Polygenism/Monogenism

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Anthony_V said:
Originally Posted by Julia Mae
Our “first parents,” before the Fall, existed as spirit, not in flesh.
That is called Origenism, and it was condemned at the synod of Constantinople (Second Council of Constantinople) in 537-555;

Quote:
If anyone says or holds that human souls had a previous existence, viz., that first they were spirits or blessed powers… let him be anathema.
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Well, not exactly. Origenism was a perception of the whole of the human race. But now we are only talking about the first people. Who lived in a condition and state from which they were ejected. They sinned in a way that caused a change in the way the Universe works. Just as the “Christ Event” changed the way it worked again.

The story is told in symbolic language, as the Church tells us, and Eden is not a geographic location on Earth. But, they were not in Heaven, either. They were in a state of grace designed by God. No spiritual souls existed on Earth until God placed them here as a result of original Sin and ejected them from where they had been.

Just these first souls. After that, well, all souls come here. Something changed.

The Second Person of the Trinity wasn’t Jesus before the Incarnation. This change in the fabric of reality happened in Time, in a specific place and moment.
 
Anthony_V said:
Where the blazes do you get your theology?

The imago Dei does pertain to the fact that a human being has a spirit, yes, but it is not, and in fact cannot claim that the imago Dei makes humans a sort of spiritual being in essence, because the imago Dei is not the essence of the human nature. Please, go read some St. Maximus Confessor’s Ambiguum 7 or something. I don’t even know where to start with this one.
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You don’t need to start anywhere. Or, you could read my other post responding to you.
 
Julia_Mae said:
They were in a state of grace designed by God. No spiritual souls existed on Earth until God placed them here as a result of original Sin and ejected them from where they had been.
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If you mean to say that man is a spirit, but not a body also by his nature, then you mean to say that the preternatural gifts which man possessed before the fall were part of his nature. This is Baianism, and it was condemned by Pope Pius V his Bull Ex omnibus afflictionibus, theses 75:
Condemned: 75. The immortality of the first man was not a gift of grace but a natural condition.
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I think you are confusing humans with angels. Angels were not created in heaven. They had to cooperate with grace to get to heaven. They did exist, as you would point out, in a sort of odd state. Nevertheless, when some of them sinned (a third of them, to be exact) they did not gain bodies. They simply fell from grace and became demons.
 
Catholicism is a beautiful, logical search for eternal love in the presence of a real God.

Catholicism teaches the difference between divinity and humanity. But, like the first Adam, there are some people who want to appear equal or better than God, the real Creator of our human nature. In a symbolic way, they want to eat the fruit of superior knowledge which they wrongly think is the key to becoming more wiser than God.

In contrast, Catholicism reminds us that in order to maintain our personal relationship with God, we need to humbly live in free submission to God because we are the creature and He is our loving Creator. We gain knowledge from Jesus Christ Who told us that He is the Way and the Truth and the Life. (John 14: 6) And we gain knowledge from those who examine our created material world.

Catholicism teaches us the difference between our material world and God’s spiritual world.

Is the being wiser than God scam – by denying His purpose for a human species that descends from two people – really a wise choice?
 
fnr said:
May I ask what is the theological reasoning for insisting on God’s special creation of humanity being two original humans? Is there a version of the Adam and Eve story compatible with evolutionary explanations for the origin of human species? For example, might we posit that Adam and Eve represented two groups of people and that Genesis 3 depicts the fall of these groups of people in allegorical terms? That even the birth of human civilization was the result of a dialectical process by which both original groups compromised themselves?

We can read Genesis as a description of human nature. As Dr. Scott Hahn points out in his book “Lord Have Mercy,” Adam and Eve respond to God after eating of the tree of knowledge by first hiding, then Adam blames Eve, and even God for putting Eve with him. This is a very good allegory of how people tend to evade admission of sin.

Later in Genesis, the story of Cain and Abel can also be viewed as an allegory of the agrarian revolution, with its attendant economic growth and increasingly hierarchical societies, destroyed the pastoral cultures that preceded them. In fact, the New American Bible notes that the Mark of Cain may represent face markings employed by the pastoral bedouins of the Middle East.

Noah and the flood, and the Tower of Babel both lead from Cain and Abel to the story of Abram, thus setting the stage for the story of the Patriarchs and the origins of the Jewish people. We already know that the story of Abram includes ethnic groups that didn’t exist in the Middle East until after 1000 BC. So it seems to me that we should read Genesis as a guide to God’s intention in creation, human nature and salvation history, as St. Paul seems to have used it. It takes nothing away from the Incarnation and Atonement to say that humanity is fallen by a process that is allegorically described by Genesis 2-3.
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One can read all kinds of stuff into Genesis. The question is - what has been the constant teaching and understanding of the Church through history?
  • God created everything “in its whole substance” from nothing (ex nihilo) in the beginning.
    (Lateran IV; Vatican Council I)
  • Genesis does not contain purified myths. (Pontifical Biblical Commission 1909[1])
  • Genesis contains real history—it gives an account of things that really happened. (Pius XII)
  • Adam and Eve were real human beings—the first parents of all mankind. (Pius XII)
  • Polygenism (many “first parents”) contradicts Scripture and Tradition and is condemned. (Pius XII; 1994 Catechism, 360, footnote 226: Tobit 8:6—the “one ancestor” referred to in this Catechism could only be Adam.)
  • The “beginning” of the world included the creation of all things, the creation of Adam and Eve and the Fall (Jesus Christ Mark 10:6]; Pope Innocent III; Blessed Pope Pius IX, Ineffabilis Deus).
  • The body of Eve was specially created from a portion of Adam’s body (Leo XIII). She could not have originated via evolution.
  • Various senses are employed in the Bible, but the literal obvious sense must be believed unless reason dictates or necessity requires (Leo XIII, Providentissimus Deus).
  • Adam and Eve were created upon an earthly paradise and would not have known death if they had remained obedient (Pius XII).
  • After their disobedience of God, Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden. But the Second Person of the Trinity would subsequently pay the ransom for fallen man (Nicene Creed).
  • Original Sin is a flawed condition inherited from Adam and Eve (Council of Trent).
  • The Universe suffers in travail ever since the sin of disobedience by Adam and Eve. (Romans 8, Vatican Council I).
  • We must believe any interpretation of Scripture that the Fathers taught unanimously on a matter of faith or morals (Council of Trent and Vatican Council I).
  • Evolution must not be taught as fact, but instead the pros and cons of evolution must be taught.
    (Pius XII, Humani Generis)
  • Investigation into human “evolution” was allowed in 1950, but Pope Pius XII feared that an acceptance of evolutionism might adversely affect doctrinal beliefs.
 
Julia_Mae said:
No, this is incorrect. The animating principle is spirit - not soul. It is the same for all of Creation. Soul is an individual consciousness, a person.
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No, the spirit is the immortal part.

367 Sometimes the soul is distinguished from the spirit: St. Paul for instance prays that God may sanctify his people “wholly”, with “spirit and soul and body” kept sound and blameless at the Lord’s coming.236 The Church teaches that this distinction does not introduce a duality into the soul.237 “Spirit” signifies that from creation man is ordered to a supernatural end and that his soul can gratuitously be raised beyond all it deserves to communion with God.238

Plants, animals and humans all have souls.

catholic.com/quickquestions/do-animals-have-souls-like-human-beings
 
Julia_Mae said:
I can name many, but for this discussion we only need two.

Species aren’t, or haven’t classically, been defined as populations whose members can be genetically compatible, but as those who in nature, interbreed to produce viable offspring. If two populations cannot do that, M1-F2 and M2-F1, they are not members of the same species. If they do it M1-F2 but not F1-M2, or vice-versa, they are subspecies of one another.

We also classify as different species, those who can mate and produce viable offspring, but in nature do not, usually because the populations are geographically separated. But some groups have changed so much physically, that in sexual selection, the other group is not recognizable as “self” and they simply won’t mate with one another. This is how Darwin’s finches speciated when they were all confined to a small set of islands.

So, by example: The BiAka people of the Western Congo Basin are a very ancient nomadic pygmy tribe. The Abatutsi people of Central Africa average over 7’ in height. These two peoples would not encounter each other for mating, but if they did, while it is theoretically possible that BiAka males could produce viable offspring with Abatuitsi females, it is not possible for Abatutsi males to produce viable offspring with BiAka females. The woman’s anatomy precludes carrying the infant to term. The whole of the human race really makes up what is called a “ring species.” A whole series of subspecies that often interbreed at the edges of their populations, but as they become more physically, geographically and genetically distant, no longer do or no longer can. What is unscientific, is the refusal to simply recognize this, )
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You use a lot of scientific-sounding terms, but I’m sorry your conclusions continue to be quite unscientific and plainly false. The limiting factor on the size of a baby in the womb is not his genetic inheritance from his father, but the physical size of the womb and the resources available from his mother’s body. The baby’s development in the womb does not depend on his size. A 2 kg full term baby is just as fully developed as a 5kg full term baby. I personally know a married couple where the husband is almost two feet taller than his wife, and their chidlren were born normally and naturally and are perfectly healthy (and presumably fertile).

In the domestic dog species, the size differences can be even bigger. Male Irish wolfhounds have been mated with chihuahua bitches and produced perfectly healthy pups, born normally and naturally.

In fact it has been observed in both animals and man, that offspring of parents of two different races or breeds tend to be HEALTHIER (i.e. including MORE FERTILE) than offspring of parents of the same race/breed. This is called '“hybrid vigour”

If you do not recognise people of other races from your own as “self” and refuse on principle to ever marry one of them, that is your personal problem, please don’t pretend it has a scientific basis.
 
MacBP said:
Monogenism does not seem to say that there was a population bottleneck of only two people. It only says that everyone on Earth descended from some common ancestor.

Could this occur? Well it already has. See mitochondrial eve. While she existed within a larger population we all carry her mitochondrial DNA; consequently, every human being on Earth that is alive today is descended from her.

So what’s to stop the same thing from happening with… say… a rational soul and a original sin. It’s very possible that Adam and Eve were the ancestors of every human alive today. As their descendants bred with those around them, their offspring were granted rational souls. In the same that mitchondrial eve’s line replaced everyone else, Adam and Eve’s line replaced the human population. Scientifically plausible and works with monogenism.
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Yes that seems possible and woould also explain some otherwise puzzling verses in Genesis such as “the sons of God knew the daughters of men” and “there were giants on the earth in those days”.

It has been suggested that the near universal existence of “ogre” type stories among all human cultures may have originated from the co-existence with men of animals which looked a lot like men.
 
grannymh said:
Catholicism is a beautiful, logical search for eternal love in the presence of a real God.

Catholicism teaches the difference between divinity and humanity. But, like the first Adam, there are some people who want to appear equal or better than God, the real Creator of our human nature. In a symbolic way, they want to eat the fruit of superior knowledge which they wrongly think is the key to becoming more wiser than God.

In contrast, Catholicism reminds us that in order to maintain our personal relationship with God, we need to humbly live in free submission to God because we are the creature and He is our loving Creator. We gain knowledge from Jesus Christ Who told us that He is the Way and the Truth and the Life. (John 14: 6) And we gain knowledge from those who examine our created material world.

Catholicism teaches us the difference between our material world and God’s spiritual world.

Is the being wiser than God scam – by denying His purpose for a human species that descends from two people – really a wise choice?
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Faith1960 said:
It’s not a choice.
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Perhaps, I was not clear enough. Going by the date of Humani Generis by Pius XII, and counting in the years the led to this Encyclical in 1950
vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xii/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_12081950_humani-generis_en.html
some , not all, Catholics have been choosing to deny God’s purpose for a human species that descends from two people for more than 70 years. Going by the questions about Original Sin and some of the off-base answers, there are some, not all, living people who have not been taught all the basic truths flowing the first three chapters of Genesis.

These people, who may only know a smattering of information about our origin, still have a choice to accept the basic Catholic doctrine of monogenism, or to turn to other sources, such as a research paper about some specific genes, for answers about eternal life with God.:eek:
 
I’m wondering if the problem I’m having with this has something to do with semantics? The CCC says: <<<<<<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).>>>>
 
Anthony_V said:
If you mean to say that man is a spirit, but not a body also by his nature, then you mean to say that the preternatural gifts which man possessed before the fall were part of his nature.
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You know, Anthony. I don’t recall saying word one about “preternatural gifts.” So why would you think I’d be making a claim about them?
I think you are confusing humans with angels.
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Nope.
Angels were not created in heaven.
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Where were they created?
They did exist, as you would point out, in a sort of odd state.
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Hmmmm. There was God and there was nothingness. Then God Created stuff from the nothingness. Including “odd states.” Do those states have names? Do you know how many there are? Do you know what all dwells where?
Nevertheless, when some of them sinned (a third of them, to be exact) they did not gain bodies. They simply fell from grace and became demons.
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Wow, an exact third of them? Could I get a reference for that?
 
Faith1960 said:
I’m wondering if the problem I’m having with this has something to do with semantics? The CCC says: <<<<<<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).>>>>
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Still unanswered:

faith1960 - when you get back share with me the top three evidences for there not being an Adam and Eve together with their base assumptions.
 
Petergee said:
You use a lot of scientific-sounding terms, but I’m sorry your conclusions continue to be quite unscientific and plainly false.
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I spent a lot of years in university acquiring my vocabulary and all that I said is completely orthodox in terms of biological science and evolutionary theory.
Male Irish wolfhounds have been mated with chihuahua bitches and produced perfectly healthy pups, born normally and naturally.
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Well, even if this were true, and I’d need a source, humans are not dogs. I can frame a theoretical scenario where 1 or possibly 2 pups and a mother might survive. But we are not dogs. Or kanagroos or fish. You cannot overcome the mechanics of human anatomy. Everything isn’t comparable to everything else, you know.
This is called '“hybrid vigour”
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And is entirely irrelevant to what I posted.
If you do not recognise people of other races from your own as “self” and refuse on principle to ever marry one of them
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I never said anything of the sort. I said it happens in some species, and referred to finches. Those are birds. And it’s not about principle it’s about sexual selection. I get that you don’t have the background to understand what I am saying, and I also think we’re done since you seem unable to overcome your tendency to be insulting and assume the worst.

You could have just asked questions about the parts that confuse you, you know.
 
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