Was Adam real?

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Now, let’s deal with Post #1…

**The first man was created by God. **Hey, man! No problem! God bless! But, how did God “create” him? Answer: God didn’t create a belly-button-less guy like a potter, and then try to match him up with lions and tigers and bears.

The evidence is overwhelming that God infused a species in the hominid line with a soul, creating Homo sapiens sapiens.

**The whole human race stems from one single human pair. **I can live with this. It may have not happened the way the readers of the Adam-and-Eve story in Genesis envision it happened, but it happened.

For example: God inspires two hominids with souls. They have a child with a soul. Across the lake, there are two other non-soul-infused hominids of the same species. God fixes it so that the child of the opposite gender they conceive does have a soul. This child and the first couple’s child meet, mate, and bear offspring and so on – all achieved without incest.

Most misunderstand the monogenesis idea. The descended-from-Adam-and-Eve concept is not an end-all-and-be-all. The purpose of that concept is quite negative: We are made of the same sin-seeking garbage as Adam-and-Eve-in-the-story. So, the story is really about YOU.

**Man consists of two essential parts–a material body and a spiritual soul. **God bless!

The rational soul is per se the essential form of the body. What does that mean???

**Every human being possesses an individual soul. **I think so, but the Church doesn’t necessarily affirmatively teach this, yet. Didn’t one of the folks in this site show that to this day the Church is holding-out on precisely when a child is inspired with a soul in the womb, to avoid contradicting Aquinas?

**Every individual soul was immediately created out of nothing by God. 👍 **

**A creature has the capacity to receive supernatural gifts.****👍 **

**The Supernatural presupposes Nature. **Well, I wouldn’t call this “Doctrine,” but rather a “semantic truism.” Notice that it wasn’t always true, otherwise Nature is co-equal with one of God’s attributes, His “foreverness.”

God has conferred on man a supernatural Destiny. *Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-MEN.👍 *
 
**Our first parents, before the Fall, were endowed with sanctifying grace. **If the intended meaning of this statement is purely historical and not a mix of metaphor and history or metaphor and theology, I only half agree with it.

I can believe that the first two hominids infused with a soul were infused with accompanying Santifying Grace at that first moment, before either sinned the first time. God bless! However, if by the “Fall” one is implying that in a particular historical incident two belly-button-less folks lived in a kind of sinless perfect Oz, and then committed A SIN which caused the couple to be kicked out of Oz, their lives shortened from “forever” to a few decades, the same fates to be applied to about one hundred billion offspring, and which caused “sin-proneness” to sort of “stick to” them and their offspring in a kind of mysterious, magical way, I disagree.

**i.e., the freedom from irregular desire. **Grace achieves this every day. It is not some kind of un-acquirable magical state previously possessed by the first two human beings, only.

**bodily immortality, the freedom from suffering, a knowledge of natural and supernatural truths infused by God. **Metaphor, metaphor, metaphor.

**Adam received sanctifying grace not merely for himself, but for all his posterity. **To tell you the truth, I did not know that this truism was a doctrine. My parents, Mr. and Mrs. BibleReader, received sanctifying grace for their posterity.

There was no Adam, however, although there probably was a first man.

**Our first parents in paradise sinned grievously through transgression of the Divine probationary commandment. **Metaphor, not history. Even the CCC implies that this is metaphor only, when it expressly teaches that “Original is is proper to each of us,” or words to that effect. The unidentified probationary commandment doesn’t exist anymore.
 
**Through the sin our first parents lost sanctifying grace and provoked the anger and the indignation of God. **As long as we get rid of the first “the,” I can agree that this is historically true. If we retain the first “the,” it is metaphor, not history.

**Our first parents became subject to death and to the dominion of the Devil. **👍 It happens every day. I don’t believe that it didn’t happen to the first two soul-infused hominids.

**Adam’s sin is transmitted to his posterity, not by imitation, but by descent. **As long as by “Adam’s sin,” you mean something metaphorical, I agree. Because we are “descended,” we are made of trashy sin-prone flesh, just like the first hominid pair!

**Original Sin consists in the deprivation of grace caused by the free act of sin committed by the head of the race. **Nah! I only half-agree with this. That “I’ll deprive-the-descendants-of-grace-too” sovereignty business is a metaphor for the sin-proneness of flesh.

**Original sin is transmitted by natural generation. 👍 ***Absolutely! *Because our flesh-ness is transmitted by natural generation, the inherent alienation from God of flesh, un-endowed with grace, absolutely IS transfered from parent to child.

**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. **Well, YOU would disagree with this, if you meant this absolutely. Clearly our Church TEACHES that Sanctifying Grace is available through the sacraments, right?

**Souls who depart this life in the state of original sin are excluded from the Beatific Vision of God. 👍 **
 
JMJ

I had just left the Baptist sect and was in RCIA when I asked a nun (Sister Patricia, a very good woman indeed) whether the Catholics believed the story was literal or symbolic. I told her that the Baptist claimed the Catholics don’t follow the Bible and make it up as they go. I told her the Baptists claimed everything as litteral and Gods Word! Of course I saw through the Baptist preachers lies as the Baptists pick and choose what is litteral and what is symbolic. They differ from sect to sect (church to church) within the Baptist sect too. This is how the nun answered me: “the theology is ALL correct.”

She explained that we should not allways debate on a story as litteral or symbolic as much as we need to understand what God is trying to point our in His message to us. She never did answer my question now that I look back on it, but she did give me a better answer then what I was looking for.
A prisoner of Christ,
 
carol marie:
Speak for yourself.

Do you have children? I can’t imagine any parent viewing his child as a “sin prone, sin seeking garbage… lower than a feces-sucking fly.”
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I have three, and they are all baptized.

I had a fourth and she was unbaptized, because she died in the womb, three days before birth.

I am sorry, but Christianity – the Magisterium of the Church, and the Bible – both ascribe to her “unsaved” status.

Otherwise, baptism is just a quaint custom.
 
BibleReader said:
**Adam’s sin is transmitted to his posterity, not by imitation, but by descent. ***As long as by “Adam’s sin,” you mean something metaphorical, I agree. Because we are “descended,” we are made of trashy sin-prone flesh, just like the first hominid pair! *

**Original Sin consists in the deprivation of grace caused by the free act of sin committed by the head of the race. **Nah! I only half-agree with this. That “I’ll deprive-the-descendants-of-grace-too” sovereignty business is a metaphor for the sin-proneness of flesh.

**Original sin is transmitted by natural generation. 👍 ***Absolutely! *Because our flesh-ness is transmitted by natural generation, the inherent alienation from God of flesh, un-endowed with grace, absolutely IS transfered from parent to child.

**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. **Well, YOU would disagree with this, if you meant this absolutely. Clearly our Church TEACHES that Sanctifying Grace is available through the sacraments, right?
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I think it is much better and easier to think of Original Sin how it is taught; as the loss of Justice or holyness. It is also taught as the loss of Grace. It is not some positive thing. This makes it easier to understand and it is not in contradiction to evolution either. Man sinned, therefore he lost the grace that he had when he was given a soul. He lost it for all of man.
 
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PhilVaz:
Oh goodie, I get to post my new links.

Hypothesis one: Adam the Neanderthal

Hypothesis two: Adam the Upper Paleolithic homo sapiens

Yes, I think Catholic dogma is pretty clear Adam and Eve were historical. But BibleReader will have a different take…

Phil P
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If people are satisfied that there was an Adam of some kind, as per Genesis, Romans, etc: they are at liberty to think so.​

What people do have to believe is that there was some primeval sin which disrupted man’s communion with God & neighbour, & spoiled human nature.

I thiunk that is the minimum we have to hold ##
 
I firmly believe in a real Adam and Eve who committed a real sin that has been passed on to every human being since that time. I can not imagine a real sin being committed without a real person doing the sinning.

I do not know if they actually called each other Adam and Eve, though. It was probably “Hey” and “Yesdear”
 
• JPII, 1996, Address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences: “In his encyclical Humani Generis (1950), my predecessor Pius XII had already stated that there was no opposition between evolution and the doctrine of the faith about man and his vocation, on condition that one did not lose sight of several indisputable points.”

• PXII, 1950, Humani Generis: “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 that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents.”
 
saulpaul said:
• JPII, 1996, Address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences: “In his encyclical Humani Generis (1950), my predecessor Pius XII had already stated that there was no opposition between evolution and the doctrine of the faith about man and his vocation, on condition that one did not lose sight of several indisputable points.”

• PXII, 1950, Humani Generis: “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 that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents.”
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Good Point!
 
"For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents.”

But that doesn’t mean that Adam and Eve had to be a “bottleneck”, as it were.

That is, just because we must all descend from Adam and Eve, doesn’t mean that there was some generation when they were the only ones we descended from. We all take our human nature from them, but DNA diversity shows that humans today have a pool of genes contributed minimally by at least 10,000 individuals.

Now, obviously, Adam and Eve were the first two humans to have souls and human nature.

If they had not fallen, their children would have at first bred with each other. This is not, strictly speaking, incest or against the natural law!

Though state and canon law traditional banned marriage between people of up to the 4th degree of consanginuity, though now the restrictions are less, natural law is strictly speaking held only to forbid it in the direct line of descent. That is, parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren, etc…cannot be married by the very fact that marriage implies an equality and mutual submission that parents cannot naturally have with their children (and thus, cannot have with their children’s children etc) But, though for social and medical reasons brother-sister is stigmatized…it would not strictly speaking have been forbidden, especially at the beginning of the race.

The Catholic Encyclopedia says this:

"In view of the recognized descent of all men from one common stock, there is a general blood-relationship between all men; hence the limitation mentioned has reference to the nearest root or source of consanguinity. This bond or union of blood takes place in one case through the descent of one person from the other; this is called the direct line. In another case it takes place because the common blood is drawn from a common root, the same ancestor, from whom both persons descend, though they do not descend one from the other, and are therefore not in a direct but in a transverse or collateral line. By the law of nature, it is universally conceded, marriage is prohibited between parent and child, for the reverential relation between them is recognized as incompatible with the equality of relations engendered by the bond of marriage. The universal sentiment of peoples is likewise opposed to marriage between all persons related in any degree in the direct line, thus between grandparent and grandchild.
Because of the acknowledged derivation of the human race from the common progenitors, Adam and Eve, it is difficult to accept the opinion of some theologians that the marriage of brother and sister is against the law of nature; otherwise the propagation of the human race would have begun by violation of the natural law. It is readily understood that, considering the freedom of intercourse between such persons, some effort would soon be made (in the interest of the social welfare) to prevent early corruption within the close family circle by placing a bar to the hope of marriage. Hence among all peoples there has arisen a natural repugnance to the marriage of brother and sister. Some theologians suppose herein a positive Divine law, but it is not easy to point out any such early Divine enactment. Abraham married Sarah who was his sister by his father, though of a different mother"

So as you can see, brother-sister is not strictly speaking against natural law…but because of medical and social problems arising from it as a practical matter, it was soon stigmatized in culture. But strictly speaking there is no divine or natural law against it, only cultural, canon, and state law. Incest, strictly speaking, is naturally forbidden only between people in the direct line of descent.

Now, Adam and Eve DID fall…and their children…it can be shown from genetic analysis…must have, in their fallen animalism and ignorance, bred with non-humans who did not descend from Adam and Eve.

But we can assume that if you have even One parent with human nature (and thus descended through Adam and Eve on at least one side of your family) you inherit a soul and human nature. Jesus only had one human parent, but he took human nature from her.

Eventually, God killed off the remaining “near humans” who were not ensouled. Perhaps these were the “giant” or “nephalims” discussed in genesis.

Either way, all hominids eventually left were humans with souls and human natures, and everyone was descended from Adam and Eve on at least one side of their family…then from both sides and eventually it all got mixed in and evened out.

It is not necessary to view Adam and Eve as a bottleneck, as long as we recognize that there was a single pair of first humans…and that all humans must be descended from them…but not necessarily descended ONLY from them…there could have been other genetic lines contributing
 
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