"Did Adam and Eve have belly buttons?"

1)Tuesday dinner tonight, 6 pm, preceded by 5:30 Mass in the Newman Center chapel. All GW students are invited!!

2)Parents’ Weekend events:
- Open House, Sat, Oct 17, 12-4 pm, Newman Center
- Holy Mass, Sun, Oct 18, 11 am, St Stephen’s (25th and Penn. Ave)+ coffee and donuts after Mass in Parish Hall
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Anon posted the following question: "Did Adam and Eve have a belly button?"

Apparently, this has been a subject of much debate for a long time. It might appear like a frivolous question, but it leads to some significant points and questions (e.g., ‘where did Adam and Eve come from?’). The short answer is that we don’t know for sure if they had belly buttons, but it’s quite reasonable to think that they did not. Belly buttons are scars which form on people after their umbilical cords are cut from their mothers' wombs at birth. As the Book of Genesis reveals, Adam and Eve were each created outside of a womb, so they did not have umbilical cords or the scars (belly buttons) that result from them. An article from gracecentered.com lays this and other historical information about the debate out in the following:

This will help answer the question. "Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being (soul)" (Gen. 2:7). Woman had not even been created at this point in time, so it is obvious that Adam did not come from the womb of one. "For man does not originate from woman" (1 Cor. 11:8). This being true, then how could Adam have had an umbilicus (belly button)?! The even greater question, of course, is this: would not the presence of an umbilicus be a visible testimony to a falsehood?! Such a physical mark would be a visible sign that Adam came through natural childbirth from a woman, when in fact he did NOT. Thus, if God had chosen to place such a distinguishing mark on Adam, it would have been a false witness, a testimony to a LIE. The apostle Paul wrote, "If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that He raised Christ from the dead" (1 Cor. 15:14-15). If testimony is made about something that did not occur, then that is "false witness." If testimony is made that Adam and Eve experienced a natural childbirth (evidenced by the presence of an umbilicus), and this couple did NOT originate via natural means, but rather supernatural means, then the testimony of the umbilicus is "false testimony," and the one proclaiming such (in this case God) would be a liar.

The same problem exists for Eve. "So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh at that place. And the Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man. And the man said, 'This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man'" (Gen. 2:21-23). Eve also did not experience a natural birth, but rather a supernatural creation! Thus, for her to have been given an umbilicus would likewise be a false testimony. It would, by its presence upon her body, declare she was formed by natural generation, rather than by supernatural creation, and would forever be a visible statement of contradiction to the reality of her creation by the Creator.

Lest one think this is all rather frivolous and trivial, and that nobody really ever gave this matter much serious thought, and that Al Maxey is getting desperate for topics for his Reflections articles, it should be noted that the question as to whether Adam and Eve ever possessed such a distinguishing mark has not only generated debate in the religious world for centuries, but has even reached into our own United States Congress! In 1944, a subcommittee of the United States House of Representatives Military Committee (chaired by Congressman Durham of the state of North Carolina) refused to authorize a little 30-page booklet titled "Races of Man," that was to be handed out to our soldiers, sailors and airmen fighting in World War II, because this little booklet had a drawing that depicted Adam and Eve with belly buttons! The members of this subcommittee ruled that showing Adam and Eve with navels "would be misleading to gullible American soldiers."

Some of the world's great artists also wrestled with this problem, as did the Roman Catholic Church. In 1646, Sir Thomas Browne, a doctor and philosopher from Norwich, published a work titled "Pseudodoxia Epidemica" in which he sought to expose some of the "vulgar errors" then present in society. He devoted an entire chapter to "Pictures of Adam and Eve with Navels." He points out that even such notables as Raphael and Michelangelo were guilty of such "vulgar errors." He declared that to paint Adam and Eve with belly buttons would be to suggest that "the Creator affected superfluities, or ordained parts without use or office." The Catholic Church, as a rule, seemed to be against artists depicting Adam and Eve with navels in their paintings, so this posed quite a problem for a number of these artists who didn't want to antagonize the church. A good many of them, therefore, chose to take the "safe path" and simply painted the couple with strategically placed foliage, long hair, or forearms blocking the abdomen. And yet Michelangelo dared to paint Adam with a navel, and to place it right there on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, for which he was accused of heresy by some theologians of his day.