If there’s a scientific idea that has been more subject to deadly abuse than Darwinian theory, I’m not aware of it. Are you? Now along comes the latest alleged would-be Trump assassin, Ryan Wesley Routh. The accused gunman wrote a self-published book citing “natural selection” as a rationale for doing what he’s charged with trying to do as the former President golfed. Routh, he says of himself, was a Trump voter in 2016. According to NBC News, he

came to regret it after Trump made what he called a “tremendous blunder” in 2018 and withdrew the U.S. from the Iran nuclear deal….

“You are free to assassinate Trump as well as me for that error in judgement and the dismantling of the deal,” Routh wrote.

Then he added, “No one here in the U.S. seems to have the balls to put natural selection to work or even unnatural selection.” [Emphasis added.]

I doubt that cogitating about natural selection led him to the Trump golf course. More likely, as with eugenics and Nazi racial theorizing and on and on, it served as a rationale for what he wanted to do, whatever it may have been that really drove him. It’s no surprise that Darwinism — a theory about progress through death, after all, and offering no support for cosmic meaning — has proved so popular with people wishing to wrap viciousness in the mantle of science.

Whatever may be the truth in the debate about Darwinian evolution versus intelligent design, from the former you would expect dark consequences. Yes, design is crucial to traditional theism, and theists have done, and still do, many horrific things. But the ethos that would most logically come from recognizing the design in life, every life, is the very opposite of what you’d expect from Darwinism.