I was introduced to Creation Ministries International when they held a seminar at our local church last year. I thoroughly enjoyed the presentation, and I appreciate much of the work CMI does in defending the inspired Scriptural account of creation and the age thereof, along with other similar organizations such as Answers in Genesis. Kinists agree with creationists that the Bible is infallible from cover to cover and that no scientific theory can serve to undermine the authority and historicity of the Bible. However, there always remains a slight difference in exegetical emphasis, as creationists support the historical-literal exegetical approach to Scripture in favor of the historical-grammatical approach of orthodox Calvinism. This is due to the fact that creationists have (to a certain degree) allied with modernists in their conditional reception of Scriptural proof – from which they derive their endless drive to prove the truth claims of Scripture. History has always been viewed by the true church as God’s revelation of His acts, and we believe the account of Genesis as historically accurate in the same way we believe the gospels’ account of Christ’s resurrection. Of course, there is nothing wrong with practicing science from a biblical perspective, but to seek to explain all of Scripture rationally easily leads to heresy. This has become evident in Ken Ham’s continual siding with Jacobin modernists and cultural Marxists on the issue of race and nationhood, the exact same people promoting evolutionary theories to undermine faith in God and His Word. Sadly, CMI seem to have fallen into the same heresy Ham has become so famous for promoting.
This year’s first edition of Creation Magazine1 contains an article by Carl Wieland entitled “A Biblical Perspective on Interracial Marriage.” The title sounds great at first glance, since Christians should always seek to gain knowledge and understanding of the Biblical perspective on all things, including interracial marriage. Sadly, however, the author’s article does not do the title justice, and his heretical statements need to be refuted.
Wieland begins the article by saying that even though all people descend from Adam and Eve and are thus related, there are still what he calls “misconception among some Christians surrounding ‘race’” — naturally, the same Christians who have concerns about interracial marriage. All Christians acknowledge that all men descend from Adam, but this does not annihilate the created diversity within mankind as meaningless. One of the greatest examples of this is the opposition of the arch-father, Abraham, to interracial marriage (Gen. 24:3-4). Abraham actually lived contemporarily with Shem (Gen 11:10-26), one of the sons of Noah’s family, the only family to have survived the flood. Abraham, therefore, would have been very familiar with the history surrounding the flood and how he was related to the Canaanite peoples around him. Despite this, Abraham advised his son to marry one of his own kin. The considerations for this choice of a wife for Isaac was not religious, since Abraham’s family were pagans (Gen. 12:1). The apostle Paul also acknowledges all of mankind’s descent from Adam in Acts 17:26a, but that of which creationists seem to be willingly ignorant is the rest of the passage, where the apostle goes on to assert that God purposefully segregated the nations, that they might better seek Him and find Him. Wieland’s deceptive claim, therefore, that “science has finally caught up with God’s Word in affirming how very closely related we all are at the genetic level,” is false, since this is only true of evolutionist science, and has never been in dispute among Christians. He then proceeds to make a claim even further removed from the truth, namely: “Evolutionary thinking has, historically, exacerbated racism dramatically.” There might be some isolated exceptions to this, but as a rule, this is historically inaccurate. Marxism in all forms, including the cultural branch (which promotes miscegenation) rose to the forefront contemporarily with Darwinism. Both these philosophies have their roots in modernism and the Enlightenment or Aufklärung, which is characterized by both its rejection of the authority of divine revelation (including the biblical account of creation) and the divinely ordained social order (tribalism). So the rise of Darwinism heralded the beginning of racial egalitarianism, in fact evolutionists have almost exclusively been racial egalitarians for the last 65 years. In other words, the historically reality is exactly the opposite of what Wieland claims it is.
The most encouraging part of the article is the third paragraph, where Wieland acknowledges the existence of races. This seems to be a step in the right direction; but then he proceeds to degrade the significance of physical features as irrelevant. He thereby sides himself with the neo-gnostic heresy, like Steve Halbrook, to which so many within the modern church have bent the knee. Furthermore, he fails to make mention of the many other significant racial differences which are deeper than skin color.
In the seventh paragraph, he states that the episode of the Tower of Babel is the origin of these racial differences, with which I agree. Unfortunately, this is followed by arguably the most shocking statement of the entire article: “In effect, the event imposed a virtually instant social and then geographic (hence reproductive) isolation from each other. Each group carried a different subset of the total ‘gene pool’. . . . Thus, racial differences, though not the purpose of this Babel event, were a side-effect.” I call this statement shocking because Wieland, a leading scholar of the creationist movement, is here actually teaching a form of naturalistic evolutionism. Wieland here sides with this camp in claiming that this element of creation came into being without the intention of its Creator. One of the most fundamental problems Christians have with the theory of evolution is that it denies the divine purpose behind the elements of creation. Even a theistic evolutionist would not admit that this process takes place without divine guidance, yet Wieland here literally goes as far as saying that races evolved merely coincidentally. Apart from totally disregarding God’s providence, Wieland’s statement is also at odds with Scripture, which teaches in the Table of Nations (Genesis 10) that the nations were separated “according to their families” (v. 5), which clearly indicates that God did indeed have a purpose with this formation of nations as extended families.
He concludes his introductory section by claiming that intermarriage was only forbidden in the Old Testament between believers and non-believers, but this is only a half-truth, since — as Nil Desperandum points out in his article on miscegenation — Israelites were not allowed to marry even believing Canaanites. Furthermore, even if international unions were allowed to take place in exceptional circumstances (always of course, with fellow Semites), their offspring were not allowed to own property in Israel or be rulers in Israel.
In the following section of the article entitled “Culture matters,” he claims that “common sense indicates that groups that have a longer history of isolation from each other, will have great cultural differences.” This is true, but he fails to mention the fact that culture is primarily carried on through lineage and along ethnic lines, not to mention that it was providentially ordained by God to be so, and that (e.g.) in the long run the expressions of culture in white communities will be consistently different from those in black communities, regardless of where they might find themselves geographically. And where exactly does this culture come from? Does it just magically appear out of nothing? Certainly things like religion, technological, geography, and history help shape culture, however the true basis of any culture is that particular people’s genetic makeup Their intelligence, strengths and weaknesses, and proclivities that they as a group genetically possess. There is no other possible explanation for however two groups of people with basically the same religion, technological, and history can inhabit the same geography and yet manifest radically different cultures much more similar to their racial kin in distant countries than to the people of different races they rub shoulders with everyday. This can be seen in South Africa, North America, and Australia amongst other examples.
He makes his final argument in a section entitled “Dogs and the dogma of ‘racial purity.’” He begins by quoting Peter Sparrow, who claims that “Adam and Eve were the ultimate mongrels.” This is a ridiculous assumption with no Biblical or scientific proof, concocted only to support Wieland and other creationists, like Ken Ham’s theory of the natural evolution of the races. What makes this theory even more scientifically dubitable is the fact that mankind consists of no fewer than five races, not merely two, in which case Adam and Eve could not possibly have been “middle of the road” mongrels. If Adam and Eve would only have been able to have 20% genetic material of each race, then it would be hard for anyone with a basic knowledge of genetics and natural selection to believe that these genetic components were coincidentally transferred through lineage in such a way that, contrary to (or independently of) God’s purposes for mankind, entire different races came into existence within (at most) a thousand years, each building their own unique civilizations on separate continents over millennia and constantly bearing children who, without exception, resemble the parents genetically and physically. Such a theory also poses blasphemous implications to God’s omnipotence. From this false presumption, he then concludes that we have been “conditioned to think of genetically depleted populations as ‘pure’ in the sense of somehow ‘better.’” Wieland, however, fails to explain to what “conditioning” he is referring. By whom and when were we conditioned to believe as such? When did this conditioning happen? This conditioning hypothesis seems especially far-fetched in light of the fact that, ever since the end of World War II, Cultural Marxism has been one of the main agendas of virtually every mainstream education institution and media outlet in the Western World. It seems as if Wieland is here inventing false claims in order to justify his willing ignorance of an empirical fact, since reality proves that miscegenated and even multicultural societies function consistently worse than homogeneous ones. In this sense, our experience of reality confirms Paul’s claim in Acts 17:27 that homogeneous societies were created so that mankind as a whole could better seek God.
He attempts to back up his distorted argument further with an illustration of domestic dog breeds. He states that by selecting various dog-races to inbreed, one can form “new and better dogs.” However, this is but a half-truth, one which cannot be applied to the animal kingdom as a whole, since any animal geneticist will confirm (e.g.) that farmers lose the advantages of the cross-breeding of cattle within three generations if a pure breed is not re-added to the genetic pool.2 There is a certain extent to which we can draw out positive characteristics of animal genomes by specific breeding; but the idea that this automatically permits rampant miscegenation is clearly inappropriate.
From here, he reasons that “Adam and Eve could not have been, as they are often depicted, pale-skinned with blue eyes and blond hair, or they could not have given rise to all of the different varieties of humans.” But this holds only if you’re an evolutionist. If you believe in God’s omnipotence, however, they could just as well have been pale-skinned with blue eyes, since the Bible teaches that God purposefully intervened at Babel, and we believe that he did so with regard to the formation of races as well. A text that further proves this belief is Jer. 13:23, which make reference to the black skin of the Ethiopians. This text was written only approximately a thousand years after the segregation at Babel, far too short a period for this kind of genetic diversity to take this effect spontaneously and naturally.
His final argument in favor of miscegenation is that “when two people from different races intermarry, they [the children] gain a greater richness and variety in their genes.” This is deceptive rhetoric to say the least. The genetic variety within the children might technically be greater, but the variety and diversity of mankind and creation as a whole is most certainly destroyed by having mulatto children. I wonder if he would make the same argument in regards to the painting Mona Lisa. If we took all the different colors used to paint the original picture and then mixed them all together and painted a second canvass using this paint, would Wieland claim that it would constitute “a greater richness and variety” than the original Mona Lisa?
Wieland concludes by saying that there are ultimately no Biblical or biological barriers to interracial marriage, but actually some very “positive aspects.” He has not actually drawn the attention of the reader to any such real aspects, but, as I pointed out, merely made use of deceptive and rather empty rhetoric to ridicule the traditional Christian view of miscegenation. With this article the author has revealed a complete disregard for the created order of creation “according to its kind,” as well as a disregard for God’s providence and purposeful creative acts (which he claims to defend). We can only pray that those within the creationist movement who promote this anti-Christian agenda can be led to repentance by the Holy Spirit.
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