Convince Me The Biblical Version is Fact

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Hope1960

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I’ve been sort of struggling with the idea of whether the first humans were Adam and Eve vs Evolution. From what I’ve researched online, very few highly educated people, (scientists etc.) agree with the Biblical version of the origin of life or the origin of species and agree with Evolution.

To those who subscribe to the Biblical explanation, please convince me Evolution is false and Genesis is literal.
 
A lot of Catholics accept evolution- the “Biblical explanation” would be that Genesis is factual in describing spiritual truths, but wasn’t written to seek scientific explanations for our origin.
 
OsculeturMeOsculo said:
Evolution is an acceptable belief in Catholicism.
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I realize that, but to be honest, I’ve been toying with the idea of checking out a nearby non-denominational church and they reject evolution. I’m curious to know if there are any well educated people, (scientist-type) who adhere to the belief of Genesis being literal and their proof it’s a fact.
 
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What does it matter, we are from single origin in both views. God works beyond mans perception.
 
My guess is that you have not read “HUMANI GENERIS”

Start there.

It is not either/or.

It is dogma that we all come from original parents. The methods that God used in creation, including these two original parents and the homo sapiens who came before them is a matter that has not been dogmatically defined.

God could have created everything from nothing in 7 literal days, He could have used billions of years, we are free to believe either hypothesis.
 
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TheLittleLady said:
My guess is that you have not read “HUMANI GENERIS”

Start there.

It is not either/or.

It is dogma that we all come from original parents. The methods that God used in creation, including these two original parents and the homo sapiens who came before them is a matter that has not been dogmatically defined.

God could have created everything from nothing in 7 literal days, He could have used billions of years, we are free to believe either hypothesis.
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I’ve read most of it before but I do lean toward believing in Evolution and wonder how Adam and Eve can fit in with that.
 
YES! I totally agree with you. Thanks be to God that the Holy Spirit gives us the information we need at various times to clarify things for us.

The Encyclical “Humani Generis”, particularly around # 37, or #38 if I am remembering correctly, is an excellent explanation. Of course, it is good to start from the beginning.

Our Lord Jesus Christ will not lead the Church’s teachings on faith and morals into error.
That is what is meant by “papal infallability”. It doesn’t guarantee the holiness of anyone because we all have free will. But the truths that we need to know are there for us, and we will not be led astray if we obey.
 
That quote and reply doesn’t make sense.
 
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Pray for faith and trust in what the Church teaches. Our Blessed Mother is a great intercessor, given to us at the foot of the cross by Our Lord Jesus Christ.

We are finite creatures and cannot understand every bit of theology. God is Infinite.

It is possible to get hung up on something and then leave the fullness of what the Church teaches for something else.
 
So far, no one has used science to prove Genesis’ version of human origins and origin of our species is a fact.
 
A human is body and soul. While the first human body may have ‘evolved’ from lower life forms, the soul was uniquely created by God.
 
Mitochondrial Eve is widely accepted in the Scientific community.

Y-Chromosomal Adam is a later, but, widely accepted Scientific theory. Yes, there are other studies finding other Y Chromosome ancestors.

As knowledge increases, there is no reason to believe that we will not learn even more about our original parents. The things we know are not disproving the dogma, in fact, they are more and more strengthening it.

We know that Genesis is not a science book, in fact, Genesis contains two different “stories” of creation. These are ways that ancient man explained creation, it is beautiful and poetic. It is poetic to say that God made Adam from mud and Eve from a rib, but, those are not scientific theories, they are romance language, the Scriptural version of “two stars fell from the sky and became the beauty in your eyes”.

At some point in the evolution of Hominina we came to Homo Sapiens Sapiens, God endowed one male and one female with a soul that was different than the souls of all of the others who had lived before and who lived along side of each of them. Their children and their children’s children and all the way to today have had the same sort of soul - this soul is created from nothing by God, infused into each modern human at some so far undefined point in their development that will then live forever.

It is not somehow unChristian to believe that our original parents lived along side with, for instance, Neanderthals.

I know that the Protestant Reformation has shaped the thinking of European and American thinking for so long that it feels somehow wrong to deviate from the young earth 7 day creationism. The beauty is that Science only serves to let us more fully understand the beauty of Truth.
 
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Hope1960 said:
I’ve read most of it before but I do lean toward believing in Evolution and wonder how Adam and Eve can fit in with that.
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Here’s a rather interesting piece written by Edward Fraser who has a way for a literal Adam and Eve that’s compatible with modern science.


@Wesrock also has sources on The Kemp proposal he might be able to share with you.

And for me, I also like thomisticevolution.org It’s a series of essays written by four priests that really helps a person to understand how evolution and faith are compatible.
 
icr.org is the institute for creation research which supports the idea of a literal interpretation of Genesis.

I think there’s two ways of looking at “literal” interpretation. First is the absolute Bible-thumping way that any other understanding was not intended. Second is to look at the ideas of ICR for ideas about what those verses might be teaching us at a spiritual level. Obviously (to me) we must look for the spiritual messages of Genesis.

It’s not obvious to me that all of God’s creatures are “good;” I take poisonous snakes as an exception, for example. If they’re good, it’s because I don’t understand everything about God, which is true anyway.
 
The Catholic Church does not require people to deny evolution so long as we do not deny core doctrines about God, His nature, and the fact that God alone is and everything is created AND doctrines about original sin.

There are actually TWO creation accounts. The Church has debated over what their literal interpretation should be. So while we might say the literal meaning is that the world was created in seven 24 hour days, you’ll find in the old debates a sense of the literal to mean the actual proper understanding of a text. As such, we’ll talk about a literalistic interpretation of Genesis today.

Anyway, the first creation account is really about presenting the entirity of creation as God’s Temple, with humanity as like like the graven images in a pagan temple of the gods they people worshiped. Scott Hahn has a pretty good exegesis on this first creation account.

The second creation account contradicts the first. He speaks of man and woman’s relationship to each other and the animal world. There have been varying interpretations of it. I find its meaning ambigious. At the heart of Catholic uncerstanding is the doctrine of original sin. And usually the conflict of believing that we stem from Adam and Eve exclusively is rooted in “How does all of humanity inherit original sin if we don’t share the same first parents?” The Pope was very concerned about evolutionary theory unraveling this doctrine and insisted that we needed to believe in first parents even if we their bodies previously existed and evolved from non-humans.

But this expression of concern was not one of the infallible statements, and the Pope did also have difficulties with believing the earth revolved around the sun. We have better apologetics for the politics of that. But I still think most apologists tend to not fully understand the science and current conflict. And there’s a lot of hesitancy about just saying "Well this doctrine isn’t infallible . . . so . . . "

What I’d say is that the story of the fall of man offers greater spiritual mysteries about the nature of sin than it does upon literal events. Both stories also read to me more as an oral tradition, a sacred fable, a divinely inspired sort of Aesop’s fable that we should imaging being taught orally by a camp fire by primitive people. An ancient parable.

We shouldn’t just dismiss the stories as if we’re wiser and realize they’re myths for the sake of tossing aside the incompatible stuff. But we should reflect upon what the original intent was of these stories. What is the literal meaning rather than the literalistic?

Oh, one other thing ‘adam’ in Hebrew means ‘man’. So even if you go to the genology chart in genesis, adam could very well be a marking of “man and his wife” rather than “A man named Adam and his wife.” These could be unknown ancestors where their genology just doesn’t go far back enough. But it even is ambigious as to when adam means man and when it’s a formal name in that second creation account. A translator has to make a decision.
 
Catholicwife32 said:
We shouldn’t just dismiss the stories as if we’re wiser and realize they’re myths for the sake of tossing aside the incompatible stuff. But we should reflect upon what the original intent was of these stories. What is the literal meaning rather than the literalistic?
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What do you mean, exactly?
 
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