Can I stay Catholic and not believe in a literal Adam and Eve?

[edwest211]

This reply is an invention. God created Eve for Adam but creating stories about alleged hominids is just speculation.

 

[po18guy]

Where is it that you have heard of an allegorical Adam and Eve? Your thinking is polluted by the confused age that we live in. An age which seeks to explain away more than it seeks to explain. An age in which missing links are made up; in which an amazing amount of faith is placed in harebrained theories, but little in revealed truth; in which there is no afterlife, no soul, no meaning of life other than instantaneous pleasure. An age which cannot explain or understand pain or suffering, other than to offer suicide.

A society and culture which has excised it roots en route to an unknown future.

Like insects - but even they have a purpose.

 

[edwest211]

That is indeed what some people have come to accept as true. Adam and Eve are NOT real people or our first parents. I read that HERE - on this message board. So, where do these ideas come from? The media - TV and movies, which model bad and nihilistic behaviors. And no consequences. Schools are increasingly being turned into indoctrination centers and mom and dad don’t have to know.

Pope Benedict -

"The Holy Father says:

If we cannot have common values, common truths, sufficient communication on the essentials of human life–how to live how to respond to the great challenges of human life–then true society becomes impossible."

Commentary by the Practical Catholic:

"How true this is. Where there is no communication, no culture, no shared experience, there is no society; because there is no people. There remains only a vast and foreboding, unforgiving sea of individuals ready to crash upon each other and the world with the slightest wind. Without a common basis, we have not the vaulted pluralism we’re taught to embrace, but Babel, in all the confusion and madness of a society with no binding forces. Already we are seeing the tensions of this fragmentation breaking out across cultures.

“Without common values and truths, such as in the socieites we find ourselves in, we find the fabric of society torn like Joseph’s cloak, by a great many tribes which would like to lay claim to the title of favored. Leftists, conservatives, anarchists, nihilists, secularists, objectivists, the shallow, the entertainers, the entertained, all vying for control against each other. Tribalism can indeed spawn differentiation, but without some common ground, and in the face of increasing jargon not only in the academies but in the cultures; we shall be left with madness. In the end this tribalism can only result in the decline of all their claims, and the alienation of one from the other. Babel is the happenstance when society tries to become God.”

 

[wiggbuggie1]

I think the notion that some people alive today have no souls and some do is kinda heretical maybe I’m wrong. Timing of Adam of Eve can clear this issue up. If they lived 200,000 years ago with the out of Africa theory in Ethiopia there descendants could of spread through out the world. Or if they originated from the near east about 9000 years ago but by then the human population was spread about the world.

As one poster pointed out yes a child from a nonensouled to an ensouled parent would have a soul and no the soul doesn’t act like genetics. the church affirms the soul is created instantly from God and it doesn’t evolve etc. the characters of a soul would be like the bible says the image and likeness of God freewill, ability to express ourselves, and we wont be driven by instincts like animals

 

[edwest211]

"Pope Benedict XVI goes on to say:

"We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires. The church must defend itself against threats such as “radical individualism” and “vague religious mysticism”. [emphasis added]

Commentary by the Practical Catholic:

“Pope Benedict does not play language games, he is unconcerned with the postmodernist’s corner on untruth. Neither should we be. Notice how he calls relativism a “dictatorship” instead of agreeing that no values and no Truth are the way forward for society. What many fail to recognize is that imposing nihilism and arbitrary tribalism is a form of dictatorship. Where untruth or half truth is the common order, there can only be oppression. Political correctness has asked us to abandon our value-laden language and to pick up a new language proper to the secular forum. However, this secular newspeak is value-laden against the traditional claims of the Western world and as such, is a poison rather than a new order. We can and should bring our own conviction laden language to the table, if we’re going to have any sort of real dialogue at all. Misinformation and restrained convictions are not the proper building blocks for a democracy.”

 

[edwest211]

Here, in this case, it’s very clear. Two people were our first parents and only two. There were no other people around. If hominids existed, they would not be human but we are told that from Adam and Eve the whole world was populated. No one can be vague about this. Anyone can believe we’re the current version of the almost humans that came before us but that’s not Church teaching.

Adam and Eve committed Original Sin. That is very important to know. No one else did. It started with them.

 

[Teek]

This reply is an invention. God created Eve for Adam but creating stories about alleged hominids is just speculation.

Totally speculation. Trying to see how it would play out if the assimilation idea were truly considered. It doesn’t work for me.

 

[Teek]

Nah. “Gorgias Roddenberry” just doesn’t have that ‘ring’ to it…

HAHAHA!!! No, but it would look great in the credits.

So, it is precisely the human soul that makes us human and not merely ‘animal.’

I agree with that—but that is why I do not believe the humans would mate with the hominids. They would then notice that the hominids were “merely animals”.

It falls, strictly speaking, in the realm of science. While it might have merit, I’m going to defer addressing it, since I’m primarily interested in the theological case we’re making, not the physically / empirically verifiable implications…

Second order consciousness is actually a matter of the intellect and the will—both are functions of the soul. However, I thought you would protest it because it is too theological, and we were going for the physically verifiable as well as theological—since we are dealing with the biological result of the theological soul in this thought experiment. Funny that I saw it the other way!

The humans would see the stars and wonder at their existence and ask “Why?”

Interestingly, that’s the type of questions that ‘origins’ scientists tend to ask

The asking of “why” is what makes it so interesting to watch scientists try to explain a universe that is entirely atoms interacting with atoms with no purpose. They why do they ask why? If there is no because, How could their be a desire to know why?

The two “species” would have a wide gulf between them almost immediately.

Perhaps. Yet, we look at Neandertals and recognize that their DNA exists in our bodies – clearly, ‘modern’ humans mated with Neandertals 100K years ago or so.

The Neanderthal DNA could be explained in this model by the original two hominids who were infused with souls. We are assuming in this model that they are genetically identical to the hominids without souls. Common genetics. Both human and hominid would have common genes, even if they never mated again.

Further, if a common segment of DNA between humans and another species indicated that we mated with them in the past, then someone has some explaining to do to the fruit flies. We share 60% of our genes with them.

But I wasn’t referring to a genetic gulf, or a physical gulf. I meant the behavioral gulf. The behavior would immediately be entirely different between the one with a soul and the one without.

 

[Teek]

“Adam looked at all of the animals and did not see a fit helper, but he recognized the soul in Eve and knew that this was equal footing.”

That being said, all the narrative of Genesis 2 says is that God presented Adam with ‘cattle’ and ‘beasts’ and ‘birds’. I think our thesis is still safe.

In any case, if we’re going to go full-on mind-bogglingly literalistic, then Adam picks Eve because of physical, not spiritual, characteristics.

Hominids without souls are one of the beasts—as you said, “merely animals.” It is the soul that sets humans apart.

I meant it allegorically, not literalistic-ly. The poetic nature of Genesis has Adam longing for someone who was like him. The beasts were not just right. She was. I don’t see that literally or allegorically it would mean physical characteristics. But if we are dismissing the relevance of the Genesis account here, I guess that doesn’t matter.

However, that did not keep white men from seeking out black women for sex (and subsequently, giving birth to children). Even more interestingly, these children were not afforded the rights that other, ‘purebred’ children inherited.

In that case, they were WRONG about the soul. And clearly, they recognized it. These were human persons with souls and dignity. Who, as you said, were not treated with equal dignity, and it was deplorable.

The enslaved women were not at all like the hominids of our proposed scenario. They did not act as if they had no souls because they DID have souls. They way they were treated, being equal in dignity in the eyes of the Lord no matter their nation of origin or ethnic heritage, was reprehensible to say the very least. Other humans would have had no problem with having children with other humans. And so they did. The fact that they treated their own biological offspring as inferior is a despicable proof of free will. Animals protect their progeny because evolutionary success depends on more genetic copies of one’s particular genes. Humans can be idiots and worse because they can freely choose right or wrong. And that example was a clear demonstration of very very wrong use of free will.

A better example would be humans having relationships with a humanoid without a soul, not humans having relationships with other humans who they subjectively think are inferior but objectively are not. If there are examples of that, no thank you, please. I don’t want to know!

With this example, we have only proven that humans may be too stupid to realize it, but they recognize a person with equal dignity and the possessions of a soul. They knew that the women they were mistreating were human, whether they would admit it to anyone or not.

The same thing has happened all over the world, wherever ‘civilized’ men came in contact with ‘primitive’ women.

Yes, but that is still just human jerks mistreating human victims. Not humans mating with non humans.

 

[Teek]

It would, but I don’t think it would prevent sexual activity and childbearing.

Well, I still want to believe (with my eyes squeezed tightly shut and my ears plugged just in case someone brings forth an example to prove me wrong) that it would prevent it. All joking aside, I don’t see any normalized or common violations that say otherwise. Or really any uncommon or rare ones.

So basically, it’s not coming together for me. In this completely hypothetical and not being proposed as a real theory conversation (to anyone late to the game): I still don’t see a case for assimilation. I see the proposed “ensoulment of two hominids among many” causing a separate group. The hominids may have gone extinct by some other route to explain why there aren’t any today, but I don’t think assimilation explains why there aren’t any today if this was how it happened. There might have been crossover at first, but very rapidly there would be a separation between humans and hominids. Even if it were not immediate, or rapid, when there were enough humans that hominids weren’t necessary in order to have a mate, they would have preferred those like themselves and left the rest of the hominids alone without mates to ensoul their children. I think there would have been a hominid remnant if two hominids got ensouled out of the general hominid population.

 

[Teek]

That thought experiment aside (which was fun, thank you for indulging me), I don’t really think the soul is passed on by a parent that possesses a soul. It’s not a communicable trait. It’s not a product of biology.

How would the soul replicate itself to be passed on? If one parent was sufficient, the mechanism must be that a complete soul is passed from one ensouled parent, right?

What would the consequence be if both parents passed on a soul to a child? Would the souls merge into a super soul? Would they battle to the death and the strongest soul survives? Would the baby have two souls?

It would make more sense if it required two parents with souls to each pass on an incomplete soul that merged with the one from the other parent to make a complete soul. But then what happens in the case of a hetero-soul-gous p1 and p2–one parent with a soul and one without? Does the child have half a soul? Does the soul expand to normal soul “size” all by itself?

Or, since it was an act of God to instill the only two souls that had yet come into existence, and therefore no mechanism of soul inheritance had developed, did it remain God’s domain, and His alone? Being love Himself, having known our names before we were born, and being the one that lovingly holds every fiber of our existence together every moment of our existence, couldn’t He lovingly infuse the soul into every single one of us at conception? With the kind of intent and purposeful attention to detail that would make each and every one of us unique and amazing? Even identical twins, who are biologically, chromosomally identical, have entirely different personalities and gifts and strengths.

It makes more sense.

To me.

And to the Church, who maintains that God gives us each our soul. Not our parents.

 

[FollowChrist34]

I would say that would be a definite yes.

 

[Gorgias]

[Humans] would then notice that the hominids were “merely animals”.

You haven’t observed Millennials in their natural habitat recently, then, have you…?

Second order consciousness is actually a matter of the intellect and the will—both are functions of the soul. However, I thought you would protest it because it is too theological, and we were going for the physically verifiable as well as theological—since we are dealing with the biological result of the theological soul in this thought experiment.

Good point. Calls for a bit more noodling, perhaps…?

The Neanderthal DNA could be explained in this model by the original two hominids who were infused with souls.

Hmm… no, I don’t think so. You’re suggesting that our “Adam and Eve” would be the only true humans with Neandertal DNA? I think not, on two counts: first, the other ‘merely hominin’ parents (who are parents of human children via their mates) would have contributed Neandertal DNA just as reasonably as Adam and Eve did. In addition, “Adam and Eve only” would create an empirically verifiable bottleneck in the population (and science tells us that such a bottleneck does not exist).

Further, if a common segment of DNA between humans and another species indicated that we mated with them in the past, then someone has some explaining to do to the fruit flies. We share 60% of our genes with them.

There are reasonable explanations for the assertion that Neandertals and ‘modern’ humans mated, rather than asserting that modern humans descended from Neandertals through evolution. On the other hand, we diverged from fruit flies way, way up the chain…

 

[CapitalistCatholic]

The Theory of Evolution is one of the only things I do agree with Pope Francis on. Having two original parents would not make sense. This would lead to inbreeding, which leads to genetic disorders. I don’t think God cares how you think he created mankind, it just matters that you believe he did.

 

[goout]

edwest211:

There’s no evidence they were assimilated.

Please provide a method for providing evidence of the presence of a soul in a human. Once you come up with such a method, I’ll take your objection seriously.

Yes
This is the heart of the matter right here: A misunderstanding of the Catholic perspective on the nature of “true human beings” as being a unity of body and soul.

 

[Teek]

“The Neanderthal DNA could be explained in this model by the original two hominids who were infused with souls.”

Hmm… no, I don’t think so. You’re suggesting that our “Adam and Eve” would be the only true humans with Neandertal DNA?

Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I do that too often.

I meant to say that the all of the hominids would have the same DNA, including the two selected for souls in our model. So the genes they have in common do not indicate mating. It would have to be due to mating if it were a trait the original humans did not have that was later introduced. That would be extremely difficult to support as a theory with the sparse evidence we have accumulated. But here we are saying they all came from the same genetic blueprint—the “hominid” blueprint. Same DNA.

There are reasonable explanations for the assertion that Neandertals and ‘modern’ humans mated, rather than asserting that modern humans descended from Neandertals through evolution.

I have only seen the argument that there were either common genes, common physical traits, or that there is evidence that they shared a similar habitat range and so they “likely would have mated.” Which doesn’t follow. I went to college with plenty of attractive members of my same species of opposite gender, and it does not follow that I then “likely would have mated.” As far as the DNA or physical traits in common—we cannot, from where we sit in time, say that it is more plausible that we obtained Neanderthal DNA from cross species mating than it does that we have a common core set of DNA with all forms of life. The fruit fly proves this. If we say common DNA with Neanderthals means early humans mates with Neanderthals, then we have to say common DNA with fruit flies (60%) means we mated with this at some point, quite frequently. Even more so mice—90% shared genetic code!

I heard one imaginative theory that there was some Neanderthal gene that was introduced late and conferred some sort of protection on a subset of the human population—enhanced immunity and intelligence. We don’t all have it. Only some. And with it comes white skin, and blonde hair, and blue eyes. And by theory, I mean pipe dream of massively ridiculous proportions, and resulting in tragic applications. (The Neanderthal gene addition was late in joining the debate, and is currently be used to espouse and attempt to resurrect the same ideology as the original racial supremacy argument. Today. People are trying to support that TODAY.)

And yes, we diverged from the fruit fly way, WAY up the evolutionary chain according to all evolutionary theories—and yet share 60% of our genes. Still. With no mating.

As far as having to have mates to share DNA—apply Ockham’s Razor. The theory that most simply explains the observation is likely to be the best one.

 

[Teek]

This is kind of like saying “All bass have scales. But small mouth bass are different. They did not have scales until they picked up the gene for scales from mating with large mouth bass. Now they have scales.”

It is more logical to say that humans have shared DNA with other species because they share all kinds of DNA with all creatures or to say they didn’t have that particular gene until they mated with another species?

That’s a common theory. I know that! And many scientists find it laudable.

I just can’t make it work. To me, it remains ludicrous.

Why go there when there are more plausible explanations?

Unless there is a better explanation that I haven’t thrown into the mix? If so bring it on!

 

[Gorgias]

The soul does not exist for science so these hominids could still be alive today

And so could Neandertals.

I think the notion that some people alive today have no souls and some do is kinda heretical maybe I’m wrong.

No, the suggestion is not that there exist “humans without souls” today.

Timing of Adam of Eve can clear this issue up. If they lived 200,000 years ago with the out of Africa theory in Ethiopia there descendants could of spread through out the world. Or if they originated from the near east about 9000 years ago but by then the human population was spread about the world.

The problem is that if you posit that all of humanity proceeded solely from two humans, then you have a genetic bottleneck. Such a bottleneck would be empirically verifiable. However, scientists tell us that, at no time did a bottleneck of less than 10K hominins exist (IIRC).

This reply is an invention. God created Eve for Adam but creating stories about alleged hominids is just speculation.

Well, of course it’s speculation! We’re including science here!

Where is it that you have heard of an allegorical Adam and Eve?

(Who’s suggesting an allegorical pair of first true humans, @po18guy?)

Here, in this case, it’s very clear. Two people were our first parents and only two.

Agreed. That’s the teaching of the Church.

There were no other people around.

No other “true humans”. Correct.

If hominids existed, they would not be human but we are told that from Adam and Eve the whole world was populated.

Two thoughts:
First off, if you want to get literal about this, then you’ll have to explain where the spouses for Adam and Eve’s children came from.

Moreover, the suggestions made in this thread would agree that the population of “true humans” comes from Adam and Eve, and not otherwise.

Adam and Eve committed Original Sin. That is very important to know. No one else did. It started with them.

Absolutely. It’s critical. All true humans share in the condition of sinfulness due to our two first true human parents (whom we call “Adam and Eve”. Or “Adam and Zoe”. Or whatever.).

 

[Teek]

You haven’t observed Millennials in their natural habitat recently, then, have you…?

I’m still laughing! Too right!

 

[Gorgias]

Having two original parents would not make sense. This would lead to inbreeding, which leads to genetic disorders.

You’re not following the discussion of “ensouled true humans” vs “unensouled hominins” in this thread, are you…?