The Bible Answers Short Questions From Our Readers
Plain Truth Magazine
July 1966
Volume: Vol XXXI, No.7
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The Bible Answers Short Questions From Our Readers
Plain Truth Staff  

If God took one of Adam's ribs in order to create Eve, why don't we find men today with one less rib? Doesn't this prove the Bible unscientific?

   Disprove the Bible? Not at all! Adam was created with the same number of ribs all normal human beings have. Suppose Adam were alive today and, in an operation, had one rib removed. Do you suppose that therefore all children born to him after the operation would therefore have one less rib? Of course not.
   The Bible nowhere says Adam's children would be born with one less rib.
   It says the very opposite. The Bible often talks about circumcision — the removal of a small portion of skin from the male baby. To this day Jews have practiced circumcision. And to this day male Jewish babies are born uncircumcised! In other words, a circumcised male did not pass on to his offspring this acquired characteristic.
   Acquired characteristics — Adam's loss of a rib for example — are not passed on from parent to offspring. A man who loses an arm in an automobile accident will not have children lacking one arm! Adam's loss of a rib in order that God could create Eve does not mean that all of Adam's male children were born with one less rib than their sisters. Yet this sort of hazy, medieval thinking is what many have blindly accepted.
   In the 1500's, church leaders were shocked! Andreas Vesalius, Doctor of Anatomy, discovered that both men and women had the same number of ribs! It had long been assumed that because God had taken one of Adam's ribs (Gen. 2:21), that all males — Adam's children — had one less rib than women. Vesalius was called into account for his amazing discovery. The religious leaders of his day believed him to be contradicting the Bible.
   If those church leaders had read the Bible, they would have known his findings were correct. Vesalius had merely discovered one of God's natural laws. Each species is designed by God to pass on to its offspring the characteristics God decreed for it at Creation. Each must reproduce "after its kind" (Gen. 1:25).
   This is a genetic law from creation. Operations and accidents do not change the genetics — the inheritance characteristics — of an individual.
   It was God who set in motion a law that characteristics acquired through accidental injuries are not inherited. Can you imagine what the world would be like if these acquired or new characteristics of the parent human or animal could be genetically passed on to its offspring? What would today's world be like after almost 6000 years of crippling wars and violence? It would be a world of halt, maimed and blind!

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Plain Truth MagazineJuly 1966Vol XXXI, No.7