Is There Only One Race?

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Are there distinct races of man or did God create only one? How do we account for the variety found among humans?

Dr. Henry Morris, in his book "The Biblical Basis for Modern Science," has several interesting things to say about race and offers evidence that only one exists among humans. Morris states that God placed within Adam and Eve the genetic material to create a large variety of humans.  This ability to create a diverse population of humans (what many mislabel as races) survived in Noah's family through the great flood.

We know that a small, isolated group of animals can evolve more rapidly than a large, generally mixed population.  It could be the origin of groups of people or "races," having a particular set of physical characteristics, developed after God confused the languages of mankind at the Tower of Babel.

Mankind, after the tower of Babel, broke up into countless small groups and scattered throughout the world (Genesis 11: 1 - 9). Various physical characteristics that had been prominent in a more general population now became concentrated in a relatively few geographically segregated groupings some commonly think of as races.

Races are not found!

Surprisingly, although the Bible talks quite a bit about nations and families, the word "races" is not found within its pages. According to Morris, the division of mankind described in Genesis 10's table of nations, as derived from Noah's three sons, does not correspond to what many believe are three distinct races or racial categories. 

"Contrary to common opinion among Christians, the three sons of Noah - Shem, Ham, and Japheth - did not form three "races," but three streams of nations.

"There are, for example, both light-skinned peoples and black-skinned peoples to be found among all three groups . . . characteristics could have developed rather quickly as the tribal units were separated and forced to propagate . . . by an inbreeding process among themselves" (Chapter 15, section on Language, Race and Evolutionism).

Evolution's explanation of mankind's existence and its division into certain groups is contrary to the truth. For example, from a Christian viewpoint, mankind is deemed qualitatively (i.e., fundamentally) different from the animals, not merely quantitatively (i.e., marginally) different.  A huge gap looms between even primitive men and (say) chimpanzees intellectually, morally, and spiritually from a Biblical perspective.


Competition

In its original form, evolution teaches that "races" and peoples should compete for dominance and that only those strong enough earn the right to live and procreate at the expense of the weak (known as the survival of the fittest). This perverted, demonic thinking led to the justification and wholesale slaughter of Jews and countless others deemed "inferior" during World War II. Adolf Hitler was so enamored with evolutionary thought that he was more than willing to risk the lives of Germans in order to assert a view of racial superiority.

The belief in distinct races of mankind, and that a select few of them were superior to others, led to the theory of evolution which has wreaked havoc on the world. According to Morris, "Not only Haeckel but a whole generation of these scientists, including Darwin and his "bulldog," Thomas Huxley, were white racists, and they used evolutionary philosophy to justify their position."

One and only one

As far as the Bible is concerned, mankind is not a multiplicity of races but rather composed of only one, the human race.

No less than the Apostle Paul told the pagans in Athens that God made all humans of one blood (Acts 17:26). The Eternal intended for a wide variety of physical variations to develop among the descendants of Adam and Eve.  Unfortunately, we tend to attribute a great deal of significance to these superficial dissimilarities when they should not matter. 

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