Although I’m not sure Darwin would approve, many people would like to make him the patron saint of… their religion? Richard Dawkins wrote “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” Which, I can see, would be quite a contribution.

There are, of course, a host of reasons to question whether Richard Dawkins really has a good claim to his fulfillment. But challenging other peoples’ intellectual foundations for their world view is hardly worth our time – and is perhaps none of our business – unless those views have profound implications that affect us all.

That is exactly the case with evolution and the atheism that rests on it.

It is interesting that these two men were born on the same day. Because their lives touched upon the same issue – in opposite ways. Abraham Lincoln opposed slavery and led a nation of people opposed to slavery into a war to stop that slavery. In the end, 620,000 Americans lost their lives, more American casualties than in all other wars combined. They went to war with a notion that all men were created equal and that no man should own another, regardless of the color of his skin. It was a notion founded upon the belief in a Creator God.

In 1859 Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species – the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The book was such a success it sold out the first day. Within a short time the notion of “Favoured Races” and unfavored races had captured the intellectual community of Europe and America. Darwin himself wrote in The Descent of Man that those with dark skin were “degraded” and said that he would rather be descended from a monkey than from such a “savage”. Within a few years social Darwinism would justify deplorable working conditions for the poor, aborigines in Australia would be killed as subhuman and the leading American paleontologist would be making statements such as, “The Negroid stock is even more ancient than the Caucasian and Mongolian … . The standard of intelligence of the average adult Negro is similar to that of the eleven year old of the species Homo sapiens.” Within 80 years of Darwin’s publication the greatest war on earth would be raging in an attempt to prove which European race was superior and destined to prevail.

But if Darwin had published his ideas when he first developed them rather than waiting until 1859 he might have prevented one war. It is doubtful a nation would have gone to war to prevent the slavery of “degraded” individuals belonging to an inferior race. Perhaps even Lincoln himself would have hesitated in the face of such an audacious but subtly flattering (to the white man) explanation of racial origins and racial inferiority.

“We hold these truths to be self evident – that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights…” Rights and respect for our fellow man come from a Creator. Anything that founds an intellectually fulfilled atheism will not bring about a respect for the value and equality of every human life. And it will never move one man to die for the rights of another.