If they were not birthed in the usual way, they would not have an umbilical cord, so would they have been buttonless?
Adam and Eve, of course, didn’t exist in the literal Genesis sense, but perhaps this OP could be phrased better. Gabriela made an interesting post a few months ago on the belly button. It sounded a lot less vestigal than I assumed. Can a human, in theory, survive without a belly button (say, if I decided to have freak comestic surgery and get it removed), or would you have to remove too many tubings and nerves and the like?
Well, according to their autopsy . . .
How would we know? You’re talking about two mythical figures.
First, the Adam and Eve story is evidently an etiological myth, a story told by the Hebrews to explain how human beings came to be, and how they came to be in the state we find ourselves in. Like many other ancient peoples, the Hebrews knew the value of story in explaining abstract metaphysical doctrine in a way easily comprehended by the average person. Only on the anachronistic theory that the account of their creation is literal historical narrative rather than myth or story, do the questions of this sort (did they have navels? where did Cain’s wife come from? etc.) have any significance.
Within the myth, we note that they were created as the archetypical human beings. Adam is the Hebrew word for “man” (anthropos, homo, Mann – human being – rather than andros, vir, Mensch – adult male); Eve is closely associated with the Hebrew for “mother.” As such, they were no doubt created with exactly what human beings have – navel included. They were also created as presumably young adults, not babies, so adding in a navel that was a relic of a non-existent umbilical cord is a minor design detail.
Lou Stool, you’ve been starting a lot of threads on the stories of the Judeo-Christian bible. The answer to all of them is easy: they cannot be answered rationally and factually. They are either instructive fables, parables, stories to make a conceptual point or they are actual miracles that must be taken on faith outside the scientific structure of answers.
If you want to ask what are the range of fanciful stories that people have made up over the years to explain away the lack of rationality in the fables, then you can get real answers. However, none of those fanciful answers are any better than any of the others. They can’t be. The stories were not designed to be rational.
In short, don’t expect to get any answers. There aren’t any.
And, since there are no factual answers, let’s move this to MPSIMS.
samclem GQ Moderator
“Well you can just rock me to sleep tonight!”
Expano,
I have posted exactly 2 threads since finding this site. These are just questions that I find interesting. Would you feel better if I asked questions about politics or cooking?
My FIL has no belly button, the result of a hernia surgery a couple of years back. He doesn’t seem to have suffered any ill effects. (Looks weird, though.)
In his 1857 book Omphalos, Philip Gosse, father of the much more well-known Sir Edmund Gosse, argued that, an instant after the single catastrophic act of Creation, the Earth presented the appearance of having existed for millions of years. The title alluded to a much older Christian philosophical debate about whether the first man, Adam, had a navel. Gosse’s book was much criticised, both by Creationists and Rationalist, from opposite ends of the spectrum, some pointing out that a logical deduction from this was that God put fossils in the rocks to play a joke on paleontologists. Father and Son tells the story of Edmund Gosse’s troubled relationship with his parents.
*So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. * --Genesis 1:27
The bellybutton problem is in fact the key to properly understanding this passage. If God created man in his own image, then how could he create them both male and female? “Image” is singular, so it makes no sense to propose that God has both male and female images. Therefore, God created man as both male and female, but in such a manner that also incorporates God’s own true image. That image is the bellybutton.
Consider the expression “navel-gazing,” often used to indicate introspection or meditation on spiritual matters. But God alone of all beings does not need to navel-gaze… because God* is * a navel. It’s no accident that the Greek word for bellybutton, omphalos, also signifies “center of the world.” Who else but God could occupy that illustrious position? Gaze at your navel, and you see God staring back at you.
Each of us is born with the image of God, the Cosmic Bellybutton, on our person; an eternal reminder linking us from child to mother all the way back to our divinely benaveled progenitors in the Garden of Eden. This is why soulless entities, such as clones and the titular succubus from “I Dream of Jeannie,” are often depicted without navels: because they do not share in the blessing of God’s love for mankind.
Before you ask, “outies” are simply an indication that God is watching those particular people more closely. For what reason? No one knows.
I had a cousin who was morbidly obese; in fact she ultimately died from obesity-related problems. At one point in her adult life, she developed some kind of infection in her navel, and it had to be removed.
Lou Fool, it might help us with answering your questions and not joking about them if you described what sort of answers you would like to get and why.
Well, actually the network freaked and said it wasn’t proper… 
You might as well ask, if humans didn’t evolve, why do we have toenails?
If God is your thing, then God gave you toenails and a bellybutton. He figured you’d look doofy without them.
That’s right. If you don’t use it, you don’t need it. He’ll never miss it.
Somebody stole His car stereo.
Whe He finds out who…there’s gonna be trouble in River City! 
In the context of producing a 1960’s TV show, for all intents and purposes the network was God!
That…that was beautiful. Encore!
According to Wikipedia, Adam and Eve did have belly buttons.
A better question I think would be "Did Adam have a penis before God decided that Adam was lonely and need a mate.