The Adam and Eve account is one of humans cutting themselves off from their power source. Thereby, they bring death upon themselves that would not otherwise come. Like the blades of a fan after pulling the plug, lifespans slow. At Genesis chapter 5, they are in the 900-year range. By Genesis chapter 11, it has dropped to about 500 years. By Abraham’s time, it was in the 200-year range. By the psalmist’s time, it had dropped to “70 years, Or 80 if one is especially strong.” (Psalm 90:10) That’s where it is today, mostly. It has even increased by 10 years or so to what it is today, a product of better sanitation, medical technology, as so forth.
The idea to take away is that death is not God’s idea. It is a penalty for sin, clearly stated from mankind’s beginning: “But as for the tree of the knowledge of good and bad, you must not eat from it, for in the day you eat from it you will certainly die.” (Genesis 2:17) The illustration that Witnesses love, because it makes so much sense, is that of a cake pan with a dent in it. Every cake coming out of that pan thereafter will have that dent. In this way, Romans 5:12 finds application, that “through one man sin entered into the world and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because they had all sinned.”
I suggested in A Workman’s Theodicy that epigenetics (unknown when I was a boy) could explain how an “acquired trait” like sin could be passed on to succeeding generation, but now it appears that suggestion was wrong. Epigenetics is a mechanism determining whether given genes are expressed or not. It can indeed result in the inheritance of acquired traits, but supposedly for no more than 2 or 3 generations, after which the natural genome reasserts itself. Maybe that view will modify again. Or maybe it is entirely some other means by which the generations descending from that first pair, even when not willfull sinners themselves, nonetheless inherit the consequences of Adam and Eve’s initial sin.
Sin, it should be remembered, literally means “missing the mark.” We can do so deliberately, aiming into the clouds or the sea because we think that target better. But even when we strain for all we are worth to hit the given target, we seldom score a bullseye.
Much of Christian religion backs away from a literal Adam and Eve, petrified at the thought of being out of step with science. The Jehovah’s Witness headship, plebeian to it roots, just like the apostles were, gives not a hoot about kissing up to science (sometimes to their detriment). Their attitude is that if the Word harmonizes with science, that Word is corroborated. If it doesn’t, then science has some catching up to do. In this, I believe they are like the original apostles, described at Acts 4:13 as “unlettered and ordinary.” Those apostles never sought to remedy that deficiency. They ran with what they had, which was not everything, but it was enough to run with.
One might think it would have been better had “smart” people been running the show back then, but they were not. Jesus all but says that smart people would have dropped the ball. “How can you believe, when you are accepting glory from one another and you are not seeking the glory that is from the only God?” he says at John 5:44. We all know it. “Smart” people are ever concerned about their standing in the eyes of their peers. If damaged heavily enough, it might even spill over to harm their financial standing, a horror worse yet. You cannot trust them to get an unpopular work done. They will crap out 19 times out of 20. If the job is to be done, it must be assigned to ones already looked down upon, ones with not special social or financial standing to begin wth.
****** The bookstore
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