If Adam was the first human, why was Cain afraid of other people when he was banished in Genesis 4:14?
A viewer asks how, under young-earth creationism, Cain could be scared of other people who might find and kill him (Genesis 4:14) if Adam was the first human and there were supposedly no other humans on earth.
Answer
Young-earth creationism does not actually say that. Genesis 5 tells us Adam and Eve had other sons and daughters besides Cain, Abel, and Seth. Adam lived 950 years, so Eve could easily have borne fifteen children or more. Cain and Abel are singled out only because this is the first instance of a major sin after the fall, and the theme of Genesis is always how man sinned and what God did about it. By the time of Cain's banishment, if a hundred years had passed and the other sons and daughters had multiplied, that is nearly three generations, and you are easily up in the hundreds of people. They were intelligent and able-bodied because the curse had not yet taken its full toll, so they built a society, a town, a city, with rules everyone could live by. We even see Lamech in Genesis 4 acting as a renegade against those normal rules. And Paul tells us in Romans 1 and 2 that they had the law of God written on their hearts, both the laws of worship and the moral law, which is why Genesis 4:26 says men began to call on the name of the Lord, and why they knew it was wrong to kill. So there were plenty of people for Cain to fear.