I have always been perplexed as to how people can turn off their rational faculties and believe in such obvious ordure as creationism—especially when viewed from modernity. So I decided to put aside evolution and the multitude of fossils that unequivocally demonstrate it, to disregard the evidence that the earth is 4.54 billion years old—I put all of my knowledge aside and picked up the Old Testament.
How do you get a population from only two people? Adam and Eve had many children, the most famous being Cain and Abel. But who did they reproduce with? Genesis is unequivocal that Adam was the first.
Adam was said to have lived until he was 930 years old and assuming that Eve lived to a similar age, it would have been possible for them to have had numerous offspring—the Jewish historian Josephus wrote that they begot 33 sons and 23 daughters.
Humanity was born from incest—Cain must have had intercourse with a family member (probably a sister or niece). God didn't forbid incestuous copulation until the time of Moses (Leviticus 18-20), even Abraham was said to have married his half sister. (Genesis 20:12)
Inter-family coitus increases the risk of sharing the same abnormal recessive genes, genes that would then become dominant in any offspring. However, Adam was created by God and therefore perfect. His genetics would have been faultless, there would have been no mutations, no defects. Incest was safe, permitted, and indeed necessary for the propagation of the human species.
Adam brought God's wrath down upon him by partaking of the fruit. But God punished not only Adam for his sin, the punishment extended to his progeny, to the entirety of the human race, to you and me, cursing us to decay and degenerate, to be separate from him, to be divorced from perfection, to be sinners. (Romans 8:20)
According to some Christian apologists, the decay is within our genes which mutated and broke down through the generations following Adam. At the time of Moses, God intervened and as a prophylaxis against genetic abnormality, he forbade incest.
But what about animals? We know that they have genetic mutations, variations that are selected and bred for by animal breeders, farmers and scientists. Why are non-human creatures corrupted?
Perhaps God made a mistake. I think few believers would hold with this notion of an inept Creator, although that is the way he is portrayed.
If animals inherited the original sin too then there is no escape for them, they are eternally damned. Christ only came to save the descendents of Abraham, only humanity (Hebrews 2:16, Galatians 3:29). If this were the case then hell would be overrun with cursed creatures, infected with the stamping and neighing, the biting and clawing of all the non-human organisms that have lived and died with no hope of reprieve.
Could all creatures be descended from Adam? Did he pass his sin onto them? Before God even considered making Eve he introduced the animals to Adam for companionship.
“Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man...But for Adam no suitable helper was found...Then the Lord God made a woman...and he brought her to the man.”
- (Genesis 2:19-22)
So Eve was only created after Adam was unable to find satisfaction within the animal kingdom. Trans-species copulation had yet to be prohibited. Are we to assume that Adam debauched himself on the flesh of beasts, perverting the innocence of a menagerie of creatures with his depraved lecherousness?
This, of course, is nonsense, but then so is the Old Testament. Genesis was a human attempt to explicate the origin of life, it is a glimpse into the psychology of historic minds and nothing more. That a contemporaneous person believes this hokum is terrifying. But even if all of science's findings, all the knowledge we have accrued, even if all of that is swept off the table, the story still does not work. Why are animals not perfect?
