Every now and then, the irony of a particular news event provides keen insights for discerning truth and falsehood. In mid-October, the world witnessed just such an event when Darwinist and co-discoverer of the DNA molecule, Dr. James Watson, was quoted in England’s “Sunday Times” saying, “… all our social policies are based on the fact that (Africans’) intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says not really.” Dr. Watson also said that there was a natural desire that all human beings should be equal, but “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”

To say that Dr. Watson’s statement has upset some folks would be a vast understatement. But therein lies the rub. Dr. Watson is a Darwinist. Darwin’s famous book, “The Origin of Species,” was published in 1859 with a full title that reads: “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.” The Darwinian narrative claims that each class of organisms has its “favoured races,” the members of which enjoy some type of survival advantage, be it a physical characteristic, behavioral trait, or even intelligence. The not-so-favored races, of course, ultimately become extinct.

I’m not suggesting that those who believe in Darwinism condone racism. In fact, I’m quite willing to concede that they do not. But given their paradigm, that seems quite peculiar. Darwinism, after all, would naturally produce the expectation that some races would evolve differently from others, and that some races would be inferior to others. If Darwinism is as robust an explanation as Darwinists claim it is, we should not be surprised at the suggestion by a Darwinist that one race is less intelligent than another.

From a biblical perspective, however, all humans are equally valuable, created in the image of God. From that perspective, the intelligence that humans enjoy was part and parcel of the human “package” from day one. Of course, throughout history humans — some Christians included — have engaged in racism. But they have done so in spite of the Bible, not because of it. From a true biblical perspective, racism is excluded from the very first chapter of Genesis on; there simply is no accommodation for it. And as a bonus, a biblical perspective also provides an absolute, transcendent moral standard according to which I am expected to treat all humans equally and can justly regard racism as morally repugnant.

But the Darwinist claim, which I reject completely, is totally different: Human intelligence developed through evolutionary processes. Intelligence, so their story goes, came upon man incrementally. From that perspective Watson’s claim seems entirely reasonable, and it’s quite easy to understand why Dr. Watson wrote, “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically.” He was simply applying principles of Darwinism in a logically consistent manner. If intelligence is the product of evolution just like other characteristics, and the various races evolved differently, then why shouldn’t we expect to find that one race is more intelligent than the other? That such a thing is possible should be intuitively obvious to anyone sympathetic to Darwinism. After all, Darwinists have gone to great lengths to account for the advanced intelligence of humans in evolutionary terms. Are we now supposed to believe that intelligence is somehow exempt from Darwinian processes?

If that’s not bad enough, the Darwinist regards moral standards as something that emerged via evolutionary processes, that there is no transcendent moral standard. Our moral standards were invented by us and remain subject to amendment; they are not handed down to us from a supreme authority. But if this is so, then on what basis can Darwinists claim that racism is morally repugnant? Their own view strips them of the ability to register any credible disapproval of the thing they find so offensive.

Darwinists, therefore, have stumbled into a rather embarrassing predicament. In their zeal to push one agenda, they find themselves unwitting proponents of another agenda, one that they find quite distasteful. The great irony, however, is that in order to denounce racism, they really need to denounce Darwinism. Such irony ought to induce suspicion about the validity of Darwinism and renew interest in a biblical worldview.