What make you think That Adam and Eve are real despite the evolutionary change or chance and widespread of the Neanderthals and Homosapians

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opop said:
The Church says that the Bible has full inerrancy, but only on a theological point of view.
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This Catholic Answers article provides a better understanding of Biblical inerrancy: Is Scripture Inerrant? | Catholic Answers
opop said:
Knowing the name of the fist moron who messed up will not help us to be more saint.
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Again, Adam’s name was quite important to multiple auhors of Sacred Scripture. They called him “Adam,” not “first moron.”
 
The Genesis story is told in order to describe the nature of our humanity. It uses a narrative form in order to place that understanding in relationship to the reader’s known reality. It asserts its vision of universal truth by giving the listeners a common element that all share, ie parents.

The story could be historically accurate, though one might wonder how the author knew the names Adam and Eve, the location of the garden. Or other details. What appears important in the story is the nature of the human, not the details of their life.

Or it could be totally inaccurate in terms of all those details, and still convey the meaning it was intended to convey.

I do not recall JP2 ever saying anyhing implying it “should be taken as literal.” That does not mean he did not. But he spent a good effort on explaining “myth” as the category it belongs in. I am interested in what convinced you he thought it was historical, as that might add to my understanding of what he was saying. Most of what you said about historical necessity did not seem connected to JP2’s understanding.
 
The scientific data:
Adam was created before Eve.

And: ‘to God a thousand years is like a day, and a day is like a thousand years.’

Adam may have been in Eden for hundreds of thousands of years of earth, before Eve was created, before the Fall.
As each of the days of Creation could actually have spanned thousands of years.
 
YoungCatholicGuy said:
The scientific data:
Adam was created before Eve.

And: ‘to God a thousand years is like a day, and a day is like a thousand years.’

Adam may have been in Eden for hundreds of thousands of years of earth, before Eve was created, before the Fall.
As each of the days of Creation could actually have spanned thousands of years.
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The mitochondrial Eve is a different horse than the real person we call Eve. If everyone on the planet died so that all the women who survived were related to your great great great grandmother in the female line on your mom’s side, then she would become the mitochondrial Eve of the human race. (I mean “would become” because it is neglecting the men alive who did not have her mitochondrial DNA: all generations thereafter would have her mitochondrial DNA, because only eggs carry mitochondrial DNA.) Likewise for the man who is the most recent human to whom all men can trace their Y-chromosome.

In contrast, the actual people responsible for the Fall cannot change. That’s the difference between the biblical Adam and Eve and the scientific concepts romantically given the names mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosome Adam. The latter terms do not refer to persons with an unchangeable identity.

Likewise, everyone, consider that mitochondria and Y-chromosomes are only passed on via one line: mitochondria via the female line and Y-chromosomes via the male line. If after Adam and Eve were expelled from the state of their innocent yet morally aware condition, Cain and Seth took wives who were not their relatives and their sons and daughters married people who were unrelated, the effects of original sin would have passed down just the same on both the male and female lines.

Consider that one geneologist has said that almost everyone currently living can trace their lineage back to some European royal house:


Even without a documented connection to a notable forebear, experts say the odds are virtually 100 percent that every person on Earth is descended from one royal personage or another.

When did Europe start having royal families, compared to the time when a moral Adam and Eve of any description whatsoever lived? A blink of the eye. Therefore, it is mathematically possible that every living person carries all the consequences of the Fall, because the consequences of the Fall would be considered, in a biological sense, the most dominant trait of the human race.

(To those who argue the aboriginal peoples were untouched by this, I’d say you wouldn’t think there could be pigs and people on a place as remote as Hawaii, either. DNA gets around…)
 
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Saints who had visions of the Old Testament saw Adam and Eve in their visions.

They were real people. Our ancestors. And it is because of their disobedience of God the Father, eating of the Tree of Knowledge that the human race fell and inherited original sin.

The New Testament refers to Adam by name as a person who was part of the fall of the human race.
 
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Thanks for the reply, Dovekin. It sounds to me like you are open to the truth, wherever that may lead, provided the evidence is there. I will get to a more in-depth reply later, but first I want to make sure I understand what you’re beliefs are, relative to Adam and Eve. It sounds to me like you are saying that Adam and Eve are not real people, but part of a mythic story that helps us to understand our origins, using the concept of parenthood. Am I correct?
 
I believe that the Genesis story was written by a human author, as well as by a divine author who inspired him. His intent was to say something about our humanity, how we respond to temptation, our relationship with God, etc. His writings reflect his social position, ie they use the idioms of family, birth, parenting, as he describes our relationship with our Creator.

As a human author, I doubt that he had access to the names and history of the first sinners. Nor do I believe God would override his humanity in order to give him historically accurate details. I do not see the point.

Maybe, somehow, the story is historically accurate. Maybe not. The author’s intent was not history, but philosophy. Adam and Eve were written to reveal a deeper truth than unexamined history can give us.

I believe mEve is similar, though the lesson given is the biological organization instead of the moral conscience. I cannot see a reason to merge the 2 stories, but if you do, geat.
 
That is incorrect.

"105 God is the author of Sacred Scripture. "The divinely revealed realities, which are contained and presented in the text of Sacred Scripture, have been written down under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit."69

"For Holy Mother Church, relying on the faith of the apostolic age, accepts as sacred and canonical the books of the Old and the New Testaments, whole and entire, with all their parts, on the grounds that, written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God as their author, and have been handed on as such to the Church herself."70

"106 God inspired the human authors of the sacred books. "To compose the sacred books, God chose certain men who, all the while he employed them in this task, made full use of their own faculties and powers so that, though he acted in them and by them, it was as true authors that they consigned to writing whatever he wanted written, and no more."71

"107 The inspired books teach the truth. "Since therefore all that the inspired authors or sacred writers affirm should be regarded as affirmed by the Holy Spirit, we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures."72

Just as the prophets did not speak their own words but the words God had given them to speak.
 
edwest211 said:
though he acted in them and by them, it was as true authors that they consigned to writing whatever [God] wanted written, and no more."
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I suppose it hinges on this statement, that the human authors were true authors. If we use the analogy to Christ, the position you are taking is like Monophysitism, the idea that the divine nature displaces the human. If the author is a true author imo it means he writes with the limitations of a human. He does not know the past, or the future, but uses his understanding to ‘glimpse’ them. It pretty much precludes a precise historical knowledge of event from 1000s of years earlier.

IOW, your quote supports my position at least as much as it supports yours.
 
I am not sure what would convince you that Adam and Eve are real. But, nor am I obligated to do so. The Catholic Church does hold that Catholics are free to believe that human bodies evolved from some primitive state. But requires that at some point the first humans were made so by God directly creating a human soul in them. In other words, while the body may have evolved, the human soul, with an intellect and will, made in God’s image, can not evolve, but must be directly created by God and placed in our first parents Adam and Eve.
 
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Dovekin said:
As a human author, I doubt that he had access to the names and history of the first sinners. Nor do I believe God would override his humanity in order to give him historically accurate details. I do not see the point.
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Adam is not named in Genesis only. St. Paul was called to be an apostle by the Lord Himself and calls Adam by name. Tobit says Adam, Sirach uses Adam, Jude uses Adam. I think Scripture gives enough support that “Adam” was an important person and name.
 
This is very strange. There is nothing in Scripture about this. And there is nothing about souls as far as science. So who decided that God picked two almost humans and dropped souls into them?
 
I think he means that while the human race may have descended from earlier hominids, we have actual moral parents. This was alluded to in Humani Generis (and my apologies to anyone who posted this already), and remember it was written in 1950, long before the human genome and other primate genomes had been mapped:

_36. For these reasons the Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter - for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God. However, this must be done in such a way that the reasons for both opinions, that is, those favorable and those unfavorable to evolution, be weighed and judged with the necessary seriousness, moderation and measure, and provided that all are prepared to submit to the judgment of the Church, to whom Christ has given the mission of interpreting authentically the Sacred Scriptures and of defending the dogmas of faith.[11] Some however, rashly transgress this liberty of discussion, when they act as if the origin of the human body from pre-existing and living matter were already completely certain and proved by the facts which have been discovered up to now and by reasoning on those facts, and as if there were nothing in the sources of divine revelation which demands the greatest moderation and caution in this question. _

37. 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. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.[12]

By “true men,” I gather that he meant moral actors with souls, the descendants of that Adam responsible for the Fall. This does not have to be identical with the Y-chromosome Adam, since remember that is the most recent biological male ancestor who is related to all men via an unbroken male line. The Adam of the Fall would be related to all humanity through either the male or the female line, a spiritual feature but passed on as if there were a dominant gene present in both copies of its chromosome, such that EVERY descendant of Adam in any degree would have it.

(See above for links: nearly every person on earth could trace their ancestry back to someone belonging to European royalty–far more recent than “the old days of good-man Adam”!)
 
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bobperk said:
Adam is not named in Genesis only. St. Paul was called to be an apostle by the Lord Himself and calls Adam by name. Tobit says Adam, Sirach uses Adam, Jude uses Adam. I think Scripture gives enough support that “Adam” was an important person and name.
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This might be an effective critique if you used examples like the Psalms or some of the Wisdom books. As it is, you used sources that can all be reasonably expected to know about Genesis. Their use of Adam is probably derived from Genesis; they are not independent sources that corroborate the idea as you seem to be claiming.
 
This makes no sense. Science does not study souls. There was no other Adam. All of this reads like fiction. Who were these unidentified, previous almost humans?
 
edwest211 said:
This makes no sense. Science does not study souls. There was no other Adam. All of this reads like fiction. Who were these unidentified, previous almost humans?
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I’m sorry, I was not talking about science. I was talking about reality.

Some biologist somewhere (a person who is known, but I am too lazy to look it up), when talking about the earliest human to which all mitochondrial DNA could be traced (since it comes down the female line in the egg) gave that person the romantic name “Mitochondrial Eve.” Never in a million years were they implying that this individual was the Eve of Scriptures. This has become a popular misconception, all the same.

The Church does not forbid us from entertaining the possibility that the human race descended from earlier hominids. The Church does hold, however, that Adam was a real person and the Fall, although it may be related in mythical language in Genesis, was a real event in moral history. The new Adam: actual person. The first Adam: actual person. Original sin: an actual thing to which all humans are heirs through Adam. Reality.

Therefore, just as through one person sin entered the world, and through sin, death, and thus death came to all, inasmuch as all sinned—for up to the time of the law, sin was in the world, though sin is not accounted when there is no law. But death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who did not sin after the pattern of the trespass of Adam, who is the type of the one who was to come.

But the gift is not like the transgression. For if by that one person’s transgression the many died, how much more did the grace of God and the gracious gift of the one person Jesus Christ overflow for the many. And the gift is not like the result of the one person’s sinning. For after one sin there was the judgment that brought condemnation; but the gift, after many transgressions, brought acquittal. For if, by the transgression of one person, death came to reign through that one, how much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of justification come to reign in life through the one person Jesus Christ. In conclusion, just as through one transgression condemnation came upon all, so through one righteous act acquittal and life came to all. For just as through the disobedience of one person the many were made sinners, so through the obedience of one the many will be made righteous.
Rom 5:12-19

If your objection is that there is no scientific biological mechanism connected to how the results of the Fall came to affect all of humankind, however–my apologies!! I meant the passing down thing as an analogy. To the best of my knowledge, there is no biological mechanism proposed for how all of mankind became heirs to the effects of the sin of Adam. As as I know, the Church only teaches that there was an Adam, a real person responsible for the Fall, but not any specific physical mechanism by which his disobedience came to affect the entire human race. (A physical route is mathematically possible, though…)
 
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Dovekin said:
This might be an effective critique if you used examples like the Psalms or some of the Wisdom books. As it is, you used sources that can all be reasonably expected to know about Genesis. Their use of Adam is probably derived from Genesis; they are not independent sources that corroborate the idea as you seem to be claiming.
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Ah yes, I forgot! The Sacred Scriptures with the Holy Spirit at their primary author need to corroborate with independent sources to be true!
 
Absolutely right! It makes no sense to cite multiple books of Scripture, as if they were “independent sources” that “give support” if the Holy Spirit is author of all of them. I don’t know what you were thinking when you did that.
 
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