Creation Moment 10/12/2020 - When Agassiz Blended Evolution & Scripture

 But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies... 2 Peter 2:1

"The most eminent nineteenth century biologist was Louis Agassiz (1807–1873), Professor of Zoology and Geology at Harvard.

Agassiz concluded that Adam and Eve fathered one race, the white race, and a separate pair of humans fathered the black races, thus, in his mind at least, satisfying both the Bible and the-then general consensus of science of the inferiority of some people groups (Agassiz 1850b, 184–185). 

Much to the chagrin of evolutionists today, the proof of this view was the then scientific consensus that confirmed major differences in intelligence and other traits which Darwinists used to prove evolution (Chapman 1873, 162–174). Agassiz thus explained the differences between Whites and Blacks as the result of fixed inborn differences due to the separate creations of the races. He first presented these views in the March 1850 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting in Charleston, North Carolina (Lurie 1960, 260).

Agassiz acknowledged the common belief that all humans have descended from Adam and Eve was both derived from the authority of the Mosaic record and widely accepted, but nevertheless he argued “that this view was flawed” (Agassiz, 1850c, 134–135). Agassiz concluded

What is said of animals and plants in the first chapter of

Genesis, what is mentioned of the preservation of these animals and plants at the time of the deluge, relates chiefly to organized beings placed about Adam and Eve, and those which their progeny had domesticated, and which lived with them in closer connection. That Adam and Eve were neither the only nor the first human beings created is intimated in the statement of Moses himself, where Cain is represented to us as wandering among foreign nations after he was cursed, and taking a wife from the people of Nod, where he built a city, certainly with more assistance than that of his two brothers. (Agassiz, 1850b, 184–185)

Agassiz failed to realize that if the Black “race” was “created” before the Flood, all persons, Black or White, not on the Ark would not have living descendants unless one or more of the Ark inhabitants mated to someone on the Ark, which violates his concerns about interbreeding. Agassiz, cognizant of pre-Charles Darwinian evolutionary writings, such as by Erasmus Darwin, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Robert Chambers, concluded

the view of mankind as originating from a single pair, Adam

and Eve . . . is neither a Biblical view nor a correct view, nor one agreeing with the results of science, and our profound veneration for the Sacred Scriptures prompts us to pronounce the prevailing view of the origin of man, animals, and plants as a mere human hypothesis, not entitled to more consideration than belongs to most theories framed in the infancy of science . . . we are satisfied that he never meant to say that all men originated from a single pair, Adam and Eve. (Agassiz, 1850b, 185 )

Agassiz described Blacks as, by nature, “submissive, obsequious and imitative” (Agassiz 1850c, 144), and, therefore, the question is how we should treat

the different races in consequence of their primitive difference . . . but, for our own part, we entertain not the slightest doubt that human affairs with reference to the colored races would be far more judiciously conducted, if, in our intercourse with them, we were guided by a full consciousness of the real difference existing between us and them (Agassiz 1850c, 144)

Consequently, according to a leading authority on Agassiz, Edward Lurie, it was

mere ‘mock philanthropy’ to consider them equal to whites. Africans, for instance, had been in contact with whites for thousands of years, yet were averse to civilization influences. White relations with colored peoples would be conducted more intelligently if the fundamental differences between human types were realized and understood. (Lurie 1960, 261–262)

Agassiz acknowledged the equality of the descendants of Adam, but concluded “the Fuegians, Hottentots, and the inhabitants of Van Diemen’s Land [Tasmania] . . . must have originated where they occur . . . . [W]e have evidence of primitive races, extending everywhere.” (Agassiz 1850c, 127, 128)

The evidence of “primitive races, extending everywhere” was reasoned from the observation that wherever men have migrated,

they met aboriginal people existing in the parts of the world which they migrate to (see Agassiz, 1850b 132). Agassiz never openly supported slavery and felt his views on polygenism were not political, but his polygenism views clearly emboldened slavery proponents (Jackson and Weidman, 51).

The weight of Agassiz’s scientific authority confirmed the imprimatur of science to racism without violating the Bible, a view widely accepted in the slaveholding pre-Civil War South. Pre-Adamism was “an idea that could be used equally to relieve the tensions of internal biblical exegesis and rationalize the politics of racial ideology (Harrold 1991, 3; Livingstone 1987, 42). His ideas were contrary to the belief that all people groups were equal because all humans are children of Adam and Eve (Chapman 1873).

 

"Whenever I think of Agassiz I can only recall his statue buried in

the pavement in front of the Stanford zoology building following the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, a tragicomic reminder of a once famous scientist who ended up irrelevant even to a fellow Darwin doubter like American science polymath James Dwight Dana. ....Agassiz became a lamentable figure lost in the murky shadows of his own Platonist forms.” And there he will likely remain."

AIG/EV&V