Here we will continue to look at some of the evidence put forth by Charles Weisman in his booklet, Facts And Fictions Regarding Noah’s Flood showing the problems with the notion that the Flood was worldwide.
Again, we are looking at Weisman’s work not because we wholeheartedly endorse it — but rather because he raises some serious questions that all Christians need to be able to answer, especially concerning “race” in the Bible. Most Christians just assume that — somehow — all “races” came from Adam and Eve — and because of the subsequent Flood — all “races” also — somehow — came from Noah and his wife.
Those Christians who promote the idea that Noah’s Flood in the Bible was worldwide run into a serious difficulty explaining how all the different racial types of people descended from the only surviving people — the eight members of Noah’s family.
They’ve been forced to come up with some wild theories to account for this post-flood racial diversity — such as the idea that merely speaking different languages and scattering people across the world (Genesis 11:9) magically changed their genetics and created different racial groups. Ironically, even if we believe this theory, then we must also believe that genetic diversity arose as the result of sin and God’s wrath against His people — not exactly something to celebrate.
However, we know that Noah’s family were all of the same race — they were Adamic, direct unmixed descendants of Adam and Eve. Genesis 6:9 tells us that Noah was “perfect in his generations” — “generations” (Strong’s 8435), meaning perfect according to his genealogy or “records of his generations.” This same word — “generations” — is used the same way in Genesis 10:32 when the genealogies of the tribes that descended from Noah’s sons are given to us — the bloodlines of the Genesis 10 nations (same use in Genesis 10:1).
Why is this important? Of all the people who descended from Adam, God chose Noah to preserve because he was unblemished morally and physically. If God is going to wipe the slate clean and then replenish the Earth with people, He would chose another pure Adamic man just like Adam who had not been corrupted.
The Bible is the story of only one specific people — “the generations of Adam” (Genesis 5:1) — as they are traced down through the 12 Tribes of Israel in an unbroken line. This idea is important because this is the particular bloodline that ultimately leads to Christ — who must be an umblemished sacrifice to cleanse the Adamic/Israelite people of their sin, as is explained to us in Hebrews 9.
The preservation of Noah’s bloodline is an example of what geneticists call a “Population Bottle Neck” — where a population is greatly reduced by some catastrophic event such as a natural disaster, famine, or war. Such events always lead to a great reduction in genetic diversity — while greatly increasing the genetic homogeneity of the small extant population.
The Great Flood was just such an event — and from a genetic point of view, it made the people in the Post-Flood world far more genetically homogeneous rather than more diverse — making it very difficult to explain how all the racial diversity we see today — only 5,000 years later — could have descended from one racially homogeneous family on the Ark.
Weisman writes:
Racial Evidence Of A Worldwide Flood?
Perhaps one of the more difficult problems proponents of a universal flood have to answer, and one they most often avoid, is how could the eight survivors of the Flood produce the numerous racial types of man that exist upon the earth.
A belief of the “Christian” sect known as creationism is that all the world was populated from the descendants of Noah’s three sons. In other words, “all tribes and races came from a common ancestral population [see Henry M. Morris, Scientific Creationism, p. 183]. Creationists are forced to place this common population — consisting of eight persons — some time after the Flood since they believe in the extinction of all people by a universal Flood.
Noah and his family were obviously of one race. The Bible states that Noah was “perfect in
his generations” (Gen. 6:9). The word “generations” [note the plural] here is the Hebrew word “T0LEDAH”– and means “descent.” Noah was perfect in his descent from Adam — meaning his lineage had not mixed with any other races — [as Cain did]. Creationists try to tell us that this racially pure family developed (or “evolved”) into the present day races, but never specifically explain how, when or why this transformation occurred.
The concept that all nations and races descended from Noah’s sons did not originate with the
early Christian writers. When the famous naturalist and zoologist Georges Cuvier devised his
classification of races in 1790, he listed three types: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid.
Soon afterwards many started comparing this classification with Noah’s three sons — Shem, Ham and Japheth. As racial distinctions became more evident and debated, the churches and literalists picked up on Cuvier’s classification and molded it into a new religious doctrine. They taught that the Negroid race descended from Ham, the Mongoloid race from Japheth, and the Caucasian race from Shem. This doctrine insults and contradicts both the word of God and science.
Cuvier’s classification of races occurred just prior to the advent of Egyptology the studying and discovering of the ruins of ancient Egypt by such men as Jean-Francois Champollion in the 1820’s. The ancient Egyptian monuments, tombs, and temples reveal a vast storehouse of ethnographical records in the form of paintings, mummies and sculptures displaying different racial types of man.
Certain racial types can be distinguished in paintings and sculptures dating as far back as the 4th millennium B.C., as Prof. Coon explains:
“…racial differentiation can be traced back to at least 3,000 B.C., as evidenced in Egyptian records, particularly the artistic representations.”
Carleton Coon, The Origin of the Races, 1962, p.3
In the era just after the Flood (2300 to 2000 B.C.) there appear many clear and well-marked
racial types in the paintings and sculptures from Egypt as well as Mesopotamia. By 1600
B.C., an even greater diversity of distinct racial types can be found. Each of these types are
represented as they appear today showing that they were permanent throughout all history
and had never undergone any type of transformation.
Creationists would have us believe that eight white people who existed after the Flood —
somehow — changed into different racial types almost instantaneously. Why is it that this type
of drastic evolutionary change has never occurred since that time? After all, if we can believe that such a racial transformation occurred, then there should be no reason not to believe any manner of evolution occurring over tens of millions of years — for the latter is more believable than the former.
It is important to understand the hypocrisy and inconsistency that “creationism” rests upon.
Creationists are allowed to do the impossible because they are supposedly “on God’s side,” but
evolutionists are not allowed to use the same principles in presenting their ideas — [because they are atheists.]
Evolution is evolution whether used by “creationists” or “evolutionists.” Thus if an amphibian
could not gradually evolve into a reptile, then a group of white people could not have evolved
into Negroes, Indians, Chinese, Polynesians, Pygmies, etc., especially in just a few hundred
years time or less.
The racial evidence supplied to us by the ancient paintings and sculptures from Egypt and
elsewhere clearly dispels a any foolish notion of a worldwide flood. This evidence of the
antiquity and permanence of the races — which is verified by the basic laws of genetics — proves that all people could not have been destroyed in a universal Flood.
In an attempt to overcome this obvious problem, some have suggested Noah brought a representative pair of each race on the Ark [see John Whitcomb’s book, The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record And Its Scientific Implications]. However, in speaking of the Flood, Peter says that only “eight souls were saved” on the Ark (1 Peter 3:20 & 2 Peter 2:5). The only way then to get the other races on the Ark is to say that these other races are not regarded as people, but are inferior “beasts” or “living creatures.” The claim that other races were on the Ark is sheer speculation.
The ethnologists and anthropologists have shown that every single racial type that existed prior to the time of the Flood existed after it. This proves that the Flood must have been confined to a specific geographical area.
[Just as “all men” could not be descended from “one blood“], all people on earth could not have been destroyed by the Flood as creationists claim. In Luke 17:26-29, Christ likens the “days of Noah” with the “days of Lot.” In each case the people experienced a catastrophe which “destroyed them all.” Yet everyone acknowledges that “in the days of Lot” all the people on earth were not literally destroyed — only all the people in Sodom were. Likewise, only all the people in the Flood were destroyed, not all the people on earth.
It cannot be supported by any rational or biblical means that all races were destroyed by a
flood — and then instantaneously reappeared or were formed thereafter. It is infinitely more
logical that all races were separately created by God on the planet — and they each survived the Flood — as did numerous other life forms — by being outside its realm and geographical
influence.
https://christiansfortruth.com/the-problem-of-racial-diversity-and-a-worldwide-flood/
