Part 5—The Fourth of the 7 C’s: Confusion

The history recorded in Genesis 1–11 clearly teaches against the idea of God using any kind of evolutionary process.

The history recorded in Genesis 1–11 clearly teaches against the idea of God using any kind of evolutionary process. In fact, it contradicts many naturalistic teachings, like the idea that humans are just the result of a long lineage of ape-like creatures who developed from more primitive forms in the distant past.

Which is why biblical creationists often hear questions like, “If you’re saying humans didn’t evolve, where did all the ‘races’ of people come from if we’re all descended from Adam and Eve? How come we see people with light and dark skin, different eye shapes, and hair types if our genetics come from just two people?”

However, just as we saw in the exploration of our third “C” of history, Catastrophe, the key to unlocking the age of the earth issue concerning rocks and fossils is the historical event, Noah’s flood—there’s another extremely significant event recorded in Scripture that unlocks the supposed quandary regarding where all of the different “races” of people around the world came from as well.

And this is the main event in our fourth stop on our journey through the 7 C’s of History, Confusion (at the tower of Babel), which among several other topics we’ll discuss, gives us even more detail as to our true anthropological origins.

We’ll tackle some of the more science-based questions regarding genetics later, but it is important to look at the Bible’s history first so we have a big picture of man’s true history to see how the facts we observe today fit with God’s Word.

God’s Judgment at the Tower of Babel

As we’ve seen, “God’s perfect creation was corrupted by Adam’s sin. During the days of Noah, God judged the wickedness of man with a great catastrophe [Noah’s flood], covering the entire planet with water.”1

“After Noah and his family came off the Ark, God commanded them to spread out and fill the earth (now very different from before the Flood).”2 Yet, in the sinfulness of man, despite the knowledge of God’s former judgment from their ancestors who’d survived the flood, “the descendants of Noah disobeyed God. They decided to stay in one place, building a tall tower they hoped would help keep them all together.”3

At this time, people only spoke one language. As Genesis 11:1 says,

“Now the whole earth had one language and the same words” (Genesis 11:1).

So, when the Lord saw their disobedience (displeased as he is with all rebellion), he decided to bring about his desire for people to inhabit every corner of the earth by confusing the people’s language.

By having separate, smaller groups of people only speak and understand each new, specific language the Lord caused them to comprehend, the entire group could no longer communicate with one another universally. And in this way, the people scattered, as Scripture explains:

“‘Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.’ So the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city” (Genesis 11:7–8).

“The several different languages created suddenly at Babel (Genesis 10, 11) could each subsequently give rise to many more. Language gradually changes, so when a group of people breaks into several groups which no longer interact, after a few centuries they may each speak a different (but related) language. Today we have thousands of languages today, but less than 20 ‘families.’”4

As a simple example, just think of how different someone from Australia sounds from a Canadian like myself, even though we speak the same language. Or even more so, think of how many of my family members from the province of Newfoundland here in Canada sound from the rest of the country because of further isolation from the mainland.

Explaining the Bible’s History with Observational Science

Now let’s back up and explain some of the questions that naturally come up when looking at man’s origins, beginning with a classic from skeptics: “Where did Cain get his wife?” (about Cain who committed the first murder by killing his brother Abel in Genesis 4).

This common question stems from the fact that the Bible clearly states that all people (that are or have ever been) on the planet come from our original parents, Adam and Eve, which is why all people are sinners and in need of the Savior, Jesus Christ (as the following verses make clear):

“And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26).

“The man called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living” (Genesis 3:20).

“Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned” (Romans 5:12).

“For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:21–22).

In summary, “because a man brought sin and death into the world, the human race, who are all descendants of Adam, needed a sinless Man to pay the penalty for sin and the resulting judgment of death.”5

And this history leads to the supposed biblical conundrums brought forth by the “Cain’s wife” question because “if we now work totally from Scripture, without any personal prejudices or other extrabiblical ideas, . . .  when there was only the first generation in the beginning, brothers would have had to marry sisters or there wouldn’t have been any more generations!”6

Hence Cain’s wife (mentioned in Genesis 4:17) must have been one of his sisters (or perhaps a niece, given the possibility of some next-generation offspring having already been born at the time of the event).

Two Objections

And here is where Bible skeptics pose two supposed objections. The first is a moral one, which is that the Bible forbids close intermarriage. The second objection is scientific—closely related people with children today have a high risk of offspring with birth defects.

Objection one is rather simple to explain, so we’ll deal with it first and then delve into the second’s scientific aspects afterward.

While it’s true that God’s Word forbids close intermarriage, objection number one disappears when put into its historical context. Why? Because that law (in Leviticus 18:6) appears around 2,500 years after Adam and Eve's creation, and close intermarriage was quite common during that period.

For example, the patriarch Abraham married his half-sister (Sarah), and there is no record of the Lord being displeased with that or any other similar union recorded during that time.

God is the final arbiter of moral rights and wrongs and imposes laws for a reason.

While the idea of close intermarriage may seem strange to us today (with some Christians insisting that you couldn’t have ever married your relation), we must be reminded that we are from one “race,” the human race, all descendants of Adam and Eve. So, “if you don’t marry your relation, you don’t marry a human!”7

We must remember that God is the final arbiter of moral rights and wrongs and imposes laws for a reason. Even more so, we must remember that this is a gospel issue! Since the Bible describes all human beings as sinners and related to our first father (Adam), the gospel makes sense only on the basis that all humans alive and all that have ever lived (except for Eve) are descendants of that first man.

The gospel could not be explained or defended if this were not so.

However, the fact that God instituted this law at a specific point in history should cause us to ask why he needed to do so. This leads to being able to answer the second objection by looking at basic scientific concepts in the field of genetics.

DNA Deficiencies

“Today [for a specific reason], brothers and sisters are not currently permitted by law to marry and have children. Now it is true that children produced in a union between brother and sister [or even close cousins] have a greater chance of to be have genetic disorders.”8

“As a matter of fact, the closer the couple are in relationship, the more likely it is that any offspring will be deformed. It is very easy to understand this without going into all the technical details.”9

Most people are familiar with DNA today and understand it is made up of two connected strands containing the genetic information for the construction, operation, and maintenance of whatever creature is being discussed. The packets of information that do so are called genes.

“Each person [like all sexually reproducing organisms] inherits a set of genes from his or her mother and father.”10 So there are two sets of genes at each location that can be expressed based on what has been inherited (sometimes, these genes work in conjunction with one another). This is why we get variation in our offspring and yet often observe similarities in families because of a similar gene pool producing similar “looks.”

Unfortunately, DNA no longer replicates and makes copies of itself perfectly. “Genes today contain many mistakes [mutations] (because of sin and the curse), and these mistakes show up in a variety of ways.”11

“For instance, people let their hair grow over their ears to hide the fact that one ear is lower than the other. Or perhaps someone’s nose is not quite in the middle of his or her face, or someone’s jaw is a little out of shape.”12

However, “the more closely related two people are, the more likely it is that they will have similar mistakes in their genes, inherited from the same parents. Therefore, brothers and sisters are likely to have similar mistakes in their genetic material.”13

So, “if there were to be a union between these two that produces offspring . . . .  Because the genes probably have similar mistakes, the mistakes pair together and result in genetic disorders in the children.”14

“Conversely, the further away the parents are in relationship to each other, the more likely it is they will have different mistakes in their genes. Children, inheriting one set of genes from each parent, are likely to end up with some of the pairs of genes containing only one bad gene in each pair.”15

We are not evolving; we are devolving.

And because “the good gene tends to override the bad so that a disorder (a serious one, anyway) does not occur.”16 The effects of us having such bad genes are greatly lessened. “Instead of having totally deformed ears, for instance, a person may have only crooked ones.”17

Unfortunately, “the human race is slowly degenerating as mistakes accumulate generation after generation.”18 We are not evolving; we are devolving. Each generation has more genetic mistakes than the last.

Better in the Past

So, if we were to rewind biblical history, we can see that the further back in time we look, fewer and fewer mutations accumulated back to the beginning when God announced his creation as “very good” in Genesis 1:31.

This means the genetic mistakes we see today did not apply to Adam and Eve. “When the first two people were created, they were perfect. Everything God made was ‘very good.’”19

“But when sin entered the world because of Adam (Genesis 3:6), God cursed the world so that the perfect creation then began to degenerate, that is, suffer death and decay (Romans 8:22). Over a long period of time, this degeneration would have resulted in all sorts of mistakes occurring in the genetic material of living things.”20

Mutations Increase with Time

And this helps us understand why it was many years after creation that God commanded that there be no more close intermarriage because genetic mutations build up over time.

“Cain was in the first generation of children ever born. He, as well as his brothers and sisters, would have received virtually no imperfect genes from Adam or Eve, since the effects of sin and the Curse would have been minimal to start with.”21

“In that situation, brother and sister could have married (provided it was one man for one woman, which is what marriage is all about, Matthew 19:4–6) without any potential to produce deformed offspring.”22

“By the time of Moses (about 2,500 years later), degenerative mistakes would have accumulated to such an extent in the human race that it would have been necessary for God to bring in the laws forbidding brother-sister (and close relative) marriage (Leviticus 18–20). (Also, there were plenty of people on the earth by now, and there was no reason for close relations to marry.)23

Putting It All Together

Let’s put all of what we’ve been discussing together so we can see why the confusion of languages at the tower of Babel (and the resultant dispersion of people from that point) explains the diverse people groups found around the world, and why it has nothing to do with the story of evolution.

We can understand that “God created Adam and Eve [in a very good state, with no mutations or genetic mistakes] with the ability to produce children with a variety of different characteristics”24 because of the variety of genes in humankind. And “this ability was passed on through Noah and his family.”25

However, “as the people [with distinct languages] scattered, they took with them different amounts of information for certain characteristics [sub-sections of the overall diversity among the human population]—e.g. height, the amount of pigment for hair and skin colour.”26

Because scientists understand that any freely interbreeding group of organisms that are divided up will start to exhibit specific traits (due to the more limited group of genetic variability such divisions naturally produce), we can see how the tribes and nations of the world have resulted from this one event.

The creation and flood legends of these peoples from around the world also confirm the Bible’s anthropology to be true because we all came from Noah’s family just a few thousand years ago and are all related. “It makes sense that, as the people split up after Babel, they took the tales their ancestors had passed on to them about the great catastrophe of Noah’s day.”27

We are all the same race—the human race—and yet there is diversity within that unity which has resulted in the unique people groups exhibiting cultural, linguistic, and genetic distinctions seen around the world.

Racism?

The biblical history revealing the origin of all people groups is a unifying one that is also the key to overcoming one of the worst cultural issues the depravity of sinful mankind has ever produced—racism. Understanding there is only one race (the human race) is the antidote to the very idea of racism. Why?

Well, racism, by definition, requires the concept of different races existing to justify the belief that one’s own race is somehow superior to another. And the idea of the superiority of one race over another requires some sort of scale to judge the races against, to decide who is supposedly more or less advanced than the others.

rac·ism

“Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior.” (Oxford Dictionary)

Now, where have we seen those ideas taught? The Bible certainly doesn’t support them. Well, the story of evolution has provided just such a set of metrics, particularly in evolutionary teachings of the past.

A simple, common example is the classic “ape-to-man” diagram (popular in textbooks and T-shirts) imprinted into the minds of millions of students every year. It almost always depicts dark-skinned hairy apes turning into Caucasians over supposed millions of years, providing a simple visual concept illustrating that the less melanin you have in your skin, the more advanced you are.

For those that think this is too simplistic, look at how racism commonly plays out in real life. Have you ever watched a European soccer game where when one of the dark-skinned players runs out on the field, and a camera pans the crowd and reveals a group of light-skinned people with their hands bunched up under their armpits screeching monkey noises at them?

Racist, isn’t it? But why is it racist? Why not kitty-cat noises or bird noises? No, it’s monkey noises. So, what’s the real message they are conveying to the darker-skinned person? The underlying idea is, “You are closer to the apes; you are less evolved than we are. Therefore, we are superior to you and can mock you.”

Darwin, the Racist

Conceptually, Charles Darwin made what he believed very clear in his exposé of human origins titled The Descent of Man, where he said:

[A]t some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races.

At the same time the anthropomorphous apes [i.e. the apes that look like people]. . . will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider . . . even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian [aborigine] and the gorilla.28

He clearly implied a hierarchy of “sophistication,” shall we call it, from the baboon or gorilla to Australian aborigine and negroes to the Caucasian. In other words, he believed dark-skinned, hairy, ape-like creatures turned into white people over millions of years (Darwin and many other evolutionists believed Caucasians were supposedly the most highly evolved “race” on the planet).

Lest you think the story of evolution contributing to racism is a stretch, understand that even giants in the atheistic, evolutionary community, like the late Stephen Jay Gould, have admitted this:

“Biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1859, but they increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory.”29

In case you don’t see the connection, Darwin’s book, Origin of Species, was published in 1859, so even though racist ideas were around long before Darwin, racism exploded after he published his ideas.

Prior to this, people were expressing bigotry in an ad hoc fashion because of their natural sinful inclinations, but the concept of human evolution in Darwin’s works provided people with a (supposedly) scientific basis for believing they were superior to others, fueling racism by “orders of magnitude,” to quote Gould.

Even one of Darwin’s closest friends, Thomas Huxley (nicknamed Darwin’s bulldog), expressed such despicable racist ideas in the following quote from 1871, the very same year Darwin’s Descent of Man was published.

“No rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the white man.”30

So, it’s likely that many times when people exhibit racist attitudes, it’s a logical outcome of what the state-run school systems have been teaching as “fact” and “science” for several generations now.

And I know that many evolutionists will cry foul when hearing this because they will adamantly declare they personally are not racist—which I accept on the face of it.

However, arguing against racism while holding to the story of evolution is inconsistent with what has been taught in the past. How could one possibly argue that everyone is equally “evolved” if there are truly different races of people on the planet that have evolved at different rates?

The fact is, taken to its logical conclusion (which many people have), the concept of human evolution has provided people with a (supposedly) scientific basis for believing they are superior to others, which is the entire basis for racism. In contrast, the Bible says we are all of one blood.

Summary

The fourth “C”, along with operational science, has great explanatory power in helping us understand the authority of Scripture regarding human anthropology.

In summary, the fourth “C” on our journey through biblical history (Confusion at the tower of Babel), along with operational science, has great explanatory power in helping us understand the authority of Scripture regarding human anthropology.

The basic principles of genetics can explain the various physical characteristics such as shades of skin color (not different colors) and how the distinct people groups (e.g., American Indians, Australian Aborigines, etc.) came about because of the confusion of languages at the tower of Babel.

The interconnectedness between the first and the last Adam in relation to us will lead us towards an even better understanding of the importance of biblical history next time when we explore the fifth “C,” the birth and life of Jesus Christ!