Likewise, he accepted views of the stability of racial traits and the inherent order of nature shot through with subtle appropriations of Christian theology. Instead, Nott endorsed the prevailing biblical interpretation of “a condensed time line for human history” (p.
66).īut Keel shows that Nott never jettisoned the biblical text. The biblical teaching of human origins, Nott taught, failed to account for the “time needed for humans to develop into different races” and the “fixed nature of racial traits” (p. Nott situated his defense of polygenesis within an overarching commitment to the belief that “modern science and the Bible were at odds concerning the study of race” (p. ethnologist Josiah Clark Nott argued that human races have different lines of descent, and so are members of different species (i.e., polygenesis). Whereas Blumenbach held that human beings share a common ancestral descent (i.e., monogenesis), U.S. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 4. Kameron Carter’s claim: “Modernity’s racial imagination has its genesis in the theological problem of Christianity’s quest to sever itself from its Jewish roots” (p. This connection harkens back to Keel’s endorsement of J. The anti-Semitism is particularly important, for Blumenbach advocates views of Jewish inferiority that support the growing rumbling about a “Jewish Problem” across German states. Blumenbach does not fully break with Christian theology he appropriates it for racial science.īlumenbach in his racial science also appropriates Lutheran-informed views of anti-Semitism, animal-human distinctions, and creation’s age. effectively reoccupies (to invoke Hans Blumenberg) the creative powers of the God in the Genesis narrative” (p. Likewise, Keel details how “the explanatory mechanism Blumenbach used to account for species diversity. Blumenbach’s Caucasian was a secular Adam” (p. For Blumenbach, Keel observes, “the white patriarch of humanity was a spontaneous naturally civilized, and unprecedented creation. 23)-he still endorsed a creationist view of human origins, and a teleological vision of nature. Though Blumenbach distanced himself from historic Christian theology-“he believed that observable laws and uniform forces, not God governed nature” (p. Keel begins with Blumenbach, the first ethnologist to divide humanity into five races and offer a scientific explanation for the original human beings being white. Inspired by Hans Blumenberg’s work, Keel’s Divine Variations reveals that scientists’ accounts of race “are often accompanied by latent beliefs about God/nature that regularly transgress the rational limits that modern science has set for itself and thus reproduce Christian assumptions it claims to have overcome” (p. The questions scientists ask about race and the tools they use to answer them reflect a “transference” and “inheritance” from “the Christian roots of Western intellectual history” (p.
Yet Keel contends that these assumptions are wrong. As Terence Keel notes, these scholars assume “Christian and scientific epistemology are incommensurable, and modernity naturally entails the erosion of religious influence over the structures of knowledge that govern social life” (p. Greene, The Death of Adam: Evolution and Its Impact on Western Thought (Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1959) David Hull, Science as Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Green and David Hull have argued for seeing the relationship between science and historic Christian theology through the metaphor of decline. What does historic Christian theology have to do with modern racial science? There are good reasons to believe the answer is “nothing.” Since Max Weber advanced his theory of secularization, arguing that modern people are disenchanted with Christian theology and have divided labor into religious and non-religious institutions, influential scholars including John C.
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