe.  Marxism, Nazism, and Social Darwinism each reduced human beings to biological or economic categories.  None produced a philosophy of equality; all produced systems of domination.  The 20th century stands as witness to what happens when a society discards imago Dei and embraces the logic of natural selection — over 100 million lives lost to ideologies that treated humans as expendable animals.

Christianity, however, gives an immutable foundation for equality.  Jesus’ ministry shattered social barriers: He touched lepers, conversed with Samaritans, honored women, and forgave criminals.  His cross declared the priceless worth of every soul.  The Apostle Paul made this theological revolution explicit:

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28, ESV)

No evolutionary theory could ever produce such a moral vision.  Equality is not a conclusion drawn from nature but a revelation received from God.  The Christian worldview alone grounds the claim that every person — regardless of race, nation, or circumstance — is infinitely valuable because they bear the mark of their Creator.

“Human equality is not self-evident in nature; it is self-evident only in the light of divine creation.”

Ravi Zacharias, Can Man Live Without God? (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1994), 145.

So far, we have now seen that evolution’s claim to explain humanity collapses under its own weight. Darwinism cannot tell us why every life matters but Christianity can.

In this part, we have demonstrated that the Christian worldview alone provides a coherent moral foundation: one blood, one image, one Creator.

From Genesis to the Gospel, human worth flows not from biological fitness but from divine imprint. Equality is not an evolutionary discovery; it is a theological revelation.

In Part 3, we move from moral foundations to ultimate meaning. We will expose the modern hypocrisy of secular humanists who borrow Christian ethics while denying its Author, and we’ll unfold the Bible’s timeless vision: one blood, one race, one Redeemer. Finally, we’ll conclude with a powerful call to see how Christ restores what evolution dehumanizes.