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2009
Adam and the immune system
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Viruses
Published: 30 May 2009(GMT+10)
Joshua C from Arizona asks about a pre-Fall role for the immune system, given that
God created everything “very good” (Genesis 1:31). Medical doctor Carl Wieland
responds.
JC: I did my senior project on biblical validity and in the process
of my research, I found numerous amount of evidence supporting The Holy Bible, the
literal six day creation, and the young earth.
However, I have one question lingering regarding human creation and The Fall. I
understand that all creation was once perfect before Adam & Eve’s fall.
There was no death, disease, and such, correct? Then they sinned and death entered
creation. This brings me to my question. If life was perfect before The Fall, did
life, especially humans, have an immune system? I mean, there was no need for one
before The Fall, right, because life was perfect and there was no disease to fight
off. So did life acquire an immune system after The Fall? Or did we have one and
it was just not in use before The Fall? If the second one is true, then we had vestigial
organs in the beginning.
Please get back to me on this one, for this question is the only one that lingers
for me and I’ve not seen addressed.
CW: In writing about preFall conditions, we have to bear in mind
first of all that there will always be an element of “maybe”. Biblical
information is very compact, and often indirectly deduced. And we can’t make
any actual observations. However, I have found a few principles to be helpful in
ensuring that one’s speculations are as informed as possible, especially concerning
the issue of biological structures or systems used to either harm or defend against
harm.
-
We are the physical descendants of Adam. This is very important
theologically. Isaiah spoke of the coming Messiah (Jesus) as literally the ‘Kinsman-Redeemer’,
i.e. one who is related by blood to those he redeems (Isaiah 59:20, which uses the same Hebrew word
גּואֵל (gôēl)
used to describe Boaz in relation to Ruth). Without being in the line of the first
Adam, we would be excluded from the possibility of salvation through the sacrifice
of “the last Adam” (1 Corinthians 15:45), the Lord Jesus Christ (a descendant
of the “first man, Adam”, through Mary
(Luke 3:23–38)—see Christmas
and Genesis). So Eve had to be a physical descendant of Adam, too, or
else she could not have been a potential heir of salvation. Hence we truly have
our inheritance “in Adam”, not “in Adam and Eve”. Thus,
she was made from the bone in Adam’s side (bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh”)—i.e.
his rib, not directly from raw materials as was Adam.1
Our physical descent from Adam indicates a biological/DNA connection, or continuity,
if you like, from Adam (and Eve) to ourselves. This immediately makes it highly
unlikely that Adam and Eve’s bodies were radically different from our own.
The structures and organs in our body are coded for by the DNA in our genes. These
are the programs we inherited from our parents, who in turn inherited them from
our grandparents, and so on backwards—in varying combinations, of course,
so that each of us is genetically unique. Trace this back to Adam and Eve, and why
would these same programs have coded for anything else in our first ancestors? In
short, their bodies would have been much the same as ours. From this alone, one
would be reluctant to propose that Adam did not have an immune system.
- Creation was finished at the end of Creation Week (Genesis 2:3). This would seem to preclude anything other than
perhaps a limited amount of redesigning at the Fall—for example, the serpent’s
body and Eve’s (re childbearing). A wholesale new creation or recreation is
therefore unlikely.
Both points 1) and 2) suggest that Adam’s immune system was probably very
much like our own (though without any inherited genetic copying mistakes, known
as mutations, of which we all inherit many hundreds from previous generations).
But then, what was the immune system for pre-Fall? First, a few extra points.
- The Fall was most only a few weeks after Creation Week, probably much less time. This
is a deduction from the fact the Eve was not pregnant until after the Fall. Adam
and Eve were two healthy married people, who had been commanded while still in Eden
to be fruitful and multiply (Genesis 1:22). In a pre-Fall world without suffering and
disease, there would have been no blocked fallopian tubes or other defects or deficiencies
leading to infertility. It is highly unlikely that Eve would have gone through more
than 1–2 fertility cycles at the most without conceiving. However, the first
conception recorded is that of Cain, which was after the Fall. See also
The Fall, Curse and Satan
- God foreknew the Fall. As creator of time, God is outside of time.
Jesus in John 8:58 does not say, “before Abraham was born,
I was”—He says, “before Abraham was born,
I am”.2
He, Yahweh (YHWH, Jehovah), the great “I am”
of Exodus 3:14,3
the eternal present tense if you like, is the one who also says, “I am the
Beginning and the End” (Revelation 21:6). In Isaiah 46:10 God tells us, “I make
known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come.”
In short, the future does not take God by surprise.
Points 3) and 4) taken together would allow for God having built structures into
His creatures (including Adam and Eve) that were only going to be utilized or fully
utilized after the coming Fall.
So one possible answer to your question is that the immune system was there in Adam
because it was required to defend against the pathogens of the soon-coming Fallen
world.
The function of the immune system is not just to fight against living organisms
such as germs that actively cause disease, but it also helps the body to distinguish
self from non-self.
However, I think it is very likely that the immune system in humans already had
an important role to play pre-Fall. The function of the immune system is not just
to fight against living organisms such as germs that actively cause disease, but
it also helps the body to distinguish self from non-self (as we have pointed out
before, e.g. Vaccines and Genesis: Questions and Answers on
Vaccinations and the Immune System).4
One function of the immune system is to build up antibodies as a protection against
any foreign protein (not just germs) that enters our body.
It has been estimated that only a small minority of all bacteria and viruses are
pathogenic, less than 1%; no pathogens are known in the Archaea domain.5 But there are a number of beneficial functions of
bacteria and viruses.6
In particular, there are today germs that do not cause us any harm, in fact are
helpful to our bowel function, if they stay inside the bowel. Recent research shows
that the appendix is a ‘good safe house’ for such “good”
germs (see Appendix: a bacterial ‘safe house’).
If those same germs were to enter the bloodstream, they could cause an overwhelming
blood poisoning. This is what can happen when an inflamed and infected appendix
that is not removed in time becomes gangrenous, leading to peritonitis and thereafter
septicemia (blood poisoning)—those same germs that were harmless in their
“proper place”, having invaded the bloodstream, now threaten that person’s
life.
But with countless millions of those same bacteria in close contact with blood capillaries,
etc. how come such a hostile invasion does not happen on a regular basis? Part of
the answer is the immune system7
which is there to mop up any such “accidental invader” before it has
the chance to multiply. The same immune system also ensures that the bacteria in
the large bowel (which are supposed to be there) do not enter the small bowel (where
they are not supposed to be).
I think that the same situation likely pertained pre-Fall, i.e. that microbes inhabited
our large bowel for various ‘good’ functions. This is also relevant
to the origins of those (and other) bacteria, because a similar question
could be asked about this—when did God create E. coli bacteria, for
instance. These can nowadays cause disease, but are also a part of our normal “gut
flora” as it is called, i.e. the inhabitants of our large bowel. I suggest
that the answer is that they were part of the original creation. Just because something
has the potential to cause harm under the right circumstances does not
mean it would be excluded from a perfect world. What is excluded is actual
harm. For example, there would have been lakes for Adam to fall into, and stones
that could theoretically be thrown at someone with force. Neither lakes nor stones
are intrinsically “bad”, though each is capable of causing “bad
things” in certain circumstances. In the same way, E. coli would
have been there already before the Fall, because they are not intrinsically “bad”
any more than lakes or stones.
We can be sure that there was no actual chance of this harm happening to
Adam, due to God’s protection and oversight. But in this case, the mediate
mechanism God used was a ‘natural’ physical mechanism He himself designed—one
that served the same ‘protection from harm’ function both pre-and postFall.
We can safely assume that in a perfect, preFall world, God would have ensured that
no harm would come from anything, whether lakes, rocks or E. coli. We don’t
know of any general mechanism (other than His perfect supervision of all situations,
similar to the situation of the Israelites in the wilderness when their shoes did
not wear out for 40 years (Deuteronomy 29:5)) that God could have used to prevent harm
from things like lakes or stones. But we do know of a general mechanism
which God could have used to prevent harm from E. Coli, for instance—namely,
the same immune system that would give humanity protection (albeit no longer perfect)
after the Fall.
The same sort of argument could be put for the immune system’s role in warding
off other potential “invaders” of our body—preFall it serves the
same function as postFall, only postFall involves the possibility of failure, i.e.
organisms being able to overwhelm a body’s defences. PostFall there would
also be increasing challenges from pathogens (disease-causing entities)
which can mutate towards more virulent strains, or from strains that do not cause
disease in humans mutating to become ones which do (to show why this is not evidence
of microbes-to-man evolution or any part of it, see Has
AIDS evolved?).
The notion I’ve tried to develop here is that if Adam has a mechanism that
protects against potential harm preFall, this does not conflict with the notion
that there was no scope for the actual harm to occur in that harm-free world.
To clarify this still further, consider this analogy—the human skin. One major
function of our skin is to prevent harm to us by way of our body drying out, losing
its internal fluids. This “natural mechanism” is there to prevent an
ever-present potential harm. There would be no argument, I trust, with
the proposition that Adam had skin like ours. So here we have Adam being protected
from a potential harm (loss of vital bodily fluids) preFall via a builtin physiological
system (skin). We can be sure that there was no actual chance of this harm
happening to Adam, due to God’s protection and oversight. But in this case,
the mediate mechanism God used was a “natural” physical mechanism He
himself designed—one that served the same “protection from harm”
function both pre-and postFall. Ditto for the immune system. Hope that helps.
Sincerely yours in Christ,
Carl W.
Update: See feedback response, When was Cain conceived? And is CMI “male dominated”?
Related articles
Further reading
Related resources
References
- This does not mean that she necessarily had to be a biological
clone, with duplication of Adam’s X chromosome. While this is possible, it
is not only unnecessary, it limits the scope for biological variability in the human
population. This is because the maximum number of alleles (varying forms of the
same gene) at any locus (a position on one of the chromosomes) in the absence of
any post-creation mutational change would then be two, rather than four.
Return to text.
- The Greek is clear: by contrasting Abraham’s γενέσθαι (genesthai) denoting that he came
into existence, with His own ἐγὼ εἰμί
(egō eimi I am) which avoids the past tense because He just exists.
So not only is Jesus proclaiming that He pre-existed Abraham, who died long before
He was born, but even more: that He didn’t even come into existence.
Here is a
detailed study on John 8:58 and Ex. 3:14. Return to text.
- To evade the force of this, some cultic groups claim that
Exodus 3:14 is better translated “I will be who I
will be”. But maybe they should inform the Jewish Publication Society, since
their translation is “I AM THAT I AM”, and they hardly have a Trinitarian
axe to grind. The Hebrew is אֶהְיֶה
אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה
’ehyeh ’asher ’ehyeh. The LXX, translated c. 250
BC, has ἐγὼ εἰμί
ὁ ὢν (egō eimi ho ōn I am the being).
Return to text.
- See also Sarfati. J., By Design (above), ch. 13:
Why are there “bad things” in Nature? 2008. Return to
text.
- Pace, N.R., A molecular view of microbial diversity and the
biosphere. Science 276:734–740, 1997.
Return to text.
- See also Bergman, J., Did God make
pathogenic viruses? J. Creation 13(1):115–125,
1999; Kim, M., Biological
view of viruses: creation vs evolution, J. Creation 20(3):12–13,
2006; Francis, J.W., The Organosubstrate of Life: A Creationist Perspective of Microbes
and Viruses, Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Creationism,
pp. 433–444, 2003. Return to text.
- The immune system is here used in the broad sense, to encompass
all of the mechanisms by which the body blocks and fights off “invaders”.
Return to text.
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