Pain in Childbirth

[jongarvey]

@vjtorley

Regarding (a): for me, the text where your theory appears to founder is Genesis 3, which traces woman’s pain in childbirth back to the sin of Eve, and death back to the sin of Adam. On your proposal, men were dying and women were suffering pain in childbirth long before Adam and Eve. To be sure, you could argue that Adam and Eve’s sin ensured that their descendants would suffer these penalties, but that Scripture says nothing whatsoever about the plight of other human beings living outside the Garden at the time. But that seems to require positing two Falls: first, a Fall which occurred hundreds of thousands of years ago, leading to death and suffering for the human race

Vincent - three poiints:
(1) The “childbirth” verse refers to “greatly increased” pain, not pain as a novelty.
(2) I’ve read at least two recent commentaries (the first John Walton’s, with an old earth agenda, but the second purely exegetical) suggesting that the pain involved in better generalised to the whole business of motherhood, not just labour. In practice, was Eve’s (unmentioned) labour pain a fulfilment, or was it the effect of sin in her first son becoming a murderer and exile, and here second son a murder victim?
(3) your idea of two falls seems to me to presuppose a category error imported from Young earth Creationism - that the world before Adam contained no pain and no death. That is (a) a physical impossibility in a “natural” world of the first, perishable, creation and (b) denied by Patristic and later exposition, as dealt with in depth in my book, God’s Good Earth.

If adams before Adam were essentially part of that first creation by nature, then neither death nor pain are a penalty, but in accord with nature. Clearly, if (as you have already suggested Catholic doctrine insists) rationality entails immortality, then my argument does not apply - but then, the tree of life in the garden becomes redundant.