Editors note: This is part 4 of a five part series of articles on the topic, by Hugh Owen. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 can be found on LifeSiteNews.
Part V
(LifeSiteNews) – It is particularly ironic that Allison Hopper and her editors at Scientific American combine their libels against the Church with an utter contempt for the true history, traditions, and values of black Africans all over the world. Assuming without proof, and against the evidence, that the Bible and traditional Christianity promote “white supremacy” and black “inferiority,” Hopper manages to conclude her article without making even a modest effort to find out what dark-skinned African human beings actually think about molecules-to-man evolution, the Bible, and traditional Christianity. Having visited Africa quite a few times, and having spent quite a bit of time especially in East Africa, I have to wonder if the self-appointed evolution-believing “saviors” of black Africa have ever taken the time to learn about the history, traditions, and values of the ones they are purporting to save from the clutches of Christian “white supremacists.”
Anyone who delves deeply into the creation-evolution controversy cannot help discovering that evolutionary claims are not only consistently false, but in most cases the very opposite of the truth. For example, biology textbooks all over the world continue to indoctrinate students in the “dogma” that mutation + natural selection = microbe to man evolution. As demonstrated by Dr. John Sanford in Genetic Entropy, however, mutations degrade the architecture of the genomes of plants, animals and humans, so that they actually produce devolution rather than evolution throughout the biosphere—the opposite of evolution!
If a Westerner takes the trouble to listen to black Africans, especially in Africa, as they reflect on their present and future in the light of their past, he will doubtless be amazed to discover how deeply religious and traditional Africans remain, in spite of the relentless promotion of Western secular humanist ideas through foreign NGO’s and the mass media. Moreover, the Westerner who actually listens to Africans speak about their past will discover that the traditions of African peoples throughout the African continent tell a very different story of their origins and past migrations from the “scientific” account of their past promoted by evolutionary biologists.
When I was a student in the 1960’s at what were considered the best schools in New York City, I was taught the conventional wisdom in mainstream anthropology, that “primitive man” had a “primitive” religion based on spiritism, which evolved over hundreds of thousands of years into monotheism. According to this view, Moses “invented” a particularly sophisticated form of monotheism for which he took elements of the pagan myths circulating in his Near Eastern environment and fashioned them into the Creation and Flood accounts in the Book of Genesis. I do not remember anyone in any of my classes, teacher or student, ever calling into question this secular dogma on the evolution of religion, but it is funny to realize that this “accepted view” had already been utterly falsified in serious scholarly circles long before I was born. Thanks to the work of scholars like Fr. Wilhem Schmidt, who carefully examined the testimony of missionaries and explorers who had interacted with “primitive” peoples all over the world, it had become evident by the middle of the twentieth century that the original religion of mankind was not “polytheism” and “spiritism,” but monotheism. Typical of the multitude of testimonies collected by Fr. Schmidt and other researchers was the testimony of the first Catholic missionaries to the Kingdom of Baganda (now Uganda):
The first Catholic missionaries to Uganda were the White Fathers, members of the Society of Missionaries of Africa, founded in 1868 by the Archbishop of Algiers, Cardinal Charles Lavigerie . . . According to the White Fathers:
The ancient religion of the Baganda had been monotheistic. They had worshipped the Creator of all things under various titles: Katonda, the Creator; Mukama, the Master; and Seggulu, the Lord of Heaven. The worship of Katonda, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, was in the early days the basis of public and private morality. The ancient Baganda were said to have been remarkably honest and loyal in their dealings with each other, and to have had a strict code of morality which frowned on polygamy and even forbade immodest talk.
The Baganda memory of a time when their ancestors practiced strict monotheism and monogamy points to a common element of the traditions of mankind—the memory of a time when their connection to the Creator was lost and the chain linking them to their original ancestors was broken. In his fascinating book Eternity in Their Hearts, missionary researcher Don Richardson records numerous accounts of pagan peoples who retained a vivid memory of the events recorded in the first eleven chapters of the book of Genesis right up to modern times, prior to any kind of Christian evangelization. Whereas the modern “scientific” account of man’s origin imagines the first homo sapiens evolving from a common ancestor with chimpanzees in East Africa and migrating north into Asia and Europe, the traditions of black Africans, not surprisingly, tell a different story—one that is completely opposite to evolutionary mythology. I have had the opportunity to speak with Africans in Africa from many different tribes, and so far I have not found a single one who had not received from his ancestors the tradition that their tribe had originated in the north and migrated south.
These traditions harmonize perfectly with the sacred history of Genesis which tells us that after the Global Flood in the time of Noah a confusion of languages took place at Babel in the Near East, after which the ancestors of all of the existing people-groups on Earth dispersed and migrated east, west, north, and south into Africa. Thus, the tribal histories of black Africans confirm the literal truth of the sacred history of Genesis. Indeed, it is no coincidence that faith in the Bible and in traditional Christianity is stronger in Africa than anywhere else in the world, in spite of all the efforts of secular humanist propagandists to promote the anti-Gospel myth of molecules-to-man evolution. According to a recent article in the Financial Times in Nigeria:
Four in five [80%] Christians in Africa attend church at least once a week – Nigeria tops the list with an 88 percent attendance rate – and nearly the same number believe that the Bible is the literal word of God, the Pew study found.
The Church in Africa can save the world
In spite of the strong Christian faith still evident throughout the continent, during our many visits to Africa my colleagues and I have seen first-hand that evolution-based secular humanism has already made great inroads with African youth. If the younger generation is going to be preserved from the brainwashing that has afflicted most of the youth of Europe and North America, it will be through the deliberate effort of the Catholic Church and of other Christian communities in the country, exposing the errors of evolutionary mythology and establishing the true Christian doctrine of creation as the only firm foundation for a culture of life.
The summer after our first visit to Uganda, the Kolbe Center held its annual leadership retreat at a seminary in Missouri, and we decided to invite a team from Uganda, including two priests, a member of parliament, and two ladies who are very involved in the pro-life movement. The member of parliament told us that he and his colleagues were engaged in a pitched battle with heavily-funded foreign agents who are trying to introduce “reproductive health”—i.e. abortion, contraception and the anti-culture of death—as well as GMO agriculture into Uganda. We gave him our booklet GMO Food: Boon or Bane? and promised to offer whatever support we could. As GMO Food Boon or Bane? demonstrates, the GMO monoculture that has largely destroyed American agriculture is rooted in a false reductionist philosophy which reduces living things to a collection of replaceable parts rather than seeing them as created unities. This reductionist philosophy goes hand in hand with a false evolutionary philosophy which sees the different kinds of living things as the result of hundreds of millions of years of mutation and natural selection rather than as the result of divine creation, marred by thousands of years of genetic degradation as a consequence of Original Sin. By the grace of God, our friend in parliament was able to use the information in our publication to persuade many of his colleagues to oppose the introduction of unregulated GMO agriculture in Uganda.
Besides being besieged by the paid agents of agribusiness corporations, for decades the entire country, like most of Africa, has been overrun by paid agents of USAID, Marie Stopes International, UKAID and Planned Parenthood, all of them offering “free” contraceptives and sex education in the name of “women’s empowerment.” These agents of change have left a host of wounded women in their wake, victims of the “side effects” of contraception, who have learned that the agents of women’s “empowerment” have no interest in helping the countless women who have been and continue to be physically, emotionally, and spiritually devastated by the deluge of “free” contraceptives. Moreover, the UN agencies and their partner NGO’s are devilishly clever at getting approval for sex education materials without letting law-makers – much less parents! – examine the materials. This is symptomatic of the global extent of the evolution-based Kinseyan revolution against marriage and the family which shows nothing but condescension and contempt for the traditional creation-based religious and family values of the vast majority of African men and women.
By the grace of God, many of the priests and lay leaders my colleagues and I have met in Africa see the signs of the times and recognize the necessity of rejecting evolution-based modernism and restoring the true teaching of the Church on creation as the foundation of the Faith. One seminary professor described evolution as:
a move of the devil to destroy our belief in the existence and power of God. The devil is doing this by first destroying our belief in creation, then our belief in God will crumble and fall by itself. Our Church in Africa is still innocent, but we need to help build a bulwark against any form of evolution be it theistic or atheistic. We need to do this in schools, because all secondary schools [teach] evolution in Biology. I was taught about it too while still at high school . . . We love our Creator and His method of creating keeps us much closer to Him than this . . . erroneous . . . evolution.
For his part, one pro-life leader affirmed his intent:
To expose that theistic evolution is false, a heresy of modernism, contrary to science, and a blasphemy of God by which His character is impugned; a challenge to the trustworthiness of the Incarnate Word, Who has revealed Himself by means of the oral Word and the written Word, both of which attest to the fact of fiat Creation;
A young woman, a university graduate, highlighted the importance of the traditional doctrine of creation for the defense of Holy Marriage and to reverse the destructive influences of the West on African society:
Linking Holy Marriage to the special creation of Adam and Eve teaches us that indeed marriage is an ultimate act of God and NOT a human idea that can easily be made and broken at any time . . . Divorce has become so common especially here in Uganda. With the so called human rights and [women’s] emancipation, everyone feels they have a right to this and that. Women are no longer submissive to their husbands and men too are not playing their role of being protectors in their homes. The marriage institution has lost meaning to some. Marrieds feel their problems can easily be solved in Court. It is like people get married to divorce.
Yet another pro-life leader, a young lawyer, told me that he has spoken of the importance of upholding the truth of the sacred history of Genesis at various conferences he has attended, with teachers and with other lay leaders. He tells me that the teachers, catechists, and other serious Catholics that he speaks to on this topic are always receptive and eager to learn how to defend the sacred history of Genesis to their young people. This is totally different from the norm in the United States, Europe, and Australia, even among traditional Catholic clergy and laity, where the usual response to any defense of the traditional doctrine of creation is opposition and ridicule, mixed with accusations of “fundamentalism” and absurdly confident appeals to radiometric dating and other alleged “proofs” of microbe-to-man evolution which fall apart upon examination.
From the mouth to the source of the Nile: African bishops contra mundum
The contemporary abandonment of the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation by most Church leaders in the so-called “rich countries” of the world recalls a previous crisis of faith in the fourth century when, according to patristics expert Fr. William Juergens, 97% of the Bishops of the Catholic Church maintained communion with Arian bishops who denied the divinity of Christ. In the midst of that unprecedented crisis of faith, St. Athanasius, the African Bishop of Alexandria at the mouth of the Nile River, led the small remnant of Orthodox Bishops who held fast to the Council of Nicea’s dogmatic definition of the divinity of Christ. In our day, it is fitting to observe that some of the most fervent defenders of the traditional dogma of creation are the Bishops of Uganda, “the pearl of Africa,” whose dioceses stand at or near the very source of the Nile River in Lake Victoria.
Indeed, when the Kolbe Center recently produced a seventeen-and-a-half-hour comprehensive defense of the traditional Christian doctrine of creation in video format, from the perspective of theology, philosophy, and natural science, Ugandan Bishop Linus Wanok was one of the first Bishops to recognize the importance of the DVD series and to recommend it to his brother Bishops throughout the world. He wrote:
As the devil strives to immerse and drown the world in darkness and confusion under the guise of science, and as he savagely launches his attacks on the pivotal doctrines of Holy Mother Church, the “Foundations Restored” DVD series casts a bright light which exposes and defeats the camouflaged lie of the Devil. The series offers logical, scientific, philosophical and theological arguments which not only restore the “Creation Providence” account to its proper place, but also liberate the whole realm of natural science from the grasp of its evolutionist hijackers. I therefore recommend the DVD series “Foundations Restored” without reservation for circulation in the public domain so as to combat error and to proclaim the reign of TRUTH.
In the neighboring Diocese of Soroti, Bishop Joseph Oliach echoed the sentiments of Bishop Wanok and recognized that only the traditional Catholic doctrine of the special creation of mankind could preserve the sacredness of human life. Speaking of the experts in theology, philosophy and natural science who appear in the DVD series, Bishop Oliach commented:
The presenters defend the traditional and authentic teachings on creation not by using their personal opinions, but by ably quoting from what has been preserved through centuries from the Church’s Magisterium and Holy Scripture. The presentation demonstrates how fervently and uninterruptedly the Church’s Magisterium has preserved the authentic doctrine of Creation while submitting to the superior and infallible deposit of Scripture.
I have no reason whatsoever to doubt the truths presented in this video series as regards our origins. It is not only ridiculous, but also nonsensical to imagine that the powerful species of humankind with all its intelligence could have evolved through some kind of “Special Transformism,” as this kind of thinking does a lot of injustice to the grandeur of the human person. It is only by acknowledging the fact that we were directly and immediately created by God, that we can preserve the sacredness of our human species who reflect the image of the Creator.
On our first visit to Bishop Wanok, when he was the Ordinary of the Diocese of Nebbi, my colleagues and I had to cross over the Nile River on a stretch of highway where chimpanzees frequently come down to the road. When I compared the anatomy of the chimpanzees on the side of the highway with the anatomy of human beings, the idea that humans could be descended from a common ancestor with chimps appeared so utterly absurd to me that it seemed quite certain that only a person far removed from the physical reality of the vast chasm separating apes from humans could ever have proposed such a preposterous conjecture!
Through the prayers of Our Lady Queen of Africa, of St. Athanasius, of the Holy Uganda Martyrs, and of all the Saints, may God raise up a remnant of holy Bishops, priests and faithful in Africa to defend and restore the traditional doctrine of creation as the foundation of the Faith and the only firm foundation for a culture of life! Amen.