Where Did Cain Find His Wife?

The following is the paraphrased essence of on of the critical junctures in American history. The scene is the 1923 Scopes Monkey Trial, and defense attorney Clarence Darrow had goaded prosecuting attorney Williams Jennings Bryan to take the stand in defense of the Bible.

Mr. Bryan. the defense has one final question,' Where did Cain find a wife?'" "I don't know." " Could you repeat your answer Mr. Bryan? The entire nation is listening via radio broadcast and this is a pretty basic and simple question. Let me rephrase it. If, as the Bible claims, Adam and Eve were the first man and woman, and no other people existed, who did their son Cain find to marry?" "I don't know."

Darrow made Bryan appear foolish, because he did not know scripture well enough to defend the most basic of questions.

This trial marked a turning point in American education, because for the first time the Bible was openly ridiculed. Bryan's inability to answer simple and logical questions was one factor allowing the American educational establishment to accept evolution hook, line, and sinker, while rejecting the historical creation account of the Bible.

Even today most Christians do not know the answer to questions as basic as " Where did Cain find a wife?" The problem with not having reasonable answers to basic questions as basic questions is that it brings all if Christianity into question. Why should people believe in a God whom they cannot see, if believers in that God cannot answer life’s simplest questions about the past and our origin's?

The reason the answer to this question is not immediately apparent is that we have all been trained to think like evolutionists. Evolution was founded on a principle of modern geology called uniformitarianism. This is the belief that small changes over vast periods of time caused the massive geologic (and later Darwin added biological) changes we see around us. In essence, we are trained to believe that everything has essentially operated as we see it today. However, this is not what the Bible teaches. The Bible teaches that mankind was created perfect, without flaws. It was only after man's disobedience that imperfection entered God's creation. Thus mankind, as originally created, would not have had the myriad of genetic mistakes now present in our mistakes now present in our DNA. In opposition of what evolution teaches, mutations or mistakes on our DNA, do not lead to better and improved humans. These mistakes cause hundreds of debilitating illnesses and birth defects. The reason all of us are not born with enormous numbers of medical problems is because our genes are a combination of the characteristics of our parents. Only when both parents have the same mistake in their genes do their children manifest the resulting genetic problem.

Furthermore, these genetic mistakes accumulate and increase with time. In other words, the information in our DNA gets more garbled-it never increases in clarity. Since mistakes are accumulated in our DNA, it is logical to assume that as we go back in time there would be less mistakes. The reason brothers and sisters cannot marry today is because they are likely to have similar DNA errors leading to children with birth defects. However, there were no moral laws against children intermarrying until after the time of Moses. This was approximately 4,000 years ago and at least 2,000 years after the creation of mankind. Before that time sibling marriage was probably quite common. The Bible states that Adam and Eve had MANY sons and daughters. Jewish tradition suggested that they had 33 sons and 23 daughters! Cain merely married his sister.

The reason we don't realize this obvious answer is because we have been trained to believe things have always been the way they are today. The past, and the present, becomes far more understandable as we view it from a Biblical perspective. This viewpoint acknowledges that the past, has at times, been very different than the present.

Bruce Malone