Cindy K

Here is something that many people do not realize: Both sexes have all of the sex hormones. In terms of hormones, men and women only really differ in terms of the levels of hormones that one has. Women have testosterone and men have estrogen in their bodies, but they are maintained at different levels. Some men with low testosterone can seem aggressive and then actually seem to calm down when they receive replacement hormone for the deficit. When their physiologic norm comes back to optimal and therapeutic levels, many men will show less anxiety, anger and such and will have a more balanced temperament. We do tend to reduce hormones down to a “male and female” understanding, but it is not that simple of a process.

Another consideration — when you speak of testosterone causing aggression — this is based upon a disease model and a study of physiologic disease, thousands of years after the fall. I think if we can assume that if any human being walked in divine health and had the optimal levels of hormone, it would have been Adam. (Again, optimal physiologic levels of testosterone do not induce aggression in healthy male adults.) Adam did not have the exogenous hormones and chemicals and disease altering this optimal balance of divine health either. His optimal level would have facilitated self-control, and I don’t think that it would have predisposed him to unusual aggression. That understanding of testosterone comes to medical science today through the disease model, not through the optimal health that Adam would have enjoyed before generations of the effect of the “wages of sin” (resulting in death and which is preceded by disease). I don’t think it’s fair to view him through a disease model.

I think the same assumptions are true for Eve, as this suggests to me that this concept assumes the presupposition of a disease model, something that I don’t think would have applied to the two people on earth who were the least affected by sin, aging and disease.

And do we even know if Adam and Eve were sexually intimate before the fall? They did not procreate, so can we assume that they copulated? We are not told, one way or another, and we do not know how long they dwelled in the garden before the fall. These are things that we are not clearly told but have to make assumptions about. Are we making the right assumptions?

There is much to consider about what we assume to be true but is not told to us clearly.