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In May of 2007, three Republican Party candidates for President — Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee and Tom Tancredo — proclaimed that they did not believe in the existence of evolution. Now that Alan Keyes has joined these figures as a Republican Party candidate for the presidency, we have four politicians who want to run the country but do not believe in the existence of evolution. Here are some of Alan Keyes’ thoughts on the subject:

Preserving right order in families has, in fact, been an essential element in the understanding of right and wrong in almost every decent society that has ever existed. Any account of such order, of course, depends in turn on an understanding of the male and the female, and of their different roles and responsibilities in relation to one another.

But according to the theory of evolution, the basic biological attributes of our nature have no significance except as particular accidents at which evolution has arrived. How, then, is it possible to ascribe moral significance to them? Evolutionary doctrine removes the basis for making moral judgments about human behavior. Once it is denied that any will or moral being informed the creation of our bodily natures, it is necessarily also denied that there is any moral significance to the biological distinctions that were the consequence of that will. Therefore family, marriage, and the decent constraints on human sexual behavior that have been understood to be essential to society, all seem like totally arbitrary impositions on human will unless, of course, they can be justified by their utility in helping us to avoid immediate inconveniences….

Evolutionary theory is the natural ally of all those forces that seek to undermine and destroy traditional social structures, precisely because it appears to relieve us of the acknowledgement of a transcendent authority. Accordingly, it destroys the basis for the possibility of objective truth in anyway relevant to our social and moral affairs….

I am confident that defenders of the belief that nature contains a divinely-crafted order have little to fear from an open and principled debate. What we must not do is barter away our commitment to the central features of rightly-ordered human life because of a “scientific” theory that remains only questionably established, but which is being used by its non-scientific proponents to intimidate us. We must remain confident in the goodness of the natural order, in our reason which discerns that order and in the God who is the author of both.

Alan Keyes’ assertions are two-fold:

1. That his God is the author of biology, that believers in creationism will win any “principled” debate, and that the theory of evolution is “questionably established.”

2. That evolution should be rejected as a theory because without the creating power of a divine authority, there’s no reason to obey the moral commandments that are supposed to have been established by that divine authority.

The first assertion is a characterization of the current state of science, and it suffices to say that Alan Keyes is at variance with the vast majority of biological scientists, undergraduates who have participated in fruit fly lab experiments, and patients who agree to take different sets of antibiotics than they would have thirty years ago.

The second assertion shows a weakness in Alan Keyes’ moral thinking. He begins with a set of authoritarian moral prescriptions that he feels must be agreed to, and from a need to justify his authoritarianism adheres to a view of the universe at odds with empirical observations. Rather than observing what the world is and thinking about the moral implications of that, Alan Keyes lets his psychological need for certainty dictate which observations of the world he will accept and which he won’t.

Alan Keyes isn’t alone among authoritarian Republicans in making this kind of argument — Ken Ham has made the same argument in writings on behalf of the American Family Association. With his second-hand, second-rate rejections of scientific observation, Alan Keyes fits snugly underneath the Republican umbrella — which is an indication that you may want to seek your own shelter elsewhere.

(Source: RenewAmerica column by Alan Keyes, July 14 2001)