Adam & Eve, Original Sin and Cosmology

[Wesrock]

Evolutionary theory is, by its nature, a materialist narrative - as all scientific theories are (in the sense that they’re limited to a material explanation, or at least could be limited if scientists want to accept that limit for science, and they don’t have to - there are no policemen telling them they can’t)…

Empirical science can only study the material (or what is quantitative). That doesn’t mean empirical science need be understood through a materialist narrative. It’s useful in the study of what it is capable of studying. That doesn’t mean that’s all there is to study.

Evolution claims to have an explanation for the origin of human beings.
So, the evolution of man must necessarily require the evolution of that which makes humans different from animals - namely, the rational intellect which is an observable feature in human life.

The data is quite clear that the earth is over four billion years old, and that life’s been evolving on this planet for hundreds of millions of years. Furthermore, it’s quite clear that man’s own physiological history has been part of this evolution, and that we evolved from earlier hominid species within the ape family. Natural selection, allele drift, speciation, etc . . . can be understood as real features of the origin of species and of man without accepting that everything that can be said about the origin of man is confined to what can be quantitatively measured.

If you’re saying that evolutionary theory only explains the origin of “some part of man” then I’d disagree because I can list and show you quite a lot in the evolutionary literature that claims otherwise. Evolution makes a claim about the origin of human beings - not just “human bodies” or not just “part of human beings” - but the whole being. That would be necessary because what would be the difference in the supposed transitional between the body of a non-human ancestor to a human? In the gradualist idea, there would be little or no discernable difference.
As explained, the difference between human and animal is an ontological gap - and this cannot be explained by evolution, although evolutionary theory denies that such a gap exists.

Yes, yes, yes, and we may as well toss out everything Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas has to say because of their obviously false cosmology and incorrect scientific examples, right?

That there are those who think a materialist explanation is sufficient doesn’t mean we have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. And on top of that, you’re conflating extrapolations from multiple fields of science and materialist inductive reasonings based on the data and specific world views as being the idea of evolution in itself.

 

[Michael_Mayo]

I think he’s saying that since all humans must be descendents of Adam and Eve, then God cannot create any other humans directly.

I guess it comes down to defining what human is. If on another planet there is a race of beings like us down to the DNA can we not call them human even though unrelated to Adam and Eve?

 

[Michael_Mayo]

This discussion reminded me of a space science trilogy that C. S. Lewis wrote, that I read the first two books of a very long time ago.

1. Out of the Silent Planet
2. Perelandra
3. That Hideous Strength

Perelandra was the name of the planet the man from the first book went to, and it was an “unfallen planet”.

It was so long ago that I read it… I don’t remember details.

Has anyone read it?

I read it in 1981. Lots of fun.

 

[truetofaith]

Empirical science can only study the material (or what is quantitative). That doesn’t mean empirical science need be understood through a materialist narrative. It’s useful in the study of what it is capable of studying. That doesn’t mean that’s all there is to study.

The data is quite clear that the earth is over four billion years old, and that life’s been evolving on this planet for hundreds of millions of years. Furthermore, it’s quite clear that man’s own physiological history has been part of this evolution, and that we evolved from earlier hominid species within the ape family. Natural selection, allele drift, speciation, etc . . . can be understood as real features of the origin of species and of man without accepting that everything that can be said about the origin of man is confined to what can be quantitatively measured.

Yes, yes, yes, and we may as well toss out everything Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas has to say because of their obviously false cosmology and incorrect scientific examples, right?

That there are those who think a materialist explanation is sufficient doesn’t mean we have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. And on top of that, you’re conflating extrapolations from multiple fields of science and materialist inductive reasonings based on the data and specific world views as being the idea of evolution in itself.

You say man “evolved from earlier hominid species within the ape family. Natural selection, allele drift, speciation, etc . . . can be understood as real features of the origin of species and of man .”

This doesn’t jive with the Biblical account in which God took the dust of the earth and formed man separately from all the other creatures!

 

[Wesrock]

To continue from my last post, I’m sure you are all familiar with the type of person who is completely flabbergasted by the person who doesn’t “believe in evolution.” The average person isn’t flabbergasted by your rejection of a materialist philosophy and evolution as a complete account for everything, they just want to know if you believe in natural selection, allele drift, speciation, that one species came from an earlier species, and that our species came from an earlier hominid species, and so on. If you qualify your point with a statement that you believe God supplied man with a rational soul, the average atheist might role their eyes, but they won’t feel like you’re denying the hand two inches in front of your face.

 

[Wesrock]

You say man “evolved from earlier hominid species within the ape family. Natural selection, allele drift, speciation, etc . . . can be understood as real features of the origin of species and of man .”

This doesn’t jive with the Biblical account in which God took the dust of the earth and formed man separately from all the other creatures!

Man was still made, in the end, from inorganic matter and separated from all other animals by being given a rational soul. Do you accuse those who say that original sin wasn’t the eating of a literal fruit as not jiving with scriptures? The creation story is not a scientific account. It is real and true history, but may very well be told using symbolic language or a mythological style.

 

[truetofaith]

Man was still made, in the end, from inorganic matter and separated from all other animals by being given a rational soul. Do you accuse those who say that original sin wasn’t the eating of a literal fruit as not jiving with scriptures? The creation story is not a scientific account. It is real and true history, but may very well be told using symbolic language or a mythological style.

I’ve been hearing the creation story is only symbolic since grammar school in the 1950’s.

The Bible says Eve saw that the fruit of the Tree was “good for food pleasing to the eye and desirable for gaining wisdom”…the Bible is very detailed for something ‘symbolic’.

 

[grannymh]

From what I am reading, it looks like some cosmology stuff is an hidden tool to remove God from the conversation. If that observation is correct or at least partially correct …It is silly to even consider the two sole founders of the human species.

 

[NormalBeliever]

Evolutionary theory is, by its nature, a materialist narrative - as all scientific theories are (in the sense that they’re limited to a material explanation, or at least could be limited if scientists want to accept that limit for science, and they don’t have to - there are no policemen telling them they can’t)…
Evolution claims to have an explanation for the origin of human beings.
So, the evolution of man must necessarily require the evolution of that which makes humans different from animals - namely, the rational intellect which is an observable feature in human life.

Except that it’s then no longer an evolutionary theory, but rather a metaphysical one. One must not confuse one’s own metaphysical beliefs with the scientific theory.

Remember, metaphysics is the true study of ultimate reality, not empirical science. Empirical science can only get you towards objective physical facts and regularities, how to view those regularities is a different matter.

For example, in quantum mechanics you have all of the empirical evidence about how a quantum system behaves, yet there are several interpretations of that evidence. One is the mainstream Copenhagen interpretation, which makes all sorts of unproven metaphysical assumptions and ends up with the observer collapsing the wave-function, which has been criticised for implying non-realism/idealism about nature.

Another yet is the Bohm interpretation, which is a fully deterministic theory of QM (deterministic not in the sense of fatalism or sheer materialism, but that nothing in QM is strictly random and indeterministic, in other words, God does not play dice with nature; it’s basically a picture of QM compatible with classical physics), where the wave-function is not collapsed at all, and particles are guided by a pilot wave that has definite properties that determines where the particles will end up, but it suffers from the fact that it violates Lorentz invariance at the most fundamental level, which means it is therefore incompatible with General Relativity. One way to fix this would be to come up with an alternate metaphysical model of spacetime that preserves all of the empirical predictions of GR, including the apparent Lorentz invariance at the Planck scale, but that gets us into deeper waters than currently necessary.

Yet another are the Objective Collapse interpretations where the wave-functions collapses randomly or when some threshold is reached, but without the observer playing any special part, This would require specifying a mechanism that QM alone cannot describe, which makes it more a theory rather than interpretation.

All of these are compatible with all of the empirical data in QM, they just differ in what are the causes of these observations and what theoretical entities are responsible for it.

The same goes with evolution. Which means that the reason evolution is often given a materialist interpretation is more because of metaphysical assumptions of materialism rather than anything resting on pure science.

And since we do have solid arguments that prove the human soul is not material and cannot arise from purely natural processes, it follows that we shouldn’t give evolution a materialist interpretation at all, at least when it comes to the soul.

 

[grannymh]

The same goes with evolution. Which means that the reason evolution is often given a materialist interpretation is more because of metaphysical assumptions of materialism rather than anything resting on pure science.

And since we do have solid arguments that prove the human soul is not material and cannot arise from purely natural processes, it follows that we shouldn’t give evolution a materialist interpretation at all, at least when it comes to the soul.

Apparently, the material world is not completely understood. That mistake occasionally pops up and ruins a good discussion.

 

[NormalBeliever]

From what I am reading, it looks like some cosmology stuff is an hidden tool to remove God from the conversation. If that observation is correct or at least partially correct …It is silly to even consider the two sole founders of the human species.

Stanley Jaki says as much in his books about the relationship between Christianity and science, particularily with regards to the infinite universe idea, calling it an excuse for atheists to remove God from the picture. His objection, though, doesn’t seem to be based on a merely practical basis, but on a philosophical one as well, considering that it seems the idea of an infinite universe is incompatible with certain insights from Christianity that made science even workable in the first place, probably because (and this is my own speculation not Jaki’s) an infinite universe discourages scientific investigation because this means the universe is far beyond human understanding and makes any serious human investigation into it superfluosly diminshed in scope and depth, as well as philosophical difficulties inherent within such a conception, and maybe also the fact that the medievals rejected an infinite universe because they thought that only God can have infinity as a quality, while nothing in creation, which is material, could be infinite; an idea which was also borrowed from Aristotelianism which rejects the idea that anything physical could be infinite in quantity or quality.

 

[NormalBeliever]

Catholic doctrine is that each and every real human being has an individual soul created directly by God. General (Thomist) understandings of the evolution of man that I’ve seen indicate that there’s an ontological gap between what could evolve through natural processes and man’s position as a rational animal. That is, the rational intellect and soul of man could not be caused by evolutionary processes. The effect cannot be greater than the cause, and if the rational intellect is indeed an immaterial operation of the human soul, it would not be contained physically, virtually, or eminently in the natural processes of evolution, but would be something that would require God’s direct intervention. Therefore, while theoretically highly advanced social animals with a human’s exact physiological form and brain size could develop through evolutionary processes, the intellectual and rational mind of a human being – allows understanding universals, abstracting from them, etc… – could not be.

So in such an infinite universe in which case there might be infinite earths with infinite physiological humans on them scattered across vast cosmic distances, none of those populations would be true humans – in the sense of having a rational soul – apart from God’s direct intervention.

Well, while this is certainly a possibility that could obtain in an infinite universe with infinite Earths, this does, however, commit us to believing that it’s most likely only us who have rational souls, while other physiological humans do not.

However, this is a divinely revealed truth, and my question was about the possibility that we would discover rational human beings unrelated to us (in a direct way at least) on other Earths, as well as in parallel universes.

For if we were to discover that there were other universes out there in the multiverse that also contain not only physiologically the same beings as us, but also beings that have rational souls, and even have similar histories as we do,* what would we do then?*

How could we reconcile belief in an original pair of rational physiological humans with the existence of multiple parallel universes that also have rational human beings in them?

Or if the universe were infinite in size with infinite Earths and infinitely many rational human beings, how would we reconcile the existence of other rational human beings unrelated to us on other Earths far away in the infinite cosmos with the teaching that all humans are descended from a first pair?

 

[grannymh]

A species-originating population of more than two is close to my maximum knowledge of the world of natural science.

 

[grannymh]

Well, while this is certainly a possibility that could obtain in an infinite universe with infinite Earths, this does, however, commit us to believing that it’s most likely only us who have rational souls, while other physiological humans do not.

However, this is a divinely revealed truth, and my question was about the possibility that we would discover rational human beings unrelated to us (in a direct way at least) on other Earths, as well as in parallel universes.

For if we were to discover that there were other universes out there in the multiverse that also contain not only physiologically the same beings as us, but also beings that have rational souls, and even have similar histories as we do,* what would we do then?*

How could we reconcile belief in an original pair of rational physiological humans with the existence of multiple parallel universes that also have rational human beings in them?

Or if the universe were infinite in size with infinite Earths and infinitely many rational human beings, how would we reconcile the existence of other rational human beings unrelated to us on other Earths far away in the infinite cosmos with the teaching that all humans are descended from a first pair?

These thoughts sound like it is certain that there are multi gods just like what was evinced in early legends.

The Shaman is now proven as being totally correct.

 

[reggieM]

Furthermore, it’s quite clear that man’s own physiological history has been part of this evolution, and that we evolved from earlier hominid species within the ape family. .

What data clearly shows that humans evolved from non-human ancestors? Where has this theory been demonstrated as being “quite clear”? What are the mechanisms that caused the evolution of all the species of living beings on earth?

Yes, yes, yes, and we may as well toss out everything Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas has to say because of their obviously false cosmology and incorrect scientific examples, right?

We toss out everything they have to say on their scientific theories because those ideas have been falsified. That’s the way it works. A scientist proposes a theory - such as “all life forms on earth evolved via random mutations and natural selection”. When observed data comes back that contradicts that theory - then the theory is falsified.

That there are those who think a materialist explanation is sufficient doesn’t mean we have to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I’m not talking about philosophy but the material science. That is what is not sufficient. There is no data showing that humans evolved from non-humans. There are fossils which show some similarities - but this says nothing about how or why these similarities exist.

Evolution must defending the Darwinian narrative that random physical mutations can cause the evolution of a rational intellect from a non-rational animal. So, you need to show the power of mutations to do such a thing. This has to be done in a lab, not in one’s imagination.

 

[reggieM]

To continue from my last post, I’m sure you are all familiar with the type of person who is completely flabbergasted by the person who doesn’t “believe in evolution.”

Yes, that’s a very common response from Catholics here on CAF. Then when questioned about the details of evolution, they get even more flabbergasted and start calling people names, etc.

The average person isn’t flabbergasted by your rejection of a materialist philosophy and evolution as a complete account for everything,

Let’s be clear - I’m not merely rejecting materialist philosophy. Many Catholic take that route. “Evolution is fine! It’s just the philosophy that is wrong.” No - the science is false also. Random mutations do not have the creative power that they are claimed to have.

they just want to know if you believe … that one species came from an earlier species

In a scientific theory, I should not be expected to “believe” that the predicted outcomes actually did or will happen. I need to see them happen. So, I ask - show me how one species came from another. What is the mutational path that caused the development of human reason. That should be easy enough. “These mutations occurred, these selection pressures were present - and voila, you have a rational intellect where before it was a non-rational animal.”
Failing that, no, I don’t believe the claim.

If you qualify your point with a statement that you believe God supplied man with a rational soul, the average atheist might role their eyes, but they won’t feel like you’re denying the hand two inches in front of your face.

Atheists use this incremental approach. “You don’t believe in natural selection!” But that’s manipulative. They need to show that their theory is true. When I demand evidence or validation for the sweeping claim (the entire biosphere on earth, all plant, animal and human life evolved from single celled organisms) - I need to see what they have to show. Don’t tell me a bacterium adapted and is now a somewhat different bacterium now. I’m not going to fill in the gaps in the theory by using my own imagination.
No - the Darwinian claim has to show that mutations can create the incredibly complex features of life (which Dawkins says “appear to be designed by intelligence”), and there has to be some rationale for why there is, on earth today, a still-uncounted number of species of biological organisms, when the first living organisms (bacteria) still exist in their primitive form. Why was there a need for all of this?
There are too many questions like this that Darwin’s defenders simply don’t answer - they don’t need to answer because through intimidation and ridicule they can avoid the hard problems of their own theory.
Catholics are intimidated by all of that too, so instead of risking “looking like a creationist idiot” they just sign on to the Darwinian narrative and claim that the entire problem is a philosophical one.
No - it’s a scientific problem.

 

[grannymh]

In reply to previous posts…

When in Rome do as the Romans do.

 

[NormalBeliever]

So…is anyone gonna at least attempt to answer my question, at least tentatively?

 

[grannymh]

So…is anyone gonna at least attempt to answer my question, at least tentatively?

Unfortunately, my answer is to skip the Cosmology speculations.

If you have particular questions about Adam & Eve as they existed in our ordinary material physical world, I will do my best to answer.