In a review in Reason magazine, Ronald Bailey trashes Ben Stein’s anti-Darwinist documentary, Expelled —and, by all accounts, with some justification. I haven’t seen the film, but it doesn’t sound persuasive. Still, this passage from Bailey caught my eye:
In the film, the mathematician David Berlinski says, “Darwinism is not a sufficient condition for a phenomenon like Nazism, but I think it was a necessary one.” Berlinski is suggesting that scientific materialism undermines the notion that human beings occupy a special place in the universe. If humans aren’t special, goes this line of thinking, then morals don’t apply.
But people through the millennia have found all sorts of justifications for murdering each other, including plunder, nationalism, and, yes, religion.
Hmmm. It’s like Bailey is testing us with a game of Name That Fallacy.
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