Dr. Unander: People have always known that as you travel to other places, that people looked different. But there wasn’t a lot of significance given to that other than each particular individual tended to think of their own group as superior to others. So Egyptians, based on forensic data, police-science examination of skulls and looking at the tomb paintings, we would label the Egyptians as a multiracial society. That both their facial shape, their skin color, the shape of their skulls, covered a range of types that would range from what we call a white Caucasian to a black African. But most of them were a mixture, to us they would look like Caribbean people. But they didn’t identify themselves by anything having to do with skin color, they saw themselves as Egyptians, and they looked down on everyone else. They had an identity, but it was based on being an Egyptian, and being an Egyptian didn’t have to do with a particular color of skin or shape of face, it had to do with culture. So that would be typical. The concept of there being big groups of the human race that were fundamentally inferior and others superior seems to have risen out of the slave trade. During the Middle Ages, under the influence of Christianity, slavery pretty much disappeared from Europe. To a very large degree, it disappeared under the influence of Christians. Slavery had been around for a long time, and it had not had an ethnic basis. Anybody could be enslaved; and anybody could also end up being freed. During the Middle Ages, there was a very large Arab slave trade that developed south of the Sahara, and so the Arabs were dealing primarily in black Africans. There were several Muslim theologians who, apparently for the first time in history, developed a theology based on misuse of Genesis where Noah pronounces a curse on his grandson Canaan through his son, Ham, which Bible scholars have debated what it means. It probably has something to do with Israel’s conquest of the land of Canaan, but at any rate, they, for the first time, put a skin color interpretation on that. All the descendants of Ham, their skin changed color, it became black, and it meant that they were inferior and deserved to be slaves. So it was linked with an economic trade. The whole idea of race grew up out of the idea to justify slavery. Spain and Portugal were the two European countries that had the most interactions with the Arabs, because the Arabs were there for a thousand years. They adopted that same theology which they extended to include the Indians when the Caribbean was encountered. Ultimately, they decided that both the Indians and the Africans were inferior races, and they, in fact, began to use an Italian word called ‘razza’, which up to that point, had only been used to refer to animals. It meant ‘breed’ in medieval Italian. Nobody ever used it to refer to people until that point. So for the first time, they began to talk about breeds of people, with the idea that some breeds were inferior and deserving to be made into slaves. From the Spanish and the Portuguese then, the idea spread into the English speaking [world], and then from there, into the rest of the European languages. The common theme running through all of this is very significant. It’s making money off of oppressing someone else. So you have Muslim Arabs and Catholic Spanish and you have English Protestants and ultimately you have various secular and atheist corporations and colonists all justifying oppression. They all have very different worldviews, but its all coming out of personal gain for themselves.

Mike: The advent of genetics as a formal science, and recent technical advances have elevated the discussion of race to a whole new level.

Dr. Unander: It is possible now, within the last ten to fifteen years, and the technology keeps getting better all the time, to compare groups of people based on differences from person to person in their DNA. That is, in the genes that they have inherited from their parents and grandparents. Some of the things that have come to light are really interesting. For example, a lot of the studies will use as their control some blood samples from one of the large primates. They will take, for example, some blood samples from two or three gorillas from the same troop in West Africa. Gorillas travel in extended family units. There’s one male with a number of females, and many of them are related, so they would kind of be like cousins, humanly speaking. So you would expect that they would be fairly closely related. And they will compare for particular DNA sequence. They will compare differences. DNA is basically a chemical language in which the words are written in an alphabet of four letters. We can compare small changes that have occurred over time, just like mistakes in an automatic typewriter, that haven’t caused serious problems. And over time, you get [an] increasing number of small differences like that that have been incorporated. So that’s a little bit of the background of the sciences. When that is done, typically what they have found is you can take DNA samples from any group of people widely dispersed on the planet, and they’ll often intentionally choose people from various isolated ethnic groups, intended to represent the continents. So perhaps you’ll have an Indian or a native American group from somewhere deep in the Amazon that has presumably not inter-married with people from outside, and some Eskimos, and perhaps some European people that have been very isolated, say, Basque people from the mountains of northern Spain are often used. Some of the African peoples, like the pygmies, that have been very isolated and also not inter-married with other groups, and so on. So you have maybe eight or nine different ethnic groups, each one of which has a strong identity, and very little known inter-marriage outside its own group. When that is done, what has come to light again and again, looking at various DNA sequences in different studies by different researchers in many parts of the world is that the differences between any two gorillas, or any two orangutans, or any two chimpanzees from the same troop are far greater than the differences between any two people, any two humans in the most widely separated ethnic groups on the planet. And in working backwards, estimates of how much time it would take for the relatively small amount of genetic differences that we see in the human race to arise, that’s where they are getting these estimates placing the origin and dispersal of the modern human race across the planet within tens of thousands of years rather than millions of years. Which is consistent with what the Bible says. We’re one family.

Mike: While modern technology may be shedding new light on race relations, the science of the recent past was often far less helpful.

Dr. Unander: Historically, when people have committed themselves to the idea of their being a superior group and an inferior group, they then needed a story, a justification for that. What that story has been has varied, with what has been seen as authoritative. The Bible has been misused. Aristotle has also been taken out of context. As science became more and more perceived as authoritative, there began to be scientific articles for racism, or scientific arguments for racism. An evolutionary type of idea was very popular. Darwin himself hated slavery. Darwin was the grandson of a leading Christian abolitionist in England. That’s something that probably neither many biologists nor many Christians know. But Darwin grew up very much in evangelical Christian circles that were fighting slavery. He himself detested it, and in fact, in his journal, ‘The Voyage of the Beagle’, he has some extremely painful passages to read about tortures that he saw being done to slaves in Brazil and in some of the Spanish colonies in South America. So we know that he himself did not believe in arguing for inferior and superior peoples. However, very early on, there were a number of people who adopted his ideas and really created a type of philosophical Darwinism. Herbert Spencer was an American philosopher. He loved Darwin’s ideas. He’s actually the one who coined the term ‘survival of the fittest’. And he applied it to the relationship between management and labor in the United States and elsewhere. Andrew Carnegie also was a fan. He wrote about how, after he learned about Darwin, it was like the light came in and he didn’t have to worry about religion anymore. And he said ‘all’s well, and everything’s going to get better. And it also was picked up both by Marx and Lenin in developing a sort of Darwinian argument for the communist revolution, the idea that the survival of the fittest meant that the workers were ultimately destined to overcome the ruling class. It was also picked up by some of the German romantics, including a zoologist by the name of Haeckel, who was one of the founders of the Nazi party. He was actually the man who coined the word ‘ecology’ and many other concepts in science. He did some good science. He also did a number of things based on his mystical ideas that today are no longer in textbooks. But he was very, very influential, and he, probably more than any other biologist, pushed the idea that each of the supposed races being different levels of evolution on this endless chain. And there was a need to begin thinking ahead to what would be the next race. Both Haeckel and other people, some very influential scientists in England for example, a man by the name of Galton who was one of the founders of the science of statistics began talking about the super men, the idea that we needed to deliberately begin breeding a new race that would be superior even to the white race, and that we needed to begin thinking about how to eliminate the inferior races, both native Americans and black Africans and Asians. And they set up social policies to do that. They were very intentional about it, and they saw it as the only scientific thing to do.

Mike: As a Christian, Dr. Unander finds the whole idea of racial superiority laughable. We are all God’s children. But the source of this evil and the untold misery it has caused are no laughing matter.

Dr. Unander: In Many ways, it is a type of a spiritual stronghold. It is an idea that has brought about a lot of evil, and the Bible says we are called to destroy strongholds. Paul says the weapons with which we fight are not weapons according to this world, but they have power for the tearing down of strongholds. And it goes on to say that we demolish every argument and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God. And so I would say that this is one of these ideas. It’s an evil idea. It’s against God’s word and it has caused untold human suffering.

Mike: Dr. Unander recently published a book on this subject entitled ‘Shattering the Myth of Race, Genetic Realities and Biblical Truths’.

Film Clip: (Man’s voice) It’s digital, massive amounts of data which extend right to the higher harmonics. (1^st Woman’s voice) Jackpot! Now we thought they were just noise, but they’re actually data…huge amounts of it. And when we combine this with the data from the amplification of the original signal, we get these encrypted pages of text. Now no two are alike, and we’ve uncovered over ten thousand already. (2nd woman’s voice) What does it mean, doctor? (1^st woman’s voice) Well, we have no idea, it could be anything. It could be the first volume of an encyclopedia galactica!

Mike: In a recent conference at the University of Kansas, I had a chance to visit with astrophysicist and theologian, Dr. Bob Newman. Dr. Newman believes this pivotal scene from the film makes a striking point well beyond Sagan’s original intent.

Dr. Newman: I think it struck me, I mean, there’s lots of interesting things about how we know things, and how you prove things, and what kind of eye witness evidence is good enough to convince somebody else. But one of the striking things about this story is how much evidence in the story did you have to convince these people it was an intelligent signal. And then how much information was transmitted by the signal. And if you compare that with the signal in DNA, the DNA conveys much more information. And I think there’s much more reason to believe it’s a much more intelligent signal, a signal sent to us, in some sense, by the maker of life. That’s not its only purpose obviously. One of its purposes is to make more life. But the information content in the story ‘Contact’ to build this transporter with 50,000 pages, and Sagan himself, in his Encyclopedia Britannica article years earlier said the information content of the simple bacterium (I think he had e-coli in mind) is equal to 100 million pages in the Encycloedia Britannica. 100 million pages to build an e-coli; you’ve got 50,000 to build a transporter. Nobody in this story would doubt that this is some intelligent signal, although they come to doubt whether it is extra-terrestrial or not. But over here we’ve got this signal in life that is telling us that we’ve got some kind of a designer in life. That is the thing that has come to strike me as I’ve studied life more and more. I’ve trained in physics, astrophysics, etc., and the complexity of planets and stars and things like that is absolutely trivial compared to the complexity of living things. It looks to me like we’ve got some kind of designer there.

Mike: Astrophysicist and theologian, Dr. Bob Newman, looking for contact; looking for the creator’s hand at work in the world around us.