“I want to unmask the lie that evolution denial is about religion and recognize that at its core, it is a form of white supremacy that perpetuates segregation and violence against Black bodies.”
So writes Allison Hopper in an editorial in Scientific American that is a combination of scientific semi-literacy, abysmal ignorance of the Bible and Christianity, and cultural Marxism in the form of Critical Race Theory.
Her complaint seems to be that “science” has proven that the modern human race originated in Africa, and hence must have been black, and therefore those who deny the Darwinian fairy tale are not denying it for religious reasons but because they hate black people.
“The global scientific community overwhelmingly accepts that all living humans are of African descent. Most scientific articles about our African origins focus on genetics.
But the “out of Africa” theory is not accepted by all Darwinists; a competing theory is the “multi-regional hypothesis,” which argues that homo sapiens developed in several different areas, including Europe, China, and the Middle East.
The “out of Africa” theory is dependent upon the notion that the Neandertals—which are conventionally dated to 400,000 years ago—are a separate species from “homo sapiens,” but the evidence continues to mount that “homo sapiens” and “homo Neanderthalensis” regularly interbred. In fact, we modern humans have some “Neanderthal” DNA, so under the most rational definition of the term “species,” we are all one species. Even in the Darwinian narrative, some of our ancestors were wandering the earth long before others of our ancestors came “out of Africa.”
Also interesting is the fact that “homo sapiens” have been found buried in caves near Mount Carmel in Israel, and these have been dated as old as 194,000 years ago, which is pretty close to when “homo sapiens” supposedly evolved in Africa. Why not “out of Israel”?
The truth is that the “out of Africa” theory is entirely notional. Fantastic stories are spun out of the most meager evidence—a tooth here, a fragment of a jaw there, some shards of a skull over yonder that we will carefully “reconstruct” to fit with our pet theory. The evidence that humans evolved at all is so scant that no thinking person of any religious or philosophical persuasion need feel compelled by it.
Ever since Darwin suggested that humans evolved in Africa—which was long before there was a single tooth or jawbone of purported “evidence” of human evolution, much less evidence of “out of Africa”—folks have been looking for evidence that humans evolved in Africa. The Darwinian origins myth was never based upon evidence, but has generated a search for evidence to support the myth.
But even assuming “homo sapiens” evolved in Africa, what evidence is there that they were black? The various giblets and bone fragments that constitute the “evidence” of human evolution do not include skin, needless to say. The idea that the earliest homo sapiens started out as black seems to be based upon . . . well, everyone knows that Africa produces only black people, right? And only black people are real Africans; Smuts van Rooyen told me that.
Hopper continues:
“The part of the story that is not widely shared is about the creation of human culture. We are all descended genetically, and also culturally, from dark-skinned ancestors. Early humans from the African continent are the ones who first invented tools; the use of fire; language; and religion. These dark skinned early people laid down the foundation for human culture.”
What is the evidence for this claim? How would one ascertain the religious beliefs, if any, of a jaw fragment, or a partial skull? Well, according to Darwinists, the intentional burial and ritualistic treatment of the dead is an indication of religion, or belief in the transcendent. So then the earliest burials are in Africa, right? Nope. From the Wikipedia article entitled “evolutionary origins of religions”:
“The earliest evidence for treatment of the dead comes from Atapuerca in Spain. At this location the bones of 30 individuals believed to be Homo heidelbergensis have been found in a pit. Neanderthals are also contenders for the first hominids to intentionally bury the dead. They may have placed corpses into shallow graves along with stone tools and animal bones. The presence of these grave goods may indicate an emotional connection with the deceased and possibly a belief in the afterlife. Neanderthal burial sites include Shanidar in Iraq and Krapina in Croatia and Kebara Cave in Israel.”
What about language? Is there any evidence that language was developed in Africa? No, that is just an inference from the assumption that modern homo sapiens originated in Africa.
Even within the Darwinian paradigm, the notion that human culture developed in Africa is little more than storytelling based upon a hypothesis. One need not have any sympathy for biblical creationism to reject it.
So is Allison Hopper a scientist? At the end of the article we read:
“Allison Hopper is a filmmaker and designer with a master's degree in educational design from New York University. Early in her career, she worked on PBS documentaries. More recently, she's been creating content for young people on the topic of evolution.”
She has a degree in “educational design.” Oh, my. The less said about that, the better.
Let’s see if she knows more about religion than she does about science:
“At the heart of white evangelical creationism is the mythology of an unbroken white lineage that stretches back to a light-skinned Adam and Eve. In literal interpretations of the Christian Bible, white skin was created in God's image. Dark skin has a different, more problematic origin. As the biblical story goes, the curse or mark of Cain for killing his brother was a darkening of his descendants' skin. Historically, many congregations in the U.S. pointed to this story of Cain as evidence that Black skin was created as a punishment.”
Can anyone tell me where the Bible says any of that? In reality, of course, the Bible teaches no such thing. One of the most interesting facts about the Bible is that race, as we think of it, is simply not a biblical category. Interestingly, Ellen White describes Adam and Eve’s skin color as “ruddy” or red: “His complexion was neither white, nor sallow, but ruddy, glowing with the rich tint of health.”
Allison Hopper is even confused about what some racist Christians have believed and taught. The “mark of Cain” was not a race, it was a personal mark on Cain that identified him alone, personally, so that he would not be killed. (Gen. 4:14-15). Even it one wrongly eisegetes that Cain’s personal identifier was passed down to his descendants, all of his descendants were destroyed in the Genesis Flood; only Noah and his family survived, and they were descendants of Seth (Gen. 5). Thus, the “mark of Cain” could have had nothing whatsoever to do with race in the post-Flood world.
Rather, the folk tale I heard growing up was that blackness was part of the curse visited upon Ham’s son, Canaan, because of Ham’s sin in viewing his naked father, Noah. (Possibly, the phonetic similarity of “Cain” to “Canaan” caused the confusion.) But in any case, there is no evidence whatsoever that Canaan’s curse was to be made into the first black person. God’s curse of Canaan is part of the Bible story (Gen. 9:20-27), but the idea that the curse, or any part of it, was blackness or skin color is entirely unbiblical, a product of racialist eisegesis.
Hopper sees signs of “progress.” “From 2007 to 2019, the percentage of teachers who present evolution without a creationist alternative grew dramatically, from only 51 percent to 67 percent.” I have no trouble believing that, and it goes a long way toward explaining why the younger generation are such godless communists.
But let’s “circle back” to Hopper’s opening assertion that any objection to the evolutionary narrative is not, and cannot be, a genuine religious concern untainted by “systemic racism.” Here, her ignorance of Christian doctrine is fully on display. In fact, Darwinism creates unsolvable, fatal problems for Christianity.
The central Christian belief—a doctrine not peculiar to any sect or denomination—is that Christ, through His atoning sacrifice as the Lamb of God, is the Redeemer of mankind.[1] This is the sine qua non of Christianity. But why does mankind need to be redeemed? Mankind is sinful and in need of redemption because of Adam’s sin, and the resulting fall of the human race.[2] The Bible specifically teaches that Christ was the second Adam, who overcame where the first Adam failed.[3]
But according to the basic tenets of Darwinism, there never was an Adam. Darwinism teaches that man evolved from lower primates. Since there was no Adam, Adam never sinned, and there never was a fall of mankind. Far from suffering the effects of a “Fall”, mankind has experienced a spectacular rise from bacteria to Beethoven, from microbe to Mozart, from single cell to Shakespeare, from ameba to Einstein. Although not created in the image of any god, mankind has somehow managed to separate himself from all other animals by developing self-awareness and civilization, with its government, religion, commerce, law, science, technology, art, literature, theater, philosophy, etc.
Since there never was a Fall, mankind does not need redemption or atonement. Christ’s role as redeemer of a fallen humanity is obliterated. One expert on the relationship between science and theology put it this way: “The traditional [Biblical] view of redemption as reconciliation and ransom from the consequences of Adam’s fall is nonsense for anyone who knows about the evolutionary background to human existence.” (Karl Schmitz-Moormann, president of the European Society for the Relation of Science and Theology) Since Darwinism destroys Christ’s role as Redeemer, it effectively destroys Christianity.
Those who jettison the first ten chapters of Genesis thereby fatally undermine the entirety of Scripture, the entire Christian narrative of a Fall and the redemption from the Fall. The creation, the Fall, the plan of salvation, the sacrificial system—these are all laid out in the first ten chapters of Genesis. Without this foundation, none of the rest makes any sense. Jesus pointed out that faith in Moses’ writings was a prerequisite to faith in Himself: “If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?” John 5:46, 47 (RSV).
Contra Hopper, “evolution denial” is very much about religion and revealed biblical truths that are central to the gospel message.
Something tells me that Allison Hopper does not know that blacks believe the biblical creation narrative, and disbelieve in evolution, at a far higher rate than whites (58% of blacks, but only 42% of whites, support teaching creationism in public schools—see here). Blacks overwhelming believe in the Genesis origins narrative, not in Darwinism. I wonder, if she were made aware of that fact, whether she would be able to ponder it and realize its implications for her theory that creationism is only and always a product of racism and white supremacy?
My guess is that blacks know something about racism and Darwinism that Allison Hopper doesn’t know, to wit, that they are much better off when the majority believes what Scripture teaches: that we are all descended from Adam, and then again from Noah just a few thousand years ago, that the Bible teaches nothing about race but a great deal about love, mercy, grace, justice, and kindness, that our rights are immutable—that the standard of right and wrong is immutable—because they come from an immutable, unchanging, eternal God who judges all men based upon, among other things, how they treated their fellow men.
My guess is that blacks remember that Martin Luther King, Jr., had a dream “that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal . . .’.” Our equality before God—and by inference our equality under the civil laws of our nation—is part of a transcendent moral reality that God created. We all are descended from Adam: “And [God] hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.”
My guess is that blacks know something else that Allison Hopper doesn’t know, namely that the shoe is on the other foot: Darwinism gives scientific cover to racism. “Biological arguments for racism,” wrote Stephen Jay Gould, “increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory.” Darwinism has given aid and comfort to racism because Darwinists see racial diversification as a precursor of speciation; one race may be closer than another to becoming a higher species. Darwinists view the African race as being closer to our putative simian ancestors; they view the white race as being more fully evolved.
Darwin himself held this opinion. He believed that humanity had begun close to the baboon, evolved into something like the gorilla, then into the Negro, and finally into the Caucasian. He even predicted racial genocide:
“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time, the anthropomorphous apes . . . will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the Negro or [aborigine] and the gorilla.”
Darwinist racial theorizing of this type persisted into the 1920s. Henry Fairfield Osborn, who gained fame as the paleontologist who named Tyrannosaurus rex, wrote in 1926:
“The Negroid stock is even more ancient than the Caucasian and Mongolians, as may be proved by an examination not only of the brain, of the hair, of the bodily characteristics . . . but of the instincts, the intelligence. The standard of intelligence of the average adult Negro is similar to that of the eleven-year-old-youth of the species Homo sapiens.”
Osborn’s racism had dire consequences for one Ota Benga (pictured), a pygmy who was kidnapped from the Belgian Congo, transported to America, and kept in a cage as an exhibit at the Bronx Zoo during the summer of 1906. William Temple Hornaday, the zoo’s founding director and curator, defended the exhibition on the grounds of science: “I am giving the exhibition purely as an ethnological exhibit,” he said. In other words, don’t blame me, it’s just science! Hornaday was not some rogue operator; he was the nation’s foremost zoologist, and he had the full backing of the nation’s foremost paleontologist, H. F. Osborn.
A strong case can be made that evolutionary thinking had a profound impact on 20th Century European philosophy, and, as interpreted by Germans such as Ernst Haeckel, was responsible for the Nazi genocide.
So the shoe is very much on the other foot. It is the unsubtle “might makes right” implications of Darwinian “survival of the fittest” that leads to violence and oppression. It is the Darwinian idea that the black race is closer to our putative simian, ape-like ancestors that rationalizes racism, racial injustice, and caged blacks as scientific displays.
“I want to unmask the lie that creation denial is about science and recognize that at its core, it is a form of white supremacy that perpetuates segregation and violence against Black bodies.”
There, Allison, I fixed it for you.
[1] Gen. 3:15; 4:3-7; 8:20; 22:8; Ex. 20:24; 24:4-7; Lev. 1-7; 16:1-34; 17:11; Num. 28-29; I Sam. 7:9; II Chron. 29:20-24; 30:15-20; 35:1-11; Ez. 6:9-20; 7:17; 8:35; Psalm 22; Isaiah 53; Ezek. 46; Mark 10:45; 14:12; Luke 22:20; John 1:29, 36; Acts 8:32; Rom. 3:24-26; 5:10-11; 1 Cor. 5:7; 15:3; II Cor. 5:18-19; Gal. 1:3-4; 4:4-5; Eph. 1:7; 5:2; Col. 1:13-14, 19-22; I Tim. 2:5-6; Titus 2:13-14; Heb. 2:17; 9:11-28; 10:10; I Pet. 1:18-20; I John 2:2; 4:10; Rev. 5:8-13; 7:13-17; 12:11; 19:6-9; 21:22-27.
[2] Gen. 3; I Kings 8:46; Psalms 51:5; 130:3; 143:2; Prov. 20:9; Eccles. 7:20; Isaiah 53:6; Hos. 6:7; John 8:23-24; I Cor. 15:22; Rom. 5:12; Eph. 2:1-3; I John 1:8;
[3] Rom. 5:12-21; I Cor. 15:21-22, 45-49.