Do any Catholics actually still think that no other humans were ever created by God except two? In other words, does anyone still believe that when Adam and Eve left the Garden, there were no other humans to breed with and that ALL of humanity for ever after came ONLY from the inter-family breeding of that original set of two parents, children, grandchildren?
Well, yes. In fact, if you ask a question, “Do any Catholics actually think [X]?”, where X is any idea under the sun, the answer is almost definitely going to be “yes.” The question is, is it a reasonable belief?
It does not seem
unreasonable to me, at the moment. Firstly, science doesn’t really seem to know how modern
homo sapiens came to be. There seems to be one theory whereby they originated from a single point (and, from what I can tell, a single pair) in Africa, and another which suggests that
homo sapiens arose concurrently in several parts of the world from a cross-pollination of various gene pools (the so-called “multiregional” hypothesis). I honestly don’t know enough about it to say which seems more likely, but from what little I’ve read it seems that the jury is still out.
But I’m not sure science actually has much to say to this – at least not paleontology. Adam and Eve were not necessarily members of the species
homo sapiens, nor, if they were
homo sapiens, were they necessarily the first members of the species. The tale of the Garden does not suggest the origin story of a unique and particular biological form which would not even be completely defined until several millenia after the writing of Genesis. The story is supposed to give the origin of the first creatures to be
sapient and
ensouled. Moreover, these creatures, according to tradition, may have been endowed with other special, preternatural gifts, and, Scripture would seem to indicate, were not mortal. So this was the dawn of a new era and a new sort of being, but not necessarily a new species. It may be that two ape-like creatures of the species
homo sapiens were picked out of the wilds of Spain 30,000 years ago (by God) and suddenly ensouled, thereby made capable of the symbolic language which separates us from beasts and BAM! there’s humanity as we know it. My point is that science can only tell us about the origin and development of the biological species. Science is not really clear on that point yet, and, even if it were, it would tell us nothing about the dawn of sapient, ensouled Man in the Biblical sense.
So, were there only two parents of all modern, sapient, lingual human beings? I don’t know. Despite its many successes, paleontology is not equipped to deal with the question, even in principle, because it’s not a question of biology or the fossil record. The Church, as expressed in
Humani Generis, is suspicious of accounts that involve more than two parents, but is not entirely closed to them. The main problem with a multi-parent theory is that it’s very hard to reconcile with the doctrine of original sin, which the Catholic Church has declared under its character of infallibility is inherited by all men. I’m not saying it’s an irresolvable problem, but if you
do buy into the multi-parent theory, I’d love to hear your thoughts on how that
The problem with the two-parent theory is that it requires brother-sister incest. Now,
grannymh has a great point, and I never thought about it that way. If we can accept that these hypothetical first parents had preternatural gifts, incorruptibility, and so forth (and is there any reason why Catholics should
not believe it, since we already
do believe in the regular supernatural intervention of God in history?), then incest would bear exactly zero risk of causing birth defects for many generations (because it would take time for mutations to arise that cause recessive genetic defects which cause birth defects which make incest risky). So there’s not much concern on a scientific front.
The objection is more a theological one: how can God permit – even
require – something which is intrinsically wrong? All our theology says that God
cannot do that, and we are left with the unsettling implication that brother-sister incest is
not intrinsically wrong. Is
that compatible with Church teaching? Does the Church teach that brother-sister incest is a sin in the same way that murder or adultery is a sin (i.e. absolutely), or that it is a sin in the same way that missing Mass on Sunday or marrying an ordained priest is a sin (i.e. only by disobedience to legitimate authority)? If the former, then I don’t think we can accept the single-pair hypothesis.
It’s tricky.
And,
larkin, I know you’re agnostic, so you don’t buy into a lot of the premises here (which are largely theological). If I were in your position, without recourse to revelation and doctrine, I think the only conclusion you could draw is “There is no clear answer.” Pure reason, observation, and the scientific method aren’t able to give us very much help on the question of when, how, and how many were given human souls in the first generation.
