Did Adam/Eve Exist?

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Maggie:
Don’t know if this helps anyone out on the evolution front, or the Adam and Eve front, but I am currently reading a book called “The Journey of Man” A Genetic Odyssey. There has been an hypothesis out there for a number of years that I think has had fairly widespread acceptance that we can all trace our ancestry back to a common female… this is the first attempt to trace it back to a common male. Apparently (and I’m only halfway through the book) what proposed is not that others didn’t exist but that other lines have died out. So as far as I can tell from how far I’ve gotten (and it’s social science based on genetics and science, so it’s a given that there are many assumptions used and the depth of the science presented in the actual book is superficial but for anyone with a better background who wanted to pursue it there is an extensive bibliography) there isn’t anything that rules out either original sin or an Intelligent Designer. Anyway, my two cents, from someone who has stayed far away from these debates thus far 😃 .
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HI Maggie, 🙂

This is actually more complex than I think most people realize.

In regard to your book, I expect they are speaking of a mitochondrial eve and/or a Y chromosome Adam. In both cases that mit. Eve or Y Adam will change as the population shifts over time. That Eve or Adam was not a first and only person (not a real equivilent to the Adam and Eve of Genesis but they just like to use the names), just the oldest going back in time who is related to all living persons. Those people would have been a part of a population (which is the key issue here is that single couple Genesis Adam and Eve versus populations from which people evolved). So there will be a different Mit Eve and Y Adam over time as certain genes ‘die out’ of the population. Today’s Mit. Eve may have lived say 500,000 years ago, but 50 years from now a different Eve who lived say 400,000 years ago. That is just a guess, www.talkorigins.org has a good article on this subject if you do a site search there on the mitochondrial eve. (hope I spelled that correctly!)

Glad you jumped in. 🙂

Marcia
 
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PhilVaz:
Yeah, you state it here stronger than I did. I need to study more on human evolution to see what is actually understood from modern paleoanthroplogy. Glenn Morton says the Biblical Adam/Eve must have lived “several million years ago” which I kind of find hard to believe. I thought modern human beings (homo sapiens) date back to about 50,000-100,000 years ago.
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As I recall Morton says the body isn’t as important as the speech and awareness, tool use, etc. that the earlier humanoids likely had. To him those things show they had a rational soul and that is what is in the image of God. He also postulates on Adam being literally from the dust of a dead hominid and God bringing that creature back to life with a human soul. I don’t think he explains how to resolve all the variations of human type creatures you show in the pic. I haven’t read his book though, perhaps he has some ideas on that.

But I think even going back several million years we still have the population model (evolutionary) versus single couple (Adam and Eve in Genesis) model conflict. We could go back to where mammals first split off from reptiles (?) and if it is a single couple instead of a population I think we still have a conflict with how evolution says things happened.

Does this make sense to you Phil? I feel like I might not be getting my point across on how enormous the population vs. single couple issue is. Once we limit to that single couple in Adam and Eve, strict evolution is out the door.

Marcia
 
maggie << called “The Journey of Man” A Genetic Odyssey. There has been an hypothesis out there for a number of years that I think has had fairly widespread acceptance that we can all trace our ancestry back to a common female… this is the first attempt to trace it back to a common male. >>

Thanks for the note, I’ve heard of the “Mitochondrial Eve” idea, from folks who are highly skeptical of the Bible (to put it mildly)

The full article is here from TalkOrigins

The existence of the Mitochondrial Eve is NOT a theory; it is a mathematical fact (unless something like a multiple-origins theory of human evolution i.e. the human species arose independently in different geographically separated populations, and that the present-day ease of interbreeding is the result of a remarkable convergent evolution, is true. Few people subscribe to the multiple-origins theory, and the Mitochondrial Eve observation is a refutation of multiple-origins).

The proof for the existence of a Mitochondrial Eve is as follows (based on an argument by Daniel Dennett)…

Consider all the humans alive today on Earth. Put them into a set S. Next, consider the set of all those women who were the mothers of the people in the set S. Call this set S’. A few observations about this new set S’. It consists of only women (while set S consists of both men and women)—this is because we chose to follow only the mother-of relationship in going from set S to set S’…Repeat the process of following the mother-of relationship with set S’ to generate a new set S’’. This set will consist of only women, and will be no larger (and very likely smaller) than set S’.

Continue this process. There will come a point when the set will consist of smaller and smaller number of women, until we finally come to a single woman who is related to all members in our original set via the transitive-closure of the mother-of relation…Thus there must exist a single woman who is the matrilineal most-recent common ancestor of every in set S.

The full article is here from TalkOrigins

He says the “Y-Chromosome Adam” also exists, but he is determined to be “considerably more recent” than Mitochondrial-Eve. Kind of a problem if Adam and Eve were “married” 😃 but still interesting. The book The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey is here, these are the kinds of books I need to get since I’m fairly ignorant in this area…could clear up some objections.

Phil P
 
More from the description of that book Journey of Man by Spencer Wells / Mark Read

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Informed by this new science, The Journey of Man is replete with astonishing information. Wells tells us that we can trace our origins back to a single Adam and Eve, but that Eve came first by some 80,000 years.

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That would fit Genesis okay, except for the 80,000 year discrepancy. 😃 It’s in paperback, perhaps a good book to purchase.

Phil P
 
One account in genesis says that God formed man out of the dust of the earth and breathed a living soul into him. Whether he did that literally or allowed the human body to be formed by some evolutionary process I don’t see as a problem. But the church says that there had to be just one original human couple.

Now if you accept evolutionary theory, of course there would have been a population of hominids similar in body type existing at that time. But since God breathed a soul into only one pair, from whom we all descended, they–Adam and Eve–would at that point have been a new species–homo sapiens. (The rest of the population without a soul were obviously not sapiens!) None of their descendants ever wrote philosophy or established internet forums.

But to Adam and Eve, God gave immortal souls, plus the preternatural gifts–impassibility, immortality, freedom from concupiscience (which they lost through original sin). From that point, history takes over and evolution leaves off.

JimG
 
Well, I wish I had read this thread before posting my ideas in the other evolution thread, oh well. I’m posting it here too, sorry if you read it twice, but it seems to fit better here.

<I vowed to myself I would stay out of these treads as I’m not really qualified. I wish I could convince my dh to contribute as he’s the Catholic biologist/researcher in the family. But I think I have something to say.

Some keep saying that death didn’t enter the picture until after the fall, isn’t that death for animals (I mean why would our sin affect the animals)? What if, through evolution, humans branched off (caused by God) from other similar animals? Now I know this can’t be proven, but it seems it’s a valid way to make the leap. God used the “materials” he created (animals) to make Adam and Eve and by giving these creatures a soul he made them human (and granted them immortality until the fall). Does that make sense? It works for me in dealing with this whole evolution thing. Evolution seems to exist, but it doesn’t deny God. Now some scientists deny God, but that’s their problem, not mine. Science should deal with the physical world, religion with God and spiritual matters.

I hope I made some sense. This whole topic can get confusing and overwhelming.
Jennifer
 
Jennifer J:
What if, through evolution, humans branched off (caused by God) from other similar animals? Now I know this can’t be proven, but it seems it’s a valid way to make the leap. God used the “materials” he created (animals) to make Adam and Eve and by giving these creatures a soul he made them human (and granted them immortality until the fall). Does that make sense?
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Makes sense to me. We all know that the soul can’t evolve, so God must have directly created the souls for Adam and Eve, no matter how they got their bodies. In doing so, He made a new species. And thus we began.

JimG
 
PhilVaz

My issue was (1) the very existence of A single Adam/Eve human pair, “our first parents” as the Catechism repeatedly states (CCC 385-421), and (2) their bodily immortality before the Fall. Can those be reconciled with standard evolutionary science in the light of (1) evolution dealing with populations, not individuals, and (2) death as a natural part of life. Deal with those specifically.

I have already shown you how it is that I reconcile all these points. I am still waiting for you to tackle the questions that you are raising. It seems to me, that your position is irreconcilable with the de fide doctrines of the Catholic Church concerning original sin.
 
OK - I’m new in reading about this particular topic - so please be kind.
I just finished Lee Strobel’s The Case for a Creator.

Have any of you read it?
The evolutionists here must have some criticism.
The book relied heavily on Stephen Meyer and the Discovery Institute.

The book made some claims concerning the Cambrian Explosion I found to be very interesting - if they are true (that a great number of different creatures surfaced in the fossil record fully formed with no ancestors and no transitionals)
That this time period was approx 5 million years - not very long in evolutionary terms.

Is this true?
 
Lorarose, I’ll happily tackle your points, but it might be better if you started a new thread for it. I don’t think the ‘Cambrian explosion’ has much to do with Adam, Eve, and human evolution! 🙂

I’ll give it a couple of days, then answer it here if no thread appears… 😉

Oolon

PS Well done Phil for finding a smaller pic of the line of skulls! I’m fed up with distorting boards with the big version (as are many others, I imagine)!
 
Matt16_18 to *PhilVaz [/quote said:
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I have already shown you how it is that I reconcile all these points. I am still waiting for you to tackle the questions that you are raising. It seems to me, that your position is irreconcilable with the de fide doctrines of the Catholic Church concerning original sin.So far, it seems to me that one or the other position is compromised in this. That both the Catholic* de fide* beliefs (Adam and Eve literal and first parents of all living, original sin is passed on in physical propogation from Adam, possibly there was no death before them see below on CCC 1008) and a pure evolutionary scenario cannot be held together in total in a logically consistent way because science says it is not a single pair of people that humanity descended from.

The Church doesn’t insist we give up the science, but for now it appears we have to reconcile the issues on our own without giving up the de fide beliefs.

[1008](javascript:openWindow(‘cr/1008.htm’)😉 Death is a consequence of sin. The Church’s Magisterium, as authentic interpreter of the affirmations of Scripture and Tradition, teaches that death entered the world on account of man’s sin.571 Even though man’s nature is mortal God had destined him not to die. Death was therefore contrary to the plans of God the Creator and entered the world as a consequence of sin.572 “Bodily death, from which man would have been immune had he not sinned” is thus “the last enemy” of man left to be conquered.573

To me there is some leeway there (along with surrounding context) that although it was intended man would not die that they mean death entered the world to people intended not to die - not necessarily nature as a whole that preceded Adam. Since Adam and Eve did eat, and so did the animals, that to me indicated death did exist prior in nature. Eating is a process which kills -even if just plant life, and is needed to prevent physical break down and death.

But on original sin and Adam and Eve as original and only parents of humanity, that seems to not be reconcilable with a pure evolutionary set up. We have to say there was something contrary to evolution in the creation and propagation of humanity if we limit to 2 original parents as opposed to populations.

Marcia
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marciadietrich:
But on original sin and Adam and Eve as original and only parents of humanity, that seems to not be reconcilable with a pure evolutionary set up. We have to say there was something contrary to evolution in the creation and propagation of humanity if we limit to 2 original parents as opposed to populations.

Marcia
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I still don’t see the contradiction. Does science say there can’t be 2 original parents? I’m not sure science says one way or the other (I could be wrong, please point to something that corrects me). While we can’t prove one way or the other about how God acted, we can believe, as Catholics, that God chose to infuse souls into what would become the human race. I’m not sure it’s all that complicated.

Jennifer
 
Maybe we shouldn´t take this story literally? It was written in a certain time by men although inspired by God. (Maybe somebody who studied Theology can help out here) I do believe God created heaven and earth and everything on it including men. The way it happened could be different though from Adam/Eve.

(ok probably opened a can of worms here)

Emmy
 
Hi Jennifer, 🙂

Science says evolution occurs in populations. (And the continued existence of creatures relies on populations - a species down to a single pair is as good as extinct.)

Even if we allow that Adam was an evolved creature (that he came from a population) and then a rational soul infused, we have stopped using the evolutionary model when we say Adam and Eve are the only parents to **all **people who follow.

Catholic teaching is clear that all men descend physically from Adam (and Eve) alone. Not from populations.
  1. When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism (human descent from populations), the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is no no way apparent how such an opinion (polygenism, the evolutionary model) can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.[12]
    *HUMANI GENERIS, *Pope Pius XII (my red editiorial comments and underline/bold)
Catholic teaching is such that all who existed from then on are Adam and Eve’s descendents alone with the stain of original sin (except Mary & Jesus). There could not be any rational human creature except Adam and Eve and their descendents from that point on - and that through reproduction from Adam’s line alone, original sin is passed on to humanity. All those souless creatures (who looked human) that Adam evolved from would have to die, nearly immediately, and that there not be generations and generations of nonrational people interbreeding with souled/rational people.

That scenario of humanity being paired down to one couple with a mass death of all other human type creatures, plus science does preclude humanity descending from a single pair (not enough genetic diversity with only two people), that does conflict with evolution. At the point we say Adam and Eve as the only parents of all people we divert from evolution.

Simply saying God ensouled Adam after he evolved doesn’t reconcile the problems of Adam and Eve as the first and only parents of humanity in Catholic doctrine.

Marcia
 
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marciadietrich:
Even if we allow that Adam was an evolved creature (that he came from a population) and then a rational soul infused, we have stopped using the evolutionary model when we say Adam and Eve are the only parents to **all **people who follow. Catholic teaching is clear that all men descend physically from Adam (and Eve) alone. Not from populations.
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Yes, that is exactly the Catholic teaching: While evolution may have played a part in the formation of the human body, human evolution stopped after the creation of Adam and Eve.

But that says nothing of how large the population from which our first parents emerged may have been, or what subsequently happened to it. Perhaps the expansion of homo sapiens crowded out the preceding species. Perhaps a subsequent natural disaster wiped out other populations but not humans. Perhaps the other population was already quite small or on the verge of extinction. There are many possibilities, even including, of course, the possibility that our first parents may not have had their bodily origin in an evolutionary manner.

JimG
 
Marciadietrich

Since Adam and Eve did eat, and so did the animals, that to me indicated death did exist prior in nature.

That private interpretation is the source of all the theological problems that are imbedded in both the theories of the Evolutionists and the Protestant Creation-“Scientists”. That interpretation inevitably leads to the denial, dismissal, and/or distortion of the Catholic doctrines regarding original sin.

There was no death in either the animal or plant kingdom in the terrestrial paradise. Physical death, not just human death, entered into the physical world because of the sin of Adam and Eve.
 
Please cite the Catholic source that says there was no physical death of animals and plants before the fall.
Jennifer
 
Jennifer J:
Please cite the Catholic source that says there was no physical death of animals and plants before the fall.
Jennifer
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CCC 1008 … Death was therefore contrary to the plans of God the Creator and **entered the world ** as a consequence of sin.

For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God.
Romans 8:19-20
 
Here’s what Fr Echert has to say from EWTN
ewtn.com/vexperts/showresult.asp?RecNum=380054&Forums=0&Experts=0&Days=365&Author=&Keyword=evolution&pgnu=2&groupnum=0

Death/Suffering before the Fall?
Question from GMN on 10-12-2003:
Where do we get the idea that there was no suffering and death before Adam and Eve’s Fall?
I know that they were told in the warning not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: “on the day that you eat of it you shall die”. Could this be taken to mean that on the day you eat of it, your soul shall be destined to die-- i.e., lose paradise, lose the privilege of being with God/the Beatific Vision due to your sin? Perhaps this consequence was referring to Spiritual Death only, leaving the possibility open that perhaps Physical Death did indeed exist in Eden before the Fall?

Also, since Adam and Eve did NOT eat of the Tree of Life, and the way to it was forever barred to them, could this be taken to support the idea further still, that they did not indeed ever possess physical immortality – as they would have obtained this only if they HAD eaten of it, instead of the other tree? It seems like they were given the choice of eternal life, by eating of that tree-- or no eternal life, eating of the forbidden tree. They chose the second tree and did not ever eat of the first one, so they did not ever obtain physical immortality (for themselves and all living creatures as well).

And the idea of suffering. The punishment given to Eve for her transgression was to “increase your pain in childbearing and in child labor”. This seems to infer that there was pain before the Fall, the punishment was only to increase what was already existing.

What is the official teaching concerning death and suffering before the Fall? And how do I reconcile these thoughts?

Of course, if we can accept that there was death in the world before the Fall, it would be easier to reconcile the Creation Story with the Theory of Evolution, i.e., Faith and Reason.

Sincerely, G

Answer by Fr. John Echert on 11-04-2003:
Physical death likely existed for the animal world, prior to the Fall of Adam, but Adam and Eve were preserved from death and suffering, by special graces given them by God. After all, for an immortal soul, the death of the body would be a punishment undeserved, prior to sin. As to the “increase” of pain in childbirth, the ancient language and logic would not require us to assume that this meant that there was already pain in childbirth prior to the Fall, for an change from no pain to much pain is a true increase, from nothing to something.
So we can accept death as a possiblity for the mortal animal world, prior to the Fall, for they were not created for eternity. But we cannot accept such with regards to Adam and Eve, who were created for immortality, and lost the eternal life of the soul in the moment they sinned, and physically died many years after.

Father Echert
 
That CCC quote (#1008) is talking about MAN not plants and animals. It has to be read in context.

I’m not sure about the biblical quote, I’ll need to read and study it a bit more.

Thanks,
Jennifer
 
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