S
SSTeacher
Guest
If evolution is a fact and the Genesis account of creation isn’t literally true when and how did sin become a part of the human condition?
Thoughtfully,
Mick
Thoughtfully,
Mick
- Status
O
O.S.Luke
Guest
Augustine. 
R
redrosetea
Guest
It came from Adam and Eve…I don’t know exactly how…the eating the fruit might be poetic license, for something else they did…or it might be a fact…but they gave it to us…because they disobeyed just like Lucifer…and just like we do when we go our own way instead of the way God has set out for us
E
Eucharisted
Guest
Evil comes from good, because evil is the absense of good.
S
SSTeacher
Guest
I understand your thinking but if the Genesis account isn’t literally true then Adam and Eve may not have been real people. Do you see what I’m driving at?
Cordially,
Mick
R
redrosetea
Guest
I don’t know if all parts of it is true…I wasn’t there…According to what science has stated all mankind developed from 2 people…they called them Adam and Eve just like scriptureI understand your thinking but if the Genesis account isn’t literally true then Adam and Eve may not have been real people. Do you see what I’m driving at?
Cordially,
Mick
Genesis is an account of creation not a blueprint…it doesn’t say how …I am not a fundy so I don’t try to decide how everything was created…I only know there is sin in the world and it came from somewhere, and it didn’t come from God…God is only goodness
M
MelanieAnne
Guest
I disagree. God is ALL GOOD and He is not evil at all. Evil does not come from God, hence evil cannot come from good.
R
Reuben_J
Guest
I am one of those who believe that Genesis account is true except the details that ain’t there. It’s a compressed story where thousands of years being told into a couple of sentences. Adam and Eve were real people. Hey, is the OP pulling our legs?I understand your thinking but if the Genesis account isn’t literally true then Adam and Eve may not have been real people. Do you see what I’m driving at?
Cordially,
Mick
Sin came for the Evil One when Adam sinned.
E
Eucharisted
Guest
I said evil comes from good, I did not say it comes from goodness. Furthermore, if evil came from God, than God would be evil in nature, and hence, we would have a dualist God.
Evil must come from good - for example, death from life - becuase evil is the absense of good. Another way of putting it, though in less than proper terms, is that evil is good destroyed or corrupted.
M
MelanieAnne
Guest
Evil does not come from good, no matter how you re-phrase it. Sorry! It does not PROCEED from good.
S
SpiritMeadow
Guest
A loaded question, but I’ll bite.
Let me start here at the beginning.
Let me start here at the beginning.
- I believe God is the source of all that is. He creates of himself without diminishing in any way.
- I believe God created the laws governing the universe and by his word, thought the universe into existence, allowing it to grow and develop as the laws of physics suggest.
- I believe that on some planets, life arose, and on some of those, live began to evolve from simpler to more complex life forms.
- I believe that on some, that evolution reaches a point of sentience sufficiently complex that the life form can begin to contemplate the whys and wherefores of his/her existence.
- I believe that all creation has this spark of God that draws it naturally to it’s maker.
- I believe that God seeks interaction and to experience through his creation.
- I believe God is pure love.
- Because we seek our beginning and source long before we are capable of understanding all this, we become captive of the false us, or ego.
- The ego’s sole purpose is survival.
- The ego eventually causes the individual to reject others in an attempt to protect itself from harm or death.
- This act is evil–the assumption that our self value is more important than anothers.
- Essentially evil entered when the first homo sapien rejected anothers desire to enter the cave for safety or rejected the request for food. Sacrificing another to protect ourselves was the first act of evil.
- I believe the story of Adam and Eve is metaphor to illustrate this point. Adam and Eve decided that for their own need of security it was some how better to reject God’s care in favor of taking care of themselves through knowledge. The rest is as they say history. They got their wish.
B
Bear_Claw
Guest
Okay, let me play devils advocate here, but the OP’s post begs a lot of questions to be answered. I’m quoting SpiritMeadow’s post here, not to pick on it, but to give a broad frame of reference to my response to the OP.
Adam and Eve. Some people take the creation account literally, and some take it figuratively.
First, how can we do that? If the Bible is the Inerrant word of God, how are we to decide which parts of the bible are figuratively and which parts aren’t?
Also, who are we to decide which parts of the Bible we follow and which parts we don’t follow, for instance, Deuteronomy teaches that if your child is disobedient, you should stone him, etc.
But then, if Adam and Eve are not real people, if you decide that they are figuratively, how can they preach that original sin comes from them?
We are being taught that our whole existence of suffering and pain and hardship in this world, was begun and committed by two people that didn’t really exist.
If they did exist, why would God intentionally create people that a) he knew would fail him, and b) would leave in their wake the suffering and hardships we now ascribe to them?
Would it not have been easier to have the rocks cry out? To create people so that they can worship him at the terrible cost of sin, pain, suffering and hardship, seems to me to be a bit, umm, funny.
Even if the evolution of the ego was the actual case, and the bible chose to frame it in two people, still, why create a system that you KNOW is going to fail, not 1 week into it (I’m just guessing, of course )
Just some burning questions I have.
Thanks!
V
Voradin
Guest
Well what Eucharisted is say is basically this in a parable.
Darkness is abscense of light,
but something cover it is taking light on the outside.
Light is everywhere as is god, and the devil is trying to cloak our eyes from him, but his existence is part of gods creation.
Thus in a way we still see god, but hell is absolute abscense of God, like another dimension unimagined.
God told the Devil basically “Fine, if you won’t serve your doomed to a place of misery, and you shall be bound to your words”
The Devil is not bound by God,
but bound by his own actions.
And answering your question,
Like Redrosetea said it came from Adam and Eve.
S
SpiritMeadow
Guest
Let me take a stab at it. First I suspect it depends on how you view the Bible. I see it, as this: humans are desireous of explaining and understanding their world and God. They are desireous of doing so to help teach future generations what they have learned and experience. God infuses them with his Spirit such that they speak truth AS THEY CAN KNOW IT. In other words in the language and understanding that they have of the natural word at the time.
So we can say, that while factually wrong about how the earth was made and so forth and how creatures came upon the earth, they got the essence of it right. God is the creator, he just used the Big Bang and Evolution.
We also try to discern what their world was like, and what was the purpose of whatever rules they laid down. If we understand what they understood, what they faced in their world and what the rules were intended to accomplish, we can discern better and better whether they have application to our world and our times. (we have better sanitary conditions, we don’t any longer have to avoid pork for instance).
Better exegesis, archaeology, psychology, and science help us to place the words in proper prospective. We discover that some things are universal, in all faiths around the world, some lead to cooperative behavior between humans, these we can safely realize are meant for all time.
I know this is simplistic, but again, I’m not writing a book, just giving some ideas.
We can do so, because we are all sinful. No matter our lives, we all sin. It has become part of human existence. It really doesn’t matter (to me at least) whether it was two people or one cave man. The result is the same. The story serves to remind me and that is the point.
Of course you make a fine point: If God knew humans would fail, why not create them perfectly? I think we might take too small a look here. If we assume that life abounds in the universe, who is to say that some places, sentient beings have avoided our mistakes? Their planets may have provided more abundantly and easily for them, thus not tempting them to self protection at the expense of others. Perhaps God knows all possible outcomes but no actual outcome necessarily unless and until it happens?
It’s my contention that we create our own pain and suffering by and large. The Buddhist have a bit of valuable information on this I think.
These thoughts are mine of course. I’ve read rather widely into a lot of spiritual works. It is terribly important to me that God be as great as I can imagine, and it has taken me a long time to come up with an explanation that is both logical and mysterious and infinite. I do take it seriously that my mind is one of God’s great gifts to us, and I truly believe his Spirit is there to guide if we put step aside, and sit quietly and allow him to lead.
F
fhansen
Guest
From the Cathechism:
**390 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.
**
From Humani Generis:
**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 no 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.18
**
**390 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.
**
From Humani Generis:
**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 no 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.18
**
S
SSTeacher
Guest
My reason for posting this question is that I hope to get an idea of how Catholics understand the teaching of the Catholic Church on this issue. I’d like to hear from anybody, though, whatever his or her chosen belief. I’m working out of an American Evangelical Protestant mindset so let me put forward some of the ideas with which I have aligned myself for the last few years.SSTeacher;4871582:
I understand your thinking but if the Genesis account isn’t literally true then Adam and Eve may not have been real people. Do you see what I’m driving at?
Cordially,
Mick
No. Sorry.
The Bible doesn’t explain how creation took place. That’s to be expected because it isn’t a science textbook. Genesis 1:1 is perhaps the most overwhelming verse in the entire Bible. From nothing, nothing comes. That’s the rule, isn’t it? So how can something come from nothing? Moreover, it’s impossible to get a mental picture of nothing. The best I can do is to imagine space. I can only conceive of something coming from nothing. I can’t imagine it.
The idea that “God used evolution in His divine plan” sounds acceptable but the Evangelical response is to point out that the theory of evolution is by no means sourced in Christianity since the Englishman, Charles Darwin, didn’t see humans as having been made in God’s image and then placed in a position of superiority above the other animals. So there was no place in Darwin’s world for divine intervention.
In the Evangelical view, what has happened since Origin of Species is that atheists (many of whom, these days, are scientists – like British zoologist, Richard Dawkins, who has written that Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist) have jumped on the evolutionary bandwagon and in the process have convinced many people that it’s possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science.
I think this is the main reason why Evangelicals have reservations about the theory of evolution. Science, compartmentalized in this way, makes God unnecessary. Notice how clever this is. It isn’t posited that science proves that God doesn’t exist – only that God is unnecessary. But the effect is just the same. Science gently but insidiously displaces God in people’s minds – and that’s the battle pretty much won. As the children continue to be taught that God isn’t necessary and is at best merely an option it’s inevitable that future generations will see the churches in this country become as deserted as those in England.
I can’t prove it but I have a feeling that what is currently happening is that Christians in the scientific field have been subtly influenced toward seeing the whole of creation in the way the atheists see it so there’s every likelihood of finding Christians who are scientists unaware that they are holding views that have been built on atheistic presuppositions. So when these Christians put the case for evolution, they are often putting the atheist’s case without realizing it. In fact, they possibly do a better job than the atheists because while evolution purports to explain the how of creation, it can never explain the why. So, God is simply tacked on to the theory of evolution; God is mentioned to make the theory acceptable; God becomes the servant of the theory of evolution – and the why is neatly tied in.
It has seemed to me that Bible–believing Christians ought to put the Bible first and then expect science to align itself with what the Bible says. If they do that then evolution remains no more than a theory that is held as a possibility only by people who are willing to accept the attendant assumptions upon which the theory rests. But if scientific theories are put first without the assumptions being questioned as part of an attempt to bring what the Bible says in line with the theory then Evangelicals see that there is a danger of going awry. In summation, then, the theory of evolution contains a number of inherent dangers for Bible–believing Christians.
Central to Biblical Christianity is the notion all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. We are saved by grace, which means that we need a savior. But as far as my understanding goes, if the theory of evolution is true then there’s a strong case to be made for believing that there is no such need.
So what I’m considering is this. If I were to decide to convert to Catholicism what adjustments to my thinking would I have to make with regard to this issue? Do I simply learn the relevant numbers in the Catechism of Catholic Church and then quote them on demand in the same way that Evangelicals like to quote verses from the Bible? If that’s the only possible mindset for me I have a feeling that I’d end up feeling as uncomfortable inside Catholicism as I currently feel inside the Evangelical world.
Undecidedly,
Mick
S
SSTeacher
Guest
Many thanks for your contribution. Could you also please say if the Catholic Church teaches that the events in Genesis 7 and 8 are also written using figurative language? And would you mind revealing what you believe regarding this issue and why you believe it?
Inquiringly,
Mick
F
fhansen
Guest
I don’t know if the Church has an official position on the literalness of the story of Noah and the flood. For myself, I don’t see much purpose in the story as allegory and I always read scripture literally and let it speak for itself whenever another sense of reading it is not obvious (for example, parables are meant to be parables and not necessarily based on actual events).Many thanks for your contribution. Could you also please say if the Catholic Church teaches that the events in Genesis 7 and 8 are also written using figurative language? And would you mind revealing what you believe regarding this issue and why you believe it?
Inquiringly,
Mick
On the other hand, certain truths revealed by scripture and our faith are more much more important and relevant to mans’ spiritual condition than others. I would classify the doctrine of the fall, with an original sin committed by a literal set of parents common in ancestry to all mankind to be an example of such a truth. And this is an official position of the Church.
V
Verisimilitude
Guest
First, I do not accept evolution with respect to humanity, but in answer to the question I like this explaination. It is a footnote in the New Jerusalem Bible for Genesis 2:16-17:If evolution is a fact and the Genesis account of creation isn’t literally true when and how did sin become a part of the human condition?
Thoughtfully,
Mick
16 The Lord God gave the man a command. He said, “You can eat the fruit of any tree that is in the garden. 17 But you must not eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If you do, you can be sure that you will die.”
This knowledge is a privilege which God reserves to himself and which man, by sinning will usurp. Hence it does not mean omniscience which fallen creatures do not possess, nor is it moral discrimination, for unfallen man already had it and God could not refuse it to a rational being. It is the power for deciding for himself what is good and what is evil and of acting accordingly; a claim to complete moral independence by which man refuses to recognize his nature as a created being. The first sin was an attack on Gods sovereignty, a sin of pride. This rebellion is described in concrete terms as the transgression of an express command of God for which the text uses the image of forbidden fruit.
- Status