The great theologian Bonaventure, eight centuries ago, observed how unbelieving thinkers are prone to two great and critical failures: the failure to ask the right questions; and the failure to avoid wrong conclusions. In the 1850s, Charles Darwin, by failing to believe and comprehend Genesis, wrote fundamentally flawed books on the origin of species and on the so-called "descent" of man. By these errant but influential tomes. Darwin has misled, and continues to mislead, legions of the unbelieving and anti-Christ.
Had Darwin possessed sound Christian faith, with the spiritual-intellectual light provided by Biblical-Scriptural revelation, combined with a powerful philosophical and theological turn of mind, he would perhaps have asked the right questions and avoided wrong conclusions. Rather than ignorantly and impiously raising questions already answered -- definitively and conclusively -- by the Lord through His prophet Moses in Genesis, Darwin might have inquired on a question of enormous import, but one left Providentially obscure in Scripture — as a Divine challenge, as it were, to human intellect bearing the image of God.
The right question then is not whence the human species, but rather, whence the various races of man, from their originally created parents, Adam and Eve.
The short answer is that the sinful nature of man, resulting from the Fall, and multiplied and magnified by procreation, and unconstrained by the limited grace dispensed, generated a single race empowered by easy communication through a single language, that conspired against the Lord. But this conspiracy was broken up, and the various multiple races of man were formed, when the Lord confused the tongues of man and divided humanity geographically by the introduction of new and exclusive languages.
But this short answer, rooted in explicit Scriptural statement of fact (Gen. 11: 1-10), stops short of revealing and explaining how the various races of man we see today developed from the confused and separated groups, originally of one race. So, while the bare fact or existence of diverse races is self-evident and undeniable, the origin of races, as developments from successive, identified, and verified causes -- whether by Divine intervention(s) or by the ordinary course of nature — has defied human inquiry hereto.
This essay is a prolegomena -- an enabling heuristic -- to any future philosophical-theological anthropology about the origin of the races of man. Dealing as it does in phenomena of a changing, material, perceptual world, we remember Plato's wise humility in the Timaeus in referring to human science — even when at its best, and on whatever subject -- as merely "the most likely story."
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The diverse races we see and experience today are, of course, ranged in the three basic groups — Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid — and within these groups are sub-groups. Distinct properties or characteristics or traits, mental and physical, internal and external, distinguish the members of these respective groups and subgroups, while also allowing individual differences.
These groups and sub-groups may be labelled races rather than species, since procreative mixing between them is possible. And they may be labelled races rather than merely individuals of a single species, since emergent internal and external attributes, shared by the individual members of the groups and sub-groups, generate group perpetuation and refinement by the psychological-moral principle of conformation to type.
Assuming the Lord has left the origin of races open and susceptible to discovery and revelation by man prior to Judgment, investigators will need to reason with great care both forward from original and revealed Edenic causes to later effects, and then backward from present racial realities or effects to prior causes, seeking thereby a continuous and unbroken and complete linkage of causes and effects. To his inferences, the inquirer must bring a sufficient knowledge both of God's written Word (the Bible) and of His spoken word (created, but then fallen, nature, including the fallen nature of the human inquirer). Most of all, success in this inquiry depends on prayerful approach to and right acquaintance with that Holy Book.
Opening our inquiry, we infer that broad and deep genetic capacity must have characterized our first parents from their creation in Eden (Gen. 1: 26-27), since we are not told in Scripture of any divine intervention that affected such capacity — in themselves in Eden or in themselves or their descendants after the Expulsion. The breadth and depth of that capacity is confirmed a posteriori from the fact of the widely diverse races we see today.
One race, descended from Adam and Eve, existed from their creation, through the Flood, and until the confusion of tongues at Babel.
After the confusion of languages and the geographic separation that subdivided the original, monolingual, single race, the varying and manifold challenges of physical and social and political environment wrought genetic divergence that was reinforced by a self-preserving impulse to conformation to type. And into this complex natural-historical mix we must add three more complications.
First, before the confusion and subdivision at Babel (Gen. 11), and soon after the Flood (Gen. 6-8), Scripture describes the Providential relation between the sons of Noah —Shem, Japheth, and Ham, including especially the curse of Ham's son, Canaan (Gen. 9: 21-27). Two of Noah's sons were blessed, and the middle son (Ham) was cursed and then destined, in his descendants, to serve the descendants of his brothers. We note these relations in passing as significant and complicating factors that must be reckoned in any exhaustive treatment of the subject of racial origins and of later interactions between the races.
Secondly, the matter of racial origins must be considered alongside the parallel and interactive Providential phenomena of election and reprobation. By grace, mankind is divided into elect and reprobate, with the former being unregenerate for a divinely assigned portion of their earthly lives. As of the Fall and Expulsion (Gen. 3), as symbolized by Cain and Abel (Gen. 4), mankind, until the Judgment, is divided into the Heavenly and Earthly cities, the City of God and the City of Satan, as Augustine says, with their citizens following or rebelling against God accordingly.
A third complication has to do with racial origin as well as with subsequent racial-spiritual conduct or behavior. As the Hebrew people came into existence through a line from Noah's son Shem down through Heber and Peleg and then Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the elect-reprobate division within that line culminates in a special or heightened enmity toward Christ the Truth — incarnate as Jew -- by carnal or unbelieving Jewry — who rejected their own -- that will persist until Judgment (John 1: 11). This enmity — typically overlooked or misunderstood or hotly denied -- is rife with Providential world geopolitical implications and consequences down through the ages.
And so, the subject of the origin of the races, left obscure in Scripture, and crowded, as it were, by complex parallel and interactive Providential phenomena, effectively daunts and thwarts all but the most determined and circumspect inquirers.
But now add to this inherent complexity of the subject of origins the fact that the Biblical lesson of the Tower of Babel —the quashing of sinful human pride by the Lord — is a perennially unpopular lesson or bitter pill to fallen and rebellious men in a fallen world. Worse: egalitarian heresy that denies all headship and all unequal distribution of grace plagues the Church now, in the 21st Century, by clouding and harassing and hampering and skewing all thought and feeling.
Three centuries ago, Leibniz, the great Christian physicist and mathematician and philosopher, bitterly complained about a" barbaric" physics that willfully neglects the full span of causes from First to Final. Today, we may similarly complain of a kindred and analogous barbaric anthropology, epitomized in Darwin and Marx, that is spiritually corrupt in its motives, purposefully hyper-abstract and ahistorical in its method, and both hostile and oblivious to First and Final causes.
It turns out then, that the subject of racial origins is both complex and unpopular. Small wonder then that so little progress has been made in giving these origins solid and definitive treatment.
Still, by persistence in glorifying God and in defying both inherent complexity and the frown of a lost and sinful world, we descry that the races emerged by proximate causes from the Fall and the Confusion. And so, as we proceed, let the effect of the obscurity and unpopularity of racial origins not baffle our interest but rather exercise it.
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The Fall occurred when the limited, finite mind of Adamic man turned away from God and toward self. The Fall, in turn, affected all of created nature, of which man had been made center and head (Gen. 12), fundamentally and negatively. The Fall by that original sin brought death into the world, alienated man from his Creator, and fundamentally damaged and fractured man's nature --- made originally in God's image -- in all of his faculties, including reason, imagination, memory, and especially, in his will. Then, after the Fall, came first the punishing Flood, and later, the punishing Confusion and Dispersal as a divine response to men conspiring against God.
Scripture tells us that, at Babel, before the confusion of languages, the one race of men, and especially the reprobate among them, led by the mighty hunter Nimrod, from a line of Ham, conspired against the Lord to build a tower or towers to heaven. This one race shared a common language and was bent on self-exaltation.
So, a single mass of humanity, formed after the Flood and descended from Noah and his sons, shared a common language which had itself descended from Adam down through Noah. And this mass of humanity was then sub-divided by the Lord by use of confusion into new language groups where mutual understanding between individual members could be re-established. And debate continues to our time as to whether or not the original, shared language continued on, among one group, through the confusion and division.
Augustine, in the City of God, argues that the original human language did indeed continue on, descending through the Shemite line of Heber, and, in time, served as the foundation of the Hebrew tongue. Accordingly, it was this oldest of human tongues, descended from Eden, in which the prophets, inspired by the Holy Spirit, cast the Testament we now call Old.
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Now from the bare fact of the profound confusion created at Babel we can deduce certain truths about the new languages and about subsequent human history. From the confusion's deep and irremediable nature, we can surmise that the new languages introduced and imposed by the Lord were so sharply differentiated one from another as to preclude, for undetermined ages, all cross communication and translation. This is so even as we are given no word in Scripture on the specific nature or degree of expressive-conceptual sophistication of these original, post-Babel languages. Also, the process by which the individuals of the different groups immediately apprehended and conversed with fully practiced and actualized facility is of course, for us, unfathomable miracle. We marvel, too, that apprehension of the original language ended for all but those in the line from Heber to his son, Peleg, whose name means "division", named thus because "in his time the earth was divided" (Gen. 10: 25).
An inevitable consequence of the confusion of tongues was immediate self-segregation into language groups, followed by wide geographic separation and scattering between the groups. And, even while the multiplication and change of languages came as punishment to mankind as a whole, the people of God, descending through Heber and Peleg, being, by God's grace, set apart spiritually if not physically from the Nimrodian conspirators, were outside the scope of this penalty, as symbolized and proved by their retention of the original language.
At this point, we pause to note the extraordinary centrality of language to human life and experience. All human thought and communication beyond the most rudimentary depend on the symbolism of letters and words expressive of factual and imaginative phenomena via concepts. Concepts, in turn, are derived from materials received both externally from sensations and perceptions, and internally from apperceptions, all conditioned and formed by innate, a priori forms of intuition and categories of the understanding, including innate ideas of perfection.
But all languages are not equal in subtlety or in expressive and communicative power. And languages are not equal because thinking and minds are not equal. And, as human thought and conversation about life and experience ebb and flow as regards insight over time, so too do the power and sophistication of human languages to express and evince such insight. And while human languages reflect human racial and other differences, none is or can be, for example, so powerful as that of a Divinity Who can, by His Perfect Language or Logos, speak material and spiritual creation into actual existence.
As one of the more advanced and powerful human languages, Latin tells us that: to conspire (cum + spiro) means to breathe together; to communicate (cum + nnunire) means to be strong together or to fortify one another; and to cooperate and collaborate means to work together. This etymology, of course, suggests how critical language is to human survival and enterprise.
But sinful human nature is ever in the business of misusing all the means or tools within its reach -including the evolving conventions that are languages -- to exalt self rather than God. So, as a Providential event in human history, designed to hem in and handicap sin nature for the good of man, the significance and great goodness of the confusion and division created by the Lord at Babel can hardly be overstated.
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Over time, following the linguistic and physical-geographical separation of men, stable genetic types emerged, and from historical experience we can again deduce some fundamental causes of these disparate racial types.
External natural and social-political conditions call forth or elicit the actualization of personal powers. Primal human struggles, first for bare physical survival and security, and then for convenience and comfort and pleasures, challenge and sift individuals in society over successive generations.
In temperate zones, environmental challenges elicited and necessitated strong intellectual and moral responses so that individuals fit to conditions tended to be selected for survival while those unfit, and without familial protection and provision, were culled. In subtropical and tropical regions, where shelter from cold and food production and storage are of less concern, the powers of enterprise and invention are elicited and developed less. By contrast, in the coldest climes, survival needs and demands, while sharpening the mind, preclude extensive civilization and the accumulation of learning and intellectual advancement. By these facts, we understand how, among current race groups, Caucasoids and Mongoloid North-east Asians must have advanced most, mentally and morally, by continuous but measured environmental challenges.
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Some ages after the Confusion, after the emergence of distinct races, and after the evolution of the original post-Babel languages into other, derivative linguistic forms, cross-communication by translation became possible. As populations grew, contact between descendants of the separated groups occurred.
But, as contact -- whether in the form of trade or war -- was established between the separated groups-now-races, the emergent genetic-racial differences -- fixed during separation -- determined the fate or outcome of those intergroup contacts. Ascendency and subordination occurred accordingly. In this way, hierarchy and subordination WITHIN groups was now followed by hierarchy and subordination BETWEEN groups.
Inevitably, contact between the once separated and evolved racial groups brought conflict and comparison. Over time, global reconnection of the human species has been, of natural and inevitable necessity, on terms of racial inequality.
In the age following the Confusion, around 1300 years before the founding of Rome in 753 B.C., three great Gentile empires emerged that, together, dominated the world: The Egyptian in Africa, the Assyrian in Asia, and the Sicyon in Europe. Around 1500 A.D., certain peoples of Europe developed to the point of exploring and colonizing on a global scale. Indeed, Columbus proved by demonstration the globe itself. So global connection was initiated by the most advanced and adventurous and enterprising of the races.
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The diversity of languages and the diversity of races, as beautiful and differential expressions of grace, redound to the glory of God.
At Babel, the Lord confused the language of man to thwart conspiratorial sin nature. Since Babel, efforts at globalist human conspiracy against the Lord have been hamstrung by racial-national divisions. At Pentecost (Acts 2), the Holy Spirit gifted the disciples with the tongues of various, existing historical languages to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Pentecost itself, it should be noted, re-affirmed the persisting Providential role and need of different languages and races. And Paul himself (Romans 9:3), the Jewish Apostle to the Gentiles, by his loving willingness to sacrifice his own salvation to save his Jewish brethren, re-affirmed as Biblical the principle of racial Kinism.
Today, the egalitarian heretics who dominate our churches stupidly and impiously ignore and
downplay and deny the importance and Providential role of both language and race. Blinded by certain hyper-abstract notions of false philosophy, they fail to see and to witness to the glory of the Lord's various and highly differentiated creation. They fail to see how certain fundamental aspects of creation would, by His Providence, unfold and reveal themselves, as the great Leibniz taught, in the ages AFTER the Six Days. Robbing the Lord of His glory, from ignorance and fear of man, these egalitarian heretics will have their reward on the Judgment.
Winston McCuen is a metaphysician and political philosopher and Christian apologist. He is a Reformed believer, native South Carolinian, proud son of the Confederacy, and outspoken Southern patriot. He holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in philosophy from Emory University, is a John C. Calhoun scholar, and a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Furman University in history and philosophy. Formerly a welding instructor, philosophy instructor and Latin teacher, he holds multiple welding certifications and is a senior certified nuclear metallurgical welding engineer.
