In this episode of The John Henry Weston Show, we are joined by Hugh Owen, founder of the Colby Centre, to discuss the controversial issue of evolution and creation in the public school system and the role of the Bible in the teaching of creation.
00:00:00.560Welcome to this episode of the John Henry Weston Show. I'm your host John Henry Weston.
00:00:04.640We're going to be talking about something very controversial about creation versus evolution
00:00:09.640and it's going to be really fascinating. Stay tuned.
00:00:30.000Let's begin as we always do with the sign of the cross. In the name of the Father and of the Son
00:00:35.220and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. I am pleased to be with on the program today someone who has studied
00:00:41.900this issue of evolution versus creation for a long, long time. His name is Hugh Owen. Hugh,
00:00:47.640welcome to the program. Thank you. It's a joy to be with you. So let's get into this issue first of
00:00:53.560all from the sort of 30,000 foot view. What's going on with creation and evolution? I mean,
00:00:59.040this was universally believed, you know, God's order of creation was believed and taught in
00:01:04.260schools all over the place until actually very recently in terms of history. And yet now there's
00:01:10.860been court cases about it to stop it, fights in legislatures to allow people to still teach it
00:01:17.140in the classroom and a big debate. Where are we today? Okay. Well, the situation today has to be
00:01:26.400understood in the right context. The origins of man and the universe is a fundamental issue because
00:01:33.940what we understand and believe about the origins of man and the universe determines our whole worldview.
00:01:41.080It determines how we understand ourselves, how we understand the creator if we believe in creation,
00:01:47.400and how we understand our relationship with him. So it's fundamental. And in the last 2,000 years,
00:01:58.520the Catholic Church has always based her teaching, her whole program of education on God's revelation
00:02:07.320of how he created the heavens and the earth and the seas and all they contain as it was revealed to
00:02:14.400Moses in the sacred history of Genesis. What happened was beginning in the 19th century,
00:02:22.140there was a movement to abandon the traditional teaching of the church on creation and to replace it
00:02:32.180with a man-made hypothesis that everything in the universe came into existence through the same
00:02:40.900kinds of natural processes that are going on now. And at first there was a lot of resistance
00:02:46.960to that, but eventually by really early in the 20th century, the secular humanists whose whole worldview
00:02:56.240is based on the assumption that everything has come into existence through a natural process of
00:03:02.800evolution through the same kinds of material processes that are going on now. These people like John
00:03:09.520Dewey basically took control of education here and throughout the Western world, and they began to impose
00:03:18.860the teaching of this molecules to man evolutionary hypothesis as natural science. And they began to work to exclude
00:03:30.980any teaching of supernatural creation as a religious doctrine which had no place in secular education. Now, the irony of this, of course, is that
00:03:46.400neither the evolutionary account of the origins of man and the universe, nor the true Christian account of the origins of man and the universe,
00:03:57.820is something that can be determined through the normal methods of natural science for one very simple reason.
00:04:05.160The work of creation was supernatural. That was understood and taught in the church from the beginning and by all the fathers and doctors of the church, including St. Thomas Aquinas. So, the very presumption that the origins of man and the universe is a proper subject for natural science is in itself.
00:04:27.160Not a straightforward inference from empirical science. It's a philosophical assumption. And the irony is that the secular humanists are actually imposing their religion, because secular humanism is a religion. And the Supreme Court has even recognized secular humanism as a religion for freedom of religion purposes.
00:04:56.160But when it comes to the teaching of evolution in the public schools, even though it's the foundation of secular humanism, it's treated as natural science, whereas the Christian explanation for the origins of man and the universe, which is much more reasonable, is banned, because it's supposedly the tenet of a religion. That this is the situation right now.
00:05:24.620Okay, so that's exactly it. But what I love about what you're doing is that you're actually taking on the science itself as well. And we're going to talk all about that. But first of all, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and about the Colby Centre that you founded?
00:06:41.500that he knew that the reason the United Nations was not making headway in solving the world's problems was because it wasn't going to the root of the world's problems, which was overpopulation. And the argument was, if we cut down on population growth, we'll have enough to go around and all our problems will be solved.
00:07:03.860And so my dad accepted to become the first ever Secretary General of International Planned Parenthood Federation at the very time when IPPF changed its position on abortion and became the world's number one provider of abortion, as well as contraception and sex education.
00:07:25.220And he held that position for about a year when he died unexpectedly of a heart attack in London when I was just 16 years old.
00:07:32.220Now, I had been brought up with no Bible, no prayer, no Christian formation whatsoever.
00:07:40.220But I believe, and I can't get into all the reasons why I'm confident that at the last moment, our Lord Jesus Christ gave my father the opportunity to see the truth and to repent.
00:07:53.480And I firmly believe that as he went down into the depths of purgatory, he began to pray for me, his very confused 16-year-old son.
00:08:04.740But whether or not the audience is willing to accept that, the fact of the matter is, less than two years after my father's death, I received the gift of faith.
00:08:15.760I was baptized, confirmed, and made my first Holy Communion as a Catholic in the Princeton University Chapel where I was enrolled as a freshman.
00:08:25.200Now, at that time, the Catholic chaplaincy at Princeton University was run by Jesuits, and the Jesuit priest who received me into the church gave me a catechism so that I could learn my Catholic faith.
00:08:39.940But the catechism he gave me was the infamous Dutch catechism.
00:08:45.380We call it the Dutch cataclysm because this is the book that totally destroyed the faith of a once vibrant Catholic community.
00:08:54.980But this catechism has a theme that runs through it from beginning to end.
00:09:01.540And it is this, that we live in a scientific age, and natural science has enlightened us so that we can understand everything in our Catholic faith in a new and deeper way.
00:09:15.600And with this very high-sounding introduction, the authors proceed to sow doubt in the mind of the reader about everything from the existence of angels, of Satan, of Adam and Eve, of original sin, of the perpetual virginity of Our Lady, the virgin birth, the intrinsic evil of contraception, and everything you can imagine.
00:09:42.300And so it's an absolute miracle that I survived the Dutch cataclysm and came into the church at all.
00:09:50.180But even though I did survive the Dutch cataclysm, it caused a tremendous amount of confusion.
00:09:57.540And I consider it a very special grace obtained for me by the Blessed Virgin Mary, that I never could really accept this idea completely, that anything that we would learn new things that were true in natural science, that would cause us to change the teaching of the church in faith and morals.
00:10:23.060And ultimately, I was delighted to discover that at the very time that my dad was being robbed of his faith, because there was nobody in his environment to show him the fatal flaws in this molecules-to-man evolution hypothesis.
00:10:41.220St. Maximilian Kolbe was writing articles and sending them all over the world, showing that the emperor of evolution was not wearing any clothes, that there actually wasn't sound scientific evidence for this idea that molecules turned into human bodies over millions of years of the same kinds of material processes that are going on now.
00:11:06.000And so, in the jubilee year 2000, we founded the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation to provide a forum for Catholic theologians, philosophers, and natural scientists who reject this molecules-to-man evolution, we would say mythology, we wouldn't even call it a hypothesis, and to defend the traditional teaching of the church on creation.
00:11:35.500That was believed and taught by all the fathers, that was believed and taught by all the fathers, doctors, popes, and council fathers in their authoritative teaching.
00:11:44.180Right. I think this is fascinating, because you have amassed for yourself a bunch of, and not only scientists, scientists is great too, because they're able to latch on to the science and show the falsehoods, and we'll get into that.
00:11:57.680But you also have the theologians and the experts in philosophy who are able to explain how this has undermined the faith.
00:12:06.560So, I understand also that you and your colleagues have just produced a DVD series, in fact, a 17-part series, called Foundations Restored.
00:12:16.380So, if you can tell us about that, what's the series about, and why did you decide to make it?
00:12:21.040Certainly. Foundations Restored is the most comprehensive defense of the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation, and the most comprehensive refutation of the principal claims of the molecules-to-man evolution hypothesis ever produced by Catholics in the video medium.
00:12:45.720It took us three and a half years. It took us three and a half years. It was a team effort on the part of a large number of Catholic theologians, philosophers, and natural scientists.
00:12:56.440And what we've done in this series is to, first of all, show that the understanding of, or the study of the origins of man in the universe is not a proper subject for natural science, because we cannot observe the work of creation.
00:13:20.280It's something that took place in the past, and all the fathers, doctors, popes, and council fathers, in the tradition of the Church, made a very clear distinction between the work of creation in the beginning, which was supernatural, and what many doctors call the order of providence, the natural order, what we are living in, where God had finished the work of creation,
00:13:46.940and now he's just holding the work of creation in existence, and everything is operating according to the natural laws that God established in the beginning.
00:13:59.000Therefore, we can't study what's going on now, and from that, extrapolate all the way back to the beginning to understand how everything came to be.
00:14:09.240But we show right up front that competing with what we call the creation providence framework, which is the one revealed to us by God as the true framework, and the only one, as we can explain, that really makes sense of what we see, is what we call the Cartesian-Darwinian framework, or narrative.
00:14:32.440And this was the framework that was put forward by the so-called Enlightenment philosophers, beginning especially in the 17th century with René Descartes and then Immanuel Kant and others.
00:14:46.500And what they did was to claim that it was more reasonable to explain the origins of man and the universe in terms of the same material processes that are going on now, instead of this strange idea that things just popped into existence in the beginning.
00:15:06.840Now, Descartes' works were put on the index because every theologian worth his salt knew that this was complete nonsense.
00:15:14.900The index meaning a list of books that should not be read by Catholics, right?
00:15:20.800And the reason was that every theologian worth his salt in the entire world knew you could no more expect to explain the origins of man and the universe in terms of the natural processes that are going on now,
00:15:37.340then you could explain the origins of the origins of the wine at Cana in terms of the natural processes that are normally at work when wine is produced.
00:15:49.260In both cases, it was the supernatural action of God that produced the result.
00:15:57.200And in fact, the fathers noted that the miracle at the wedding of Cana was the first sign that our Lord Jesus Christ did and that there were six containers of water precisely to show that the divine power by which our Lord instantaneously changed ordinary water into the most wonderful wine that anybody had ever tasted,
00:16:21.740which had all the appearance of having gone through a long natural process that it actually didn't go through at all.
00:16:29.420It was the same divine power by which he created the heavens and the earth and the seas and all they contained supernaturally in the beginning.