#STRask - Did God Create Other Human Beings Not Described in Genesis 1–2?

Episode Date: January 23, 2025

Questions about whether God created other human beings not described in Genesis 1–2, whether the children of Adam and Eve had to commit incest, and whether women are more naive or less intelligent than men since Eve was deceived and not Adam.   Did God create other human beings not described in Genesis 1–2? If all humans came from Adam and Eve, wouldn’t that mean early humanity was forced to commit incest? Are women more naive or less intelligent than men in general since Eve was deceived and not Adam?

This is the hashtag STR Ask podcast and we're so glad you're here and by we, I mean Amy Hall and Greg Kogel. We are. Now, Greg, in the last episode, we were talking about God creating human beings. So we're going to keep going on in that direction a little bit here. And this first question comes from Jeremy Melberg. Oh, I know Jeremy. He's my nephew.

All right. On my wife's side. Great guy. Well, I'm glad I picked his question. Hope I can answer it. All right. Here is his question. Did God create other human beings not described in Genesis 1 and 2? That's a great question in light of a lot of controversy, not only with the broader issue of Darwinian evolution, but many Christians who, academics, who are struggling with trying to make sense of what they perceive to be

scientific evidence on one side of the issue, genetics, etc., and the biblical record. All right. Notably, William Blank Craig right now, and the, what's the title of his book? The Historical Adam. Yeah. The key here, Jeremy, is what one means by human being. And it seems like straight up, but it's not because in this discussion we have to be more precise. If we understand a human being to be one just like all the rest of us who have been multiplying for a long time, and theologically, those made in the image of God, it appears that the biblical record

is that all those human beings, those image bearers, a human being is a homo sapien image bearer, okay? So we're adding a theological element there, descended from one set of parents, Adam and Eve. All right, that seems to be what's theologically required. And this thing has been knocked around by lots of people. In fact, I would recommend a wonderful book that came out about five or six years ago, titled, interestingly, Theistic Evolution. It's an interesting title because the book is a critique of theistic evolution and it's a critique on the evolutionary

side of the science, on the philosophical side. So Stephen Meyer is the one overseeing the pieces that were written by other people in the first section, J.P. Moreland in the philosophy section, and then— Theology. Is it Grudem? Yeah, Wayne Grudem does the theology section. Well, that's the one that applies here. What does theology require? And even Bill Craig, working through all of these issues very carefully and somewhat sympathetic, it seems, to the Darwinian model when it comes to human origins. He says, theologically, we have to have an original human pair for the rest of the human race,

who are human beings in the sense that they are homo sapien God-image bearers. So I would say, no, the Bible does not indicate that there are other human beings in that sense that God created. Now there is a view held by a number of people, and I'm trying to think of the guy with the Indian name, but I'm not going to pronounce it right unless you can. Ramashami. No, that's not close. Joshua, is it Swamidass? Yeah, Swamidass. Okay, thank you.

Sorry, Josh. I might have gotten it wrong still. No, I met him last year and so I'm just sorry about that. I get my girls' names wrong too. So Josh Swamidass. You get staff members' names wrong too sometimes. But moving along, that hold that the hominem chain that is identified as homo sapien at some point in history received a soul that bore the image of God. Now I'm probably oversimplifying, but the idea is you

could have human beings, true human beings, developing over time, and at some point there is an original pair that receive that unique mark that make them image bearers, and from them, all the rest of the human race developed that human race bearing the image of God and fallen in sin, etc., etc. So that's another way of resolving the problem. Notice that the difference there is just that there are homo sapiens before Adam and Eve, but there are no human being image bearers until Adam and Eve. So in both views, you have a unique pair that then is the progenitors of the human race as we understand it. Now,

I think pretty much everybody acknowledges the existence of other hominems, that is, hominid creatures that are human-like, but ended up dying out and are not necessarily on the chain of human evolution, those who hold the view of human evolution. That's not my view, but those who do hold it. And I'm talking about Christians who hold it. And Neanderthal might be kind of somewhere in there, and I'm talking about Christians who hold it. And Neanderthal might be kind of somewhere in there, and there's debate about whether Neanderthal is a true human being or not, but that's another issue. There certainly are australopithecines, you know,

like Lucy, and there is Cro-Magnon Man, you know, there are all these homonyms that seem to be evident in the fossil record. The question is, where do they fit in the larger tree for those who are advocating a Darwinian progression? But it's interesting, the Christians that I know of, Swami Das and Bill Craig, for example, are affirming an original pair as the parents of the human race bearing the image of God. And that seems like a theological necessity and that's developed well in this book, the last third of the book on theistic evolution, titled Theistic Evolution. And I have seen some articles on reasons to believe by, I think they were by Fusrana about

Neanderthals and other hominids and I think, so if you're looking for information about that I would look at how he kind of works through that. But theologically, there are huge implications if God had created more than Adam and Eve. And like you said, there's no way. More humans than Adam and Eve. Right. So like you said, the Bible does not indicate in any way that God created other human beings. Here are some of the implications of this. The first one is just the idea that we are all equally valuable.

So I think the idea that we evolved separately, like maybe separate races evolved, I think people probably used this back in the 19th and 20th century to support racism. Darwin, for example. Yeah, that has implications there. If we're not all descended from Adam and Eve, then in what sense are we all equal? Are we all in the same family? Secondly— Sharing the same rights.

Right. Because the concept of rights is a transcendent element that is attached to a certain group of people by nature. And secondly, if we're not all in Adam, maybe we're not all fallen. But we are all fallen. So we're all in Adam. Was there a second Adam that people fell in? Well, that's completely foreign to the text.

Thirdly, we're all represented by Adam, and this is very clear in Romans 5 when Paul talks about how when we're born, Adam is our representative, that's why we're fallen, and we move from the natural to the spiritual. When we're in Christ, he becomes our representative. So Paul is very clear that these are the two choices. You are either in Adam, a natural person, or you are in Christ, you're a spiritual person. Those are the two options. So there's just no indication at all that I don't see how another human being being created would fit into all of that. So in light of that, we come to a question from Xander.

I was recently in a conversation with someone who asked me if all humans came from Adam and Eve, wouldn't that mean early humanity was forced to commit incest? I'm not entirely sure how to answer and was hoping to borrow some of your expertise. The answer is yes, because there weren't that many choices. And clearly in the Mosaic Law there are restrictions on this and there are different speculations on why God restricted it. Some would say, well, there are genetic reasons because when you have close family ties, then you have genetic problems, and we see this in dynasties in the 17th and

18th and 19th centuries, whatever, in Europe, and a lot of intermarrying. I just noticed as I'm reading through the book of Genesis now, as I'm restarting my Bible reading from the beginning, having finished one round, then I'm doing another, is that Abraham married his first cousin, Isaac married his first cousin, Jacob married his first cousin. They were all related very closely. Part of the reason is because they wanted them all from the same family, not the Canaanites,

because they didn't want that foreign religion corrupting their own religious and spiritual convictions. But nevertheless, that didn't seem to be a problem early on. It's just later that you see this restriction in the law. And I think the reason that they have this restriction in the law, and this isn't my idea, this is Dennis Prager's, and he doesn't think it has that much to do with genetics, though nowadays that is a concern. He thinks it's there because God was seeking to protect family members from sex and keeping –

Taking that element out of it. Yes, taking that element out of the family environment so that family members were not vulnerable to other family members sexually. And I think there's a lot of merit to that view. I think it makes a lot more sense to me than the genetic stuff, which didn't seem to be in play, at least then, maybe now with a lot more aggregation of genetic mutations and stuff, those being passed on.

But yes, from the outset, you've got Adam and Eve and their children. Okay, now what? It's the beginning of the human race. You don't have any other choices. And people apparently lived quite a bit longer then. And, you know, it's not clear to me that the sense of, what's the right word here, discomfort with being married to somebody that is from your immediate family

was part of the environment then. I don't know, it's hard to tell. But the fact is, yes, incest was in the sense that brothers and sisters were marrying, apart from other kinds of incest where the parent has sex with the child. Well, that really, that was the only option. And this is where I think Dennis Prager's insight is really important because if the goal is you want to take out of the immediate family that dynamic out of the family, when you consider the fact

that Adam and Eve lived for hundreds of years, it wouldn't be the case that you would have siblings who were very close to each other growing up together would be marrying each other necessarily. You'd probably have a lot of children being born before they start marrying and they didn't necessarily grow up right next to each other. So even though they're brothers and sisters, it wouldn't be in quite the same sense that say... A nuclear family that we think of. Right, right.

Because they lived for so long. And so I think that's how I would understand this, that idea of the close nuclear family who grew up in proximity with each other. I don't think those people were marrying each other, even in the case of Adam and Eve's children. But I guess we'll find out when we ask God. Yeah, it's speculative. But certainly, they were siblings, even if they were environmentally separated to some degree, they were siblings.

And I think this brings up a good topic here, because clearly later on, God does outlaw incest in the Mosaic law. So he didn't want them to do that. So why is it the case that he allowed it there? Well, sometimes you're working with a situation and you make the best of it. So I think he got around the issues that would come up later by having them live for so long. I think that actually took that away. But sometimes circumstances change, and what's okay in one circumstance is not okay in the other

circumstance. All we know is that now, for sure, God does not allow that within families. Yeah, and there are some things that God says no to that are based on universal. So they are immoral in themselves, and they are going to be true regardless of what kind of legal system you're under, whether it's the Mosaic system or whether it's the New Covenant, these are still wrong, and we've discussed this before. So we see in the Mosaic law universals. But there are other things that are expressed as, in a certain sense, temporally wrong by God under the circumstances that he gives the law, that are not inherently immoral. And I would consider this as an example of that. It's not

inherently immoral to marry your sister or your brother. But there was a practical reason down the line while God restricted that, maybe because of health concerns, genetic health concerns, or maybe because of protecting the larger family. And you may have an example of what's called a logical slippery slope, or no, a moral slippery slope where the thing that's being done is not itself intrinsically immoral, but could lead to something intrinsically immoral. And so this is why God says no to that. And why it would be okay at another time when those circumstances didn't obtain that were the practical circumstances

that God made to restrict it. And just to be clear, maybe this is what you're saying too, but I think it is objectively immoral in the nuclear family as they are today. So I think it, and this is how people get confused about what we mean by objective morality. In a situation, depending on what makes up the situation, depends on what the objective right and wrong is in that situation. Right, the case that it was intrinsically immoral for Adam and Eve's children to marry, even though they were separated as maybe you would be from a cousin today? Maybe.

Then I would say no, because that's not the issue. The issue would be in the nuclear family inside the... Nowadays. Yeah, inside... No, the circumstances.... a close... So what if you had siblings that were separated at birth and then met each other under... in the nuclear family inside the, yeah, inside a closed. So what would you, what if you had siblings that were separated at birth and then met each other under, you know, innocuous circumstances, but didn't realize they were still? Oh, that's, I, you know, I would still say that's wrong. So I, I, I, maybe I'd have to think about this some more then. But whatever it is, that, that was the only option with Adam and Eve. So yeah,

that's a really good challenge, Greg. I think I have to think about that one because I would definitely say it was still wrong. Okay, here's one more question. This one comes from Lois. Are women more naive slash less intelligent than men in general since Eve was deceived and not Adam? I don't have any reason to think. Be very careful, Chris. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't have any reason to think that. Certainly not less intelligent, or even more naive.

And notice that Adam was with her the whole time. And Adam took the fruit that she gave him in aid of it. And the instructions regarding the fruit, et cetera, were given to Adam, not to Eve. So I don't have any reason to draw that conclusion. Yep, sorry, I thought you were gonna say more. No, I'm not gonna say more. So far, I thought you were going to say more. No, I'm not going to say more. So far, I'm okay. I mean, I think that there are other generalizations people might make.

Generalizations, not truisms, but generalizations people might make about the differences between the sexes. But I don't think those two are them. I agree. I don't think there's anything about naivete or intelligence that has to do with this. What I do think or what I suspect, because obviously this is speculation. And you can say what you want because you're a woman. What I suspect is that the serpent went after Eve because he knew what her gifts were. I think one thing that we as women are

really good at is accommodating ourselves to others, seeing through other people's eyes, kind of, yeah, seeing things the way we see them because we're kind of the peacemakers. We bring people together, we, and these are beautiful things. These are really important things. So I think what- They're all part of the nurturing element that's strong, especially strong in women. So I suspect that the serpent went after her because those gifts make you more susceptible to certain sins or seeing things falsely or even maybe deceiving yourself because you want

to make someone else happy. That's something we want to do. We want to please people. We want to make them happy. Again, these are beautiful things, but they can be manipulated by people who are trying to take advantage of a good quality. So I don't think it's because they were naive or she was naive or less intelligent,

but because of these good gifts that God had given her that were distorted by the serpent and used for bad ends. And men have their vulnerabilities too that pertain to their uniqueness as male human beings. Yeah. Okay, hopefully we got out of that safely, Greg. We did. I think so.

Thank you, Jeremy and Xander and Lois. Right. We love hearing from you. Please send us your questions. We're just starting out a new year now, and I want to really get a bunch of questions so we can get some great shows going for you. So send those on X with the hashtag STRask or go to our website at str.org. This is Amy Hall and Greg Kogel for Stand to Reason.