Brain dump

Did five miles this morning at exactly a 10-minute pace and with a negative split. Boom!
(I'm feeling it tonight.)

I learned a new word today, endogamy. It means marrying outside of one's clan, tribe, religion, or other group. That led to...

Twice in the last two weeks I've had brief conversations about where Adam & Eve's grandchildren came from. That is, who did their sons marry? The Genesis narrative only names Cain, Abel, and Seth, but refers to Cain's wife, who "conceived and bore Enoch." The two options most commonly identified are that Adam & Eve had daughters who married their brothers or that there was a parallel race of humans that provided the wives for Adam's sons.

That latter explanation runs into trouble in Romans where Paul tells us that sin entered the world through Adam, the first man, and that life came through Christ. For Paul, Adam was clearly the father of all humanity and the source of both our humanity and our sin nature. If there was a parallel race were they wiped out at some point, or do their offspring continue today, presumably without the burden of Adam's guilt?

Of course the problem with postulating that Adam and Eve had daughters whom their sons married is the Arkansas effect (sorry). If cousins shouldn't marry because of the risk of genetic defects what must be the outcome of siblings having offspring? The usual answer to this is that God temporarily suspended the laws of genetics until the time when the human population had grown large enough that this wasn't a problem. By the time of the Mosaic Law sexual relations between close relatives is specifically prohibited (Lev. 18:8-18).

This morning I got to thinking about this genetic "law" (my mind sometimes goes strange places, especially early in the morning) and wondered if we come to wrong conclusions because we have a wrong understanding of what constitutes a law of nature. If something is a law of nature now was it always thus? Why? Is it not possible that God set some of nature's laws in place at some point in history, as opposed to instituting them all at creation?

I suppose it may be a distinction without a difference. In one case we're saying that God suspended the laws of nature re. genetics until the population had grown sufficiently and in the other case we're saying he waited to institute it as a law of nature until that point in time. The only reason for noting that other option is that it warns us agains uniformitarianism - that things have always proceeded as we see them operate now.

The principle of uniformitarianism is what has led some evangelicals to agree with contemporary science that the earth is billions of years old. Erosion, for example, happens at a fixed rate that has remained constant so that identifying the current rate can be used to work backwards, establishing the age of a particular geological feature. But if the processes of nature are not uniform, if we allow for catastrophism, calculating things like geological age becomes more difficult, if not impossible.

Catastrophism by another name is the work of God, as in the Noahic flood for example.

Certainly God can do whatever, however. He can suspend or institute at a later time. For me the important thing is to take him at his Word even if that means the details are inscrutable. And again, if God chose not to give us the details it's because the details aren't important, aren't germane to what is important and the truth he wants us to learn and live.