“Contact”ing Cain’s Wife!

Millions of viewers of America’s CBS-TV on Wednesday evening, April 25 watched the television premiere of the anti-Christian film “Contact,” based on the novel of the same name by the late astronomer and skeptic Carl Sagan.

From the outset, the movie (and book) is as much an attack on Christianity and supernaturalism—and conversely, a glorification of naturalism—as it is about an attempt to “contact” intelligent extra-terrestrial life somewhere in the universe. As just one example of this anti-Christian sentiment, the chestnut “Where did Cain find his wife?” jumped from the pages of the book right on to the screen.

The scientist looking for extraterrestrial life, played by Oscar-winner Jodie Foster, dismisses Christianity as a logically defensible faith when she recalls that in Sunday school, she asked a lot of “annoying questions’—such as a sarcastically posed “Who was Mrs Cain?’—without receiving answers. She therefore rejects Christianity because it is not capable of being defended.

The riddle of Cain’s wife may be the most-asked question we receive at Answers in Genesis. It comes from perplexed Christians as well as mockers of this Bible-upholding ministry. If an AiG speaker appears on a talk show program of sufficient length, the Cain’s wife question invariably pops up. Ever since the 1925 Scopes “monkey trial” in Tennessee USA, when the world saw that the defender of Christianity could not answer the Cain’s wife question, humanists have often used this as one of their most effective “clubs” to shake the confidence Christians have in the reliability of the Bible and also to convince non-Christians not to consider the Christian faith seriously.

If you have never been presented with the logical and satisfying answer to this “riddle,” here is the easy-to-understand answer to the identity of Cain's wife.