Re: [asa] The Bible does not require a Neolithic Adam!

Quick addendum -- I happened to have John Walton's NIV Application
Commentary on Genesis handy and took a quick peek -- his take is that "pain
in childbirth" actually refers to "anxiety in conception," not physical pain
at all. According to Walton, the Hebrew translated "childbirth" actually
refers to "conception," not childbirth, and the Hebrew translated "pain"
only appears a few other times in the OT and generally refers to "anxiety."
Walton also interprets this particular consequence not as a "curse," but as
a description of one consequence that flows from the actual curse, which is
"death."

So, Walton says, the most likely meaning of this text is that people will
have anxiety mingled with the joy of bringing children into the world
because their children will suffer the brokenness and death that comes from
the curse. This wouldn't resolve the problem of how humans experienced
physical death before the fall if Adam & Eve were literal and more recent,
but it would seem to resolve the anatomical problem that childbirth has
always been rather painful.

In my experience as a father of three, this interpretation resonates with
me. I'll never forget eleven years ago when my first was born, when we
buckled her into the car seat for the first time and drove away from the
hospital, thinking -- HELP!!! And I've thought that every day since!

On 10/22/06, David Opderbeck <dopderbeck@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I wonder if some things like the curse of increased pain in childbirth
have primarily a social / cultural aspect rather than a physiological or
psychological one. This would be analagous to the way many like to handle
the problem of "natural evil" before the fall -- there were hurricanes,
earthquakes, etc., before the fall, but sin destroyed the sort of wise and
just civil administration that otherwise would have mitigated the
consequences of those natural events on human civilization.
>
> Similarly, perhaps absent the fall, the pain of childbirth would have been
more manageable, because human culture, including medical culture, would
have advanced more rapidly and would have been more equitably available to
all women. Today, for many women in developed countries, childbirth is not
nearly so painful as it otherwise would be, due to the epidural drugs. Of
course, even today, due in many ways to sin (economic and social injustice),
most women in the world don't have access to this technology.
>
>
>
> On 10/22/06, jack syme <drsyme@cablespeed.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > I had kidney stones once. In a sense, I gave birth to those stones.
And it was extraordinarily painful. It was beyond pain.
> >
> > And I have witness from a woman or two, who have both passed kidney
stones and given birth, and, at least in their words, the experience was
comparable.
> >
> > On a slightly more serious note. Do you think that we have reached the
end of our evolution? Is it not possible, short of routine caesarian
sections, that human brain capacity has reached its limits?
> >
> > Concerning pain in child birth. The argument I thought I was making is
that pain in childbirth is due to the ratio of the neonatal head
circumference to that of the birth canal. This is one sentence out of my
new pamphlet, Who was Adam. The page number is still to be determined when I
finish formatting it.
> >
> >
> > ". The human birth canal is 13 centimeters at its longest dimension and
10 centimeters at the smallest. By comparison the baby's head is 10
centimeters at the longest dimension and the shoulders 12 cm." Glenn R.
Morton, Who was Adam?, Pathway Papers, 5 (Spring: DMD Publishers, 2006),
page to be determined.
> >
> > That is a tight fit. Similar proportions among fossil men go back to
about 2.5 million years.
> >
> > Anyone who has seen animals give birth, know that they are not entirely
comfortable. Watching the contractions during the birth of a cow, or even a
cat, the animal is experiencing discomfort. However, it is nothing like
what we humans experience. Everytime I tell a group of women that I once
broke my leg in 4 places and my foot was at my kneecap, and tell them how
horendously painful it was, they always say, it can't match childbirth. And
the few women who have broken their leg like that agree. Since I will never
experience pain in childbirth, I can't quite be an expert on it.
> >
> > Thus, this is to say, I do agree with you that in and of itself, pain
in childbirth could be said to be psychologically increased. But when one
realizes that the anatomical features of the human birth which cause the
pain we see today, existed two and a half million years ago, why would I
need to resort to psychology or subjective feelings to say that pain
increased? I have the anatomical data which shows that it was a problem back
then.
> >
>
>

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Received on Sun Oct 22 21:46:05 2006