Adam and Eve No Longer Tenable

Jason Rosenhouse over at EvolutionBlog details some of the theological twists and turns some religious writers are going through trying to explain a religious world with no Adam and Eve to blame original sin on.

“One of the many problems modern science poses for Christianity is the question of how to understand original sin. The traditional teaching, which holds that Adam and Eve were the only humans on the planet when they were created on day six of Creation Week, that the ground was cursed and they were expelled from Eden as a result of a specific sin they committed, and that this corrupted state was in some way passed down to all future human beings, is no longer tenable. A variety of lines of evidence make it clear that the human population has always numbered in the thousands and certainly never dipped down to two. Moreover, evolution makes clear that humans arose through eons of natural selection. There was no moment of creation, and there was no state of primordial perfection for them to sully.”  Jason Rosenhouse PhD, EvolutionBlog.  Full post Here    My emphasis
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There Was No Moment of Creation

One of the many problems modern science poses for Christianity is the question of how to understand original sin. The traditional teaching, which holds that Adam and Eve were the only humans on the planet when they were created on day six of Creation Week, that the ground was cursed and they were expelled from Eden as a result of a specific sin they committed, and that this corrupted state was in some way passed down to all future human beings, is no longer tenable. A variety of lines of evidence make it clear that the human population has always numbered in the thousands and certainly never dipped down to two. Moreover, evolution makes clear that humans arose through eons of natural selection. There was no moment of creation, and there was no state of primordial perfection for them to sully. Jason Rosenhouse, The Evolution Blog http://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/2011/09/what_does_original_sin_mean_in.php?utm_source=nytwidget
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Where DID Cain get his wife?

So not to long after Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Garden of Eden they have that long awaited and dreamt about sexual contact…it must have been driving Adam crazy seeing Eve all naked while they were in God’s good graces and keeping the gardening up and all. I wonder how long they were both running around naked? The Book of Jubilees (late 2^nd. Century BCE) says Adam and Eve were kicked out about 8 years after being created. (Jubilees 3:33)

Anyway, after they were kicked out, they had the worlds first human sex and not long after Eve delivered a baby boy …Cain. Then she got pregnant again and had Abel. Now the Bible doesn’t say how long after the great ‘Kick Out’ she gave birth, but it seems like it was shortly after their expulsion.

Now, some time later…again Bible doesn’t say, but it was probably after Abel was at least 16-18 years old, after all he was the chief sheep-herder for the only 4 inhabitants of the earth.

So at some point when Able was young, after all God was visiting them for the first time, Cain got insanely mad at Abel, because he was smarter than Cain, and he killed his younger brother. We all kinda know what happened next. God confronted Cain and Cain asks God if he was his brother’s keeper…and so on. So Cain was kicked out of the clan of Adam and Eve the gardeners.

He leaves Eden (after packing up his other suit and toiletries), and lo and behold, he marries his wife.

Now we have all probably thought of this discrepancy at some point, and there is a whole line of apocryphal texts that have attempted to solve this problem by writing new Scripture, and claiming that he had sisters that were not mentioned at the time. Some have gone so far as to come up with the sisters names. Trouble with these documents is they seem to have all been written looong after the Pentateuch was written or transcribed or redacted (700 to 400BCE). So one should maybe not put to much stock in them.

Three people left on earth; Adam, Eve, and Cain. The official Protestant and Catholic Churches and the many sects, that seems to keep growing in number all the time, deny that the Apocrypha is true. Cain takes a wife.

After Cain and Able; Adam and Eve, the progenitors of the whole human race have no more children until Adam (and I assume Eve) is 130. Then they (Adam and Eve) have Seth. Then they have more sons, and finally…daughters.

While Adam and Eve are waiting until they are 130 years old to have more children…Cain takes a wife, and builds a city.

So to recap; Adam and Eve have Cain and Abel right after leaving Eden, where they had spent 8 years. Cain kills Abel. Only 3 people left on Earth. No more children for about a hundred or so years, but Cain takes a wife and builds a city.

Do you suppose Eve visited her grandchildren before Seth was born? Maybe skinned a few rabbits to provide clothing for the little ones?

Something is missing here. If you are purporting to write the history of the human race, as given to you by divine revelation from God, you really need to have your stories make more sense.

We know that the people of the time were very intelligent, after all the Egyptians had already built a civilization and were contemplating building the Pyramids :-), and the people of Babylonia were building cities (and Plains Indians of the Southwestern US were chasing and killing Mammoths).

You would think the scribes could put together a more believable and internally consistent story. Or, God would know his people were not dummies and tell them the true story.

For latest post go: Here

Adam and Eve and the Beginning

“If the Bible is true, certainly Adam was the first man; consequently, we know, if the sacred volume be true, just how long man has lived and labored and suffered on this earth.

The church cannot and dare not give up the account of the creation of Adam from the dust of the earth, and of Eve from the rib of the man. The church cannot give up the story of the Garden of Eden — the serpent — the fall and the expulsion; these must be defended because they are vital.

Without these absurdities, the system known as Christianity cannot exist. Without the fall, the atonement is a non sequitur. Facts bearing upon these questions were discovered and discussed by the greatest and most thoughtful of men. Lamarek, Humboldt, Haeckel, and above all, Darwin, not only asserted, but demonstrated, that man is not a special creation.

If anything can be established by observation, by reason, then the fact has been established that man is related to all life below him — that he has been slowly produced through countless years — that the story of Eden is a childish myth — that the fall of man is an infinite absurdity.”
The Divided Household of Faith, Robert G. Ingersoll, 1888

Now we know that Adam of the Bible was NOT the first man, or Eve of the Bible was NOT the first woman. We humans know this as well as we know that night follows day. The fact that humans have inhabited this earth for hundreds of thousands of years is established and undeniable by those people who live in the real world.

We know that Proto-humans, or Neanderthals, were walking the earth-long-before we Homo sapiens did. This fact alone disproves Biblical beginnings of man.

We know that the Chinese were predicting eclipses before Moses supposedly wrote Genesis and described creation wrong.

We know that Noah’s flood never happened. NO evidence at all for this story. This fact alone disproves Biblical beginnings.

We know for a fact, that all people living on earth today are NOT descended from the supposed eight survivors of Noah’s flood about 4300 years ago. DNA science has disproved this religious notion.

We know that the ‘Tower of Babel’, as described in the Bible, never happened. Languages were all over the world at the time of the OT Bible story, any many, many years before that.

We know that the Bible and Scripture have been manipulated throughout its history.

We know that prayer is never answered. It’s all statistical anomaly.

We know there are no hard proofs for the existence of any ‘God’ or ‘gods’…none.

There are no hard proofs for Jesus…as described in the Bible.

Religious organizations try their damnest to disprove these facts, but all their arguments inevitably fall back on the rejection of real evidence, and the use of magic.

Despite the total failure of the Hebrew religion to explain our natural world, which it should be able to do if it were the ‘Word of God’, millions of people leave their brains at the door and believe superstitious nonsense and somehow justify it to themselves.

Think of the whole sweep of the history of our earth and ALL of its people. Think of the millions and millions of people that were living everywhere on earth when the Old Testament history was supposedly written. That a real God would pick these non-descript desert dwellers, and embroil Himself in their day-to-day matters and tell them who to kill and steal land from…is ridiculous.

And that anyone would believe these Hebrews wrote down the word-for-word ranting of a God out to kill off Hebrew opponents, and make a religion out of it…is insane.

God is made in the image of man, not vice-versa.

For latest post go: Here

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