Lev Navrozov
Friday, Jan. 3, 2003

My column of Dec. 27, "A Christmas Carol: Christ and Darwin," received over 60 enthusiastic e-mails from NewsMax readers and from listeners of Barry Farber's show on which Barry and I spoke about Christ versus Darwin on the same day from 10 to 11 p.m. Barry has always been generous in his evaluation of my writings, but this time he surpassed himself. One reader, Alvin J. Schmidt, wrote:

"I very much appreciated your piece on Christianity. As I read it, I was wondering whether you have heard about my book "Under the Influence: How Christianity Transformed Civilization," published by Harper/Collins/Zondervan, 2001? This book documents countless contributions that we today in the West and elsewhere enjoy but usually don't understand that had it not been for Christianity we would not have those many benefits. The secular media of course is largely ignorant of the many things Christianity has given to the world."

Naturally, I asked the author to send me a review copy of his book to review in NewsMax.com and reflect it in my book with due attribution. On the next day I received the following response:

"I am putting a copy of the book in today's mail. Many kind thanks for asking me to send the book to you. A blessed New Year. Alvin Schmidt"

Why is this book so important, in my opinion, even before I have read it?

A reader from Alabama (perhaps he does not want his name publicly disclosed) wrote about his son, a computer engineer, who, for example, "insists that the Earth is 5,000 years old" because this is what the Bible says and those who disagree are "non-believers headed for hell."

Thus speak the "creationists." On the other hand, the "evolutionists" say that since the Bible is not abreast of today's geology, astronomy, biology and other sciences, both the Old Testament and Christ's teaching are outdated, false and worthless. They forget that the notions like conscience or compassion are outside any science and as new in the 21st century as they were in the 1st.

They glorify Darwin, though even at the beginning of the 20th century it was clear to Henri Bergson, a great French thinker, that Darwin's theory of evolution was as wrong in biology when Darwin was setting it down on paper as the assertion that the Earth is 5,000 years old became wrong in geology millennia after it was uttered.

Both "creationists" and "evolutionists" forget that notions like conscience and compassion do not motivate man instinctively as do greed, vanity, hunger, sex or care for the offspring. Nor is conscience or compassion a scientific phenomenon that can be seen with a telescope or a microscope or verified empirically or experimentally like Newton's laws or Einstein's theory of relativity.

Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia demonstrated what happens without the teaching of Christ to the notions like conscience or compassion that Christ ushered forth so miraculously more than 19 centuries ago.

"I want to liberate man from conscience that maims him," said Hitler, quoting Nietzsche, a disciple of Darwin. The most terrible medieval Russian czar, Ivan the Terrible, killed those who obstructed his absolutism, but as, at least nominally, a Christian, he was conscience-stricken and prayed for forgiveness. While Stalin killed suspected opponents of his absolutism on a scale that Ivan the Terrible had not seen even in his worst nightmares, to Stalin conscience or compassion were "class notions" – they existed with respect to "us," and not with respect to "our enemies," for whom there could be no mercy or pity.

As for China, it has never been a Christian country, and a couple of millennia ago, when dynasties changed, the new dynasty buried alive 5 million officials of the previous dynasty. What pity? It was all rational, scientific, cool-headed. What's wrong with burying alive "x" million human organisms? About two millennia later Darwin explained that billions of organisms perish, while others survive as fitter for survival and this is how man gradually evolved in the process of evolution.

One response to my column "A Christmas Carol: Christ and Darwin" was critical with respect to my treatment of Darwin. Merrick from Fairbanks, Alaska, wrote that he had "enjoyed your other columns on issues not pertaining to evolution." He explained to me "evolution," which I had allegedly "failed" to understand or describe:

"Let me offer one, very simple example for you. Do you ever wonder why various bacteria become resistant to certain antibiotics? This is a concern in the medical community. We worry about finding drugs to treat certain antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Why is this a problem? Evolution. When millions of bacteria are exposed to an antibiotic, it takes only one that has a slightly different genetic make-up to survive, and reproduce. Survival of the fittest – the ability to adapt to a changing environment. Evolution."

Merrick will not, I hope, be offended if I say that I heard hundreds of such examples in the Soviet school lessons of Darwinism when I was 12 years old. The trouble with these examples was and is that in Darwin's evolution, organisms evolve, due to the death of those unfit for survival, from lower to higher species up to mammals, to the monkey and finally to man, who evolved from the monkey, as Darwin boldly asserted.

Well, in the times of Darwin, man, and certainly the British of the British Empire, seemed to be the fittest for survival. But with China, which had developed nuclear weapons by 1964 and since 1986 has been developing post-nuclear weapons, man, and certainly the Westerners, are the most endangered species.

The antibiotic-resistant bacteria that Merrick cites do not constitute a higher-organized species compared with those bacteria that were killed by an antibiotic. Indeed, they do not constitute even a separate species – tomorrow they will be killed by another antibiotic, and those who will survive will be resistant to it. Some people may be resistant to one of thousands of infectious diseases – that does not make them a new species, such as "Homo resistant to plague."

In medieval plague epidemics, millions of people died of plague. Those who survived were plague-resistant. But that did not make them a new Homo sapiens – superman, as higher-organized than man as man is higher-organized than the monkey, from which man evolved, according to Darwin.

Ironically, Merrick's example I quote above is good for illustrating my proposition that lower organisms are fitter for survival than higher organisms, and hence Darwin saw the history of the organic world upside down. Merrick says that "millions of bacteria" are killed by an antibiotic, and it only takes one," fitter for survival, "to survive and reproduce," that is, produce then and there, in a kind of chain reaction, new millions or billions of bacteria resisting that antibiotic.

Let us suppose that all Westerners have been killed by the Chinese Weapon No. 3 except one couple. Can one couple produce then and there millions or billions of new human beings? It takes 16 years for one human embryo to become an adult human being whether the process starts within a woman's uterus or as a clone in a test tube.

Yes, man is infinitely higher organized than bacteria. Man has created philosophy, the arts and sciences, technology, civilization. Yet man is less fit for survival than bacteria, who will perhaps survive man, which will be the final proof that Darwin, who postulated the survival of the fittest for survival as the moving force of the evolution from the lowest organisms to the highest, and finally man, has turned reality upside down, and that has done much in Christendom (the West and Russia) to foster strife (struggle for the survival of the fittest), ruthlessness and wars, all contrary to the teaching of Christ.

Men of genius often have poor health, live in poverty, and hence are less fit for survival than healthy and prosperous mediocrities. Let the men of genius perish? As Nietzsche said: "If one is falling, push him."

Tragicomically, if this Darwinian-Nietzschean approach had been applied to Nietzsche, he would have perished as unfit for survival – he was a sick, lonely man who lived on a university pension and finally had to be kept at public expense in a psychiatric asylum. He kept surviving owing to charity, which originated from Christianity, which he called the worst evil in recorded history.

Compare Hitler, who was a decorated brave soldier in WWI, and the frail Einstein, who was horrified by the mere prospect of being a soldier and stayed out of Germany to avoid the draft. But Hitler did not win his war for world domination because Einstein and several other Jewish physicists emigrated to the United States, which developed, owing to them, the "atom bomb," while Germany did not, no matter how many Germans, including Hitler, were the fittest for survival.

Hitler and his mistress-wife committed suicide, as did Goebbels and his wife, who poisoned their children. So, they themselves did away with their own lives, and Mrs. Goebbels destroyed even her offspring for all the Nazi vaunted fitness for survival.

My NewsMax.com columns have been accompanied by my proposal to publishers to send them by slow-mail the 130-page beginning of my book, "Out of Moscow and Into New York: A Life in the Geostrategically Lobotomized West in the Age of Terrorism and Post-Nuclear Superweapons."

Though the proposal was addressed to publishers, hundreds of readers sent me e-mails expressing their appreciation of my columns and requesting that I send them my book, or at least the beginning of it. I have decided to meet their wishes by posting on my Web site my book in weekly installments. Those interested, please let me know (navlev@cloud9.net) and you will be informed by e-mail as to the link to my Web site.

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