At first you said my suggestion was possible, but later, in your last paragraph, you spoke about polytheism. Are you saying that God taking two from a group and ensouling them, making them our first parents is polytheism or am I misunderstanding you?
I think you mean to say “polygenism”?
Polygenism is the idea that there exist true humans who did not descend from our two first parents, and all that implies with regard to original sin, and that bits and pieces of true humans pooled together and evolved, apart from the biblical context of Adam and Eve.
If we do not understand what it means to be a true human, none of this can make sense.
True humans are a unity of
- body
- rational soul
If a being looks like a human, walks like a human, and quacks like a human, but does not have a human soul, is it a human being? NO.
( but we need to stop for a second and be very careful here… it’s not our purview to know the existence of a soul, so we assume that if our reason tells us an embryo looks human, we assume it is human rather than make the arrogant error of deciding it is not).
Maybe the most important point again is, for us to admit we really don’t know,
in a scientific way, how God ensouled our first two parents. As Catholics we accept everything the bible tells us in regards to God’s creation, but
not in a fundamentalist way. God created the physical world and all that is unseen as well.
Science attempts to unlock the mysteries of the physical world that God creates. In a nutshell, the Church objects when hard science pretends to know things that it cannot know, like the existence of the soul, how it came to be, when it came to be. Science cannot prove that. In these cases, science oversteps it’s bounds.
On the other hand, the Church does not make scientific proclamations. The Church does not tell us how the body came to be, or when it came to be, or what process God used to bring it about. It allows and encourages science to explore and explain these things. The idea that the Church is, in a general way, opposed to the science of human evolution is just absolute nonsense. It is nonsense. The words of Popes contradict this assertion. Again, that’s not to say that some scientists overstep their bounds into the spiritual realm, and the Church rejects those oversteps.
We can’t drift off into fideism. Faith and reason coexist and inform one another nicely.
Through our faith, we accept that God is God. God is not our own personal scientific tool. Scripture is not a science textbook.
This is the danger of fundamentalist scripture interpretation: it robs the scriptures of their full inspiration. In effect, fundamentalism does not allow God to be God, it forces him into a man-sized box, locked into the rigid words of the scriptures.
No, the sky does not have a dome covering it. No, the earth was not created in 6 literalist days. That’s ok, the inspired nature of scripture is much larger than science.
The fundamentalist interpretation of sacred Scripture
- The attention we have been paying to different aspects of the theme of biblical hermeneutics now enables us to consider a subject which came up a number of times during the Synod: that of the fundamentalist interpretation of sacred Scripture.[145] The Pontifical Biblical Commission, in its document The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, has laid down some important guidelines. Here I would like especially to deal with approaches which fail to respect the authenticity of the sacred text, but promote subjective and arbitrary interpretations. The “literalism” championed by the fundamentalist approach actually represents a betrayal of both the literal and the spiritual sense, and opens the way to various forms of manipulation, as, for example, by disseminating anti-ecclesial interpretations of the Scriptures. “The basic problem with fundamentalist interpretation is that, refusing to take into account the historical character of biblical revelation, it makes itself incapable of accepting the full truth of the incarnation itself. As regards relationships with God, fundamentalism seeks to escape any closeness of the divine and the human … for this reason, it tends to treat the biblical text as if it had been dictated word for word by the Spirit. It fails to recognize that the word of God has been formulated in language and expression conditioned by various periods”.[146] Christianity, on the other hand, perceives in the words the Word himself, the Logos who displays his mystery through this complexity and the reality of human history.[147] The true response to a fundamentalist approach is “the faith-filled interpretation of sacred Scripture”. This manner of interpretation, “practised from antiquity within the Church’s Tradition, seeks saving truth for the life of the individual Christian and for the Church. It recognizes the historical value of the biblical tradition. Precisely because of the tradition’s value as an historical witness, this reading seeks to discover the living meaning of the sacred Scriptures for the lives of believers today”,[148] while not ignoring the human mediation of the inspired text and its literary genres.
w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_ben-xvi_exh_20100930_verbum-domini.html
This!
