Wow, I haven’t heard that one before.
Except that Hell is not just some divine torture chamber, set up by God as an arbitrary punishment, meant to comepl us to accept him. It’s a condition we choose when, using our free wills, we reject God, who is the source of all that is good. In rejecting this Supreme Good, we reject all goods, even the good of possible repentance. This condition naturally brings with it suffering, in body and soul.
This is incorrect. You are misinterpreting the scientific evidence. Polygenism with a minimum population size of about 10,000 individuals in the last 6 million years is the scientific consensus. Your dogmatic statement is based on a misinterpretation of the science. Sorry about that. Go here to learn more:
Hell, I’d go as far as to say that I’m almost *certain *Pius didn’t have my interpretation in mind. The fact that he left in the true part of his definition indicates, to me at least, that something was protecting the truth. Some might call it dumb luck, but I call it the Holy Spirit. Of course this is purely a matter of faith, but it’s one of the reasons that I’ve found my faith being shaken less and less as issues like this arise. The Church has a long history of extremely “dumb” luck, at least in my research
Were it not for Church dogma on the subject, I’d say it’s certainly possible. Taking the story of Adam and Eve as fundamentally true, there’s really no objective scientific way to know that I can think of. Since I accept the Church, however, I say this is an impossibility of faith. By the time Christ (and, given the extent of human interbreeding and migration, likely significantly earlier) I definately believe that the human soul was spread among the entire species. It’s an interesting intellectual exercise to try and figure out how this spread would occur, but ultimately I think it’s unnecessary to the faith. In fact, I would argue that it’s unnecessary even if the soul hadn’t been spread around, because we would have no way of knowing who possessed one and who didn’t, and would therefore have to err on the side of everyone having one (events like the Holocaust demonstrate the danger of playing the “lesser races” game).
I’m afraid my knowledge of the y-chromosome tracing is sadly deficient, but my basic understanding of the mitochondrial issue leaves this as not too much of a problem. Eve wouldn’t have to be the “mitochondrial Eve”, and, if Scripture is taken at all seriously, then she couldn’t be if my hypothesis is correct. The key point in Scripture for me is Cain and his unnamed wife. Now, if his wife came from this “soulless” population, and wasn’t his sister, then she would bear a mitochondrial marker not in any way derived from Eve, though distantly related to her far back in the genetic line. If Cain had a sister, then his nieces and nephews would have Eve’s mitochondrial line, while his kids would have his wife’s. Both sets of kids would have a soul, and would share in natural progression from Adam and Eve, but they would have a “mitochondrial Eve” that would be potentially dozens, or hundreds, of generations distant. This would be in just the second generation from Adam and Eve, among people who shared a theoretically close genetic pool. Imagine how this could grow as more “sons” of Adam and Eve spread out and married more distant lines. “Mitochondrial Eve” would have necessarily been hundreds of generations before the actual Eve, assuming my hypothesis is correct.If we take your suggestion as right we are left only with the scientific problems that the mitochondrial coalescence date is 175,000BP, which is before the emergence of anatomically modern humans, and the Y-cchromosome date is 75,000BP, on the fringes of cognitively modern humans but separating Adam and Eve by 100,000 years
Definately, and that’s why the Church weighs in on the problem. Scientifically it’s an impossible question to tackle, at least until we find a “spiritual marker”
This is a response to quite a long post of yours and I promise to get back to the rest of it, but it’s late at night for me. I just make the comment now that it seems rather odd to me that doctrine drives us to a search for a single genetic marker for humanness. Science has long given up the idea that humanity can be defined in that way.Definately, and that’s why the Church weighs in on the problem. Scientifically it’s an impossible question to tackle, at least until we find a “spiritual marker”
The Exultet is my favourite part of Easter Vigil!
DominvsVobiscvm said:
On the contrary, anyone who knows anything about evolutionary biology and palaeontology knows that human monogeny is rejected and that the minimum population size of humans and direct human ancestors is at least 10,000 individuals at least as far back as the divergence of human and chimpanzee lineages. As the Wikipedia article points out there were many other females alive at the same time as matrilineal MRCA. Many of the other 5000 plus females alive at the the time will also be ancestors of at least some of us and in some cases **of all of us **- in other words we have other common mothers in the same generation as mitochondrial Eve - the difference is that their ancestry has not come down to us purely through the maternal line… Gene trees are not the same as population trees and Most Recent Common Ancestor in a gene tree is not the same as Most Recent Only Ancestor or even Most Recent Common Ancestor on a pedigree basis. Furthermore the matrilineal MRCA is not an individual person fixed for all time but changes as the years go by and particular matenal lineages die out.
I have real problems with doctrines plucked from thin air. If you were to say to me that all races and all families of humans are all equally human then that’s fine. But to say that the human population today could, logically, consist of a mixture of people with and without souls, but we all have souls simply because the Church has said it is so is to set off down a path where I cannot follow. To the extent that people have radically different cognitive abilities from other animals (which is what having a soul means), I have to say that the evidence is that this developed in a population through many tiny steps, not in the equivalent of a single massive saltational mutation (or breathing in by God to a single couple) which then spread through the human population.