Final answer:
Polygenism is the belief in multiple races being created by God, once used to justify racism, but is rejected by modern science and most major religions, which support the monogenist view of a shared human origin.
Step-by-step explanation:
The belief that multiple races were created by God and that each race has a separate origin is known as polygenism. This concept was once particularly espoused by certain 19th-century scientists and thinkers, such as Louis Agassiz, who believed in and promoted the idea that different races came from separate beginnings. Polygenism is now largely discredited and regarded as a pseudo-scientific belief used historically to justify racism and racial inequality, as it suggested inherent differences at the level of species among various human groups.
Race itself is increasingly understood as a social construction rather than a biological reality. The majority of modern scientists and sociologists assert that all human beings belong to a single species, Homo sapiens, and that variations within the species are the result of historical and social factors, not separate creations or evolutionary lines.
In contrast to polygenism, most of the world's major religions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, tend to hold to a monogenist view, which is the belief in a single human origin. In the Biblical context, for example, the Book of Genesis describes all of humanity being created by God, without reference to separate creations for different races. These traditions emphasize the shared ancestry of all humans, aligning with the scientific understanding of the human species having a single point of origin.