From: gpalo@digi.lonestar.org (Gerry Palo)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.jewish
Subject: Re: Who did Cain marry?
Date: 11 Jan 93 15:31:26 GMT
Organization: DSC Communications Corp, Plano, TX


 
n article <10JAN199320163492@utkvx1.utk.edu> egw@utkvx1.utk.edu (Wolpert, Edward G
reenwal) writes:
>This question came up between me and a few friends.  If Adam and Eve were the
>first two people on Earth, who could their childern marry?  (Assuming no
>incest)  Here is a response I've heard, and a few notes.  Please feel free to
>comment of the validity of the notes/responses:
>
>       1)  Adam and Eve were the first people to reconise G-D, thus the first
>with an inteligence, the first we would call human.  At first, this seems to
>contradict that the universe was made in six days.  The rational for this not
>being a contradiction is that thousands of years for a human is like a day
>to G-D.  Also, a literal first day would have been impossible with out the 
>Earth rotating.  (Since the deffanition of a day is the rotation of the earth.)
>

Another way to look at it is that cosmically-spiritually "day", or "yom"
indicates a vaster kind of process of which the earthly day involving the
rotation of the planet and its transition from light to twilight to dusk
to darkness to morning twilight to dawn to day is but a microcosmic reflec-
tion.  I think there may be readers of this newsgroup who can say something
about this with respect to the Hebrew language.  A scriptural passage can
be literally true without being materially true in the narrow sense.  Thus
the creation story can be seen to characterize not 24 hour days but cycles
of divine creative activity, which have a beginning, a development, a 
high point, a decline, and an ending, with a rest period and then a 
transition to a new cycle, which then goes through the same process, 
except that it builds on the essence of what has gone before.


The statement that a thousand years is like a day to God, or better, that
God's day is a thousand years - a thousand being a general term to indicate
vast ages of time - characterizes this concept that "day" has a greater
meaning than the "everyday" one we use.
 
>       2) This interpatation does not controdict the big bang and the theory
>of evolution.  As heard before, (By a religious Jew) "I don't believe in
>uncontrolled evolution, but evolution controlled by G-D"
>
However, the idea of repeating cycles, characterized in the word day,
stands in contrast to the more or less linear progression, with occasional
interruptions, that characterizes modern theories of evolution.  The idea
of day is more in harmony with the life cycle of a living organism, such as
a plant, which embodies the principle not only of development but of 
metamorphosis.

>       3) Creation scientise do not like this interpatation.
>
The main objection to the big bang and other such theories of materialistic
evolution is to the idea that form, life, consciousness, and self consciousness
arose out of chaos - that the parts created the whole, as if the bricks
created the building. The concept that the whole existed first, as spirit
potential and then broke down into the individualized manifestations is not
a working principle of modern science.  This in my mind is a case of science
keeping one foot in the middle ages.  Sometime in the eighteenth century
the discovery of cellular biology freed science from the incorrect belief,
previously held, that living creatures sprang forth spontaneously out of
the mud.  This established the principle that life begets life.  The big
bang is a return to the old principle, only the moment of life springing 
forth from the mud is pushed back so far into the past that it is practically
impossible to picture it in a meaningful way.  But the principle is the
same as that of medieval superstition.  

The principle that life springs from life, soul from soul, and spirit from
spirit characterizes all religious views of creation and existence.  But 
these views are usually characterized in pictorial, sometimes mythological
forms.  The objective treatment of these principles and their investigation
in a scientific manner appropriate to them has not been a characteristic
of modern science, which denies them or - better said - does not understand
them.  Goethe in his scientific writings, with his concept of the archetypal
plant ("Urpflanze") and his morphological studies of animals and geological
processes was working in this direction.  Following him, Rudolf Steiner 
developed this principle further in the approach he called anthroposophy.  
By following such lines of thought the objective validity of the ancient 
scriptures can begin to come to light without having, for example, to 
shoehorn the creation story in Genesis into modern darwinistic and related models.


Gerry Palo (e-mail address 73237.2006@compuserve.com)
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