As a child–I think around 8 or so–I once got booted out of Sunday school for “disrupting the class” with a series of “outspoken incidents”. What actually happened, at least as I remember it now, was that I was politely but firmly asking the teacher a number of questions she found inconvenient about the material she was laying out.
On the particular day of this incident, the material was about the Adam & Eve story, and the problems started when I asked about the wives. You know the question–it’s obvious to an 8-year old, and it’s a common one among people pointing out the irrationalities of faith in the literal text of the Bible–the one about “If Adam and Eve were the first people, and the only humans were them and their descendants, then where did their kids get their wives from?”
The problem, of course, stems from the very small set of possible answers:
1) There were other humans on earth who didn’t descend from Adam and Eve, from whom the wives were chosen
2) The wives were not human
3) The wives were also children of Adam and Eve (a.k.a. their sisters)
None of those is particularly palatable to most Christians, although some of them make for some great stories–particularly that second one.
Some particularly fundamentalist types will actually make long, serious arguments that Cain and Abel did marry their sisters and have kids with them, based apparently on the notion that it was OK because Adam and Eve were genetically perfect and the genetics problems that arise with incest are based on sin–or something–and get worse over time. As an aside, how strange is it that you can understand enough genetics to hack out that pseudo-science explanation and not understand that genetics can also prove the relation between humans and other species?
Much later, I was very thrilled to find that Clarence Darrow, who in many ways is a hero of mine, actually pulled this very same question on Bryan during the he was on the stand in the Scopes Monkey Trial.
You can read that in the transcript of Darrow’s examination of Bryan. Here’s my favourite exchange from that:
BRYAN: The purpose is to cast ridicule on everybody who believes in the Bible, and I am perfectly willing that the world shall know that these gentlemen have no other purpose than ridiculing every Christian who believes in the Bible.
DARROW: We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States, and you know it, and that is all.
Of course, Darrow’s examination of Bryan was eventually excluded, but he still accomplished his goals. In a note to H. L. Mencken, Darrow said, “I made up my mind to show the country what an ignoramus he was and I succeeded.”
I think the whole theodicy question is a better way to disrupt the whole idea of a Supreme Being, since it isn’t dependent on the specific creation myth of Christianity. It has resulted in a lot more apologia–some quite interesting–from the religious, though. The Cain’s wife argument is less abstract, and thus more useful for debating, or irritating, people who are more literal in their interpretation of their mythological texts–I mean can you imagine the guy who made the crazy God’s perfect genes argument up there following, much less originating, something like this?
