Tuesday, September 25, 2007

In God’s Image

The quote below is from an aricle called “Darwin’s Graveyards” by Edward T. Oakes. The article is a review of a book called From Darwin to Hitler. The book places Hitler in the stream of Social Darwinist thought. I think the quote is interesting because it reminds us of the diffculty of justifying ethics untheologically. I have serious doubts that it is even possible to do so.

 

“Alasdair MacIntyre famously said in After Virtue that every debate about moral issues in contemporary society can be boiled down to a debate between Nietzsche and Aristotle. Perhaps another way of phrasing that same insight would be to say that every contemporary ethical dispute is really a debate between Charles Darwin and Pope John Paul II, especially in his encyclicals Veritatis Splendor and Evangelium Vitae. One either regards man as a complicated bag of cells wrapped in skin, whose only law is the biological imperative of vitality, self-preservation, and procreation; or one sees man as created in the image and likeness of God, whose innate and divinely bestowed dignity absolutely forbids any metaphysically significant division in human society between fit and unfit, strong and weak, white and black, Aryan and Semite, Greek and Jew, adult and fetus, those new born and those near death.”

-Edward T. Oakes 

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