Atheists Weekly: Raising Cain

The First President of PETA

Welcome to the final part of Raising Cain

The City of Enoch

This is my favorite part of the story. Consider the list of problems that arise from this
simple phrase:

Cain was a fugitive and a wanderer. How could he found a city?
The progress of civilisation to the point of urbanisation was still well into the future.
What would be his purpose in building a city? There are numerous reasons to build a city, including things like protection, specialisation of trades, or being a centre for distribution. Considering the population at the time (one family of about three generations), none of these reasons would exist.
Where would he get the people to inhabit the city? Enoch was the third generation from Adam. If Adam and Eve had ten surviving children, and each of their children paired up and had ten children, the world population would be 62. Even if you made some ridiculous assumptions about reproduction, the number would still not be enough to populate a village, let alone a city.
Where would they get the surrounding population? In the early days of civilisation, before the automation of agriculture, it was impossible for urban centres to achieve populations of greater than 1% or 2% of the region’s total population. It required 50-100 farmers to grow enough food to support themselves and one city dweller. Huge cities, like Athens and Rome, did not develop until many centuries later and even then, they sat upon world empires. If the city of Enoch was very small, say 1,000 in population, the surrounding region must have had a population of between 50,000 and 100,000. This is approximately 1,000 times the population implied by the Bible. So, once again, I must ask, where did they get the people?

At this point, I must address one other housekeeping issue. The Bible says that Adam lived for 930 years. Other early Bible characters lived for similar lengths of time. It could be argued that this would allow for plenty of time for the population to grow.

Well, this argument is a long one, so for this chapter, I will consider it adequate to say that those long life spans are hogwash, and refer you to the chapter entitled "Of Numbers, Poop, and Other Things".

Cain's Wife

Up to this point, we have not even addressed the issue that started this discussion:

Where did Cain get his wife?

The story implies, in many respects including this one, that there were other people around and about. Yet, the Bible story does not allow for this. All persons are descended from Adam and Eve. There were no other people. So, the only source for Cain’s wife would be his own sister.

This raises some interesting questions. For example, how does one go about courting one’s sister? I don’t suppose their courtship took the normal course, i.e. Cain meeting her at a party and chatting her up. I expect his pick up line looked something like this:

"So, baby, if I were the only man on earth, would you go out out with me?" I bet it worked every time.

Then you have to wonder, did he ask her father for her hand? And, would Adam have declined, perhaps objecting to Cain’s religion (he was a bad sacrificer), or maybe to the fact that he was not just a convict, he was the world’s first and only convict? Apparently, Adam’s daughters must have liked "the bad boys".

In Conclusion

God’s not a very competent handyman. Notice that there were four people on the earth. Two of them had committed the original sin, supposedly the worst crime in history. One was a murderer. The other was dead. That’s not a very good track record. God must not have manufactured humans very well, since the first four models broke down.

Most of the problems in this story arise from the fact that it takes place in the very early days of the human race. The writer seems to have forgotten that point, and tells the story as if there were large quantities of people, even entire cities and countries in existence.

But, as we have seen, there are many other flaws as well. In summary, if you take this story literally, you find that there is a problem in virtually every phrase of the story. In fact, the list of problems is even longer than the story, itself.