The origin of the human being within Judeo-Christian theology lies in the moment of creation, when God created Adam as his image and likeness. This way of understanding the origin of man has stood out as predominant since Christianity became the main religion of the West.
However, since the strengthening of rationalism, from the Enlightenment in the 18th century, the doctrines religions started to be questioned and new explanatory theories on the most varied subjects were developed. In the case of the origin of the human being, the influence of rational analysis on the natural world led Charles Darwin, mainly, to elaborate the evolutionary theory, placing the origin of the human being as a result of the evolution of species, facing their adaptation to the environment in which they were inserted.
The dilemma about the two explanatory theories may keep alive a question that has been asked for centuries: Did Adam have a navel or not?
This question hung over the heads of theologians during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in the West, even leading to intense debates among the Byzantines.
Under the creationism there are two possible versions. God having created Adam as an adult, it would not be necessary for him to have a navel, for he had not been begotten from a woman's womb. However, as God created a perfect being, even though he was already an adult, Adam was made with a navel, just like the other men and women he would have left as descendants.
From the viewpoint of evolutionism, it is certain that Adam had a navel, because even though he is treated as the first man proper, resulting from the evolution of hominids, it would have been generated inside the uterus of a mother, being necessary for her pregnancy to feed through the cord umbilical. Cutting this cord after birth would result in the navel.
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Despite the existence or not of Adam's navel is a discussion whose outcome is sterile, it generated some controversies during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, especially with regard to artistic production. The painters who portrayed the scenes of Eden were faced with this question: to represent Adam with or without a navel?
Some painters used as a resource to escape the insoluble response the painting of large leaves in the pelvic region of Adam, which in addition to hiding his genitals, also covered the place where presumably the belly button. Theologian John MacArthur claims that Michelangelo in painting his most famous fresco in the Sistine Chapel, The Creation of Adam, would have given a huge navel to Adam, which earned him repressive remarks by some theologians of the era.
This question of the existence or not of Adam's navel serves in our days to show how conflicting the explanation of the origin of man in the face of the two main explanatory theses about this fact, creationism and evolutionism. The debate confronting faith and science may not generate absolute answers, but it can broaden our reflection and deepen our knowledge about life and the way we develop it in the world.
* Image credits: Zheltyshev and Shutterstock.com
By Tales Pinto
graduated in history
Would you like to reference this text in a school or academic work? Look:
PINTO, Tales dos Santos. "Adam's Navel and Man's Origin"; Brazil School. Available in: https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/historiag/o-umbigo-adao-origem-homem.htm. Accessed on June 27, 2021.