Another Evolution thread

[amarischuk]

Okay, since there are so many threads already dedicated to evolution…and everyone seems to have an opinion. This poll is for the monogenism-Genesis literal folks.

Who where the wives of Cain and Abel?

Adam

 

[jdnation]

Didn’t know Able had a wife, but if they did it would have been their sisters… do you want names as well?

For any further clarification on this please see my response in this thread about 6 posts down:
forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=31744&highlight=Cain

 

[amarischuk]

So the Catholic Encyclopedia is in error when it states:

It is certain that this crime has its distinctive enormity from the prohibition of the natural law, where there is question of the first degree in the direct line, for instance, between parents and children. For the other degrees it is probable that recourse must be had to the ecclesiastical law which invalidates marriage within those limits.

Or is incest between siblings not of ‘the first degree’? Is the only prohibition against such incest ‘ecclesiastical law’?

Why is it that conservative Catholicism must always be ready to abandon Thomism to force interpretations on scripture (also see my thread on Abraham and Isaac and the teleological suspension of the ethical).

And why didn’t this thread appear as a poll which I posted it as?..computers.

Adam

 

[marciadietrich]

Abraham married his half sister, they had the same father and different mother. The natural law prohibition you quote does indicate parent to child, not siblings. There was a lot of first cousin marrying going on in Genesis as well. Jacob and his wives Leah and Rachel who were the daughters of Jacob’s Uncle Laban (his mother’s brother). The difference there is that none of those cases involved people being RAISED together as brother and sister in the same household. In that society even the first cousins were considered brothers and sisters for being of the same patriarch line. It appears whether or not you were raised in the same household was how they defined it not being incest rather than the genetic relationship. That would be true now as well, society would not see it as right for adopted kids not genetically related to marry if they had been raised as brother and sister.

Anyhow, all I know is that the Church says Sententia Certa that mankind is descended from one couple, Adam and Eve - but seems it is being changed to mean Adam and Eve and a whole bunch of other ‘souless’ (they mean not having an immortal soul) non-humans marrying into the line to give us the genetic variety that evolution says we must have.

 

[JimG]

I don’t know who their wives were; but I’m assuming they must have been sisters. There are several assumptions in play. First, that Adam and Eve lived very long lives. We know that God told them to ‘be fruitful and multiply.’ They could have had dozens of children who scattered about the earth. Also, I’m assuming that God in those early years might have had more distaste for inter-species marriage than he did for the marrying of siblings. It wouldn’t take more than a few generations for the human population to become so large that the immediate-family incest taboo could have become active.