Dominick McCausland

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Dominick McCausland (1806–1873) was an Irish barrister and Christian writer. He studied law at Trinity College Dublin, earning a BA in 1835 and a doctorate in 1859, and he later served as Crown Prosecutor.

McCausland’s early writings defended premillennialism and argued that biblical prophecy should be read as a literal historical narrative. He recognized a conflict between the Genesis timeline and geological evidence for an older Earth. In Sermons in Stone he argued that the Genesis “days” were geological ages, a view he credited to Hugh Miller.

He was an early advocate of pre‑Adamism, the idea that humanity consists of more than one original race. In 1864 he published Adam and the Adamite, the first of two works on ethnology, and he aimed to harmonize scripture with science.

McCausland argued that the Book of Genesis refers primarily to the Adamic or Caucasian race. He believed that if Adam were the universal progenitor of all humans, the Bible would be inaccurate; instead, Adam could be a special, superior race created by God, allowing scripture and science to agree. The term “Adamic race” would later appear in some Christian Identity ideas.

To support his theory, he claimed prehistoric humans existed before Genesis and that the Hebrew words Adam and Ish may refer to different races. The Adamite was a special creation whose history is told in Genesis, while other races were, in his view, incapable of higher thought.

McCausland taught that the Flood affected only the region inhabited by the Adamites. Cainites survived by moving eastward and some even reached China, where they supposedly influenced Chinese civilization.

In The Builders of Babel he argued that civilizations such as those of Egypt and Mexico were built by an extinct “Hamitic” race from Babel. He also claimed Jubal and Tubal-cain founded an antediluvian civilization in Central Asia, which later spread eastward and mixed with “pre-Adamite savages of China,” a process he said was slowed by Mongolian blood.