A. Dr. Arthur C. Custance, renowned scholar and anthropologist, outlines the contributions of each people group: God appears to have apportioned specific responsibilities and equally specific capabilities for the fulfillment of them: to Shem, responsibility for man’s religious and spiritual well-being; to Japheth, his mental well-being; and to Ham, his physical well-being. . . . All that is intended is that the great religions of the world—true and false—had their roots in the family of Shem, all true philosophical systems have originated within the family of Japheth, and the world’s basic technology is a Hamitic contribution.

B. Custance argues that the Hamitic people contributed most of our basic technologies:

All the earliest civilizations of note were founded and carried to their highest technical proficiency by Hamitic people. There is scarcely a basic technological invention which must not be attributed to them. As we shall show later, neither Shem nor Japheth made any significant contribution to the fundamental technology of civilization, in spite of all appearances to the contrary.

C. Further, the Japhetic people applied philosophy to technology and religion, producing science and theology respectively:

The Hamitic people never developed science and the Semitic people did not develop theology, until the influence of Japhetic philosophy was brought to bear. . . .

One may take almost any essential element of our highly complex civilization . . . and an examination of the history of its development leads us surely and certainly back to a Hamitic people and exceedingly rarely to Japheth or Shem. The basic inventions which have been contributed by Shem or Japheth can, it seems, be numbered on the fingers of one hand. This seems so contrary to popular opinion, yet it is a thesis which can be supported—and has been documented—from close to 1000 authoritative sources.

D. Finally, together, these contributions advanced civilization: When these three worked together in balanced harmony, civilization as a whole has advanced.

It is important to observe that all three are necessary for this. If any one element is given overemphasis the ultimate effect is detrimental. No society prospers which is overly materialistic, or overly intellectual, or overly spiritual. (The Doorway Papers vol. 1: Noah’s Three Sons, pp. 26, 37–38, 263–264) In another book, Custance suggests these skills were not divided among individuals but distributed in somewhat equal measure to each:

I believe that in Adam and his descendants, until the Flood brought an end to the old world, these three capacities were by and large combined within each person individually though, of course, not always in exactly the same measure, just as not everyone now has the same level of intelligence. But each man carried within himself a threefold potential which after the Flood was very greatly reduced and more often than not was limited to a capacity chiefly in one direction. . . . On the whole, those who are highly inventive and mechanically minded are rarely of a philosophical turn of mind, and philosophers tend to be rather impractical. Whenever these two capacities do happen to appear in one man, we have the scientific individual. Unfortunately, scientifically minded people tend to be somewhat indifferent about spiritual things that are matters of faith. And since man is primarily a spiritual creature, science has often tended to be one-sided and inadequate, sometimes rather futile, and frequently dangerous because it encourages a sceptical attitude. But consider what would happen if every man had within himself a large capacity for invention and could extend the application of his own inventiveness as greatly as scientists have recently extended the basic technology of the previous 6,000 years of civilization. The progress of the past 100 years might have been crowded into the first few centuries of human history, and Adam’s grandson might have seen the development of city life, the erection of very large buildings, the appearance of the arts including all kinds of music, the extended use of metals, and the establishment of cattlemen and farmers on a large scale—as evidently Cain’s children did (Gen 4:17–22).

But, as always seems to have been the case, man’s spiritual capacity tended to suffer from disuse, or even abuse, and the evil in man was fortified very rapidly to an extraordinary degree by the exercise of his other capabilities, until the Lord looked down from Heaven and saw that it was too dangerous for the individual to be endowed so fully. After the Flood, what had been combined in Adam was thenceforth divided between Shem, Ham, and Japheth. During pre-Flood times, however, it seems that the capacity of the individual was so much greater that the processes of civilization were all enormously accelerated. (The Doorway Papers vol. 2: Genesis and Early Man, pp. 138–139)