You appear to be reading more into the text than what is there, or supposing that God brought them to him not knowing that the animals would be able to be a helper or not
Well… it’s difficult not to reach that conclusion. After all, the text says, “[God said, ']I will make a helper suited to him. So the LORD God formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds of the air, and he brought them to the man… but none proved to be a helper suited to the man.”
for the sake of conversation, I do want to mention that God will often ask questions or let people be a part of a process of determining things in order, not for God to figure something out that He already knows, but as a learning process for the sake of man.
Fair enough. Yet, in this case, God isn’t asking a question – He isn’t asking Adam, “do
you think that any of these animals are an appropriate helper for you?” Now, you might make the assertion that what’s really happening here is that God
already knows that only Eve will be Adam’s helper, and He’s only going through the paces to help demonstrate to Adam that the animals don’t fit the bill. Yet, a close reading of the text forces us to ask a question: if God declares that He wants a helpmate for Adam, why does it say that, “
so, the Lord God formed the animals”? After all, the ‘so’ here tells us that the creation of the animals is the result of the desire for a helpmate. It’s not as if the animals already exist, and Adam might be tempted to think that
they’re his helpmate, and therefore God has to demonstrate to him that they’re not! No… the creation of the animals, in the mind of the inspired writer, is the response to God’s desire to have a helpmate for Adam. You might want to suggest otherwise, but that’s certainly not what the text puts before us.
And yet, you suggest that the Church Fathers thought otherwise. Can you provide a citation that demonstrates that any of them thought that the creation of the animals (in Genesis 2) was actually a ‘teaching moment’ for Adam?
you are taking that obscure interpretation of yours and trying to force everyone that believes in a literal position would have to follow that line of thinking
Certainly I’m doing no such thing. But, now that you mention it… can you provide an alternative explanation? You’ve attempted one here, of course, but I’ve demonstrated that it fails to explain the narrative of Genesis 2. Perhaps you have some other explanation in mind that we might consider? I’m hoping that you might have a reference to Aquinas that might shed light on your wholesale refusal to consider my question.
Are you saying we don’t have to believe that Eve literally came from Adam’s rib?