Noah's Ark?Adam and Eve?

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Timothysis said:
But to simply believe that these stories are “true” is to completely miss the point which they are trying to convey. When Jesus said that a man had two sons, he wasn’t trying to tell us a historical fact; he was trying to illustrate a certain point, the same way the authors of the ancient texts were trying to convey a point of faith, not science or history. It is not a Catholic point of view to simply believe that everything in the bible is “true” in the modern sense of being a historical fact. Even St. Augustine did not believe in the literalness of Genesis. You are absolutely correct when you point out that the real problems arise when personal beliefs are presented as facts. Do we still believe that “Blessed be he that shall take and dash thy little ones against the rock?”
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If you were exiled to Babylon, you’d feel affinity with the psalmist.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe that the bible is either a scientific text or a history record (in the sense that modern histories are, historical records in the bible (e.g., Kings) are a kind of literary genre, like a hagiography). But there are some things that Catholics are obligated to believe literally, regardless of how unrealistic from a scientific point of view they are, I assumed that Adam and Eve were one of those stories, but I may be wrong.

I enjoy debating ye Arke because it is absurd from a marine engineering perspective, but if someone wants to believe it as a matter of faith, well, end of discussion.
 
Reservoir_Dog said:
Matters of faith should be beyond argument, what is there to argue about?

Am I wrong here? I thought that Catholics are obligated to believe that Adam and Eve were actually the first man and woman and are literally the parents of all humanity.
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I have no idea if Catholics are supposed to believe that. Are we even arguing? I didn’t think we where.

Totally lost right now…:confused:
 
Rascalking said:
I have no idea if Catholics are supposed to believe that. Are we even arguing? I didn’t think we where.

Totally lost right now…:confused:
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Catholic Dogma


  1. *] The first man was created by God. (De fide.)
    *] The whole human race stems from one single human pair. (Sent. certa.)
    *] Man consists of two essential parts–a material body and a spiritual soul. (De fide.)
    *] The rational soul is per se the essential form of the body. (De fide.)
    *] Every human being possesses an individual soul. (De fide.)
    *] Every individual soul was immediately created out of nothing by God. (Sent. Certa.)
    *] A creature has the capacity to receive supernatural gifts. (Sent. communis.)
    *] The Supernatural presupposes Nature. (Sent communis.)
    *] God has conferred on man a supernatural Destiny. (De fide.)
    *] Our first parents, before the Fall, were endowed with sanctifying grace. (De fide.)
    *] The donum rectitudinis or integritatis in the narrower sense, i.e., the freedom from irregular desire. (Sent. fidei proxima.)
    *] The donum immortalitatis, i.e.,bodily immortality. (De fide.)
    *] The donum impassibilitatis, i.e., the freedom from suffering. (Sent. communis.)
    *] The donum scientiae, i.e., a knowledge of natural and supernatural truths infused by God. (Sent. communis.)
    *] Adam received sanctifying grace not merely for himself, but for all his posterity. (Sent. certa.)
    *] Our first parents in paradise sinned grievously through transgression of the Divine probationary commandment. (De fide.)
    *] Through the sin our first parents lost sanctifying grace and provoked the anger and the indignation of God. (De fide.)
    *] Our first parents became subject to death and to the dominion of the Devil. (De fide.) D788.
    *] Adam’s sin is transmitted to his posterity, not by imitation, but by descent. (De fide.)
    *] Original Sin consists in the deprivation of grace caused by the free act of sin committed by the head of the race. (Sent. communis.)
    *] Original sin is transmitted by natural generation. (De fide.)
    *] In the state of original sin man is deprived of sanctifying grace and all that this implies, as well as of the preternatural gifts of integrity. (De fide in regard to Sanctifying Grace and the Donum Immortalitatus. D788 et seq.)
    *] Souls who depart this life in the state of original sin are excluded from the Beatific Vision of God. (De fide.)
 
buffalo said:
Catholic Dogma
… (De fide.)… (Sent. certa.) …
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Would you clarify the purpose of Latin? I have to supervise new lawyers and roast them if they can’t write clearly enough to say what they need to say without peppering briefs with legalese and archaic grammatical usages. Is this a shorthand? I’ve often wondered about that on this forum.
 
Reservoir_Dog said:
Would you clarify the purpose of Latin? I have to supervise new lawyers and roast them if they can’t write clearly enough to say what they need to say without peppering briefs with legalese and archaic grammatical usages. Is this a shorthand? I’ve often wondered about that on this forum.
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Latin is the language of the Church. It is a dead language which preserves the original meaning.
 
buffalo said:
Latin is the language of the Church. It is a dead language which preserves the original meaning.
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So when you use Latin phrases, its like a term of art, has a specific meaning. Thanks for the insight.
 
Pope St. Clement I:
You have studied the Holy Scriptures, which are true and inspired by the Holy Spirit. You know that nothing contrary to justice or truth has been written in them.
  • Letter to the Corinthians, Ch 45
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Emphasis added. Written circa AD 96.
 
Adeodatus said:
Emphasis added. Written circa AD 96.
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The Gospels are Historical

Year AD Event
The Resurrection.
The leaders of the Jews persecute the first Christians.
Saul/Paul is converted.
Matthew composes his Hebrew gospel/ liturgy in Palestine.
Matthews gospel is translated into Greek.** King Herod Agrippa executes the Apostle James the Great. Peter escapes and flees to Rome. The other apostles spread out from Palestine. 44 King Herod Agrippa dies. 49 Jews and Christians expelled from Rome following riots. **Luke writes his gospel for the Gentiles, partly based on Matthews gospel.
First of Pauls epistles; some influenced by Matthews gospel.
Paul imprisoned by Romans.
A copy of Matthew’s Gospel taken to India.
54 Nero becomes emperor.
The Apostle James the Less, bishop of Jerusalem, killed by stoning.
The Christians are expelled from the Temple.
Luke completes his Acts of the Apostles.
Paul asks Timothy to join him on a mission to Spain.
Paul released from prison.
Peter ordains Linus, Cletus and Clement as assistant bishops.
Peter endorses Lukes gospel by using it in a series of talks.** **Mark issues a first transcript of Peters talks.
Peter approves Marks transcript. Used as a Gospel. Lukes gospel published as an authorised gospel.
Acts issued with the authorisation of Paul and Peter.
John writes twenty chapters of his Gospel.
64 July Rome devastated by fire.
65 Spring Nero commences persecution of Christians.
Peter martyred.
Linus replaces Peter as bishop of Rome.
Mark issues second edition of Peter’s talks.
66 Jewish rebellion in Palestine.
Paul goes to Spain.
68 early Jerusalem surrounded for first time by Romans.
68 June Suicide of Emperor Nero followed by civil strife. This leads to the Roman troops surrounding Jerusalem being withdrawn.
Paul returns from Spain and visits Asia and Crete.
Paul writes an epistle to the Hebrew Christians in Jerusalem.
The Hebrew Christians flee from Jerusalem to Pella.
Paul again imprisoned in Rome and then martyred.
69 Galba, Vitellius and Otho die trying to become emperors.
69 Vespasian becomes emperor and renews war in Palestine.
69 Romans surround Jerusalem for second time.
Clement of Rome replies to Corinthians on behalf of Linus.
70 Aug Jerusalem, including its Temple, is destroyed.
Linus dies (about 81). Cletus becomes bishop of Rome.
91 Domitian starts persecution.
Cletus dies (about 92). Clement becomes bishop of Rome.
Jewish leaders (about 96) hold a conference at Jamnia.
Clement, bishop of Rome, exiled by Romans to the Crimea.
John the Apostle (About 96) adds final chapter to his gospel.
John the Apostle dies.
98 Trojan becomes emperor.
About 101 Clement dies and Evaristus becomes bishop of Rome.
About 130 Papias records that Mark wrote down Peter`s words.
About 180 Ireneaus familiar with the Matthew-Luke-Mark sequence.
About 200 First Latin translations (prologues). Matthew-John-Luke-Mark sequence.
About 200 Clement of Alexandria says gospels of Matthew and Luke written first.
About 212 Tertullian uses Luke prior to Mark sequence.
About 250 Origen popularises Matthew-Mark-Luke sequence.
 
Warrenton said:
I think we Catholics should show heightened sensitivity toward our brethren,
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I wasn’t poking at anyone. I was poking at the act of accepting translations without reservations or skeptism. After all, I believe this was the first step of Reformation. But in my experience, bilingual and multilingual folks tend to be less vulnerable to possible misinterpretations. Perhaps they are more aware of the difficulties in translations and realize that some things are better left untranslated or left in their cognate form. Not that that is always accurate either but just saying.

Having said that and going back to the OP, I feel that if this whole issue of Creation were all that important, perhaps Christ would have said something about it. But this was not recorded and the Bible doesn’t say to believe every translation of the Bible so where do we go from here? We can only report the degree of uncertainty with each theory, in my opinion. But will it matter in the end?
 
If someone admits, as under the tutelage of Pope St. Clement I, that the Holy Scriptures are free from both moral and factual error, it is no mark against him if he professes ignorance as to the specific nature of some event described therein.

It is impossible for the Holy Scriptures to contradict themselves or to be contradicted by any cognizable fact. If someone admits this but says “I have no idea what manner of boat Noah must have built, or how, or what exactly it contained” there is no argument to be had.

If a man accepts everything the Catholic Church teaches, and believes everything revealed by Almighty God, then for him to say “I know not” is a mark of humility. It is not necessary for a man to be a scholar, a theologian or a genius for him to be saved.

If God can turn water into wine, raise the dead, and in fact create the entire cosmic fabric of space-time out of nothing then He can basically do anything. That’s no excuse to ignore the regular, intelligible laws of the physical universe but they are established over us, not over God Who is their Author.
 
Adeodatus said:
If someone admits, as under the tutelage of Pope St. Clement I, that the Holy Scriptures are free from both moral and factual error, it is no mark against him if he professes ignorance as to the specific nature of some event described therein.

It is impossible for the Holy Scriptures to contradict themselves or to be contradicted by any cognizable fact. If someone admits this but says “I have no idea what manner of boat Noah must have built, or how, or what exactly it contained” there is no argument to be had.

If a man accepts everything the Catholic Church teaches, and believes everything revealed by Almighty God, then for him to say “I know not” is a mark of humility. It is not necessary for a man to be a scholar, a theologian or a genius for him to be saved.

If God can turn water into wine, raise the dead, and in fact create the entire cosmic fabric of space-time out of nothing then He can basically do anything. That’s no excuse to ignore the regular, intelligible laws of the physical universe but they are established over us, not over God Who is their Author.
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So you Catholics are obligated to believe the account of a seven day creation is free from factual error?
 
buffalo said:
Catholic Dogma


  1. *] The first man was created by God. (De fide.)
    *] The whole human race stems from one single human pair. (Sent. certa.)
    *] Man consists of two essential parts–a material body and a spiritual soul. (De fide.)
    *] The rational soul is per se the essential form of the body. (De fide.)
    *] Every human being possesses an individual soul. (De fide.)
    *] Every individual soul was immediately created out of nothing by God. (Sent. Certa.)
    *] A creature has the capacity to receive supernatural gifts. (Sent. communis.)
    *] The Supernatural presupposes Nature. (Sent communis.)
    *] God has conferred on man a supernatural Destiny. (De fide.)
    *] Our first parents, before the Fall, were endowed with sanctifying grace. (De fide.)
    *] The donum rectitudinis or integritatis in the narrower sense, i.e., the freedom from irregular desire. (Sent. fidei proxima.)
    *] The donum immortalitatis, i.e.,bodily immortality. (De fide.)
    *] The donum impassibilitatis, i.e., the freedom from suffering. (Sent. communis.)
    *] The donum scientiae, i.e., a knowledge of natural and supernatural truths infused by God. (Sent. communis.)
    *] Adam received sanctifying grace not merely for himself, but for all his posterity. (Sent. certa.)
    *] Our first parents in paradise sinned grievously through transgression of the Divine probationary commandment. (De fide.)
    *] Through the sin our first parents lost sanctifying grace and provoked the anger and the indignation of God. (De fide.)
    *] Our first parents became subject to death and to the dominion of the Devil. (De fide.) D788.
    *] Adam’s sin is transmitted to his posterity, not by imitation, but by descent. (De fide.)
    *] Original Sin consists in the deprivation of grace caused by the free act of sin committed by the head of the race. (Sent. communis.)
    *] Original sin is transmitted by natural generation. (De fide.)
    *] In the state of original sin man is deprived of sanctifying grace and all that this implies, as well as of the preternatural gifts of integrity. (De fide in regard to Sanctifying Grace and the Donum Immortalitatus. D788 et seq.)
    *] Souls who depart this life in the state of original sin are excluded from the Beatific Vision of God. (De fide.)
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  1. You forgot number 24-that jerk who hit my car and didn’t leave a note last summer is totally excluded from heaven and has no chance of ever getting there.
 
The Bible contains real history, and Adam and Eve were real people.

"Real History

The argument is that all of this is real history, it is simply ordered topically rather than chronologically, and the ancient audience of Genesis, it is argued, would have understood it as such.

Even if Genesis 1 records God’s work in a topical fashion, it still records God’s work—things God really did.

The Catechism explains that “Scripture presents the work of the Creator symbolically as a succession of six days of divine ‘work,’ concluded by the ‘rest’ of the seventh day” (CCC 337), but “nothing exists that does not owe its existence to God the Creator. The world began when God’s word drew it out of nothingness; all existent beings, all of nature, and all human history is rooted in this primordial event, the very genesis by which the world was constituted and time begun” (CCC 338).

It is impossible to dismiss the events of Genesis 1 as a mere legend. They are accounts of real history, even if they are told in a style of historical writing that Westerners do not typically use.

Adam and Eve: Real People

It is equally impermissible to dismiss the story of Adam and Eve and the fall (Gen. 2–3) as a fiction. A question often raised in this context is whether the human race descended from an original pair of two human beings (a teaching known as monogenism) or a pool of early human couples (a teaching known as polygenism).

In this regard, Pope Pius XII stated: “When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains either that after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parents of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now, it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the teaching authority of the Church proposed with regard to original sin which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam in which through generation is passed onto all and is in everyone as his own” (Humani Generis 37).

The story of the creation and fall of man is a true one, even if not written entirely according to modern literary techniques. The Catechism states, “The account of the fall in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man. Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents” (CCC 390)."

I took that from the Catholic Answers library of articles.

Wake up my fellow Catholics. The Bible is not this big symbolically symbolic book. It is called Sacred Scripture. The reader at Mass says: “This is the Word of the Lord.”

The prophets spoke as God commanded.

Peace,
Ed
 
Reservoir_Dog said:
So you Catholics are obligated to believe the account of a seven day creation is free from factual error?
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Depends on what you mean by “day”. When I think of a day, I think of the cycle in which the sun comes up and then sets and it becomes night. Obviously that does not seem to be what is being described in the creation narrative, since the sun and moon and evidently the stars were not made until something like the fourth “day”. I don’t understand the term “day” as a discrete 24-odd hour period of the Earth’s rotation on its axis in an environment devoid of the sun, moon and stars.

Many of the Church’s most sublime intellects have written upon the six days of creation. I don’t count myself in their number! I believe it was St. Bonaventure who suggested that the days of creation represent orders or modes of creation: the emanation of certain general types of realities from the Godhead. My intellect does not fully encompass the Seraphic Doctor’s point, but I find that it draws my mind upward.

Just because the Holy Scripture is factually inerrant in every verse does not mean that it is restricted to a purely material mode of discourse. It very obviously contains passages (indeed, evidently whole books!) written in a poetical mode.

I think of it like this: you may have seen a 3D representation of an x-y-z coordinate system such as a structure composed of 3 bars. One represents the “x axis”, another the “y axis”, another the “z axis”. Each bar, signifying a dimension, is related as it were perpendicularly to the ‘lesser’ dimensions. The y is perpendicular to the x, and the z to both the y and the x. To describe the fourth dimension, the w axis, I might say something like “Imagine a fourth bar, perpendicular to the first three.” And yet obviously you cannot imagine that. I could continue by saying that “The v axis is then perpendicular to the first four” and so on. You cannot actually imagine it, but you can employ a conceptual analogy to at least partially encompass what I’m saying.

Some metaphysical, cosmological or theological realities are no doubt far beyond my ability to conceive them. Even angels are difficult to conceive: a being of intellect which is purely formal. So I can infer that no two angels are exactly alike in form, because lacking material differentiation they would then be the same angel, just as there can be many pairs of things but there is only one number with the form “two”. So when I think of angels I can think that they are somewhat like the numbers, but are not merely concepts but real beings and in fact intellects. And yet somehow they are also able to appear to the senses and to affect matter. So some things about angels I can conceive in my intellect univocally, some things about them I can conceive only analogically, and some things about them I can barely conceive at all, in a remote manner such as by mere reference.
 
Reservoir_Dog said:
So you Catholics are obligated to believe the account of a seven day creation is free from factual error?
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Think about it. We are required to believe God made the universe from nothing. There is nothing to analyze in that statement from a scientific standpoint. However, we don’t know, from a scientific standpoint, what, if anything, existed prior to the appearance of the universe in what is called the Big Bang.

“factual error”? Like what? If you look at the work of the same God that made the universe, Jesus Christ, what is the explanation for turning water to fine wine? Or how do you raise the dead without technology? A scientist standing right next to Jesus would come back with no data or “factual” observations.

It is simply not possible to constrain God to a “this is the way it’s supposed to work” paradigm. Heal the sick, give sight to the blind? Apparently God can manipulate matter at will. Sounds like God as opposed to something natural.

Peace,
Ed
 
Adeodatus said:
Depends on what you mean by “day”. When I think of a day, I think of the cycle in which the sun comes up and then sets and it becomes night.
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I think the biblical author of Genesis meant what he said, he said “day” and he meant “day”. Assigning entirely arbitrary meanings to “day” is not sublime, its ad hoc reasoning, without any factual basis and is usually advanced as an unconvincing argument to counter modern science. And at this point, the discussion begins to drift into shoal waters as you try to shoehorn Genesis into something that it wasn’t intended to be. I mean, what is the point of decreeing Day 4 was the actual dividing line between the Ladinian and Anisian stages of the middle Triassic? What purpose does this serve?

The creation story contains truth that is well beyond the physical creation of the universe, which is the key point of Genesis, so I don’t have any problem rejecting Genesis as literal.
Adeodatus said:
I think of it like this: you may have seen a 3D representation of an x-y-z coordinate system such as a structure composed of 3 bars. One represents the “x axis”, another the “y axis”, another the “z axis”. Each bar,…I can barely conceive at all, in a remote manner such as by mere reference.
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I’m familiar with this, I use an example from quantum mechanics, how a photon can be and act both as a particle and a wave at the same time. This is so far beyond human experience that the mind does not readily grasp this and, correspondingly, there is no familiar language to describe it (there’s no one word for apparently contradictory phrase wave-particle duality).

God’s nature and actions are magnitudes more distant in terms of human knowledge and experience than human experience with real world quantum mechanics. So the analogy is apt.

You can, as a matter of faith, accept that God could will the universe into existence in six days with the “how” being beyond human comprehension, or accept the physical evidence that creation proceeded from some initial start point by physical processes that are not yet entirely understood.

But you don’t have to believe that Genesis, bolstered by ad hoc explanations, is a literal account of creation.
 
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