who did Adam and Eve's children marry?

[Mike_O]

Philomena:

Mike, can you tell me where in the Bible I can find where God disallowed incest. And someone mentioned Abraham marrying his half-sister at the request of God. I couldn’t find that. But if it’s there, it would help me a lot.

God did not “disallow” incest; He never ESTABLISHED the law until the time of Moses, hence, MOSAIC law.

There is no other way to maintain monogenism and propogate the human race without incest. Copulating with hominids/monkeys, and all the other wild theories flung out there without any basis in the Magisterial teaching are simply fishing for answers. You won’t find anything about incest with regards to the first parents because the law did not as yet exist.

 

[Black_Jaque]

With all due respects I think Steve Anderson has a point.

It would help if we would make a distinction between an immortal soul and a mortal soul. Humans are not unique in that they have soul, all living things have a soul. What makes humans unique is their immortal soul.

Well since a soul is invisible. It may very well be that an immortal soul is even more difficult to distinguish. And especially so in a fossil record.

Now the reason behind the Church’s insistence that all humanity comes from Adam and Eve is because there is NO HUMAN on earth today that does not have original sin.

But Steve is merely saying that there is a possibility that the truth of all humanity having original sin can coexist with the truth that incest can be fatal biologically for humans.

You COULD have Adam & Eve as the first humans with an immortal soul, not the first humans. The sons and daughters of A&E could have married into the pre-existing community into which they were already born. All of those offspring would still be decendants of A&E, they would all have immortal souls, and they would all have original sin. And so it would go until the decendants of Adam and Eve were a very vast and broad people with plenty of genetic diversity.

Then, something catastrophic would happen that would come along and wipe out all of humanity except for a few. And those few would happen to come from the lineage of A&E. Interestingly, just such a catastrophic event happens with the flood.

I also seem to recall that recently geneticists have found that the entire human race has a strangely narrow genepool. Like it came from just two people.

Questions:

Did Neanderthals have immortal souls? How about Cromagnon?

I believe all of these were hominids, but not homo sapiens, and they all have records of them observing burial practices. Something to keep in mind also is that paleontologists definition of species is not the same as a biologists definition of species. In biology the two creatures must be able to mate and produce viable offspring in order to be considered the same species. Obviously paleontologists do not have the luxury of applying that test to extinct animals, so paleontologists have to draw the lines at appearances.

It is plain to see that on the earth right now there are creatures that are very similar which are entirely different species by the biologist definition. But if those two were found by a paleontologist they may very well be considered the same species (rabbits and hares for example). On the other hand there can be variations within the same species that could cause a paleontologist to classify them separately (Europeans and Pygmies).

So it might be very difficult, or impossible to tell the amount of interbreeding going on with early hominids.

Keep in mind Genesis does mention something about the Sons of God taking wives from the sons of men. Prior to the flood of course.

 

[Mike_O]

steveandersen:

As I mentioned above, my objection to incest was that it was against natural law and not just Mosaic Law.

We are speaking of PRIMEVAL time, here. There was no Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith to define and explicate natural law for these people, not even the rudiments of the Deutoronomic and Mosaic laws and convenants. This is the very, very beginning of the human race. Eve was formed from Adam’s rib. That seems some higher degree of incest–not just having relations with a sibling, but having them with part of yourself!

Yet God told them: “Be fruitful and multiply.” Granted, this was pre-Fall, but observe the timing of the institution of the laws. If you insist on the natural law route, I’ll ask you this: How else could the human race have been propagated? Let’s designate the non-souled hominids theory for what it is: BESTIALITY. Beasts were dismissed in Genesis 2 as siutable mates for man.

 

[steveandersen]

Mike O:

We are speaking of PRIMEVAL time, here. There was no Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith to define and explicate natural law for these people, not even the rudiments of the Deutoronomic and Mosaic laws and convenants. This is the very, very beginning of the human race.

I was under the impression that natural law wasn’t relative to time or place.
Mike O:

Eve was formed from Adam’s rib. That seems some higher degree of incest–not just having relations with a sibling, but having them with part of yourself!

Yes, it is beautiful imagery. One flesh
But it is genetically unsupportable
Mike O:

Yet God told them: “Be fruitful and multiply.” Granted, this was pre-Fall, but observe the timing of the institution of the laws. If you insist on the natural law route, I’ll ask you this: How else could the human race have been propagated?

That’s what we’ve been taking about.
Mike O:

Let’s designate the non-souled hominids theory for what it is: BESTIALITY. Beasts were dismissed in Genesis 2 as siutable mates for man.

As I said above how can something that is genetically human be a different species?

 

[littlesheep]

Physical death is a natural part of life. All things that are not plants have to eat other things to live and even for plants dead creatures provide nutrients in the soil.
Before the Fall? Is death a “good thing” or a “bad thing”?

How could God make anything that wasn’t “very good”

Exactly My point. How could He? See He did not make things to die. He made things to live. Sin causes things to die there was no sin before the fall.

So obviously things died before humans came around.

See it is not so obvious to me.

If there was no death before the fall, then what does survival of the fittest have to do with the question Who did Cain marry? Seems kinda obvious to me. Must have been his sister, or his niece or his grand niece, or cousin, or cousin twice removed.

 

[Philomena]

Black Jaque:

Keep in mind Genesis does mention something about the Sons of God taking wives from the sons of men. Prior to the flood of course.

Where??

 

[littlesheep]

Was Adam “son of god” or was Cain ?

Was Cain “son of man” or was Adam?

Gen 6: 1-3 Now it came about, when men began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them, 2that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose. 3Then the LORD said, “(My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh; nevertheless his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.”

Wonder how many years after Cain and his clan this happened?
Read it the easy way why make such a big deal of this.
Sons of God = Adams and Seths descendants
Daughters of men = Cains descendants
What is so hard about that?.

 

[jdnation]

steveandersen:

The fact that the two stories don’t necessarily match just highlights the point that the order and mechanism of Creation is unimportant to the story.

Actually both Genesis 1 and 2 can be harmonized. Genesis 1 looks at creation from God’s perspective overall from beginning to end. Genesis 2 begins closely with more detail on the day God created man and gives the story from man’s perspective. It does mention that God formed the animals out of the ground, but that isn’t to say that animals were created after man. God raised them so Adam could assign each a name. The animals were already created before Adam. Of course, it would be impractical for Adam to go over the whole earth and find and anme each animal. Thus God again raised each animal out of the ground (beast and fowl, except for the cattle who must’ve already been there in Eden) in the location where Adam was so he could go around and name them.

tektonics.org/jedp/creationtwo.html

 

[jdnation]

Issues on incest and the genetic problem were addressed in the AIG Link:

**God’s laws **

Many people immediately reject the conclusion that Adam and Eve’s sons and daughters married each other by appealing to the law against brother-sister intermarriage. Some say that you cannot marry your relation. Actually, if you don’t marry your relation, you don’t marry a human! A wife is related to her husband even before they marry because all people are descendants of Adam and Eve—all are of ‘one blood.’ The law forbidding marriage between close relatives was not given until the time of Moses (Leviticus 18–20). Provided marriage was one man to one woman for life (based on Genesis 1 and 2), there was no disobedience to God’s law originally when close relatives (even brothers and sisters) married each other.

Remember that Abraham married his half-sister (Genesis 20:12). God blessed this union to produce the Hebrew people through Isaac and Jacob. It was not until some 400 years later that God gave Moses laws that forbade such marriages.

 

[jdnation]

**Biological deformities **

Today, brothers and sisters (and half-brothers and half-sisters, etc.) are not permitted by law to marry because their children have an unacceptably high risk of being deformed. The more closely the parents are related, the more likely it is that any offspring will be deformed.

There is a very sound genetic reason for such laws that is easy to understand. Every person has two sets of genes that specify how a person is put together and functions. Each person inherits one gene of each pair from each parent. Unfortunately, genes today contain many mistakes (because of sin and the Curse), and these mistakes show up in a variety of ways. For instance, some people let their hair grow over their ears to hide the fact that one ear is lower than the other—or perhaps someone’s nose is not quite in the middle of his or her face, or someone’s jaw is a little out of shape—and so on. Let’s face it, the main reason we call each other normal is because of our common agreement to do so!

The more distantly related parents are, the more likely it is that they will have different mistakes in their genes. Children, inheriting one set of genes from each parent, are likely to end up with pairs of genes containing a maximum of one bad gene in each pair. The good gene tends to override the bad so that a deformity (a serious one, anyway) does not occur. Instead of having totally deformed ears, for instance, a person may only have crooked ones! (Overall, though, the human race is slowly degenerating as mistakes accumulate, generation after generation.)

However, the more closely related two people are, the more likely it is that they will have similar mistakes in their genes, since these have been inherited from the same parents. Therefore, a brother and a sister are more likely to have similar mistakes in their genes. A child of a union between such siblings could inherit the same bad gene on the same gene pair from both, resulting in two bad copies of the gene and serious defects.

However, Adam and Eve did not have accumulated genetic mistakes. When the first two people were created, they were physically perfect. Everything God made was ‘very good’ (Genesis 1:31), so their genes were perfect—no mistakes! But, when sin entered the world (because of Adam—Genesis 3:6ff, Romans 5:12), God cursed the world so that the perfect creation then began to degenerate, that is, suffer death and decay (Romans 8:22). Over thousands of years, this degeneration has produced all sorts of genetic mistakes in living things.

Cain was in the first generation of children ever born. He (as well as his brothers and sisters) would have received virtually no imperfect genes from Adam or Eve, since the effects of sin and the Curse would have been minimal to start with (it takes time for these copying errors to accumulate). In that situation, brother and sister could have married with God’s approval, without any potential to produce deformed offspring.

By the time of Moses (a few thousand years later), degenerative mistakes would have built up in the human race to such an extent that it was necessary for God to forbid brother-sister (and close relative) marriage (Leviticus 18–20).12 (Also, there were plenty of people on the Earth by now, and there was no reason for close relations to marry.)

answersingenesis.org/home/area/tools/cains_wife.asp

 

[Mike_O]

steveandersen:

I was under the impression that natural law wasn’t relative to time or place.

This should not be a matter of natural law; presumably, relations between even brothers and sisters are fruitful, whereas, e.g., homosexual acts are not.

Yes, it is beautiful imagery. One flesh
But it is genetically unsupportable

In what way do you reconcile the passage with scientific knowledge of genetics?

As I said above how can something that is genetically human be a different species?

Easily. The very notion of “human” implies a human soul. Genes are irrelevant. We share an enormous percentage of our genes with a certain type of chimpanzee, for instance. But no animal has a human soul. If you subscribe to the ensoulment theory, then the pre-ensouled hominids, regardless of their genetic makeup, were not human. They lacked a human soul.

Therefore, the ensouled hominids–humans–having relations with unsouled hominids–animals–is indeed bestiality.

 

[msproule]

Sorry, but I have not been following this thread all the way through. For what it’s worth, I posted this in the parallel thread:

Polygenism was explicitly condemned in Humani Generis (paragraph 37). It is part of the Modernism heresy, is it not?

 

[steveandersen]

littlesheep:

Before the Fall? Is death a “good thing” or a “bad thing”?

Death is a thing. It’s neither good or bad, it is a part of the natural workings of Creation.
A chicken died so I could have dinner last night
Before that many insects and corn plants were eaten by the chicken
And I don’t really want to know what the insect ate before the chicken got to them but you get the picture.

littlesheep:

Exactly My point. How could He? See He did not make things to die. He made things to live. …

But death is a part of life

littlesheep:

See it is not so obvious to me.

I’m not sure what to say to that. As I pointed out we have lots of evidence of dead things from the past. The plastics in the computers we’re typing on and the electricity to power them are made from dead things.

And, considering the old chestnut “you are what you eat” so are we

littlesheep:

If there was no death before the fall, then what does survival of the fittest have to do with the question Who did Cain marry? Seems kinda obvious to me. Must have been his sister, or his niece or his grand niece, or cousin, or cousin twice removed.

Well, besides the difficulty that incest is against natural law; we have a record of things dying before there were humans, a record of teh evolution of humans, no evidence of a genetic bottleneck, and we know that faith and reason can’t contradict
Ergo there may be another explanation

 

[steveandersen]

Mike O:

We are speaking of PRIMEVAL time, here. There was no Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith to define and explicate natural law for these people, not even the rudiments of the Deutoronomic and Mosaic laws and convenants. …

So are you suggesting that Abel’s murder wasn’t a sin because the laws hadn’t been written yet?

 

[steveandersen]

msproule:

Sorry, but I have not been following this thread all the way through. For what it’s worth, I posted this in the parallel thread:

Polygenism was explicitly condemned in Humani Generis (paragraph 37). It is part of the Modernism heresy, is it not?

Yes, but we were discussing variations on monogenism.

it’s really interesting

 

[Mike_O]

steveandersen:

So are you suggesting that Abel’s murder wasn’t a sin because the laws hadn’t been written yet?

My first question remains unanswered: The Church has never taught otherwise about this copulation with animals business.

If not by incest, how do you propose that the human race propagate itself and where is the evidence for your theory?

 

[steveandersen]

Mike O:

My first question remains unanswered: The Church has never taught otherwise about this copulation with animals business.

That is right. She has not taught any details about when souls were granted or what is the difference between a human with an eternal soul and one with a regular old soul like the rest of Creation.
Mike O:

If not by incest, how do you propose that the human race propagate itself and where is the evidence for your theory?

Our museums and laboratories are full of evidence for my theory

Since we cannot measure a soul we do not know when exactly humans got them
We do however have an unbroken line of human evolution which places the most recent common ancestors in Africa at around 150,000 YA +/- 50,000 years

Since the one definitive thing the Church has taught about this is monogenism then that could very well be the time and the place.

 

[buffalo]

Black Jaque:

With all due respects I think Steve Anderson has a point.

It would help if we would make a distinction between an immortal soul and a mortal soul. Humans are not unique in that they have soul, all living things have a soul. What makes humans unique is their immortal soul.

Well since a soul is invisible. It may very well be that an immortal soul is even more difficult to distinguish. And especially so in a fossil record.

Now the reason behind the Church’s insistence that all humanity comes from Adam and Eve is because there is NO HUMAN on earth today that does not have original sin.

But Steve is merely saying that there is a possibility that the truth of all humanity having original sin can coexist with the truth that incest can be fatal biologically for humans.

You COULD have Adam & Eve as the first humans with an immortal soul, not the first humans. The sons and daughters of A&E could have married into the pre-existing community into which they were already born. All of those offspring would still be decendants of A&E, they would all have immortal souls, and they would all have original sin. And so it would go until the decendants of Adam and Eve were a very vast and broad people with plenty of genetic diversity.

Then, something catastrophic would happen that would come along and wipe out all of humanity except for a few. And those few would happen to come from the lineage of A&E. Interestingly, just such a catastrophic event happens with the flood.

I also seem to recall that recently geneticists have found that the entire human race has a strangely narrow genepool. Like it came from just two people.

Questions:

Did Neanderthals have immortal souls? How about Cromagnon?

I believe all of these were hominids, but not homo sapiens, and they all have records of them observing burial practices. Something to keep in mind also is that paleontologists definition of species is not the same as a biologists definition of species. In biology the two creatures must be able to mate and produce viable offspring in order to be considered the same species. Obviously paleontologists do not have the luxury of applying that test to extinct animals, so paleontologists have to draw the lines at appearances.

It is plain to see that on the earth right now there are creatures that are very similar which are entirely different species by the biologist definition. But if those two were found by a paleontologist they may very well be considered the same species (rabbits and hares for example). On the other hand there can be variations within the same species that could cause a paleontologist to classify them separately (Europeans and Pygmies).

So it might be very difficult, or impossible to tell the amount of interbreeding going on with early hominids.

Keep in mind Genesis does mention something about the Sons of God taking wives from the sons of men. Prior to the flood of course.

Perhaps the early inbreeding of genetically superior humans has led to where we are now - more genetic defects.

 

[Black_Jaque]

Or perhaps the genetic defects are a result of thousands of years of mutations, and have nothing to do with how flawed or perfect the genetic stock was back then?

I recall that we have a 10% chance of passing on a gene that neither of our parents had.

No one really knows what is meant by sons of God and daughters of men. The Church leaves room for various interpretations.

 

[Mike_O]

steveandersen:

That is right. She has not taught any details about when souls were granted or what is the difference between a human with an eternal soul and one with a regular old soul like the rest of Creation.

The difference between a human soul and a “normal” soul is this; a human being has a human soul and a non-human does not.

This is not so hard. Advancing the non-souled hominids theory is tantamount to polygenism. Human beings are descended from human beings, not from human-animal pairs. You can be sure that this bestiality issue would have been mentioned in Genesis. But it isn’t. Commentaries and translations I have seen are in agreement; while incest is immoral, the law had not been established yet, and so God dispensed with such relations in the beginning, there being no other way to propagate the human race.

Our museums and laboratories are full of evidence for my theory

Since we cannot measure a soul we do not know when exactly humans got them
We do however have an unbroken line of human evolution which places the most recent common ancestors in Africa at around 150,000 YA +/- 50,000 years

Since the one definitive thing the Church has taught about this is monogenism then that could very well be the time and the place.

I would be careful to tout evolution so highly. There are certain parts of the theory–or, more broadly, the overall Darwinian system–that do not and will never mesh with faithful Catholicism. People seem to elevate the whole of evolutionary theory to a validity on par with gravity or other natural laws. It should not be that way. There are unanswered questions, and a number of them.

Neither, I think, should someone espouse “Young Earth” 6 day creationism. But moving to either extreme does not seem to be in the spirit of the Church’s teaching, and it is understandable why this has perhaps not been fully revealed as of yet. The Holy Spirit does not make mistakes, but men can when not speaking under the Spirit’s guidance, and so science needs to reveal more before real conclusions can be drawn.

I don’t see how the existence of museums or ancient primate skulls lends any credence to your theory that early humans mated with animals. The only useful tidbits seemingly offered by the former are dates–with disputed techniques for dating–and certain possible genetic links. None of this says anything about a soul.