The "Pious Lie" has a long history in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. In its true sense, it is a lie used to protect someone from harm, as when Rahab hid the Israelite spies, but told the officials they had escaped over the wall. However, many Christians are not above telling lies for other, less noble purposes. Austin Cline, writing on about.com, commented on one such lie:
It looks for all the world like another made-up quote that one sees so often attributed to humanists, atheists, and scientists -- a "pious lie" used by many religious believers to make them feel better about themselves and superior to everyone else. Why do they think that they can get away with stuff like that? Well, because they can -- it's a rare believer who ever raises a challenge to such things when they read it.One such "pious lie" Creationists have used is intended to equate evolution with racism. Some are straightforward about it, accusing Darwin of having racist beliefs. Others apply layman's understandings of evolution as "progress" to say the theory of evolution has some humans superior to others, and is thus racist. To dispense with such lies, then, we must take the two versions separately.
First, did Darwin have racist beliefs? Probably -- he was, after all, a Victorian Englishman. Racism was normal in Victorian England; the Victorians considered themselves the apex of civilization, which is an inherently racist idea. It is only to be expected that Darwin, coming from this culture, would have shared in its values and ideas.
Where, then, does this leave the missionaries of Victorian times? Missions work in that era was inextricably intertwined with the notion of "the White Man's Burden," that is, the idea that white Europeans -- being the apex of civilization -- had a duty to bring "civilization" and all its benefits to the benighted "savages." Missionaries throughout Victorian times did more than just preach the Gospel; they also taught the "primitive" peoples the ways of the white man. Christian converts were expected to leave their traditional lifeways and take up wage labor or European-style farming, and to join the monetary economy.
Now, would it be fair to say that, because these early missions were steeped in racism, that therefore all evangelists are racists, and that evangelism is inherently racist? No? Then neither is it fair to smear evolution with that brush, merely because Darwin partook of the racism of his day. Austin Cline again:
It is interesting to read someone trying to talk about the "heart of the (insert the name of some group)." It hearkens back to the day when whites would regularly talk about "the morals of the Negro" or "the politics of the Jew," lumping everyone from some group into a single, monolithic entity. Such statements would be immediately recognized as vile bigotry.
The other proposition deserves more consideration. At first glance, it might seem to have some merit. David Catchpole, in his web article "The People Who Forgot Time (and Much Else, Too)" used the example of the Mlabri people of Thailand. The Mlabri are hunter-gatherers, who at first were assumed to have continued their way of life since prehistory. But the Tin Prai, a tribe of small-scale agriculturalists, have an oral history in which the Mlabri originated from them, as a breakaway group. DNA evidence confirmed that the Mlabri are indeed descended from a very small founding group, possibly as few as one female and one male.
All this is accepted science. But then Catchpole goes far outside the bounds of science. Because the Mlabri hunter-gatherers are descended from farmers, he extrapolates this to try to cast doubt on the whole notion that hunting-gathering, on the whole, was earlier than farming. Why would this matter? Simply because, as a Creationist, Catchpole needs to believe that a literal Adam and Eve were farmers. If the earliest humans were hunter-gatherers, that would disprove the literal reading of Genesis.
Even so, this would not necessarily lead to the conclusion that evolution was a racist theory. After all, the Mlabri hunter-gatherers, the Tin Prai farmers, and the Thai city dwellers are all of the same Malay racial stock. We cannot draw racial conclusions by comparing them with each other. In order to accuse evolution of racism, then, Catchpole must go further. He must resort to a common layman's misunderstanding of evolution as a synonym for "progress." Why else would he say, "[evolutionists have] replaced the true history of man with a story that implies some people are ‘less evolved’ (and thus less human) than others—fuelling racism"?
I have never encountered a Creationist who actually understood evolution. Catchpole is no exception. He has based his conclusion on a non-scientific misunderstanding of evolution. Biological evolution is not about progress or regress. It is about maximising a given organism's survival in its particular environment. The human species evolved on a path of enlarging cranial capacity and finely dexterous fingers, allowing us to invent and use tools (without which we would be nearly helpless in nature). It has turned out to be a successful strategy on land. But so has the rat's evolutionary path of rapid reproduction, omnivorous diet, and skulking ways. Human and rat are equally evolved down their respective paths. Let us remember, too, that two-thirds of the planet is ocean, which humans have never successfully inhabited. Shall we say, then, that the whale is "more evolved" than the human, because it can live over a larger area of planet earth? And if we consider sheer numbers of individuals, the bacteria must surely be "superior," because even in our own bodies, bacterial cells outnumber our own cells ten to one. Every organism is equally evolved. But this is a difficult concept to explain to non-scientists, steeped as they are in the ancient notion of the "Great Chain of Being."
The Great Chain of Being dates back to Plato and Aristotle, and, like so much else Greek, was quickly assimilated into early Christianity. Thus most laypersons in Western culture think of a hierarchy, with God at the top, then angels, then man, then "higher" animals, and so on in descending order down to inanimate minerals. It is a theological concept, not a scientific one; yet most non-scientists, in trying to think about evolution, get it hopelessly tangled in their notions of the Great Chain of Being. Catchpole has clearly done so, too, else he could not have thought evolution implied some people are "less evolved."
Secondly, we need to consider Catchpole's own possibly-racist bias. Is it not racist to assume that a Stone Age way of life implies "less evolved" than modern civilization? This was the racist thinking of those Victorian missionaries with their "white man's burden." It is unfortunate that we use the term "cultural evolution" to refer to the changes in human culture over time, because it opens the door to confusion with biological evolution; but since evolution simply means change over time, there is no other term to use. But cultural evolution is a separate process from biological evolution. All extant human cultures, whether Stone Age or Space Age, are all biologically the same; we are all Homo sapiens sapiens. Some cultures developed down a path away from hunter-gatherer life, others down a path that kept them in their original hunter-gatherer life, because that was suited to their environment. There is no need to assume that industrial culture is more "advanced" than hunter-gatherer cultures; indeed, one could argue the opposite. Aboriginal peoples inhabited Australia for 40,000 years as hunter-gatherers, developing languages rich in kinship terms, and their own storytelling and song traditions. Times of plenty and times of famine would have caused fluctuations in their populations; but averaged over time, their populations remained right about at the level their environment could support. Industrial culture, by contrast, can only sustain itself by depleting resources -- fossil fuels to run its machines, fossil aquifers to irrigate its farmland, mineral ores to supply metals and plastics. All these resources exist in finite quantities; when they become scarce and expensive, industrial civilzation will not be able to exist. Without its technological base, industrial culture's population cannot but collapse catastrophically. The hunter-gatherer way of life may prove to have been the wiser choice in the end. So why should we see the Mlabri as having "devolved" from the Tin Pat? There is no such scientific concept; all change over time is evolution, no matter its direction. (Incidentally, the word "devolve" actually means, "to transfer or delegate (a duty, responsibility, etc.) to or upon another; pass on," so let us henceforth avoid using it in discussions of evolution.)
Given the racist history of Christian missions throughout colonial times, it is only to be expected that some would want to shift blame somewhere else. Evolution is a handy scapegoat, since most laypersons do not understand it very well, and will easily believe any statement made with conviction, if it appeals to their existing beliefs. That Creationists are mostly preaching to the converted seems to make little difference -- as Cline noted earlier, it makes them feel better about themselves and superior to everyone else. Thus we get Catchpole accusing "evolutionists" of deliberately forgetting -- in his eyes, looking at the empirical evidence is "forgetting what the Bible says." Thus the trick of smoke and mirrors keeps his audience spellbound, distracting from inconvenient facts, making the uninformed feel superior to the scientists they do not understand, and defaming scientific theories to ensure his duped audience does not take an interest in looking deeper. Back again to Cline: "Why do they think that they can get away with stuff like that? Well, because they can -- it's a rare believer who ever raises a challenge to such things when they read it."
A faith that depends on such smoke and mirrors is a faith of lies; it can have come from none other than the Father of Lies.
