Adam and Eve-why did God invent adults without inventing children?

Question

Don't tell me-he can do anything! If he can he sure has some long ways round of doing things-almost seems completely and totally man made to anyone outside the bubble of delusion....

Answer 1

Be careful, or you might actually cause the bible-worshipers to do some independent thinking for a change! (I'm surprised so many people used God's directive to be "fruitful and multiply" as a reason to shoot down your suggestion. Why would God who is timeless worry about waiting 5-10 years for the young Adam & Eve to be able to procreate?)

I think it was a great question you posed. Children would have captured the "innocence of mankind" metaphor a lot better if Adam and Eve had been children instead of adults. It would also be more consistent with the narrative: they're young, naive, wide-eyed, innocent children in god's parental eyes, so it only makes sense to have had them be kids. It also makes Eve's "transgression" of eating the forbidden fruit all the more acceptable if she was just a child.

Who better than children to buy into the notion of an all-powerful, protective, parental deity? Children are gullible. They believe whatever we spoonfeed them: Santa, the Easter Bunny, the fact that fluffy's up in heaven and not taking an extended dirt nap...

That is the secret to religion’s success - they indoctrinate our kids while they are young and impressionable. Thus, it would have made sense to replicate this same formula with the original biblical characters. I'm sure if kids in Sunday school were taught that Adam & Eve were kids just like them they'd be able to relate to them even better.

"The great trouble is that the preachers get the children from six to seven years of age and then it is almost impossible to do anything with them."
— Thomas Edison, (1847-1931)

Give me child until the age of six and I will give you a Nazi for life.
— Adolph Hitler

Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt.
— Clarence Darrow

It is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are atheists and were religion not inculcated into their minds, they would remain so.
— Ernestine Rose

Finding that no religion is based on facts and cannot be true, I began to reflect what must be the condition of mankind trained from infancy to believe in error.
— Robert Owen

Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.
— Isaac Asimov, 1994

I am now convinced that children should not be subjected to the frightfulness of the Christian religion.... If the concept of a father who plots to have his own son put to death is presented to children as beautiful and as worthy of society's admiration, what types of human behavior can be presented to them as reprehensible?
— Ruth Hurmence Green

Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.
— Arthur Schopenhauer

There is no absurdity so obvious that it cannot be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to impose it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.
— Arthur Schopenhauer

It is difficult, none the less, for the ordinary man to cast off orthodox beliefs, for he is seldom allowed to hear the other side.... Whereas the Christian view is pressed on him day in and day out.
— Margaret Knight

Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold. What have we to offer in exchange? Uncertainty! Insecurity!
— Isaac Asimov

If we must play the theological game, let us never forget that it is a game. Religion, it seems to me, can survive only as a consciously accepted system of make believe.
— Aldous Huxley

The loss of religious faith among the most civilized portion of the race is a step from childishness toward maturity.
— Charles Eliot Norton

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
— Bertrand Russell

I do not believe that religion has been a force for good.... I regard it as belonging to the infancy of reason.
— Bertrand Russell

I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind--that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
— H.L. Mencken

If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man's evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.
— Sigmund Freud

For that again, is what all manner of religion essentially is: childish dependency.
— Albert Ellis

The origin of the absurd idea of immortal life is easy to discover; it is kept alive by hope and fear, by childish faith, and by cowardice.
— Clarence Darrow

Many people never grow up. They stay all their lives with a passionate need for external authority and guidance, pretending not to trust their own judgment.
— Alan Watts

Illusions die hard and it is painful to yield to the insight that a grown-up can be no man's disciple.
— Sheldon B. Kopp

Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.
— Isaac Asimov

Answer 2

well... to be logical about it...
why would he have to make children if he made adults? wouldnt they do that on their own?
and lets say theres 2 adults and 2 children zapped in a field somewhere.. the children couldnt identify with the adults in any way... they might even go someplace else.
i think the reasoning behind only make adults is so the first family could be established... not because God wasnt up for making kids that day.

its also the same reason God would make chickens and not eggs. why start from the begining when you can skip a proccess and then they can make new life on their own?
by the time some animals are grown.. they could have already been extinct and never had a chance to reproduce.

Answer 3

First of all, God created a man and a woman, named Adam and Eve. If He created a man and a woman, with all the human instincts we have, so there was no need to create children. That's the way God planned it.Just because His plans don't meet with peoples' approval, some say it's all hog wash. The deluded ones are those who believe lies of the Devil, rather than the Truth that is Jesus our Lord.

Answer 4

whoa there atheist. God made them adults because He told them to populate the earth, and they had to be mature to do that. Also, they were in charge of all the worlds animals, giving that responsibility to a 4 year old would have been disaster. Last, who would feed, nurture, ect. the baby? ya, God was smart when he made them adults.

Answer 5

While you listened to the account in Genesis of Adam & Eve, did someone read to you what God told them to do as their jobs? Does the term "multiply and fill the earth" ring a bell?
Having kids was their job as was subduing the earth.

Forgive my sarcasm, but your title "thethinker" made me do it.

Answer 6

Because its a man and a woman's job to create children.

Answer 7

Why would you start with a kid? It would be hard to start humanity with a baby. It would be easier to make an adult from the get go eh?

Answer 8

Maybe because the adults were able to produce children?

Answer 9

What do you mean? From my standpoint, God DID invent children. So what are you talking about?

Answer 10

I suppose cos the big G man wanted them to get it on an speaking from experience its almost impossible when there are kids around