Creationism - National Center for Science Education

Charles Magne cites Rushdoony approvingly in The Negro and the World Crisis
(undated), in which he demonstrates that the Bible teaches that blacks were created
separately, as animals (servants and beasts of burden for the Adamic white race), and
have no souls. (Rushdoony, on the other hand, accuses evolutionists of claiming separate
origins for the races, and insists that the Bible teaches the unity of all mankind.) Magne’s
argument, expounded in many similar books and pamphlets, is a central doctrine of the
“Christian Identity” movement, which is espoused by many neo-Nazi groups. In
“Christian Identity” belief, blacks are a pre-Adamic creation, literally the “beasts” of
Genesis (there being both four- and two-footed kinds). Eve was impregnated both by
Adam, whose descendants are the white race, and by Satan the Serpent, from whose line
Jews descend. “Christian Identity” doctrine is endorsed by many neo-Nazi groups.
THE COSMONOMIC MOVEMENT
Christian Reconstructionism has interesting ties with the Cosmonomic movement,
which began in Holland around the turn of the century. Abraham Kuyper, the Dutch
Prime Minister (1901-1905), was a conservative Calvinist theologian who campaigned
against liberalism. Rushdoony attributes to Kuyper the development of the concept of
“sphere laws.” It was Kuyper who first advanced the notion that all thought must
proceed on presuppositional faith (the presuppositional apologetics developed later in this
country by Van Til), recognizing God’s sovereignty in each “sphere,” rather than relying
on reasoning solely from evidence.
Herman Dooyeweerd, a Calvinist philosopher and law professor at the Free
University of Amsterdam (founded by Kuyper in 1880 as a bastion against liberalism),
expanded on the concept of “sphere law” and presuppositional apologetics in his massive
three-volume treatise A New Critique of Theoretical Thought (1953-1957; originally
published in 1935-1936 in Dutch; published in this country by Presbyterian and
Reformed).
The great turning point in my thought was marked by the discovery of the religious root of thought itself,
whereby a new light was shed on the failure of all attempts, including my own, to bring about an inner
synthesis between the Christian faith and a philosophy which is rooted in faith in the self-sufficiency of
human reason.
I came to understand the central significance of the “heart,” repeatedly proclaimed by Holy Scripture to
be the religious root of human existence. On the basis of this central Christian point of view I saw the need
of a revolution in philosophical thought of a very radical character. Confronted with the religious root of
the creation, nothing less is in question than a relating of the whole temporal cosmos, in both its so-called
“natural” and “spiritual” aspects, to this point of reference. In contrast to this basic Biblical conception, of
what significance is a so-called ‘Copernican’ revolution which merely makes the ‘natural-aspects’ of
temporal reality relative to a theoretical abstraction such as Kant’s ‘transcendental subject’?
From a Christian point of view, the whole attitude of philosophical thought which proclaims the selfsufficiency
of the latter, turns out to be unacceptable, because it withdraws human thought from the divine
revelation in Christ Jesus.
If temporal reality itself cannot be neutral with respect to its religious root, if in other words the whole
notion of a static temporal cosmos ‘an sich,’ independent of the religious root of mankind, rests on a
fundamental misconception, how can one any longer seriously believe in the religious neutrality of
theoretical thought?
One of the fundamental principles of this new philosophy is the cosmological basic principle of sphere
sovereignty. Its development was suggested by (the famous Dutch thinker and statesman) Abraham