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The Bible v
slavery and apartheid
From
Mr Robert Howard of New Zealand, who gave permission for his full name
to be used. By his own admission in other correspondence, he is an atheist
lacking any scientific qualifications (and seems quite proud of this),
in common with many vocal Skeptics in Australia. This letter continues
his practice of criticising AiG [Ed. note: Answers in Genesis, a Christian apologetics organization] without first bothering to find
out what we actually say, because many of his objections, including in
this letter, have long ago been answered. His letter is printed first
in its entirety. A response by Dr Jonathan Sarfati, Answers in Genesis,
also (formerly) of New Zealand but now of Answers in Genesis, Australia,
immediately follows his letter (italics dark
red text) with point-by-point responses (regular text) interspersed
as per normal email fashion. Ellipses (…) at the end of one of Bob
Howard’s paragraphs signal that a mid-sentence comment follows, not
an omission.
“Most of what you
write I treat with amusement but your article suggesting evolution led to
racism is outrageous. Did you know the Dutch Reformed Church, one of your
Christian churches in South Africa upheld apartheid?
“In
spite of all the Christian churches in the American South I don’t
recall reading of any outcry against slavery before the civil war. Where
were the Churches and God fearing Christians during segregation in the
South in the earlier part of the last century.
The truth is your
Christian churches upheld a lot of racism.
“In
the 19th century it was thought evolution meant humans ranged
from the Englishman at the top of the tree to the black African at the
bottom but that was at a time of still a lot of scientific ignorance.
During the last century scientific testing of people showed there was
no difference between any humans mentally and only minor physical differences.
“You
might have read in the last few days that studies of DNA have shown even
less difference. There might be more difference between two people of
the same race than between two people of different races.
“Science has
done more to kill racism than anything.
“Plimer was right
when he said you were prepared to lie to uphold your philosophy.
“Bob Howard”
Most
of what you write I treat with amusement...
It’s doubtful
that Mr Howard is in a position to know, because it’s obvious from
this and other correspondence that he hasn’t read most of what we
write.
...but your article suggesting evolution led to racism is outrageous.
It’s a historical
fact, as we have amply shown in several articles.
The leading evolutionist, Stephen Jay Gould (an atheist and marxist as
well as an anti-racist), wrote (Ontogeny and Phylogeny, Belknap-Harvard
Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, pp. 127–128, 1977):
‘Biological
arguments for racism may have been common before 1859, but they increased
by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory.’
Did
you know the Dutch Reformed Church, one of your Christian churches in
South Africa upheld apartheid?
Yes we know that.
However, it seems that they had been evolutionized towards accepting white
supremacy, and used pseudo-biblical arguments to back this up. One chapter
of One Blood is devoted to refuting the nonsense that black people
are the result of a curse on Ham, which is non-existent in the Bible.
Another is devoted to refuting other pseudo-biblical arguments adduced
by white supremacists to support their cause. The main point is that the
Bible speaks against racism regardless of any way in which people have
misused it, and AiG has consistently opposed racism for
this reason, as a cursory glance at our website would show. Any good philosophy
can be (and is) misused to support evil, but sound exegetical principles
make it clear that it is indeed misuse. Conversely, racism is consistent
with evolutionary theory. For example, the atheistic evolutionist Sir
Arthur Keith, wrote (Evolution and Ethics, Putnam, NY, USA, p.
230, 1947.):
‘The
German Führer, as I have consistently maintained, is an evolutionist;
he has consciously sought to make the practice of Germany conform to
the theory of evolution.’
In
spite of all the Christian churches in the American South I don’t
recall reading of any outcry against slavery before the civil war.
This merely shows
that Mr Howard’s recall is faulty, as will be shown.
Where
were the Churches and God fearing Christians during segregation in the
South in the earlier part of the last century.
The
novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896), Uncle Tom’s Cabin
(1852), written from an overtly Christian perspective, is widely recognized
as a major cause of people in the North turning so strongly against slavery.
Abraham Lincoln called her: ‘the little woman who wrote the book
that made this great war.’ She came from a prominent family of theologians
and married a theologian, and also wrote religious poems and Woman
in Sacred History (1873), an exquisitly illustrated book, which stated
in the Introduction (p. 11):
The
object of the following pages will be to show, in a series of biographical
sketches, a history of WOMANHOOD UNDER DIVINE CULTURE, tending toward
the delevopment of that high ideal of woman which we find in modern
Christian countries.
She also pointed out
(p. 63):
It
has well been said that nations struggling for liberty against powerful
oppressors flee as instinctively to the Old Testament as they do to
mountain ranges. The American slave universally called his bondage Egypt,
and read the history of the ten plagues and the crossing of the Red
Sea as parts of his own experience. In the dark days of slavery, the
history of Moses was sung at night, and by stealth, on plantations,
with solemn rhythmic movements, reminding one of Egyptian times.
The
anti-slavery forces in the USA were influenced by William Wilberforce
(1759–1833), who tirelessly fought for 50 years against slavery in
Britain, basing his opposition on Biblical morality. Wilberforce realised
that 1 Timothy 1:10 lists ‘slave traders’ (andrapodistès)
with murders, adulterers, perverts, liars and other evil people. Paul
also encouraged Philemon to free his escaped slave Onesimus (Philemon
16), and ordered masters to treat their slaves in the ‘same way’
as they were treated, and not to threaten them (Ephesians 6:9). Such practice
would see the end of slavery.
Wilberforce
in turn had been influenced by the preaching of John Newton (1725–1807),
who wrote the famous hymn Amazing Grace. Newton in his earlier
days had been a slave trader himself before his conversion to Christ.
After conversion he first insist that slaves were treated humanely, then
came to see that since the slaves were also created in the image of God,
the slave trade was wrong regardless. He left the trade, became friends
with the great evangelists George Whitfield and the Wesleys, became a
minister, and testified to King George III about the atrocities of the
slave trade.
Another
prominent anti-slavery activist in Britain was Granville Sharp (1735–1813),
who was most responsible for a law that a slave became free from the moment
he set foot on English territory, and founded a society for the abolition
of slavery. He was also a joint founder of the British and Foreign Bible
Society and the Society for the Conversion of the Jews. A noted Greek
scholar, he published a detailed and accurate study, discovering a rule
of grammar that’s accepted by the majority of Bible translators today
and now bears his name. But the existing English translations had overlooked
this rule, thus, as he pointed out, they obscured the deity of Christ
in places like Titus 2:13 and 2 Peter 1:1, which should say ‘our
(great) God and Savior Jesus Christ’.
Conversely, it was
futile to rely on other means to achieve abolition. For example:
Politics:
The USA had been prepared to give states the option of choosing to be
‘slave’ or ‘free’. By 1820, there were only 22 states,
11 of each. After that, in admitting new states, Congress was very keen
to make sure that this ‘balance’ was maintained. So the ‘Missouri
Compromise’ was reached when Maine entered the Union as a free state
and Missouri as a slave state, and any new states to the south would be
slave and northern ones were to be free. Thus Arkansas entered as a slave
state in 1836 and Michigan as a free state six months later. Then there
was the ‘Compromise of 1850’ where California was admitted as
a free state while allowing for the possibility of admitting more slave
states to balance the numbers.
England’s
politicians were no better—Wilberforce, Sharp and their allies had
to battle prevailing attitudes like, ‘Humanity is a private feeling,
not a public principle to act upon’ (Earl of Abingdon) and ‘Things
have come to a pretty pass when religion is allowed to invade public life’
(Lord Melbourne).
But society hasn’t
learnt from this folly—when pro-lifers speak out for the millions
of unborn babies butchered in their mothers’ wombs every year, much
the same fallacious arguments are raised about ‘religion invading
public life’ (never mind the humanist religion that has already invaded
it!). Instead, abortion, like owning a slave, is portrayed as a ‘choice’
that must be protected, and the fact that another human being is involved
is conveniently ignored.
The
legal system:
In 1857, the US Supreme Court, under Roger Brooke Taney (1777–1864)
ruled in the ‘Dred Scott decision’ that Congress could not outlaw
slavery in any territory—this was to be the territory’s ‘right’
after it had become a state. Also, slaves were defined as non-persons,
and their descendants could not become citizens.
Later,
this was rescinded, but it severely dented the moral authority of the
Supreme court. And they haven’t learned either. In 1973, in Roe
v. Wade, liberal justices led by Harry Blackmun invented a ‘right
to privacy’ supposedly found in the US Constitution, applied this
to a woman’s womb, and decided that she has a right to abort her
baby for any reason. In the process, the Court explicitly declared the
unborn baby a non-citizen. One day, posterity will look upon Roe v.
Wade with as much revulsion as the Dred Scott decision.
In
the 19th century it was thought evolution meant humans ranged
from the Englishman at the top of the tree to the black African at the
bottom but that was at a time of still a lot of scientific ignorance.
During the last century scientific testing of people showed there was
no difference between any humans mentally and only minor physical differences.
AiG has always
pointed out that the concept of human ‘races’ should be abandoned.
You
might have read in the last few days that studies of DNA have shown
even less difference. There might be more difference between two people
of the same race than between two people of different races.
Clearly,
Mr Howard has not paid us the common courtesy of reading what we say before
criticising us. We have often pointed out this fact. For instance,
the article interracial marriage—is
it Biblical? points out:
The
truth though is that these so-called ‘racial characteristics’
are only minor variations among people groups. If one were to take any
two people anywhere in the world, scientists have found that the basic
genetic differences between these two people would typically be around
0.2 percent—even if they came from the same people group. But,
these so-called ‘racial’ characteristics that people think
are major differences (skin colour, eye shape, etc.) ‘account for
only 0.012 percent of human biological variation.’ In other words,
the so-called ‘racial’ differences are absolutely trivial—overall,
there is more variation within any group than there is between one group
and another. If a white person is looking for a tissue match for an
organ transplant, for instance, the best match may come from a black
person, and vice versa.
Actually, this article,
because it argued there was no Biblical impediment to so-called
interracial marriage, mainly because there is neither Biblical nor scientific
basis for the concept of different ‘races’, resulted in a lot
of hate mail from white supremacists. Our responses to their pseudo-biblical
arguments formed the basis of ch. 7 of One Blood.
Science
has done more to kill racism than anything.
Science
can tell us that all humans are the same, but it can’t tell us that
they ought to be treated the same. The Bible does give us an absolute
moral basis for this. Conversely, if we are just rearranged pond scum,
then as Lanier said and Dawkins affirmed: ‘evolution … leads
to what they perceive as a moral vacuum, in which their best impulses
have no basis in nature.’ It’s important to note that Nazism
flourished in the most scientifically advanced nation on Earth, with a
third of all science Nobel Prizes awarded up to that time.
Plimer
was right when he said you were prepared to lie to uphold your philosophy.
If
anyone trusts a demonstrably unreliable source like Ian Plimer, then they
are not to be taken seriously. After all, Plimer has sometimes professed
to be a practising Christian and feigned concern that creation is damaging
to Christianity, but this is incongruous with his signing of the following
statement: ‘I subscribe to the objects and rules of the Humanist
Society of Victoria in order to create a society in which a person may
reach their full potential free from supernatural beliefs’,
and he was even Australian Humanist of the Year (1995). All Plimer’s
charges against AiG in his book Telling Lies … were
proven false by the committee led by Mr Clarrie Briese, former Chief Magistrate
of New South Wales (Australia), nationally famous for his campaign against
corruption in high places, which ended the career of notable anti-Christian
High Court justice Lionel Murphy. Also, a fair-minded person would see
through Plimer’s unethical debating tactics such as guilt-by-association,
innuendo, half truths, and name-calling. Anyone with a modicum of scientific
competence would not have made such crass blunders, and if the Australian
Skeptics were truly concerned about good science rather than promoting
atheism, they would have pulled him up on these.
Also,
lying would be inconsistent with our belief that Jesus Christ is ‘the
way and the truth and the life’ (John 14:6). But it’s
impossible to conclude ‘lying is wrong’ from either of the premises
‘Evolution is true’ or ‘God does not exist’. So on
what basis should a consistent evolutionist be concerned about alleged
lying? We also shouldn’t be surprised that Plimer and his Skeptic
mates believe that it’s acceptable to use deception to advance the
anti-creationist cause. The problem is, how can we be sure that any attack
on creationists they present isn’t just another part of this deception?
Bob
Howard
(Dr) Jonathan Sarfati
Research scientist, author and editorial consultant
AiG (Australia)
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