by Bill Nugent
Article #186
Herbert George (H. G.) Wells (1866-1946) was one of the most brilliant yet ardently racist minds produced during the early years of the promotion of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Most of us are familiar with the name H. G. Wells in association with his famous book Outline of History (1920) which is still in print. He was also one of the earliest science fiction writers and some say he largely invented the genre. His books, The Time Machine (1895), The invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898) are classics.
Wells was born into a poor family in Bromley, Kent, England. Despite his humble background he was able to obtain a college education. He studied under Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) who destroyed Wells’ Christian faith. Huxley was known as Darwin’s bulldog because of his work in spreading Darwin’s theory of evolution through writings and lectures.
Wells began writing science fiction but soon ventured into more sinister venues. He began to apply Darwinistic principles to social problems and wrote books advocating extreme policy measures to solve humankind’s problems. His science fiction acumen equipped him to look to the future and to try to predict the future. His book Anticipations (1902) was his first nonfiction best seller and had an enormous impact on the thinking of European intellectuals.
In Anticipations, Wells outlined a brutal and merciless program of eugenics to eliminate the weak, deformed and mentally disabled. He advocated ‘mercy killing’ on a wide scale. His version of eugenics did not end with those who were merely weak but extended to “those swarms of blacks, and brown, and dirty white, and yellow people.” He advocated applying Darwinistic principles such as survival of the fittest and natural selection to eliminate the weak and ‘inferior’ from the human gene pool. Eugenicists disdained Christians who were regarded as working against natural selection by feeding the starving masses who would otherwise die off. Anticipations was reprinted in 1999. One wonders what kind of people would go to the trouble to republish such a racist tome.
Wells advocated not only killing but also extensive use of sterilization and birth control to reduce the population of those he considered inferior. He was by no means the only evolutionist to advocate such policies. Wells was unique in the eloquence of his promotion of eugenics. Wells greatly influenced Margaret Sanger, foundress of Planned Parenthood, who also became openly racist in her advocacy of eugenics. As a side note let me mention that Sanger’s son and his family lived in a large house down the street from where I grew up in Katonah, New York. He and his wife had six children. I wonder if they planned to have that many?
Wells advocated eugenics throughout his adult life though he later modified his views by dropping advocacy of mass killings and settled for the ‘soft eugenics’ policy of mass sterilization and birth control. He also became a firm believer in socialism and embraced Soviet Communism though he later rejected it.
One of his last books was A Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945) in which he expressed a very bleak pessimism regarding humankind’s future. He regarded humankind’s future as not salvation but extinction. This was a product of the extreme despair into which he lapsed toward the end of his life. Indeed his life is a tragic picture of a brilliant mind that turned away from God and embraced evolution with its implicit atheism. This caused him to abandon the concept of the sanctity of life. By extension he also denied the dignity, purpose and eternal destiny of human beings.
My source for much of the above is from the article H. G. Wells: Darwin’s disciple and eugenicist extroardinaire by Dr. Jerry Bergman available at answersingenesis.org.
Steps to salvation:
Jesus said “Ye must be born again” (John 3:7).
Prayer to receive salvation:
“Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved” (Romans 10:13).
To receive the salvation that Jesus purchased for us at the terrible cost of His suffering and death on our behalf I invite you to pray this simple prayer:
“Dear heavenly Father, I thank you for sending Jesus, the promised Messiah, to die for my sins. I admit that I am a sinner. I repent of my sins and I ask for your forgiveness on the basis of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I ask you to fill me with your Holy Spirit to empower me to serve you under the Lordship of Jesus Christ, Amen.”
If you prayed this prayer in the humble sincerity of your heart then you have received everlasting life, which includes power to live right in this life and entrance into heaven in the afterlife!