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According to the Judeo-Christian tradition, does God create more people or is everyone on earth a product of incest?
I had an article up in a site dealing with this issue. I inserted the link here so that anyone interested could read the article. But the administrator pointed out that it is against rules. So I apologize for doing so. I am now pasting that article here for anyone who might be interested.
Before dealing with the arguments against surrounding Cain let us see some points that we need to keep in mind.
Adam had other children: Cain was the first child of Adam and Eve recorded in Scripture (Genesis 4:1). His brothers, Abel (Genesis 4:2) and Seth (Genesis 4:25), were part of the first generation of children ever born on this earth. Now where these the only children Adam and Eve had? Skeptics would want to assume so but it was not so. Let me quote Genesis 5:4. “And the days of Adam after he had fathered Seth were eight hundred years. And he fathered sons and daughters.”
130 Years: Adam was 130 years (Genesis 5:3) when Seth was born and Adam was created as a fully matured adult. He was capable of reproducing from day one of his creation. He could have had many children during that time. So it is very possible that there were a lot of people by the time Cain killed Abel.
Now let us look at the arguments.
There are two possibilities. One is that he would have already been married to one of his sisters and so when he had to leave his people, he just took off with his wife. Another possibility is that he was not married and when he had to leave he knew he would be alone and so took off with one of his sisters. This will lead us to the next question.
The answer is yes. Today, brothers and sisters (and half-brothers and half-sisters, etc.) are not permitted to marry because their children have high risk of being deformed. The more closely the parents are related, the more likely it is that any offspring will be deformed. Every person has two sets of genes, there being some 130,000 pairs that specify how a person is put together and functions. Each person inherits one gene of each pair from each parent.
Unfortunately, genes today contain many mistakes (because of sin and the Curse), and these mistakes show up in a variety of ways. The more distantly related parents are, the more likely it is that they will have different mistakes in their genes. Children, inheriting one set of genes from each parent, are likely to end up with pairs of genes containing a maximum of one bad gene in each pair. The good gene tends to override the bad so that a deformity (a serious one, anyway) does not occur. (Overall, though, the human race is slowly degenerating as mistakes accumulate, generation after generation.) However, the more closely related two people are, the more likely it is that they will have similar mistakes in their genes, since these have been inherited from the same parents. Therefore, a brother and a sister are more likely to have similar mistakes in their genes. A child of a union between such siblings could inherit the same bad gene on the same gene pair from both, resulting in two bad copies of the gene and serious defects.
But things were different during Genesis time. Adam and Eve did not have accumulated genetic mistakes. When the first two people were created, they were physically perfect. Everything God made was “very good” (Genesis 1:31), so their genes were perfect—no mistakes! But, when sin entered the world (because of Adam—Genesis 3:6, Romans 5:12), God cursed the world so that the perfect creation then began to degenerate, that is, suffer death and decay (Romans 8:22). Over thousands of years, this degeneration has produced all sorts of genetic mistakes in living things.
Cain was in the first generation of children ever born. He (as well as his brothers and sisters) would have have received virtually no imperfect genes from Adam or Eve, since the effects of sin and the Curse would have been minimal to start with (it takes time for these copying errors to accumulate). In that situation, brother and sister could marry with God’s approval, without any potential to produce deformed offspring.
By the time of Moses (a few thousand years later), degenerative mistakes would have built up in the human race to such an extent that it was necessary for God to forbid brother-sister (and close relative) marriage (Leviticus 18-20).[12] (Also, there were plenty of people on the earth by then, and there was no reason for close relations to marry.)
Some claim that there had to be lots of people on earth other than Adam and Eve’s descendants, otherwise Cain would not have been fearful of people wanting to slay him for killing Abel.
First of all, in the days before civil government was instituted to punish murderers (Genesis 9:6), someone would want to harm Cain for killing Abel only if they were closely related to Abel! Strangers could hardly have cared. So the people Cain was afraid of could not have been another race of people.
Second, Cain and Abel were born quite some time before Abel’s death. Genesis 4:3 states: “And in the course of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering to the Lord.”
Note the phrase “in the course of time.” We know that Seth was born when Adam was 130 years old (Genesis 5:3), and Eve saw him as a “replacement” for Abel (Genesis 4:25). Therefore, the period from Cain’s birth to Abel’s death may have been 100 years or more—allowing plenty of time for other children of Adam and Eve to marry and have children and grandchildren. By the time Abel was killed, there could well have been a considerable number of descendants of Adam and Eve, involving several generations.
Sigh...nowhere in Genesis does it mention "curse"...:)
Including stuff - not from the bible - to explain the bible - is augmenting "god's" perfect word.
800 years.
Fiction. Add up the distance between Adam (I did...it's where everybody gets the 6,000 year issue from) and Jesus...then, add another 2,000 years...and the Earth is less than 8,000 years old. OR people are :)
In either case, clearly false.
Overall, though, the human race is slowly degenerating as mistakes accumulate, generation after generation False...again.
Look, we have stats that prove people live longer (on average) now, than they used to. Plague? Not for nearly a milennia...childhood diseases? Virtually gone, in many parts of the world.
Given the increasing lifespan of the average human...this is an assumption with zero scientific fact or scriptural evidence. Nowhere was the bible say people are degenerating. :)
There are a few "magical" people (the offspring of adam & eve gets married to a woman whose origin is never explained)...which begs the question.
If the bible is infallible, why the error? If it's not, then, why the lack of explanation? As the rest of it is so gosh specific about how God used a rib bone, etc, etc.
I was reading the other day about religious history, the oldest ones we can find, globally, are from India...folklore, etc, about the Earth as mother and how this gave rise to burial traditions, etc (the Earth being a symbolic pregnant woman)...
With DNA sequencing, though, we can determine that everybody living has a common ancestor in Africa, which is interesting...does that mean homo sapiens first evolved there? OR is that divinity and incest?
The explanation that I always liked best (and that actually sort of makes sense from a 'the Bible is literal truth' standpoint) is that Adam and Eve were the true son and daughter of God, yes, chosen to live in paradise, but that doesn't mean he wasn't off creating lots of other people as well. The other folks just didn't get written about. Adam and Eve were royalty, and these guys were the serfs. So when they were finally kicked out of Eden, they didn't wander into a barren, unpopulated wasteland but found lots of other people waiting for them.
Considering how Genesis has two separate and distinct creation stories within paragraphs of each other, though, it's hard to take anything literally.
well I dont beleive in any god an no god can just magically conjure up people but according to the christian faith, adam and eve supposedly started the human race meaning there children would have had to have sex with each other and so on and so forth to populate the planet so according to the chrisitian faith, everyone would have to be the product of incest because there is no other way to explain how all these people got here
The Christian faith came from Judaism first. The whole concept came from the Caldian and Babylonian text. Their concept was very different. They had many men and women to start the human race. It was all abarated as their religion was absorbed by Mithraism to Judaism to Christianity.
im an atheist. christians believe it started with 2 people, but there are more than 4 races
existing, which is another reason christianity is a dumb religion.
lol...my son was expelled from catholic school for asking just that. 'When Cain was banished...where did the people come from that he met?'
Thanks eternallife. Although a simple yes was all I was looking for. But interesting read.
the whole adam and eve story its actully very confusing
Christians lie. They're full of bullshit
