Reconciling Evolution with Adam and Eve

[buffalo]

To which passage are you referring? Please direct me to it.
Petrus

[390](javascriptpenWindow(‘cr/390.htm’) 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.264 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.265

399 Scripture portrays the tragic consequences of this first disobedience. Adam and Eve immediately lose the grace of original holiness.280 They become afraid of the God of whom they have conceived a distorted image - that of a God jealous of his prerogatives.281

 

[drpmjhess]

[390](javascriptpenWindow(‘cr/390.htm’) 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.264 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.265

399 Scripture portrays the tragic consequences of this first disobedience. Adam and Eve immediately lose the grace of original holiness.280 They become afraid of the God of whom they have conceived a distorted image - that of a God jealous of his prerogatives.281

With due noting of the figurative language – which acknowledges what anthropological science has shown to be the long origin of the human species – this theological statement sounds reasonable to me.

Matthew Fox and others have replaced “original sin” with “original blessing,” but this (among other things has put him outside the Church. Many Catholic theologians would interpret “original sin” in the sense of the competitive evolutionary state out of which humanity has evolved into rational awareness. As humans became aware of evil and the possibility of avoiding it, they developed a sense of “sin” symbolized in Genesis 3 by the eating of the fruit.

Petrus

 

[Neil_Anthony]

Hi Esran, Here’s how I see it:

God made the universe for people to live in. God doesn’t live in space, He doesn’t live in time, but for some reason He made space-time for us to live our lives in. I think of it like the set of a play or a movie that the actors ‘live in’ temporarily for the duration of the story.

Being infinitely wise and powerful, there is simply no limit to how much ‘work’ he could put into building this set. Why bother with microscopic details that we are just scratching the surface of? Because God can do all of this. It’s like asking why a painter bothers painting individual leaves in a painting. The details make it a wonderful work of art.

When making our place in space-time, God had to decide how to portray the limits of his creation. A wall in space where it just ended is something people would imagine, but God is much wiser than us, and made the universe either infinite, or folding back on itself. It’s a beautiful creation. There’s no reason for us to ever leave the solar system, yet God put the details of the entire universe there, because He is perfect.

We could ask if the stars we see billions of light years away are really there. But what does that actually mean if we will never go there? It’s like asking if the background scene in a stage play set is ‘real’. Well it is to the characters in the movie, in a sense. But they will never walk to the back of the stage into those hills or forests or the sunset, because on a stage it’s just a painting in the background. But for the purposes of the story in the play, it is real.

The same goes for time. A blunt start to time 6000 years ago would be like a wall where space just ended, and would just lead to more questions. It’s something a simple being like us would do, not something an omnipotent being would do. God made his creation more fascinating and beautiful than that. People didn’t exist before Adam, and everthing before that is like the backdrop of the stage scene. No person ever lived in that time, God lives beyond time, so it’s only real in the sense that it provides the historical/timeline backdrop to our world.

So why did God make the earth’s history look like life evolved step by step? The same answer as why he made a whole universe for Earth to be a backdrop in. It’s because the laws of science are a beautiful component of the stage that God made for us to live in, and rather than proving that God doesn’t exist, they are so amazing to contemplate that it boggles the mind and shows us the inifinite wisdom of God. Once evolution stops seeming threatening to the faith, we can see it for what it is, a stunning proof of God’s omniscience and infinite intelligence and wisdom.

Oh wow this took longer to type than I intended, but I’ve been wanting to type it for a while

I’ve heard a lot of people say that there is no contradiction between it and what the Bible says about Adam and Eve. However, I can’t find anyone who really explains why and how evolution and the Bible go together.

 

[Benadam]

.

Why should we privilege one primitive people’s cosmogonic myth over those of the approximately 100,000 other world religious traditions?

hello Petrus;

one difference is the Genesis myth ( the biblical account) isn’t an account completely shrouded in symbology with deified characters. Genesis finds it’s source of revelation in the lives of people who are described in ways that incorporate them not only into our own human history but the human present, In other words they are not fantasm’s that spring from a genesis memory shrouded in a mist but a concrete account of the genesis event preserved within a linear unbroken chain of human lives. The people in the true myth are not morphed into gods and demi-gods but are described as real people who revealed the Truth of God with their physical bodies.

 

[Esran]

So, God exists outside of space-time, and takes our prayers, which are made in the future, into consideration when He lays the foundation of the universe at the beginning of time. This covers all answers to prayer. Sometimes, higher natures intervene with the course of ours to produce miracles, which manifest according to laws just as natural as thermodynamics or gravity but hail from a higher plane of existence (the realm of angels and demons).

Matter became life, and life became sentience. When the time was right, the Lord intervened by infusing two hominids with souls. Thus sentience became spiritual. Now, the coming of Christ has issued in the next step of the glorification of creation: through Him, the spiritual becomes Divine.

Adam and Eve are the names we give to our two original parents. These names signify who they are. The original sin consisted of rejecting God’s moral law, and instead creating our own. We claimed we had the right to discern good and evil for ourselves.

This original sin resulted in our loss of bodily immortality and harmony with ourselves and those around us. Jesus came not only to restore this, but take it to the next step.

Death clearly existed in the garden of Eden, that is, animal and plant death. God’s warning to Adam presupposes that the first man knew what death is. Otherwise, how could he understand the words “you shall surely die?”

I understand now. Thank you.

In the end, the whole universe will be redeemed in a manner too wonderful for us to comprehend in our present state. Then, the fate of the animals, and the meaning of all suffering will finally be revealed in full.

 

[drpmjhess]

Esran, this is very nicely put! I have a book coming out in May 2008 on Catholicism and science that deals in part with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and your articulation of science in a Catholic context is in some senses reminiscent of his vision.

Christian (and Catholic in particular) theology must always be done in light of cosmology, as Max Wildiers has pointed out in "The Theologian and his Universe (1982) What I would add to your fine statement is that although humanity will not be around very long, God may be experimenting with episodes of life throughout the universe. Our earth has harbored animal and plant life for only 500 million years (the hot infant earth had mainly cyanobacteria), and macro life such as ourselves has only another 500 million years left. The remaining 7 billion years of earths history will see the atmosphere gradually stripped off by solar winds as the sun converts more hydrogen into helium and increases in luminosity, so that from 5 to 8 billion years in the earth’s life cycle the planet will be back to bacteria.

Meanwhile, with a hundred billion galaxies each containing on average hundred billion stars, the chances of life evolving on numerous other planets throughout the cosmos seem very large to me. I can image God the Creator willing life into existence all over the universe. Here we have not only creatio ex nihilo, but creatio continua. The eschatological consummation of all this life, rising to meet the divine love that engendered it, is inconceivable!

Petrus

 

[drpmjhess]

.

hello Petrus;
The people in the true myth are not morphed into gods and demi-gods but are described as real people who revealed the Truth of God with their physical bodies.

Thanks for your posting, Benadam. Certainly there is a difference between kinds of myths. I have always been struck by the similarities between the Genesis myth and that of the Popol Vuh, the Mayan cosmogonic myth. There are important differences, of course, but in the Popol Vuh (available at sacred-texts.com/nam/maya/pvgm/pv09.htm) we have creation by word from a watery chaos parallel to that in Genesis 1:2.

Clearly there are elements of Genesis 1-11 that we cannot take literally – such as a worldwide flood, humans hundreds of years old, etc. – but the quality of the Hebrew myth does set it apart from other mythical traditions. What is more important in my view is what later biblical writers did with the myth, building upon it theologically to create a “heilsgeschichte” or salvation history that became seamless interwoven with the New Testament experience in the theology of the primitive Christian Church.

Petrus

 

[buffalo]

Thanks for your posting, Benadam. Certainly there is a difference between kinds of myths. I have always been struck by the similarities between the Genesis myth and that of the Popol Vuh, the Mayan cosmogonic myth. There are important differences, of course, but in the Popol Vuh (available at sacred-texts.com/nam/maya/pvgm/pv09.htm) we have creation by word from a watery chaos parallel to that in Genesis 1:2.

Clearly there are elements of Genesis 1-11 that we cannot take literally – such as a worldwide flood, humans hundreds of years old, etc. – but the quality of the Hebrew myth does set it apart from other mythical traditions. What is more important in my view is what later biblical writers did with the myth, building upon it theologically to create a “heilsgeschichte” or salvation history that became seamless interwoven with the New Testament experience in the theology of the primitive Christian Church.

Petrus

myth?

8 This also said God to Noe, and to his sons with him, 9 Behold I will establish my covenant with you, and with your seed after you: 10 And with every living soul that is with you, as well in all birds as in cattle and beasts of the earth, that are come forth out of the ark, and in all the beasts of the earth. 11 I will establish my covenant with you, and all flesh shall be no more destroyed with the waters of a flood, neither shall there be from henceforth a flood to waste the earth. 12 And God said: This is the sign of the covenant which I will give between me and you, and to every living soul that is with you, for perpetual generations. 13 I will set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be the sign of a covenant between me, and between the earth. 14 And when I shall cover the sky with clouds, my bow shall appear in the clouds: 15 And I will remember my covenant with you, and with every living soul that beareth flesh: and there shall no more be waters of a flood to destroy all flesh. 16 And the bow shall be in the clouds, and I shall see it, and shall remember the everlasting covenant, that was made between God and every living soul of all flesh which is upon the earth. 17 And God said to Noe: This shall be the sign of the covenant which I have established between me and all flesh upon the earth.
18 And the sons of Noe who came out of the ark, were Sem, Cham, and Japheth: and Cham is the father of Chanaan. 19 These three are the sons of Noe: and from these was all mankind spread over the whole earth.

 

[drpmjhess]

Yes – myth. If we read Genesis 6-9 as a beautiful story about God’s loving care for at least a tiny part of creation (not the part that he destroyed!), it retains its theological significance. I love hearing the flood story proclaimed in a darkened church on Easter vigil!

But reading the flood story literally, as fundamentalists will, is indefensible. That is, it is indefensible if you want to declare it as scientifically possible. If you want to invoke miracles (e.g., God stopped up the bowels of the elephants for 150 days) that’s one thing, but the fundies go to the ends of the earth to twist “science” to make the flood a geological possibility. They cannot. I needn’t go into all the factors (e.g., not enough water to cover Mt. Everest, ark not big enough to contain 30 million species, no terrestrial evidence of such a flood, etc. These have all been nicely deflated at talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html.

Prayerfully yours,
Petrus

 

[edwest2]

Jesus Christ as God performed miracles. God can and does perform many miracles, even today. Only reducing God to something that can be understood by men makes anything He did seem “indefensible.”

Please remember that as you consider His words.

God bless,
Ed

 

[buffalo]

Yes – myth. If we read Genesis 6-9 as a beautiful story about God’s loving care for at least a tiny part of creation (not the part that he destroyed!), it retains its theological significance. I love hearing the flood story proclaimed in a darkened church on Easter vigil!

But reading the flood story literally, as fundamentalists will, is indefensible. That is, it is indefensible if you want to declare it as scientifically possible. If you want to invoke miracles (e.g., God stopped up the bowels of the elephants for 150 days) that’s one thing, but the fundies go to the ends of the earth to twist “science” to make the flood a geological possibility. They cannot. I needn’t go into all the factors (e.g., not enough water to cover Mt. Everest, ark not big enough to contain 30 million species, no terrestrial evidence of such a flood, etc. These have all been nicely deflated at talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html.

Prayerfully yours,
Petrus

The detail is remarkable. The story, the people, the situation!

It could have been written much simpler. They went through alot of trouble to elaborate, don’t you think?

 

[drpmjhess]

Jesus Christ as God performed miracles. God can and does perform many miracles, even today. Only reducing God to something that can be understood by men makes anything He did seem “indefensible.”

Please remember that as you consider His words.

God bless,
Ed

Ed, thanks for your reply. I have not attacked miracles. Nor have I attacked the idea of floods in general. Flood myths exist throughout the world in many different traditions, not surprisingly considering that most ancient civilizations arose in river valleys where catastrophic floods occur from time to time and become ingrained in cultural memory. What I attack is the slippery Fundamentalist defense of the flood on scientific grounds.

If you want to defend the scientific plausibility of the global deluge, let me ask you
(1) where did the water came from to cover Mt. Everest, at 29,035 feet?
(2) Where did all that water go?
(3) Where in the fossil record do we find evidence of the massive diluvian die-off of animals?
(4) How did Noah fit 30 million species on the ark?
(5) How did the marsupials make it all the way from Australia to climb on board the ark?
(6) An adult elephant excretes 200 pounds of manure per day. There were seven pairs of African and Indian elephants, making for a total of 28 elephants, who generated 840,000 pounds of manure while on board the ark. This doesn’t even count all the other megafauna, such as wooly mammoths, the dinosaurs, hippos, rhinos, etc. How did they dispose of all this manure?
(7) How did Noah construct the ark and collect the animals without electric drills, pneumatic tools, heavy-lifting cranes, and a global information network of at least satellite radio to collect all the animals?

Ed, I do believe in Noah’s flood: it is a great story that is symbolically very important for Catholic theology. But it cannot be scientifically defended as being literally true, any more than American Indians can defend the literal truth of the Earth Diver story in which a muskrat dives down and brings up mud in its paws to form the earth.

Petrus

 

[Esran]

Esran, this is very nicely put! I have a book coming out in May 2008 on Catholicism and science that deals in part with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and your articulation of science in a Catholic context is in some senses reminiscent of his vision.

Christian (and Catholic in particular) theology must always be done in light of cosmology, as Max Wildiers has pointed out in "The Theologian and his Universe (1982) What I would add to your fine statement is that although humanity will not be around very long, God may be experimenting with episodes of life throughout the universe. Our earth has harbored animal and plant life for only 500 million years (the hot infant earth had mainly cyanobacteria), and macro life such as ourselves has only another 500 million years left. The remaining 7 billion years of earths history will see the atmosphere gradually stripped off by solar winds as the sun converts more hydrogen into helium and increases in luminosity, so that from 5 to 8 billion years in the earth’s life cycle the planet will be back to bacteria.

Meanwhile, with a hundred billion galaxies each containing on average hundred billion stars, the chances of life evolving on numerous other planets throughout the cosmos seem very large to me. I can image God the Creator willing life into existence all over the universe. Here we have not only creatio ex nihilo, but creatio continua. The eschatological consummation of all this life, rising to meet the divine love that engendered it, is inconceivable!

I like your thoughts on this matter. We should start up a correspondence. I am actually getting my degree in mathematics and computer science in about two years, after which I will probably go into the seminary. After getting a masters in divinity, I plan to become a parish priest, but still continue my studies. The role models I am trying to shape my life after are St. Thomas Acquinas and St. John Chrysostom.

Petrus, please check your PMs for my email address. Let us continue our conversation via email.

 

[Benadam]

Thanks for your posting, Benadam. Certainly there is a difference between kinds of myths. I have always been struck by the similarities between the Genesis myth and that of the Popol Vuh, the Mayan cosmogonic myth. There are important differences, of course, but in the Popol Vuh (available at sacred-texts.com/nam/maya/pvgm/pv09.htm) we have creation by word from a watery chaos parallel to that in Genesis 1:2.

Clearly there are elements of Genesis 1-11 that we cannot take literally – such as a worldwide flood, humans hundreds of years old, etc. – but the quality of the Hebrew myth does set it apart from other mythical traditions. What is more important in my view is what later biblical writers did with the myth, building upon it theologically to create a “heilsgeschichte” or salvation history that became seamless interwoven with the New Testament experience in the theology of the primitive Christian Church.

Petrus

Your welcome Petrus, thank ou for the link I hope to get the time to enjoy it soon. It must be a well preserved expression of the genesis events to have revealed such a truth so unambiguously… Myth points to truth. but Truth happened! The seemless weave you are keen to observe is what distinguishes the Biblical accounts from other accounts isn’t it. What other myth has been validated by real events that unfolded in ways that infuse it exponentially with life and meaning so that even today it has no rival in it’s original function as myth.

Peace

 

[homeric]

Many Catholic theologians would interpret “original sin” in the sense of the competitive evolutionary state out of which humanity has evolved into rational awareness. As humans became aware of evil and the possibility of avoiding it, they developed a sense of “sin” symbolized in Genesis 3 by the eating of the fruit.

Can you list one or two Catholic theologians who develop this idea?

A link to an online article giving an overview of it would be appreciated as well.

 

[scottm]

Ed, I do believe in Noah’s flood: it is a great story that is symbolically very important for Catholic theology. But it cannot be scientifically defended as being literally true, any more than American Indians can defend the literal truth of the Earth Diver story in which a muskrat dives down and brings up mud in its paws to form the earth.

You’re talking out of both sides of your mouth. You say that you believe it, but you say that it’s not literally true. Well, give us a straight answer in one word, “yes” or “no”:
Did the flood happen – yes, or no?

 

[Spirithound]

This doesn’t even count all the other megafauna, such as wooly mammoths, the dinosaurs,etc. How did they dispose of all this manure?

Clearly the mammoths and dinos weren’t on the ark…that’s how they went extinct!

 

[drpmjhess]

Clearly the mammoths and dinos weren’t on the ark…that’s how they went extinct!

Spirithound, that’s not what most Creationists argue. They argue that there had to be all animals on board the ark, including the dinosaurs. See answersingenesis.org/docs2001/dinos_on_ark.asp. Curiously, they work themselves into paroxysms over the question of how all the animals fit. Some argue that the exemplars were juveniles, some that only 55 “kinds” of dinosaurs were on board, and that these evolved into the other nearly 700 species that later went extinct. A number of problems present themselves with this tortuous logic:
(1) We are often told by Creationists that all dinosaurs were carnivorous either until the Fall, or until the Flood. In any case, it stretches the limits of credibility to think of Tyrannosaurs eating and digesting fruits and vegetables until they turned carnivorous, either before or after they were on the ark.
(2) In a 6,000 year time frame, with the flood at 4,500 years ago, that leaves precious little time for the ark-borne dinosaurs to reproduce and evolve into 700 species and then go extinct all in a few hundred or a thousand years.
(3) If we do have to include all terrestrial species on the ark, allowing for speciation after the Flood, then what happens to the Creationist denial of evolution?
(4) Unless Noah had fish tanks on board, how did saltwater fish survive the diluvial dilution by freshwater, and hoe did freshwater aquatic life survive in the brackish floodwaters for 150 days?
(5) How did seed-bearing plants survive being drowned for 150 days?
(6) Assuming they did survive in seeds, how was there any vegetation after the flood to feed the herbivores? Or did God miraculously feed them until natural food was able to grow again? In the case of Koalas this would be a matter of years before their eucalyptus leaves were available.

I could go on, but this topic has been answered in detail at talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html.

Still, problems with a literal reading of the flood do not negate its theolgoical value for Catholics and other Christians.

Petrus

 

[Neil_Anthony]

Ed, I do believe in Noah’s flood: it is a great story that is symbolically very important for Catholic theology. But it cannot be scientifically defended as being literally true, any more than American Indians can defend the literal truth of the Earth Diver story in which a muskrat dives down and brings up mud in its paws to form the earth.

Hi Petrus,
In the case of the creation myths, in this thread people have shown how although they are symbolic, they do refer to real events in pre-history, such as the creation of humans through evolution and the development of a human intelligence which could differentiate right from wrong. But in the case of Noah’s ark, what historical or pre-historical event could the flood story possibly symbolize?

The only things that pop into my head are … our distant evolutionary ancestors survived the mass extinctions that happened millions of years ago, or how our early homo sapiens ancestors survived while the other brances of the homo family tree like homo erectus (and neandertals) died off. Do you know of any explanation along those lines that theolgians have come up with?

Actually I’d be glad to hear from anyone about this, not just petrus

God Bless,
Neil

 

[SpiritMeadow]

If you read the Bible without previous assumptions you will see that it is an eyewitness account. However, for various reasons, others wish to confuse the issue. I thank the earlier poster for pointing out how the Church teaches that sin came through a particular pair of individuals, Adam and Eve.

It is easy to call someone a liar but God does not lie. The dinosaurs lived but died, just as many species of animals have been wiped out in recent history. Genesis 1:5 “And the evening and the morning were the first day.” This is repeated for the second day.

What you may read here is a strange insistence for Christians to accept the word of man over the word of God. God cannot be separated from His Creation and the sin of the first man and woman was the cause for Jesus Christ coming to earth as one of us.

Pope Benedict has made certain statements that show the Church is open to science, but that God must be part of Creation. As written, the theory of Evolution makes no allowance for God, and this cannot be. The Church does not support a mechanistic naturalism where we sprang from nothing and will die to nothing.

God bless,
Ed

Esran, this is very nicely put! I have a book coming out in May 2008 on Catholicism and science that deals in part with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and your articulation of science in a Catholic context is in some senses reminiscent of his vision.

Christian (and Catholic in particular) theology must always be done in light of cosmology, as Max Wildiers has pointed out in "The Theologian and his Universe (1982) What I would add to your fine statement is that although humanity will not be around very long, God may be experimenting with episodes of life throughout the universe. Our earth has harbored animal and plant life for only 500 million years (the hot infant earth had mainly cyanobacteria), and macro life such as ourselves has only another 500 million years left. The remaining 7 billion years of earths history will see the atmosphere gradually stripped off by solar winds as the sun converts more hydrogen into helium and increases in luminosity, so that from 5 to 8 billion years in the earth’s life cycle the planet will be back to bacteria.

Meanwhile, with a hundred billion galaxies each containing on average hundred billion stars, the chances of life evolving on numerous other planets throughout the cosmos seem very large to me. I can image God the Creator willing life into existence all over the universe. Here we have not only creatio ex nihilo, but creatio continua. The eschatological consummation of all this life, rising to meet the divine love that engendered it, is inconceivable!

Petrus

Oh how wonderful Petrus. I can hardly wait! Your posts and a couple of the others are truly enlightening. I don;t have a science background to make these arguments nearly as well. You are sure adding to my understanding.