Creationist Theology

I'm sure others have asked this before, but I have yet to come across it so...

I've heard the speculation about whether or not the mythological Adam of Genesis had a belly button.  There is no mention of it in the bible so no help there.  I've heard a few different answers to that question, but the common thread in all the answers is an attempt to make them seem rational.  Generally, most people seem to believe that Adam did NOT have a navel prior to the fall as they rightly conclude that there would have been no need for it since he was not the offspring of parents.  After the fall then breeding takes place, giving us the umbilical cord to provide nourishment while we're developing in the womb, something neither Adam nor Eve did.

I've got a few more questions, however.

Like, did Adam have teeth?  I know that many people believe that Adam would have eaten, other than the proverbial "forbidden fruit", but I can't believe that.  If the lying Abrahamic god could be believed, death in the Garden of Eden was unknown and not an option prior to the fall, so Adam (indeed all life) was created to be immortal.  He could not starve to death.  Further, it wouldn't just be his teeth that would present as a problem but his entire digestive tract!

If Adam couldn't starve to death then he couldn't have any need for food, it would strictly be a recreational activity.  However, that would make the act of eating strictly carnal, and being in and of the world is a sin.  Clearly the god wanted this Adam to eat even though eating wasn't needed for survival.  Did this god have a different position on carnality prior to the fall? 

Did Adam have olfactory receptors?  If Adam was built to be immortal then the only reason to have a sense of smell is, again, carnal.  Lacking a need to determine whether or not something may be desirable based on its smell means the only function would be for gaining pleasure from the world, for gaining pleasure through the flesh.

Did Adam have lungs?  Again, if Adam was immortal, what need did he have for lungs?  For Kidneys?  For a liver?  For sensing hot or cold?  For sensing pain?  All of these things, and most everything else about living organisms, are designed to help us survive in this world.  In the garden of eden there would be no need for any of this, so did Adam and Eve have any of them? 

Did Adam have toes?  He had no need for them and, lacking an evolutionary explanation, they therefore become puzzling.  Did Adam have hair?  Again, he had no need.

The inescapable conclusion is that an apologist will be all over this with stories that almost every person on Earth would be embarrassed to promulgate, but most people of the Abrahamic religions will probably verbalize it anyway.

I couldn't help but have these thoughts as I read Answers in Genesis, referred as I was by a P.Z. Myers blog entry.  It's not that the universe is old, it's that the universe only looks old as their god made it so the universe was fully functioning from the start.  It all makes so much sense!

Check it out!

"What would a doctor from today’s fallen world say if he looked at Adam and Eve’s bodies just after they were created? This doctor would be very confused. Such perfect bodies would show no degenerative aging, and he would be shocked to learn that these adults were less than a day old."

Shocked I tell you!  A doctor from today's world would be shocked.  I guess that's an admission that the bullshit factor is out of this world.  I would love to know what Ken Ham means when he says "perfect bodies".  He can't mean aesthetically, because that would be subjective and, once again, carnal.  He MUST mean objectively, but no human body could be perfect (an unattainable state) as you can't improve on perfection, and the human body has many design imperfections.

Let's also try to figure out what bullshit he means by "show no degenerative aging".  "Degenerative aging" is a term used to describe the effects on the body not caused by chronological aging but by stress on the body, such as arthritis or type 2 diabetes.  Since these effects tend to accumulate with time they are considered part of the aging process, but they are not part of the chronological process so they accumulate at different rates in different people.  A person who appears to be in their twenties should show some degenerative aging but it's far from necessary.  What does that mean?  I would imagine that most doctors encounter many people who are adults yet show no obvious signs of "degenerative aging", just as it's likely that they have encountered children and adolescents who DO show signs of it (juvenile rheumatoid arthritis for example) .  I doubt they would be confused by it, although I'm sure it would be noteworthy.

So, what did Ken Ham tell us?  He threw a lot of Sophistic bullshit at you in an attempt to have you turn your brain off.  It kind of sounded like he was giving a rational explanation for the phenomenon of an apparently old universe but he was instead treating you like a sucker.  As an apologist he feels the need to explain the mistakes and contradictions in his holy book, but lacking any honesty or morality he has no problem making up his own excuses and trying to foist them on people as though they are genuine.  On the surface his "argument" sounds good, but it doesn't take much effort to show that they're quite disingenuous.  He tries to stack the deck by making an assertion whose only purpose is to manipulate your thinking by inserting the word "perfect" in his description of the bodies of Adam and Eve.

"Perfect" creatures have no need for physical bodies, they don't have eyes that can be overwhelmed by the light from the sun or leave them stumbling about in the dark.  They don't have ears that hurt if the sound is too loud or ring long after the sound has stopped.  They don't have stomachs that growl when they're empty or finger nails that require grooming.  Perfect creatures don't need help-mates or social interactions.  As said before, perfection is an unattainable state.  By throwing it in to the mix Ken Ham wants you to believe the impossible, that perfection was attained, and despite it not being perfect by any measure, it was still perfect.  I hope you aren't someone who finds this reasoning persuasive.

Let's be at least somewhat intellectually honest.  Although there is no place in the bible where it directly says that Adam and Eve were immortal there are several denominations of christianity that advocate it as a concept, and Ken Ham is a supporter of this view.  Ultimately, here's what you have to believe if you're Ken Ham:

• Despite being immortal the first humans were given digestive tracts and senses of pain and smell, useful only in staying alive or in enjoying the "sins of the flesh".  
• Despite having the largest portion of their bodies dedicated to useless and unneeded endeavors, these first humans had perfect bodies.
• Despite the knowledge that immortal beings that could reproduce indefinitely would overwhelm any environment they occupy and then continue to stack bodies up in space until all the mass of the universe has been expropriated, his god still gave Adam a penis and Eve a womb.

It doesn't even make sense if you don't question it! 

Finally, and here's the kicker, Ken Ham wants you to believe that the creation of Adam is analogous to the universe in that, lacking any other people to reference to determine age, one couldn't say how old Adam was by appearance and neither can you determine the universes age by appearance.  He thinks he's being clever by adding the modifier "appear" to the dating of things.  Adam wasn't 20 - 30 years old, he was only a day old and just "appeared" to be older.

How does Ken Ham know what age Adam looked like?  There is no reference that I can find to Adams "apparent" age in the bible, and lacking any physical description one could make an argument that Adam appeared as a fetus or a deathbed occupier!  Ken wants to believe, however, and since everything he touts is made up anyway I guess he's just being consistent. 

Still, his argument is that the only reason you can assign any "apparent" age to Adam is because you have plenty of references all around you of what humans appearance is like at various stages of life, enabling one to make an informed assessment of someone's age, and this is the same with the universe.  If you can make sense of that, well you just may be a creationist. 

We've only one universe so saying that it "appears" old is meaningless unless you also say why it appears old.  Ken acknowledges that the universe does appear to be old but doesn't say how he makes that assessment.  It can't be because he's been watching stars and planets form and knows how long that takes because the evidence is that his vaunted 6,000 year old universe would be too hot to even form atoms and would consist of plasma!  He knows  that the evidence for this is overwhelming, so instead of arguing the science he thinks he's being clever in using the "it only appears old" argument.  Since he can't use any other universe to decide whether or not the universe appears old in comparison he must be using the same evidence that science does when he admits that the universe appears to be old.  So Ken understands enough about science to know there are excellent reasons to assert that the universe is old, and it's not because we see universes in all stages of their existence and can figure it out from comparison and contrast but because we understand many physical processes and can calculate the time needed for events to occur.  The irony of this seems to escape Ken, especially since he seems oblivious of the fact that his reference to the appearance of Adams age is informed by his experience with other people and not just because it's in the bible, and that he has absolutely no idea how old Adam appeared to be anyway.

The appearance of both the universe and Adam in Ken Hams mind is irrelevant and misleading, but not misleading in the sense of deception.  He knows the age of both because it's cryptically stored in various texts written by nomadic desert dwellers thousands of years ago, and the deceptive, but non-deceptive, evidence must be ignored, but only when it contradicts the nomadic desert dwellers from thousands of years ago.  If the same evidence supports the nomadic desert dwellers from thousands of years ago, well... you can't argue with science!