Genesis — V — Polygenesis
By JOE SIXPACK
It is frequently pointed out that two of the sons of Adam and Eve — Cain and Seth — married women from other lands (Gen. 4:16), thus implying that God made more humans than Adam and Eve. Some people who point this out promote the heretical belief of a polygenesis; that is, a belief in more than one creation of man.
Even though I know such people exist, I’ve never personally met anyone who uses this seeming contradiction to disprove the Church’s teaching that we all come from a single set of parents. All of the people I’ve met who bring this up are merely trying to understand where these other people came from. So today we’re going to examine this apparent inconsistency.
Before we do, though, let me first tell you a story to help get your mind thinking in the right direction so it will be easier to help you understand what you are about to read.
There’s a story of a monk named Felix, who went walking in the woods near the monastery where he lived. He heard a bird singing overhead and looked into the treetops to see it. The bird was a beautiful blue bird, and the sight and sound of the bird filled Felix with a great thrilling joy. Felix was so enthralled with the bird that he followed it for a great distance, until he finally lost sight of him. Just then, in the distance Felix heard the peal of the monastery bell, calling the monks to evening prayer.
To his surprise, the lay brother who let Felix in was a new one he had never seen before. In fact, all the monks in the monastery were new to him. The confused Felix finally asked another monk, “Where have you all come from, and where are all our priests?”
The monk Felix had approached looked puzzled and took him to the father superior, the monastery prior. The prior said, “Tell me your name and where you have come from. Have you been a monk in this house? I’ve been prior here for forty years, but I don’t remember your face.”
Felix told his name, and how he had been out that morning to walk in the woods and followed the blue bird for hours. The oldest monk in the community came up just as Felix finished his story about the blue bird, so he hadn’t heard the name given to the prior. The elder monk asked, “What is your name?”
“My name is Felix,” he repeated for the oldest man in the monastery.
“Wait a minute,” said the aged monk, then he took down an ancient leather-bound book which archived the history of the monastery. Sure enough, there in faded ink on the yellowed pages it was written how a monk named Felix had left the monastery ninety years before, without a word to anyone, and had never been heard from again.
Felix fell to his knees and with great emotion prayed, “My God, I thank you, for now I understand how a thousand years would pass like a single moment in the joy of your presence!” While the words of his prayer were still ringing in the ears of the other monks, Felix fell forward and died peacefully.
When we look into the philosophical and theological aspects of time, things can get a little tricky and difficult to understand. We have always known and experienced time and its effects. So it’s not at all easy for us to grasp the concept of a world without time.
After the creation of the world, time certainly existed for the trees, animals, and everything else beneath man in the hierarchy of creation, but not for man. Trees sprouted, grew, and died. Animals generated their own species, grew old, then died. But not so for man. Man was created to live forever and to never know death. The application of time to man came about as a consequence of the fall of man — of original sin.
When God created Adam and Eve, He said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth” (Gen. 1:28). But it wasn’t until much later (and Scripture doesn’t tell us how much later, because time didn’t apply to man at that point) that Adam and Eve offended God when they brought sin into the world by yielding to the temptation offered by the serpent; that is, Satan (Gen. 3:1-7).
It was after original sin that God handed down His punishment to the three principals involved. He condemned the serpent to a certain failure when He promised that the messiah would come through the woman and crush his head (vs. 14-15). His punishment for Eve was that “I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you” (v. 16).
Then to Adam He promised death, thus also for all of his progeny: “In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (v. 19). It’s only after this that Scripture begins to record the offspring of our first parents in chapter four.
The recorded births of Cain, Abel, and Seth are not indicative of their being the only children of Adam and Eve. It doesn’t mean they didn’t have other children. It only means those were the children they produced after their offense to God with sin. God ordered them from their creation to be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth. So between the time of their creation and the time of their fall, the sun could very well have risen and set enough times to mark literally millions of years. How many children could they have produced over that period? Until sin entered the world, they obeyed God perfectly. They never aged, never knew suffering or pain, had never known anything but Paradise. Scripture never records anything of Adam and Eve’s life events until their fall and the punishment of time being applied to them.
So there was no polygenesis — there was no multiple creation of man. Adam and Eve obeyed God’s commands perfectly, which means they produced countless offspring between their creation and their fall. And all those offspring obviously continued with procreating life, just as Adam and Eve had done. The application of time to man and the subsequent record of time for them from that point forward explains where Cain and Seth found their wives.
I realize this isn’t the easiest concept in the world to grasp, because we have always only known time as a linear thing. This explanation also opens the door to many other questions that can’t be covered here and now because of space limitations. I could go on with further explanation of the obvious questions that come to mind, but the print would have to be so small you couldn’t read it if I were to try to get it all in our limited space. I don’t really think you’d like that. Indeed, this single discussion could go on quite literally for weeks if we followed it every day.
For now, just be content in knowing that the Church teaches as she has always taught: All of us come from one set of parents, whom Scripture calls Adam and Eve. DNA research, which is still in its infancy, backs up the Church’s teaching. It seems it has been discovered there is one common thread in all human DNA, which is evidence that we all come from one set of common parents. The Church teaches that those common parents are Adam and Eve.
If you have a question or comment you can reach out to me through the “Ask Joe” page of JoeSixpackAnswers.com, or you can email me at Joe@CantankerousCatholic.com.
Hey, how would you like to see things like this article every week in your parish bulletin as an insert? You or your pastor can learn more about how to do that by emailing me at Joe@CantankerousCatholic.com.
