God Created Sex: Part 1 - What's it all about?

Sex is not only a potent biological drive, it governs or influences most of our social conventions and for thousand of years has been responsible for the structure at the heart of societal cohesion.

As its title suggests, in this three-part series we shall be examining the area of sex from Judaeo-Christian perspective.

In Part 1, we will consider the competing claims of evolution, that sex simply emerged as a biological imperative with survival advantage, and that of the Christian Bible, that it sex was specially created by God and gifted to mankind for a specific purpose.

Part 2 will consider the sexual dynamic within the context of the institution of marriage Christian, how it reflects God and how that reflection influences the respective relationship roles of male and female within marriage and, in particular, the often fraught area of marital submission.

Part 3 will focus on two areas that not only divide the Church from much of the secular world, but can even be a source of some confusion within the Church: celibacy and homosexuality. What is the Biblical view on both and how this differs from the secular perspective and very often from what is taught from many pulpits.

So, without further ado, let Part 1 commence.

A friend recently when related a funny story of how while browsing a shopping site on the Net he chanced on a photograph of a scantily clad young lady. ‘Whoa, right there!’ he thought and clicked on her icon, whereupon he read: ’Now I’ve got your attention…!‘ He’d discovered a site selling sandshoes, or some such and experienced the truth of the old adage, dear to every advertising executive: Sex Sells!

So what’s all the fuss about, anyway? Why does sex sell? Why do we have two sexes at all? And whose idea was it anyway?

To answer the last question first, sex was created by God. It was his idea. I suppose there may be a few religious prudes out there to whom that may come as a shock, but I suspect it might annoy a few atheists even more, because sex is actually one of the strongest arguments in favour of creation and therefore a Creator.

Think about it. How would sex have evolved? At what point did little Ms Amoeba consider that self-replication just didn’t cut the evolutionary mustard and decide to reproduce sexually instead? Where would she have found a partner when every Amoeba hanging around the same Singles Bar was asexual? Because, not to put too fine a point on it, it takes two to tango, so our single-celled Single would have had to have simultaneously co-evolved with its sexual opposite.

The biology and mechanics of sex are familiar enough to most people, but I suspect few have thought out the practical difficulties in determining, far less instigating, a first cause. Where did sex come from in the first place? You see, if we evolved, Mr Amoeba must have appeared at the same time as Mrs Amoeba, because if they had bizarrely mutated some twenty or thirty million years apart their wedding night would have proved something of a disappointment.

Of course, some will point out that hermaphrodites do occur in nature, but that is a ‘cart and horse’ argument because even an hermaphrodite with both sets of reproductive organs, presupposes sexual diversification. When two snails meet to do what two snails do, one assumes the male role and penetrates the other, before they reverse roles and repeat the process. The problem is not that they have two sets of sexual organs, but that they have two sets of gametes to interchange and the problem for evolutionists is how to satisfactorily explain how two sets of gametes came to exist. Gamete is the generic term for the reproductive cells: the male spermatozoon and the female ovum. For sexual reproduction you need at least one of each, a sperm and an egg, because either gamete contains only half the complement of chromosomes necessary for a new offspring to develop. And whereas the male gamete or sperm will contain either a female ’x’ chromosome or a male ’y’ chromosome, the female gamete or egg can only contain an ‘x’.

It’s an example of a common scenario that creationists point to that’s called ‘irreducible complexity’. Sex either exists or it doesn’t, but to suggest that it slowly evolved from an asexual entity is ludicrous. It’s similar to the haematological phenomenon of the extrinsic clotting cascade. This is a mechanism that causes our blood to clot when we are injured. As you might imagine, that makes it quite important as we could slowly haemorrhage to death from a shaving cut or a minor graze without the body’s ability to stem the blood loss. The problem is it involves some thirteen different biochemical clotting factors that have to react and combine in precise sequence or the whole mechanism fails. That means that over millions of years our bodies gradually developed and synthesised twelve redundant biochemical reagents which served no useful clotting purpose until the thirteenth factor appeared to complete the cycle. That is not only fanciful but flies in the face of the evolutionary doctrine of natural selection which dictates that any mutation must justify its own continuation by contributing some survival advantage. If it does not, it dies out. So, tell me how the twelve redundant factors of the clotting cascade spent their time while they waited a few million years for number thirteen to evolve. Now, if it was planned or designed it could make some sense, but evolution excludes any notion of design and demands only random chance not directed choice.

It’s the same with sex. There’s no point in evolving an egg if you have no sperm to fertilise it; and no useful purpose that a sperm can perform with no egg to fertilise. So, when it comes to explaining the very existence of sex, antitheists have a conundrum to which only theists have a ready explanation - God.

So, what was God thinking when he created sex? For one thing, sexual reproduction is efficient at producing variety and facilitating useful mutation. That makes it a useful mechanism for reproducing animal and plant species. For example, it’s useful if some animals migrating from more moderate to cooler climes can produce hairy offspring from a homogeneous gene pool. Likewise, if yaks and woolly mammoths decided to move south, it would be useful to be able to produce smoother yak and elephant calves.

But what about human sexuality? Well, contrary to the ‘My-Second-Cousin’s-a-Baboon’ school of thought, human sexuality is more complex than that of animals, which the Bible attributes to a vital principle of creation: namely, that God made each animal after its own kind, but created man in his own image. In other words, baboons are like baboons, centipedes are like centipedes and sea slugs are like sea slugs; but man is a reflection of God. So, does God have sexuality? In a way he does, because in being created in God’s image and likeness, Adam reflected profound aspects of the divine nature and that included his human sexuality. This does not, of course, imply any need of gross physiological apparatus, as Jesus himself explained in Matthew 22:23-30.

The same day Sadducees came to him, who say that there is no resurrection, and they asked him a question, saying, "Teacher, Moses said, 'If a man dies having no children, his brother must marry the widow and raise up children for his brother.' Now there were seven brothers among us. The first married and died, and having no children left his wife to his brother. So too the second and third, down to the seventh. After them all, the woman died. In the resurrection, therefore, of the seven, whose wife will she be? For they all had her."

 

But Jesus answered them, "You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.

Jesus didn’t say that we won’t possess sexuality in heaven, only that we won’t need sexual relations. So, what is sex for? The traditional religious response is that sex is for procreation for the perpetuation of the species, and that is true - for animals - but there is much more to it in the case of human beings.

Certainly, procreation should not be underestimated because, in one respect, it is an area in which humans are unique, as we see from Genesis 1:26-27.

Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

What makes human beings unique is not that we can physically reproduce young like every other creature, but what it is we can reproduce spiritually. Because, as we see here, whereas every other creature produce offspring each after its own kind, human beings produce offspring after God’s image and likeness.

And what precisely is that image? In verse 27 again:

‘…God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.’

The word for create used here is different from the one used almost everywhere else: It is bara, the word used in Genesis 1:1 of God’s creation of the whole universe out of nothing. What Genesis 1:27 is telling us is that man is different. Another thing the verse tells us is that man is both male and female. We are fundamentally sexual in nature - Sexuality it‘s hardwired into human nature, into our very being. We have God’s word on that

We see this in more detail in Genesis Chapter 2:18-25.

Then Yahweh Elohim said, "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him."

 

Now out of the ground Yahweh Elohim had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field.

 

But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. So Yahweh Elohim caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that Yahweh Elohim had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.

 

Then the man said, "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man." Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.

Genesis chapter 2 tells us that when the first man Adam was created physiologically male God considered him incomplete and formed an equal counterpart from his rib, in the physiologically opposite form of a female man. That may sound a bizarrely unfamiliar way of putting it, but it’s essentially what the Bible says, because in Hebrew, Adam means Man in the generic sense of Mankind; in the sense we might even attach to the word Person. So, in agreement with Genesis 1:27, God made a male Adam and a female Adam.

As an aside here, the verbal similarity between man and woman in English is shared by Hebrew in which they are ish and ishshah. However, there is no corresponding similarity between male and female in Hebrew, where they are zakar and n’qebah. This is because zakar derives from a root meaning remembered, while n’qebah derives from a root referring to the female physiology - basically meaning ‘person with a vagina’. Some have suggested that this is because the male is more notable or memorable, but let me suggest a simpler solution that I have already alluded to, which is that the male is considered the basic template, inasmuch as you can construct a female from male genes but not a male from the female. Which also brings us to the etymological myth that in English woman means a man with a womb. As we’ve just seen, the Hebrew for female comes close, whereas woman actually derives from the Old English wimman - itself from wifman (a compound of wife, meaning female and roughly pronounced weefuh) and man (meaning person). Womb, incidentally, comes from the Old English wamb (paunch).

And if you ever wondered about the rib reference, this is biologically sound, because modern plastic surgeons who have to perform bone graft will often use a rib as a donor site for facial reconstruction. And they might not just take part of the rib; if required they can use the whole bone, as long as they leave the periosteum (the cartilaginous outer capsule) intact, because then the rib will grow back again. So much so, that in reconstructive surgery requiring multiple bone grafts, the same rib can be used again and again. If you didn’t know God was a plastic surgeon, maybe you missed the word banah which is the Hebrew used to describe how God formed the woman from Adam’s rib, and is quite different from yatsar, the Hebrew word translated made when God fashioned Adam from the dust of the earth. Yatsar suggests squeezing or moulding, rather like a potter working with clay, whereas banah speaks of building or repair. This tells us that while the male template, so to speak, was fashioned from inanimate earth, the female was reconstructed from the living flesh of the man.

Again, this is biologically sound, because the male’s cell nuclei contain both an ‘x’ and a ‘y’ chromosome, from which a skilled bio-engineer could theoretically clone either another male or a female, whereas female nuclei contain two ‘x’ chromosomes, from which only another female could be formed. So, the Biblical order of creation is correct, contrary to the popular theory that the male sex evolved from the female. Indeed, even the idea of the male evolving from a female progenitor is ludicrous, because what need would there be for a female of any kind, if there was no male to impregnate her? Once again, if you extrapolate from a fundamentally unsound premise you will tend to end up with a non sequitur.