Man has not made Moral Progress

......and the whole world lieth in wickedness. 1 John 5:19

"Between the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, and the outbreak of what is now called the First World War in 1914, there was a

century of widespread peace and very rapid economic, scientific, technological, and cultural development. 

The transformation of the world of horse and carriage to automobile and then to airplanes, from wooden sailing ship to steel steamship and submarine, from carrier pigeon to telegraph and telephone, was perhaps the most dramatic transformation ever seen in one century. 

---It appeared that humanity was becoming better, and perhaps her baser instincts would be overcome as poverty and want were steadily eradicated.

But this theory suffered a mortal blow with the events of the 20th Century. The 20th Century demonstrated, in a most horrific and unforgettable manner, that there was no correlation between technological advance and moral advance. We saw continual genocides and mass murders throughout that century, beginning with the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and ending with the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. 

We saw two devastating world wars, more destructive than anything seen before, and the beginning of chemical weapons, and nuclear weapons “of mass destruction.”

To utterly dispel the notion of moral progress, one need only contemplate the history of Germany. The last nation in Europe to

coalesce from a fragmented collection of principalities and duchies into a powerful nation-state and then an empire, Germany was the mightiest and most advanced nation in the world. Her universities were the finest on earth, her scientists were unrivaled, her chemical industry was the envy of the industrial West, her engineering synonymous with excellence, her arts and culture peerless. 

---And yet all of Germany’s many advantages and achievements did not prevent the horrors of the death camps." 

F.D. Nichol