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However, the concept that all nations and races descended from Noah's sons did not origi-
nate with the early Christian writers. When the famous naturalist and zoologist Georges Cuvier de-
vised 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 Cau-
casian race from Shem. This doctrine insults and contradicts both the word of YEHOVAH and
science.
Cuvier's classification of races was 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 ethnog-
raphical 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 Professor Coon explains:
"...racial differentiation can be traced back to at least 3,000 B.C., as evidenced in Egyptian records, par-
ticularly the artistic representations" (The Origin of the Races, p. 3).
In the era just after the Flood there appears many clear and well defined 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.
Some Christians would have us believe that eight white people that 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? If we can believe that such a racial
transformation took place, 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!
If you don't believe an amphibian could 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 and elsewhere
clearly dispels any foolish notion of a worldwide flood. This evidence of the antiquity and perma-
nence of the races, which is verified by the laws of genetics, proves that all people were not de-
stroyed in a universal Flood.
To overcome this problem, some have suggested that Noah brought a representative pair of
each race on the Ark. The apostle Peter, in speaking of the Flood, says that only "eight souls were
saved" on the Ark (1 Peter 3:20 and 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 and cannot be proved
by the Bible.
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