Adam, Eve, and Catholicism

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ayden
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
Ayden said:
What was the grace that God had given them? Growing up, I was taught that it was living forever on earth.
Click to expand...
They may have had gifts of immortality. I haven’t dwelled on that. They were justified before God. Their passions did not dominate their reason, as ours sometimes do. Imagine you feel a sense of strong hunger and this overpowers your reason to not take a cookie from the cookie jar. We’re compromised in that we sometimes throw reason out the window in a fit of animal like passion or urges or addictions. This can mitigate our culpability, somewhat. Adam and Eve had no such issues. Their disobedience was made with full knowledge that what they did was wrong. It was a choice made out of their own reasoning ability, not because of some animal type passion compromising their ability to think clearly.
 
Last edited:
It sounds like the Church’s teaching has some relatively broad parameters around interpreting Genesis. Does anybody want to take a “fallible guess” at how humanity went from an evolving species to “Adam & Eve” to us? I’m puzzling over “the real life story.” 🙂
 
Ron Conte, the author of the site I sent you above, says that there was evolving species for thousands of years but not humans with an intellect or free will like ours. Then at a certain point God created Adam and Eve separately from the earth which are now what we know to be humans like us with an intellect and will to know and love and serve God.
 
Last edited:
Hey, Ayden. I just sent you a PM. It actually has some overlap with what @LittleFlower378 wrote.
 
Last edited:
St. Pope John Paul the 2nd, speaking before the pontifical science academy, said that while it is the role of science to investigate the origins of the universe (i,e., evolution), and such, but three issues are not up to science and are theologically and literally known and legitimate science cannot suggest otherwise:
  1. God exists
  2. the soul is not evolved, but is individually created by God at the moment of conception
  3. Man had original parents
On the third item, science has evidence of this being true scientifically.
 
Can you elaborate about what evidence science has for the third item?
 
For example, science has trace DNA about 3000 yrs, as the most recent common ancestor, Here is a press release from Yale University

If we can make this discovery, logic demands that if we can do it, we should find common ancestors going back further. Other researchers have suggested 150,000 years and another about 200,000 years.

Regardless of the veracity of this research, the point is that science is investigating this issue and is finding discoveries that we do have a common ancestor.
 
Last edited:
I have read this before. Adam and Eve were special creations and given what are called preternatural gifts from God, including bodily immortality.
 
Science does not have the means to investigate pre-fall human beings.
 
LittleFlower378 said:
Ron Conte, the author of the site I sent you above, says that there was evolving species for thousands of years but not humans with an intellect or free will like ours. Then at a certain point God created Adam and Eve separately from the earth which are now what we know to be humans like us with an intellect and will to know and love and serve God.
Click to expand...
That is one way that God could have done it. A creature is not “human with a soul” until God implants that soul (an image of Himself) in that creature. Thus, God could have allowed evolution to do its thing until a creature evolved with the brain capacity and the throat structure (need for language), and then chose that creature to be “Adam”. That creature then becomes a person, a human being with an immortal soul made in the image of God.
 
Ayden said:
Hello everybody!
I’ve been researching Catholicism and I’m a little confused about your take on Genesis. One of my favorite YouTubers, Bishop Barron, seems to affirm that Adam was not a real person. He calls these early Genesis stories “theological poetry.” This has been my take on the text. I think it’s a fictional narrative written in response to similar Babylonian myths, the Enûma Eliš. The Israelites were combating one story with another, and it’s still a powerful thing… on the theological level. But I’m pretty sure none of it is real life history.
But according to this article (Adam, Eve, and Evolution | Catholic Answers), it is the indisputable teaching of the Church that Adam and Eve were literal parents of the human race. It also affirms that these two people committed an evil deed that “marked” the whole of human history.
Anyway, sorry for the long post! I’m just looking for some clarification. Thanks!
Click to expand...
Another article to consider for Adam & Eve being humanities first parents

AND

Re: Bp Barron’s views,

he is also of the view, “it’s a reasonable hope all are saved” or “will be saved”.

That belief has a name and a history
Universalism / Apocatastasis is condemned by the Church. It is heresy

History of apocatastasis

the doctrine was formally condemned in the first of the famous anathemas pronounced at the Council of Constantinople in 543: Ei tis ten teratode apokatastasis presbeuei anathema esto [See, also, Justinian, Liber adversus Originem, anathemas 7 and 9.] The doctrine was thenceforth looked on as heterodox by the Church.

Universalism was taught by Origen (185-254 A.D.) but declared heresy by the ecumenical Council of Constantinople in 543 A.D.

ALSO

excerpt: From THE SYLLABUS OF ERRORS CONDEMNED BY PIUS IX .

"INDIFFERENTISM, LATITUDINARIANISM
  1. Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true. – Allocution “Maxima quidem,” June 9, 1862; Damnatio “Multiplices inter,” June 10, 1851.
  2. Man may, in the observance of any religion whatever, find the way of eternal salvation, and arrive at eternal salvation. – Encyclical “Qui pluribus,” Nov. 9, 1846.
17. Good hope at least is to be entertained of the eternal salvation of all those who are not at all in the true Church of Christ. – Encyclical “Quanto conficiamur,” Aug. 10, 1863, etc.

IOW, Re: #17, Apocatastasis being error, is NOT a reasonable hope that all are saved.

Apocatastasis is a 1500 year old heresy

Not saying Bp Barron is absolute on what he proposed. He surely knows what I just posted on that error. So I give him slack on what he said
 
Last edited:
I have read ‘God just dropped souls into two random almost humans’ before. This contradicts Humani Generis.
 
Last edited:
I did not say “random”. And what I posted is possible. We do not know. If God wants he could have created man in an instance in one day of the six days of creation. Catholics may believe that or believe in an evolutionary possibility, according to St. Pope John-Paul.
 
edwest211 said:
I have read ‘God just dropped souls into two random almost humans’ before. This contradicts Humani Generis.
Click to expand...
It would follow, if one held that to be the case, that Adam and Eve would have been conceived with human souls from parents who were biologically the same species but lacked the rational soul. Not that Adam or Eve ever existed without souls and then the souls were added.
 
Last edited:
"CHRISTOPH SCHÖNBORN
7/07/05
NY Times

"EVER since 1996, when Pope John Paul II said that evolution (a term he did not define) was “more than just a hypothesis,” defenders of neo-Darwinian dogma have often invoked the supposed acceptance - or at least acquiescence - of the Roman Catholic Church when they defend their theory as somehow compatible with Christian faith.

"But this is not true. The Catholic Church, while leaving to science many details about the history of life on earth, proclaims that by the light of reason the human intellect can readily and clearly discern purpose and design in the natural world, including the world of living things.

"Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science…

In the homily at his installation just a few weeks ago, Benedict proclaimed: “We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.”

"Throughout history the church has defended the truths of faith given by Jesus Christ. But in the modern era, the Catholic Church is in the odd position of standing in firm defense of reason as well. In the 19th century, the First Vatican Council taught a world newly enthralled by the “death of God” that by the use of reason alone mankind could come to know the reality of the Uncaused Cause, the First Mover, the God of the philosophers.

“Now at the beginning of the 21st century, faced with scientific claims like neo-Darwinism and the multiverse hypothesis in cosmology invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science, the Catholic Church will again defend human reason by proclaiming that the immanent design evident in nature is real. Scientific theories that try to explain away the appearance of design as the result of “chance and necessity” are not scientific at all, but, as John Paul put it, an abdication of human intelligence . . .”
 
This is not consistent with Church teaching.

“37. 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 that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent 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 with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.[12]”
  • Humani Generis
 
I’ve heard of people going around with the idea that Noah was the father of the human race based on the flood wiping so many human beings out. But, that does not take away from Adam and Eve’s place in the universe.

Of course, this is a context regarding humanity as we know the holy trinity is the father of the human race.
 
Last edited:
Another interpretation of Adam and Eve, that makes it comptaible with evolution, is that our oldest, oldest primate descendents at one point in time reached the stage where they became humans, and were given a soul by Christ. Adam and Eve might have been these first parents, i.e. this theory is not creationism, but is in line with church teaching and not incompatible with scientific theories.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top