Adam, Eve, Incest and the idiocy of Answers in Genesis

The creationists' belief that the entire human race descended exclusively from two people living around six thousand years ago is of course impossible for a number of reasons. Genomic evidence confirms humans and apes share common ancestry [1] while population genetics shows that the human race has never been smaller than several thousand people. [2] No amount of appeals to human creeds or 'theological necessity' will change reality. There is also the unpleasant reality that the creationist worldview demands incest, something which is somewhat difficult to square with the laws against incest in Leviticus 18:7-18 and Leviticus 20:11-21. How do the creationists respons? Ad hoc reasoning. They simply assume without any convincing evidence that God had no problems with brother marrying sister.

 

An Answers in Genesis comment shows just how unconvincing this sounds, declaring that "God waited 2,500 years after creation to institute the law against close intermarriage". 

 

One is entirely justified to ask why it took God 2500 years to declare incest a "depravity" as Lev 18:17 emphatically declares it when the concept of ritual cleanness as shown by the command to Noah in Gen 7:2  to differentiate between clean and unclean animals when collecting them for the ark existed well before then. Was God more concerned with ritual cleanliness than violation of family bonds? Besides, AiG is factually wrong here as the reference to Lot's daghters having sex with their father as recorded in Gen 19:30-38 is entirely negative, showing that well before Moses, incest was regarded negatively. The answer is of course the need by AiG and other creationists to reconcile the need for Adam's children to marry each other as required by their insane belief that humans descend from two people with the clear porohibition of incest in the Bible, both OT and NT.

Furthermore, when one examines the early chapters of Genesis, Cain's words in Gen 4:14 expressing his fear that people would kill him, as well as his taking of a wife in v17 clearly imply the existence of other people, and the automatic assumotion that Adam and Eve had alreaday had other children is negated by the force of Gen 4:25 "Adam knew his wife again, and she bore a son and named him Seth, for she said, “God has appointed for me another child instead of Abel, because Cain killed him." It is impossible to see why Eve would invest so miuch into Seth as a replacement if she already had children from whom Cain could have taken a wife and whom he would fear would kill him.

The AiG post which arbitrarily declares God only found incest abominable 2500 years after creation is clearly an ad hoc argument motivated solely to avoid the implied divine condemnation of the incest that would have been required if the entire human race startewd with two people. Genetics of course rules this out as we have no evidence of a bottleneck of two people living 6000 years ago, and the early chapters of Genesis clearly hold incest in low regard.

References

1. Johnson WE, Coffin JM. Constructing primate phylogenies from ancient retrovirus sequences. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 1999 Aug;96(18):10254-10260. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.96.18.10254. PMID: 10468595; PMCID: PMC17875.
2. Li, H., Durbin, R. Inference of human population history from individual whole-genome sequences. Nature 475, 493–496 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature10231