Creationism - National Center for Science Education

This is the disheartening kind of argument that I faced at Headquarters; argument logically constructed on
premises chosen by the other fellow. Add to these assumed premises of the Allmacht of struggle and
selection based on it, and the contemplation of mankind as a congeries of different, mutually irreconcilable
kinds, like the different ant species, the additional assumption that the Germans are the chosen race, and
German social and political organization the chosen type of human community life, and you have a wall of
logic and conviction that you can break your head against but can never shatter—by headwork. You long
for the muscles of Samson. [1917:29-30]
Previously a pacifist, Kellogg became convinced that Germany had to be defeated totally
in order to eradicate this rapacious militarism. His book was widely cited by
fundamentalists as proof that evolutionism leads inexorably to “might makes right”
militarism. But Kellogg himself emphasized—and this, significantly, the fundamentalists
never mentioned—that the “struggle for existence” of natural selection is only one aspect
of biological evolution, and that the German officers, by worshiping this one aspect as the
whole of evolution and as the basis for their social and moral philosophy, were not doing
justice to biological evolution. For instance:
Altruism—or mutual aid, as the biologists prefer to call it, to escape the implication of assuming too much
consciousness in it—is just as truly a fundamental biologic factor of evolution as is the cruel, strictly selfregarding,
exterminating kind of struggle for existence with which the Neo-Darwinists try to fill our eyes
and ears, to the exclusion of the recognition of all other factors. [1917:27-28]
And Kellogg, in many other works, repeatedly emphasized the “limitations of science,”
and that, contra the fundamentalists and many others, morality and philosophy were not
derivable from science. Nevertheless, the fundamentalists who appealed to Kellogg’s
Headquarters Nights were correct in that this Allmacht version of evolutionism and
invocation of inexorable biological law was indeed how these German officers—and a
great many others in other nations—interpreted evolutionary theory and its implications
regarding society, politics, morals and religion. William Jennings Bryan echoed
widespread fundamentalist belief when he asserted that “Darwin’s doctrine leads
logically to war,” and that it laid the foundations for the World War, the “bloodiest war in
history” (1922:133, 125). Germany’s appalling condition was caused by infection by
evolution: a fate which the fundamentalists were determined to prevent in America.
Before the Great War, Bryan doubted evolution, but hardly made an issue of it; after the
war, he campaigned indefatigably against it, preaching that it destroyed Christianity and
justified war.
T.T. Martin, in Hell and the High Schools, said:
We gave our sons to save the world from being crushed by the Germans, and we did well; but they had
already stealthily crept in and captured our citadels of learning, and now they and their dupes are damning
our children. The soul of one high school boy or girl sent to hell by your German evolution is worth more
than the bodies of all our brave boys killed in the great war in Europe. But they are being sent to hell by
the thousands, as I shall show. [Quoted in Gatewood 1969:241]
“It has been asked,” wrote Alexander Hardie in Evolution: Is It Philosophical,
Scientific or Scriptural?:
Where do theories go when they die in Germany? It is answered: They go to England. And when they die
in England, where do they go? They go to America. And when they die in America, where do they go?
Well, it appears to some that they are smuggled into our institutions of learning and that the carrion is fed to