Teachers are very important. Apart from parents they are probably the most serious formative influence on a young life. My history teacher was truly wonderful – cheerful, intelligent, inspirational and encouraging. On the other hand my science teachers – with one or two honourable exceptions, varied between the sadistic and the boring. Hence yours truly studying history and politics at the University of Edinburgh rather than biology and physics. Nonetheless, although I have no real scientific training, I have an interest in science, in particular the relationship between Christianity and science and the history thereof.

That relationship is something that remains of great interest to many others as well. A few years ago I was speaking at Spring Harvest on the subject of Christian perspectives on Creation, when I was approached by a man who introduced himself as a Christian biologist. He was very grateful that I had spoken of Hugh Miller, Thomas Chalmers and the 19th Century positive view of science held by the Free Church. He felt as a practising Christian that he was being forced to choose between one of two fundamentalisms – either you are a six 24 hour day, 6,000 year view person or you are a liberal anti-God evolutionist. It was a relief to him to meet a bible believing Christian who did not accept that antithesis.

Another time I asked someone from the Biblical Creation Society to come and speak at St Peter’s. It was a total disaster. I had asked the person concerned to concentrate on the main things and not to discuss in house debates such as the age of the earth. Over 150 people came (triple our normal congregation at that time) – the vast majority of whom were scientists. The speaker was awful. He concentrated on attacking and ridiculing science and modern science and then, despite my request, launched into a diatribe against Christians who did not accept a young earth. In the question and answer session afterwards he was destroyed by a young French atheistic scientist. It was a PR disaster for the Church and the gospel . As a result we had to hold a congregational meeting the next night to try and undo some of the damage. Never again!

I love reading some of the more populist scientific authors – Steve Jones (In the Blood), RJ Berry (God and the Biologist) and Stephen Jay Gould (Rocks of Ages). However I have a strong dislike for some of the more anti-Christian Fundamentalists such as Dawkins and Hawking. Their polemic and vitriol is quite disturbing. From the Christian side I have greatly enjoyed Alister McGrath (Science and Religion); David N. Livingstone (Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders) and especially the wonderful Kirsten Birkett (Unnatural Enemies). However I have to confess that I have really struggled with the likes of Morris and Whitcomb (The Genesis Flood) and am totally turned off by the abrasive, aggressive and self promoting Ken Ham. It seems to me that the attempt to prove the Bible from science is as untenable as the attempt to disprove it. Perhaps the best six day creationist material I have read is Douglas Kelly’s Creation and Change – although I find some of its arguments unconvincing.

All of this came to mind recently when reading about Bill Hamilton, the biologist whom Richard Dawkins once described as the closest one could come to meeting Darwin. Dawkins owed much of his book, The Selfish Gene, to Hamilton. His writing was according to Dawkins passionate, vivid and informed. After his death in March 2000 Dawkins declared, “He was kind, and humble, and gentle, and I loved him”.

Yet for all Hamilton’s brilliance there is a worrying and chilling aspect to his personality and work. He did not really like the human race. He once said that he had more sympathy for a lone fern than he did for a crying child. He argued that males were largely doomed to compete and that the purpose of sex was to clean out the gene pool by filtering out the useless and the weak. The low status male would be better off dead.

Everything in nature according to Hamilton could be explained as the outcome of competition between genes. He accepted the Gaia Hypothesis (earth as self-regulating goddess). He believed that Aids was caused by a human error – a polio vaccine manufactured with the kidneys of infected chimpanzees. A theory that has since been disproved. But most embarrassingly of all is his legacy in terms of the second volume of his autobiography. In this he argues for a radical programme of infanticide, eugenics and euthanasia in order to save the world. He believed that modern medicine was doing harm by allowing the weak to survive and thus preserving their genes. His two concrete examples of these are caesarean sections and the glasses worn by John Maynard Smith! Spectacles were a symbol of decadence within the gene pool and as for caesarean sections – women should be allowed one and then only to save the mothers life – after that they should be paid not to have any more children. Hamilton’s view of modern medicine was so eugenically based that he believed that the only acceptable forms of medicine were painkillers and surgery.

He declared that genocide was the result of overbreeding and that he grieves more for the death of one giant panda than he would for a ‘hundred unknown Chinese’. Whilst Dawkins and co might be prepared to write these views of as harmless eccentricities, Hamilton regarded them as proven scientific fact.

It is in his advocacy of euthanasia that Hamilton reaches a real low. Firstly he argued that the handicapped should be killed at birth. In arguing for what he termed ‘inclusive happiness’ he stated “I have little doubt that if trying to survive on Robinson Crusoe’s island with my wife I would indeed with my own hands kill a defective baby”. Then he talks about his brother who died in infancy. Hamilton argues that this was a good thing. “Had Jimmy been born today I imagine he might have been saved by an intestinal re-section, but I know from my mother’s attitude to all these matters that she would never have allowed it if she could have prevented it…Freya (his dog) deserves to be more loved and remembered than Jimmy to my mind, a statement I think my mother would have understood”.

Although Dawkins argued that if Hamilton had been alive then his friends would have persuaded him to tone down some of the politics, one of the editors, Mark Ridley, felt he could not remove the offensive bits as “it would be like editing Moses.” Dawkins himself has refused to review the book. Now what intrigues me here is how silent the media have been about this. Can you imagine what would happen if any churchman, never mind one of the leading figures, argued in such a way? ‘Christianity causes racism’, ‘Churchman argues for killing the weak’, would be the least of the headlines we would have to deal with. One also wonders why Dawkins has refused to review the book.

Which brings me back to the Church. It seems to me that we are in danger of straining at gnats and swallowing camels when it comes to our own in-house debates on these issues. It is social Darwinianism and the extreme views of Dawkins, Hamilton et all which are the real enemy. Not our fellow believers who differ with us about the age of the earth or just exactly how the world was made.

In more recent days I have been disturbed, not by those who advocate the six day 24 hour young earth position, but rather by those who use that issue as a shibboleth for orthodoxy. For example the sinister Gary North sending out a 40 page document on how to use the issue as a Trojan horse to get theonomy and a right wing agenda into the Presbyterian Church in the US. It is here that a sense of perspective, history and theology will help us against the potential divisiveness of our new fundamentalists, who seem more concerned about taking on their fellow Christians than they are about fighting the good fight.

And if we can get a grasp of the main issues we can and indeed must, take on the anti-Creation, anti-God, Hellish doctrines of our Biological Fascists. Perhaps this last phrase is unfair. It may be that the extreme social and political views of Hamilton are in fact an exception and that it would not be right to tar all biologists with the same brush. That is true. There are many fine biologists who either do not accept the presuppositions (and thus conclusions) of Hamilton’s social Darwinianism, or who have social and political views which are in contradiction of their biological views. But it is a fact that some of the leading biologists in the 20th century have been people who, because of their science, adopted extreme political views. Konrad Lorenz was an enthusiastic Nazi. JBS Haldane was a committed Stalinist and RA Fisher used to argue that civilisation was threatened because upper class women (i.e. ‘quality’) did not have enough babies. Hamilton may have been a ‘kind and gentle man’. Dawkins may be a wonderful human being. But then many of the Nazis would have appeared that way as well (have you sent the family photos of Goebbels and his children?). What was most disturbing about Nazism was not whether its main thinkers were ‘nice’ people but rather its philosophical foundation and the basis and justification it gave for cruelty and injustice. That is the same for Social Darwinianism where the elimination of the weak and the destruction of the handicapped is the very antithesis of Christianity and the real enemy of humanity.

One wonders why so many leading biologists have adopted such extreme social and political views, if they are not in fact a logical outworking of selfish gene Darwinianism? Perhaps its genetic?

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