It All Comes Down to "Who Says?"

The following article, It All Comes Down to “Who Says?”, was first published on The American Vision.

While researching for my new book It All Comes Down to “Who Says?,” I came across the eugenic views of Julian Huxley (1887–1975). Julian and his brother Aldous (1894–1963), author of Brave New World and The Doors of Perception, ^[1] were the grandsons of Thomas Huxley, the earliest defender of Charles Darwin’s new atheist theory of human origins.

Julian Huxley wrote, “We are as much a product of blind forces as is the falling of a stone to earth or the ebb and flow of the tides. We have just happened, and man was made flesh by a long series of singularly beneficial accidents.” ^[2] According to Huxley, what is the source of our uniqueness and purpose? They arise from the human will. Accordingly, Huxley wrote that “purposes in life are made, not found.” This is hardly a scientific approach. He wrote The Uniqueness of Man in 1940. The American edition was titled Man Stands Alone. True, man is unique. He does stand alone when compared to that of “birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures” (Rom. 1:23). But why? Who ultimately says? What separates humans from every other creature in the cosmos? Evolution can’t tell us.

This is why the doctrine of creation is fundamental to understanding the world and our place in it. It’s why the Bible begins with “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). We are unique because we are created in God’s image (1:26–27). Because we are created in God’s image, we are bound by the character of His image. Adam and Eve were created with a moral boundary. Take that away, and anything goes because everything is unanchored by any outside moral authority.

Given that morality cannot be found in “blind forces,” falling stones, or “the ebb and flow of the tides,” it’s possible to claim that anything goes because who’s to say otherwise? It’s not surprising that Huxley was a life-long supporter of eugenics. He was the President of the British Eugenics Society from 1959 to 1962. Huxley justified his eugenic beliefs by making the created order foundational to ethics, the very thing the apostle Paul argued would lead to the rejection of God’s design and purpose of His creation (1:27) with the result that

God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them. For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.

For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error.

And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper, being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; they are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful; and although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them (Rom. 1:24–32).

Huxley wrote, “no one doubts the wisdom of managing the germ-plasm ^[3] of agricultural stocks, so why not apply the same concept to human stocks?” This is a modern-day invention of evil by making what happens with animals and the development of new varieties of wheat and cattle the moral reference point for what humans can do with other humans. If man can use breeding techniques to make a better breed of cattle, then who’s to say the same approach can’t be taken with evolved humans?

He believed that social status was a sign of evolutionary fitness and that people belonged to lower classes because they were genetically inferior. From this point of view, population studies revealed a worrying trend. People of the lower classes were reproducing more than prominent members of society. If this continued, their undesirable genes would soon overwhelm the species.” In his book The Uniqueness of Man Huxley wrote, “The lowest strata are reproducing too fast. Therefore . . . they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilization.”

At the time, Huxley was serving as vice president of the British Eugenics Society, whose membership included a number of prominent British scientists and thinkers. The society had been founded by Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton (1822–1911) and headed by Darwin’s son Leonard. While the emphasis of the society was mostly on positive eugenics, others had few moral qualms about the negative direction things were taking. The measures Huxley proposed in Great Britain were actually being carried out—not only in Nazi Germany, but also in the United States. The U.S. eugenics movement arose from a long tradition of prejudice against the poor and the mentally impaired…. ^[4]

There were others with a more upfront approach. Consider Marie Stopes (1880–1958) who was a prominent “women’s rights campaigner and the first female academic at the University of Manchester” in Great Britain. “Among her writings, Stopes called for new laws that allowed the ‘hopelessly rotten and racially diseased’ to be sterilised and wrote fiercely against interracial marriage.” Marie Stopes International is the international version of Planned Parenthood. Even the abortionists are getting discombobulated over Stopes’ eugenic views. The pro-abortion organization has changed the name of its pro-abortion organization to simply “MSI Reproductive Choices.” Stopes name has been flushed down the memory hole.

Given the foundational operating assumptions of atheism, there is nothing morally wrong in breeding out the “hopelessly rotten and racially diseased.” Ultimately, if the creature is ultimate, then those creatures at the top of the food chain, so to speak, can do what they please since there are no ultimate moral standards or an ultimate Judge to restrict such policies and actions.

Why has Marie Stopes International distanced itself from its racist founder? Money!

Since 2017, MSI has missed out on about $30m (£22m) a year in US funding because it refused to sign the Mexico City policy, or “global gag rule”, which Donald Trump reenacted when he took office. The policy prevents overseas NGOs that receive US money from providing any abortion services. President-elect Joe Biden is expected to rescind the policy in January.

Remember all those anti-abortion anti-Trump “Evangelicals for Biden,” here is the rotten fruit of their labor.

1. The rock group “The Doors” took its name from the title of Huxley’s book The Doors of Perception.
2. Julian Huxley, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (London: London: Allen & Unwin, 1942), 576.
3. The hereditary material transmitted to offspring through the germ cells.
4. Russ Hodge, The Future of Genetics: Beyond the Human Genome Project (New York Facts on File, 2010), 63–64.

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