Blood brothers
A remarkable gift seals an enduring friendship—and further reinforces the
Biblical reality of human origins.
by Carl Wieland
Outward appearances do not provide too many more striking contrasts than this. Bill
Coolburra has been lightheartedly called ‘blacker than the ace of spades’,
whereas they don’t come much paler than his ‘best mate’ (Australian
for closest friend), George ‘Snow’ Wilson.
Bill and Snow have been ‘mates’ for around 40 years, having met when
they were both 19-year-old volunteers among the first Australian combat troops into
Vietnam. They were part of a group of ‘sappers’ (army engineers) known
as ‘tunnel rats’, who had one of the most dangerous and stressful jobs
of the war. Their task was to clear and explore some of the huge underground tunnel
networks used by the North Vietnamese. Theirs was the only allied troop to undertake
a mission into the infamous enemy tunnel system in southern Vietnam known as ‘the
Pentagon’.
Bill says people and government seem to have little understanding of the horrors
of that war. One time when he was hit by ricochet (‘like being kicked by a
horse’), he believes that Snow, who dragged him into the bushes, may have
saved his life. Another time, when Bill’s colleagues thought he was dead,
he regained consciousness and noticed that he had a tag on his arm and was in the
morgue section of a MASH unit!
The photo at right shows them both in 1964, when the two of them were serving with
the Australian Army in Borneo.
Both Snow and Bill believe that their many shared experiences of the reality of
death are what forged the lasting bond between them. So when Bill was suffering
kidney failure brought on by severe diabetes, Snow offered one of his own kidneys.
He says that it took him six months of hoping that a suitable donor kidney would
turn up. But when Bill’s wife told him, ‘If he doesn’t get a kidney
soon, he’s going to die’, he did not hesitate to set the wheels in motion.
It is of course well-known that to minimize the risk of rejection problems with
such a transplanted organ, one needs to have the closest possible match between
the donated tissue and one’s own. The highest chance of finding such a close
match is from among one’s close relatives, although this is no automatic guarantee
of a transplant matching. So it is not surprising to often hear of live organ donations
between parents and children, or siblings. But where such an option is not available,
those needing an organ often have to wait in agonizing hope until a close-enough
match turns up among the organs donated from people who have died in car accidents,
for instance.
Organ recipients and their families are frequently surprised to hear that when their
‘ship comes in’ in the form of a suitably close tissue match, the donor
may often be from a different ‘race’. In the United States, for instance,
once close relatives are excluded, an African-American is as likely to find a good
donor match from a Euro-American as from a fellow African-American—and vice
versa. Bill’s and Snow’s tissue turned out to be quite a good match.
In fact, we all have the same skin colouring—the browny-black pigment melanin.
When we realize how trivial the so-called ‘racial’ differences are between
people (as CMI has often pointed out), this should be no surprise.1 After all, we are all relatives—descendants from
one family surviving the great Flood around 4,500 years ago. The fact that some
groups have more or less of any characteristic than others is primarily a result
of the ‘sorting’ that took place at Babel.2
In fact, we all have the same skin colouring—the browny-black pigment melanin.
Bill has more of it, Snow has less. After Babel, as people groups were rapidly broken
up and then dispersed across the globe, they took subsets of the previous gene pool
with them, each with differing proportions of the genetic information.
Biologists, including evolutionists, are today fully aware of the amazing genetic
closeness of all of humanity. This is totally consistent with the Bible’s
declaration that we are all from ‘one blood’
(all descendants of Adam) as the Bible puts it (Acts
17:26).
Though evolutionists have had to rework their stories of human origins to try to
somehow fit this data, today no evolutionary molecular biologist or geneticist would
find the story of Bill and Snow’s transplant compatibility surprising. But
it is no wonder that the general public is still astonished. After all, there has
been around a century and a half of evolutionary conditioning since Charles Darwin
published his book On the Origin of Species, followed by The Descent of
Man. And the obvious prediction from an evolutionary/long-age history of
mankind would be that there should be a vast genetic gulf between the ‘races’.
Darwin taught that the differences between various people groups were the result
of many tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years of separation, in which each
group allegedly evolved independently.
According to the mechanisms by which evolution is supposed to occur, this should
have involved the accumulation of a large number of genetic differences.
Since Bill and Snow are not supposed to have had any common ancestry for maybe one
or two hundred thousand years (even in the most modern evolutionary ‘just-so’
stories), why would anyone predict the sort of genetic closeness that exists?
Clearly, the biological reality, so movingly affirmed in the true story of Bill
and Snow, is utterly inconsistent with the direction in which evolutionary thinking
has been brainwashing our culture for generations. Namely that, since evolution
has no preferred tempo or direction, then it follows that some groups of separately-evolving
people would be less evolved (and thus by implication ‘less human’)
than others.
People like Bill and Snow feel deeply that there should be reconciliation between
‘black and white’ Australians.
One important step would be to recognize the deep scars that Darwinist thinking
has left upon Western nations. Most people carry at least some form of residue of
the evolutionary conditioning mentioned above.
Another important step to true reconciliation and away from racism would involve
recognizing the truth which the Creator’s handbook has told us all along about
who we are and where we came from. All of us, by way of our created origins through
Adam (then Noah) are part of one (human) family. There is ultimately only one race—the
human race.
The more important issue still is to recognize that this same history teaches us
that we have all been estranged from God—no matter what our superficially
varying attributes (like shades of skin colour) may be. And that we all desperately
need to be ‘reborn’ into another family—God’s family—through
faith in Christ, who is also our ‘kinsman-redeemer’
(Isaiah
59:20).
References
- Ham K., Wieland C. and
Batten D., One Blood, Master Books, Arizona, 1999. Return
to text.
- Batten, D. (Ed.), The Answers
Book, Creation Ministries International, Brisbane, Australia, chapter
18, ‘How did all the different ‘races’ arise? 1999.
Return to text.
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