It’s one of those questions that children ask. The obvious answer seems to be that Adam and Eve would not have had belly buttons because they were created as adults, rather than being conceived through natural means. This means there would have been no umbilical cord to remove at birth. If so, it would have made for interesting conversations between them and their children. Why were mum and dad so different? An opportunity perhaps to talk about the God who had created them.
However, I think they probably did have belly buttons and this is why it matters. If you believe in a “young earth creation”, that God did create as the Bible says he did in six 24 hour days and if that suggests the earth is between 6,000 -10,000 years old, then some people think this gives us a problem. How do we account for things that seem to point to an older universe from rock formations and fossil fuels to the light from far distant stars?
There is sometimes a misunderstanding here, if we believe the world is really here as a result of God creating it less that 10 millennia ago, then does this mean that we think God tried to trick us by making the world seem older? As I said, this is a misunderstanding. You see, it’s not that God made the world to appear “aged” in order to deceive. Rather, he made the world, “mature”, exactly as it needed to be at that stage.
And part of that, sense of the world being mature, made with all of the backstory and back provision in place, ready to supply our needs, means that he made the first animals and first humans mature, as adults. This means that they were there with everything they would have had if they had been born and grown up in the normal way that would follow. So, it is entirely possible that they did have belly buttons.
Of course, we don’t really know for certain whether or not they did have belly buttons and in that sense, it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is God’s ability to create the world, good and complete, ready to fulfil his purposes.
Faithroots 