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grannymh
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My first reaction is that the three suggested proposals are actually polygenism which is not a theological possibility. Hopefully, someone more familiar with the subtleties will answer this post.
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larkin31
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Yeah, geology and chemistry and physics can be so “convoluted.” This is so much simpler: “God did it.”Like I said - convoluted.
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Rothbardcatholi
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The first two examples are not polygenist. Monogenism holds that all human beings were descended from Adam and Eve, which is preserved under the first two scenarios,
The third scenario is biologically polygenist but spiritually monogenistic, since all true humans are spiritual children of Adam and Eve, inasmuch as their fate with respect to Original Sin is dependent on the choice of Adam and Eve. Even a special creation scenario depends on such spiritual dependence on Adam. I am not sure that even this form of polygenism contradicts what the catechism teaches on the subject.
404-How did the sin of Adam become the sin of all his descendants? The whole human race is in Adam “as one body of one man”.293 By this “unity of the human race” all men are implicated in Adam’s sin, as all are implicated in Christ’s justice. Still, the transmission of original sin is a mystery that we cannot fully understand. But we do know by Revelation that Adam had received original holiness and justice not for himself alone, but for all human nature. By yielding to the tempter, Adam and Eve committed a personal sin, but this sin affected the human nature that they would then transmit in a fallen state.294 It is a sin which will be transmitted by propagation to all mankind, that is, by the transmission of a human nature deprived of original holiness and justice. And that is why original sin is called “sin” only in an analogical sense: it is a sin “contracted” and not “committed” - a state and not an act.
Also, if we read Pius XII Homo Generis carefully, my first two scenarios do not count as polygenism (as he defines it):
“When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains either that after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parents of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now, it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the teaching authority of the Church proposed with regard to original sin which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam in which through generation is passed onto all and is in everyone as his own” (Humani Generis 37)."
I list the third scenario because it is possible for doctrine to develop even beyond what is contained in an encyclical. For example, the Church once condemned all lending of money at interest as usury and it only gradually came to see that interest has a natural market function and that not all interest is “usurious”. Likewise, the Church’s teaching on the right to religious liberty has developed. Pope Gregory XVI’s encyclical * Mirari Vos* condemned the ideas of Lamennais (a Catholic priest who argued that the best scenario for religious freedom and peace would be a society whose government had no official religion and in which their was a basic right to freedom of religious practice.) However, Vatican II affirmed precisely the rights that this encyclical condemned. So while one must be careful about staying within orthodoxy, the mere fact that an idea has been condemned in an encyclical as being incompatible with Catholic doctrine does not mean that a different form of that idea might not be compatible. I advance my modified form of polygenism cautiously therefore, but the first two are monogenism.
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jmcrae
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Actually the simple explanation is that there was water covering the mountains.
“God did it” explains how the water got there.
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Rothbardcatholi
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Frustrating isn’t it?
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jmcrae
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Yes, but we do know that Cain wasn’t born until after the Fall, but Eve became pregnant when she was created - therefore, less than one year after Eve’s Creation (which in Genesis 1:27 is at roughly the same time as Adam’s Creation).
Give or take a year or so. Okay, so there is one less child, maybe.
Right, I am making some assumptions, there. I am also assuming that there was an equal number of males as females, and that they all paired up.
I am not a “literalist” but I am just showing how it is possible that Cain could have found a wife, and that there could have been a village with people in it for him to find. There is nothing in the passage that requires us to assume that Adam and Eve only gave birth to Cain, Abel, and Seth. There was a significant period of time there in which they could have been having other children, and in which those other children could, in their turn, been having other children, etc. I am not insisting that my numbers are exact - 129 years is also possible, it doesn’t really affect the outcome.
In a family of 16 children, typically the eldest never gets to know the youngest very well, because they go away to University in the same year that the youngest is just learning to talk. So it is perfectly possible for Cain to not know his brothers and sisters, and nieces and nephews who are 40 or 50 years younger than him. Nor are we required to assume that they would just automatically forgive him for the murder of their other brother.
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grannymh
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Briefly, transmitted by propagation and through generation are the operative words.
There is nothing in proposals 1 or 2 to prevent inbreeding with the rest of the biological species or to prevent a separate lineage of non-soul, highly intellectual beings living today. More important, looking at hominids from a spiritual awareness speculation is not part of the scientific realm which is the realm opposing Adam and Eve. When the Catholic Church says that humans have spiritual souls, it is not speculating.
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Rothbardcatholi
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"but Eve became pregnant when she was created"-Citation?
Give or take a year or so. Citation?
I am not a “literalist” but I am just showing how it is possible that Cain could have found a wife=Possible, but to my mind this explanation sounds very…what’s the word…convoluted.
A straightforward reading suggests far away lands that are already populated. It’s logically possible that Cain is worried that one of his younger or older brothers (who is already living in a land far far away or who plans to live there someday) might run into him by chance and kill him, but then why would Cain describe has physical banishment from the lands of his family as “banishment from [God’s] presence?” Does he have reason to believe that his siblings siblings have or will be similarly banished from God’s presence? God’s presence can’t refer to Eden, since they’re already banished from there, so we must assume that Cain is expecting to meet up with old siblings who’ve already been banished to far away lands and won’t know who he is (even though they should, since they all have the same parents and grandparents.) These are additional assumptions we have to make to sustain that reading of Genesis.
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jmcrae
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Right - by human beings. The de fide definition of a human being is “one who is descended from Adam and Eve.” Otherwise, we end up with the heresy of polygenism. How does a scenario involving human beings not related to Cain not end up in heresy?
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Rothbardcatholi
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See my previous posts.
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jmcrae
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The soul is the animating principle of the body, so it would be a complete contradiction in terms for them to have human bodies without human souls - unless they were dead, but then, they wouldn’t be procreating, if they were dead.
Also, even if it were possible to have human-like beings without rational, eternal souls, then we now have Cain committing bestiality, as well as having his offspring only partially descended from Adam and Eve - how is this “better than” marrying his sister, niece, or cousin?
You’ve already rejected this one, so I won’t comment.
This is the exact word-for-word definition of the heresy of polygenism. We are forbidden to believe that Adam was “a representative of a large group of humans.”
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Rothbardcatholi
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The soul is the animating principle of the body, so it would be a complete contradiction in terms for them to have human bodies without human souls - unless they were dead, but then, they wouldn’t be procreating, if they were dead.
Actually, animals have animal souls according to Thomas Aquinas, so it is not a “complete contradiction” to have ‘human’ (they wouldn’t be human, just homo sapien) bodies without human (in the theological sense) souls.
This is the exact word-for-word definition of the heresy of polygenism. We are forbidden to believe that Adam was "a representative of a large group of humans.
I guess I didn’t make myself clear. I wasn’t saying that the name “Adam” is representative of a large group of humans (which is what is condemned) but that the individual person Adam was a spiritual representative* for a large group of humans*. In other words, it is already Catholic doctrine that we all contracted the spiritual predicament of original sin because of one man Adam, who was in some sense our representative before God, and we all acquired salvation through one man, Christ. What I proposed, tentatively, was that a group of true humans, created by God (partly through evolution) were represented or mediated for by Adam. That Adam was selected for this role, with the understanding that his response to God’s commands/grace/etc would spiritually effect the rest of the newly made humans, so that all humans (even though not all physically descended from him) would be spiritually descended from him. See also what I said about the development of doctrine in the area of usury and religious freedom and how it might apply to physical versus spiritual descent.
Also, I wasn’t proposing that Cain married a quasi-human (or whatever you want to call it.) I’m not sure where you’re getting this. I was simply pointing out the logical problems of saying that the only humans in the Bible are the children by (natural generation) of Adam and Eve, at least if we take Cain as being a literal human being and not just an image selected by the scriptural author to represent the entry of murder into the world. The name Cain means ‘spear’, just as the name Adam means “man”. It may very well be that there never was an individual specifically named Cain just as the first human man may have been name “Ugh Bug” instead of Adam. The point I was making was about the difficulty of approaching the earlier chapters of Genesis as straight history. However, the later parts of Genesis seem to be pretty good history. Why the discrepancy? Well, it is generally accepted (including by people like Pope Benedict XVI) that the scriptural authors made use of various different source material when composing the Torah. I personally don’t think you can use Genesis to discover the age of the human race or the actual names of it’s earliest members, any more than you can track down the literal Garden of Eden with an angel standing there, holding a sword.
Actually, animals have animal souls according to Thomas Aquinas, so it is not a “complete contradiction” to have ‘human’ (they wouldn’t be human, just homo sapien) bodies without human (in the theological sense) souls.
This is the exact word-for-word definition of the heresy of polygenism. We are forbidden to believe that Adam was "a representative of a large group of humans.
I guess I didn’t make myself clear. I wasn’t saying that the name “Adam” is representative of a large group of humans (which is what is condemned) but that the individual person Adam was a spiritual representative* for a large group of humans*. In other words, it is already Catholic doctrine that we all contracted the spiritual predicament of original sin because of one man Adam, who was in some sense our representative before God, and we all acquired salvation through one man, Christ. What I proposed, tentatively, was that a group of true humans, created by God (partly through evolution) were represented or mediated for by Adam. That Adam was selected for this role, with the understanding that his response to God’s commands/grace/etc would spiritually effect the rest of the newly made humans, so that all humans (even though not all physically descended from him) would be spiritually descended from him. See also what I said about the development of doctrine in the area of usury and religious freedom and how it might apply to physical versus spiritual descent.
Also, I wasn’t proposing that Cain married a quasi-human (or whatever you want to call it.) I’m not sure where you’re getting this. I was simply pointing out the logical problems of saying that the only humans in the Bible are the children by (natural generation) of Adam and Eve, at least if we take Cain as being a literal human being and not just an image selected by the scriptural author to represent the entry of murder into the world. The name Cain means ‘spear’, just as the name Adam means “man”. It may very well be that there never was an individual specifically named Cain just as the first human man may have been name “Ugh Bug” instead of Adam. The point I was making was about the difficulty of approaching the earlier chapters of Genesis as straight history. However, the later parts of Genesis seem to be pretty good history. Why the discrepancy? Well, it is generally accepted (including by people like Pope Benedict XVI) that the scriptural authors made use of various different source material when composing the Torah. I personally don’t think you can use Genesis to discover the age of the human race or the actual names of it’s earliest members, any more than you can track down the literal Garden of Eden with an angel standing there, holding a sword.
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larkin31
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Aye, there’s the rub… with the illogical prohibition. There clearly were other humans present outside Eden. It’s the only reasonable proposition, and does not affect a Christian’s ability to mean every word of the Apostle’s Creed.
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grannymh
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A brief description of the scientific opposition to Adam and Eve is in post 278. May I respectfully suggest that this opposition must be met on the scientists’ turf. Theological speculation is useless in the scientific realm. Solving what is literal and what is figurative is good for religion but not good for reevaluating genomic data. A molecular biologist and a statistician are needed.
Blessings,
granny
These two websites contain TV ads about Catholicism. The first is from one of the Dioceses which is using them. The second is general information.
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larkin31
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jmcrae
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Right. So, either they were beasts (non-humans), or they were humans without souls.
The reason is that all of our bodies were still contained in his body. (See Psalm 139:15-16)
Then what place would there be for Christ? If Adam is already our spiritual father, then there is no role left for Christ to fill - the choice made by Christ is null and void, because Adam already made the choice on behalf of the human race in a spiritual manner - the switch, then, is already flipped, and cannot be unflipped.
Also, without physical fatherhood to precede it, how does one arrive at spiritual fatherhood, to begin with? Where is the physical template upon which it is formed?
This seems to me like an attempt to “spiritualize” our faith away. It’s only a short step from there to saying that Jesus was resurrected “spiritually” but not physically, and that He ascended into Heaven “spiritually” but not physically - with the end result that we become nothing more than rather mystical atheists, instead of Christians.
Since we don’t know what language they spoke, we don’t know what they called themselves, that’s true. And obviously the stories are highly stylized; however, that doesn’t make them to be “not true.”
Probably they did - which still doesn’t mean that they’re “not true.” Any race in the family of Man could have remembered something about our first ancestors - Adam belongs to all of us; not just to one or two races.
I agree with you on that part. I have my own theories about what actually happened to the Garden of Eden, but I won’t air them here; people already think I’m crazy enough.
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jmcrae
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There is nothing “illogical” about it.
If we are not all the children of Adam, then are we connected at all? What makes us human beings, instead of just rational animals? Are some of us “more human”
than others? Was Hitler right? Did we condemn him unjustly? Are only some human-like creatures truly human beings? Are there “animal” races of rational human-like beings that were not descended from Adam?
I will insist on believing not - I will insist on believing that we are all fully human - that all of us are physically descended from Adam. The alternative horrifies me.
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grannymh
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The following is part of post 27, thread “Adam and Eve” in Apologetics.
Blessings,
granny
Spring is a message of hope sent by God.
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Rothbardcatholi
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Since this seems to be the real issue for you, I’ll respond to this alone. The rest of what you said shows that you were not really reading what I said carefully but instead heresy hunting, that is to say, reading in bad faith.
Like a fundamentalist, you are afraid that if we say that too many things are allegorical, pretty soon the whole thing will be allegorical. First of all, that’s a slippery slope argument, which is a logical fallacy. Second of all, there is no reason why it ought to lead to a spiritualization of the rest of Christian doctrine. The Gospels are written in such a way as to leave no possibility for a reasonable person to conclude that the authors are being allegorical. For example, they name specific places, dates ("the #nd year of so and so’s reign), contemporary historical events, landmarks and buildings, historical figures and important religious figures (who interact with the main people in the Gospel) and witnesses. They were written “so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught” (Luke 1:4). The same is largely true of 1 and 2 Kings and other books like that. However, nothing even resembling this exists in the first few chapters of Genesis (roughly from Creation to the Deluge.) Also there is strong historical and scientific evidence that the truths (and they are truths) that are presented in these chapters are not straight “facts” in the form they are presented. What’s more, the literary structure of Genesis has features in common both with historical writing and mythic writing (and myth doesn’t men “false”.)
Now you are either appraised of the relevant science and history or you are not. That all depends on whether you’ve considered it worth your time to try and learn what you can about what contemporary sciences have to say about prehistory and human evolution, or whether you think that because this is secular knowledge, it is somehow unimportant and doesn’t have to be taken into account in your reasoning. I’ll let Augustine comment on that:
“Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of the world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.”
-St. Augustine, On the Literal Meaning of Genesis
I don’t see much more point in pursuing this issue. There are well established facts about the history of mankind and the history of the genus homo, of which the family of true humans is only one of several specialized offshoots. What we truly are is obviously not reducible to evolution, any more than we are reducible to atoms, but that is nevertheless how we were made. What I am trying to do, rather than stick my fingers in my ears and recite “it’s just stupid science, who cares?!” over and over again, is to find a way to reconcile the truth of evolution with the higher order truth of Man’s creation and Original Sin (the latter two of which, must be preserved.) Currently, there are two main trends among Catholics. One is to accept the evidence for evolution and sweep Original sin under the rug (unacceptable), the other is the accept a child’s version of Original Sin and ignore the evidence for evolution (which is unacceptable.)
The Church has to deal with this issue sooner or later. Sooner is better when salvation hangs in the balance.
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jmcrae
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I have been told that evolution does not produce more than one mutation at a time, which means that evolution is actually more likely to have produced one Adam, than many Adams. If Adam was a successful mutation radical enough that species change took place, then his offspring (and his alone) would have retained the advantageous mutations, and they would have become the first generation of the human race - no others.
When viruses mutate, they don’t all mutate the same way at the same time - there is a “source mutation” - one virus which then reproduces, and its offspring overtake the inferior versions of the same virus until the superior mutation is the dominant species, and the others die off.
Not accepting a whole village-full of Adams does not mean that I reject science - far from it. I am just rejecting inappropriate spiritualization of events that actually took place in the history of our salvation.
As far as I know, St. Augustine believed in Adam as being one man, the ancestor of the whole human race, as well.
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