Q) A READER ASKS: Can you supply me with reference and full quotes and links to Darwin being racist and his comments re aboriginals being most primitives of all humans?
OUR RESPONSE:
Darwin regularly referred to Australian aborigines as savages, in contrast to Caucasians who are referred to as civilised. He considered the Fuegians (South American) as the least civilised and aborigines to be a little higher. In his Beagle diary, January 1836, p519, Darwin describes meeting a group of aborigines on his way to Bathurst NSW.
“In their own arts they are admirable: a cap being fixed at thirty yards distance, they transfixed it with a spear, delivered by the throwing stick, with the rapidity of an arrow from the bow of a practised archer. In tracking animals or men they show most wonderful sagacity; and I heard of several of their remarks which manifested considerable acuteness. They will not, however, cultivate the ground, or build houses and remain stationary, or even take the trouble of tending a flock of sheep when given to them. On the whole they appear to me to stand some few degrees higher in the scale of civilization than the Fuegians.”
Full text of Voyage of the Beagle can be found here:
In The Descent of Man Darwin places aborigines between Caucasians and apes when trying to explain the gaps in the fossil record. From Descent of Man, 1st Edition, Chapter 6 pp200-201:
“The great break in the organic chain between man and his nearest allies, which cannot be bridged over by any extinctor living species, has often been advanced as a grave objection to the belief that man is descended from some lower form; but this objection will not appear of much weight to those who, convinced by general reasons, believe in the general principle of evolution. … But all these breaks depend merely on the number of related forms which have become extinct.
At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”
The entire text of Descent of Man is available here.
ALSO read our Article The Descent of a Man. PDF here.
THE HAWK REPORT QUESTIONED? During the recent Aussie Creator King road trip the most common questions asked at events centered around the age of the universe and earth. This usually included references to the reliability of radiometric dating. At one meeting, a supporter of long-age creation proponent Hugh Ross disagreed with my reference to a recent New Scientist article that indicated most cosmologists have moved away from the notion of a big bang at the beginning of time. He did not believe my references could be true. The exact quotes used were:
“These days, most cosmologists find little use for the vague notion of a big bang at the beginning of time. Instead, phase transitions have come to the fore.”(Stuart Clark – article writer)
“Old school big bang cosmology has been superceded by what’s now called inflationary cosmology” (Kai Schmitz University Munster, Germany)
(In: “The Other Big Bang”, Stuart Clark, New Scientist 11 November 2023)
Ultimately, if you have a problem with the New Scientist’s statement, it needs to be taken up with New Scientist or the various cosmologists it quotes. However, it does begin to highlight an issue that Christians have when they take on non-Biblical ideas such as the Big Bang. Man’s ideas are fallible and they are likely to change sooner or later, whereas the Word of God is the same yesterday, today and forever. The Big Bang has lasted as an idea for the best part of 100 years, yet many cosmologists now really do question its ability to explain the beginning of the universe. It is foundational to secular estimations of time yet has varied from 2 billion years ago when first proposed in the late 1920’s, to 5 billion years ago in the early1960’s, to 13.8 bya in more recent times. There have been recent studies suggesting that the time since the Big Bang be doubled to over 26 bya.
Hugh Ross, of Reasons to Believe holds to the concept of a “big bang” authored by God. He says:
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth……It’s explosive impact bursts upon the reader like the creative blast physicists have come to call the “big bang”” (Navigating Genesis p25).
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