No, just mythical. You can’t have billions of humans descend from incestuous mating between a single couple. Just take a look at how high the rates of congenital defects are among children born to consanguineous couples, and you expect things to be fine and dandy with Adam and Eve’s children mating with their own siblings?
Your use of the word “mythical” is misplaced, unless you meant it as a pejorative. If you meant it as a story of great, but unknown age then you’d be correct. It’s also a very misunderstood story.
Even the Hebrew is so archaic as to be open to interpretation. The story is repeated twice indicating redundancy or perhaps a spiritual and then a physical creation. The words in Hebrew don’t mean what many people think they mean. They’ve been told what they “mean”, but go to the source.
Take a look here: http://biblos.com/genesis/1-1.htm (Biblos is a great site for Biblical research as you can read the original language and see the occurrences as found in the Bible. Remember that every translation is a transmission as well and subject to interpretation.)
In Genesis 1:1 you can see that the word created doesn’t mean ex nihilo - http://concordances.org/hebrew/1254.htm It is more akin to the English word “fashion” or “form”.
Genesis 1:2 is even more interesting: http://biblos.com/genesis/1-2.htm
The world was formless is better translated as in primeval chaos - emptiness or waste. http://concordances.org/hebrew/8414.htm
Read the entire creation story word for word. Anciently, Eastern peoples believed that conquering chaos was the greatest power. It’s really interesting stuff when you see what’s really written as opposed to someone’s interpretation. Even the time periods involved are undefined. Read it for yourself.
The story of Eden is even more interesting, particularly because it is so commonly misunderstood and misinterpreted. Eden is a special place on earth and within Eden is a garden specially made for Adam and Eve. It isn’t the Garden of Eden, but the Garden in Eden. Eden isn’t the Garden. The Garden is simply located in a place called Eden.
Hope this helps both of your studies.
One speculative theory is that the DNA of Adam and Eve was "perfect"...in other words there would be no physical consequences to an offspring.
However the introduction of sin into the world caused physical corruption...things fall apart. Over time this corruption caused the degradation of DNA. By the time of Moses bonding between close siblings was problematic thus the need for the Lord to prohibit relations between siblings.
Thank you for bravely going into that territory. Although the inconsistencies of Genesis are fairly obvious, I've yet to see anyone acknowledge they exist. I've also mostly avoided pointing them out, which is maybe a mistake on my part. Not only is there the issue of bad results from inbreeding, but when Cain was expelled from the garden, he was afraid of how other people would receive him, given his history of committing murder--wait, what other people? Isn't Cain supposed to be the only surviving offspring of the only other two people in the world at that point?
It's fairly obvious that the book of Genesis is metaphorical, not literal.
The Genesis account says there were two different 'days' of creation of flesh bodies. Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. And according to the method in which the Creator keeps time these two 'days' were at least two thousands years apart. The Bible is the story of Christ from the beginning to eternity, and named and traced, that progeny through which He was to come and all those His progeny came in contact with through the generations. Do 'souls' also evolve?
That is not the way evolution happens. It would not have been incestuous unless the new form just appeared suddenly but evolution takes place over a long time. A new mutation happens leading to a new trait and the individual is still able to breed with those who do not have the new trait introducing it into the total gene pool. At some point populations diverge so much from one another that they can no longer breed. Contrary to popular belief science does not point to Humans evolving from Apes but rather apes, monkeys, chimps and Humans evolving from a common ancestor. We can not breed with these other primates but at some point all primates could breed with one another until there was enough divergence in the different lines. So a new species does not appear suddenly as a single pair and go from there breeding incestuously.
I wasn’t disagreeing with you by the way I just got sidetracked and forgot to say that The story of creation has man and all the other primates created at the same time and presumably from a single pair in each species so yes you can’t have billions of Humans descended from a single pair. That is why creationists have to say that human DNA was perfect in the beginning. But there is no evidence that it was.
The best and brightest in science today shows the genomes are devolving NOT evolving. Therefore the first pairs would be near perfect which present no mating nor mutation problems for incestuous relationships. The real problem is the ‘incestuous’ relationships among all the creation deniers in the mainstream academia and the media...
Dr John Sanford has written a book: Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome.
“Selection slows mutational degeneration, but does not even begin to actually stop it. So even with intense selection, evolution is going the wrong way—toward extinction!—Plant geneticist Dr John Sanford.
My recent book resulted from many years of intense study. This involved a complete re-evaluation of everything I thought I knew about evolutionary genetic theory. It systematically examines the problems underlying classic neo-Darwinian theory. The bottom line is that Darwinian theory fails on every level. It fails because:
1) mutations arise faster than selection can eliminate them;
2) mutations are overwhelmingly too subtle to be “selectable”;
3) “biological noise” and “survival of the luckiest” overwhelm selection;
4) bad mutations are physically linked to good mutations, so that they cannot be separated in inheritance (to get rid of the bad and keep the good).
The result is that all higher genomes must clearly degenerate. This is exactly what we would expect in light of Scripture—with the Fall—and is consistent with the declining life expectancies after the Flood that the Bible records.
The problem of genetic entropy (genomes are all degenerating), is powerful evidence that life and mankind must be young. Genetic entropy is probably also the fundamental underlying mechanism explaining the extinction process. Extinctions in the past and in the present can best be understood, not in terms of environmental change, but in terms of mutation accumulation. All this is consistent with a miraculous beginning, a young earth, and a perishing earth...
All of the problems with evolutionary theory, as outlined in Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome, have now been rigorously proven using numerical simulation. We did this using “Mendel’s Accountant”, a state-of-the-art computer analytical tool for genetic systems. Five scientists—John Baumgardner, Wes Brewer, Paul Gibson, Walter ReMine, and I—developed this tool. We reported these new findings in two secular publications, and they will soon be discussed in a second book, Genetic Entropy and Mendel’s Accountant.”
Well said, and unless there were *more* mutations, and I mean MANY more, and miscarriages from bad ones, there’s no way to make it work — IOW, the “explanation” one of Satan’s followers up there gave that before “corruption” the genome was totally stable, makes no sense at all.