Hi Antoine,
Thank you for your detailed response. I’d like to address your key points, beginning with Pope Paul VI’s Credo of the People of God (1968). You commented:
Section 16 refers to the Fall of Adam, in whom all have sinned. But what does “all” refer to? According to you, it means all of humanity after the first sin. But what the Credo says is that the Fall “caused human nature, common to all men, to fall to a state in which it bears the consequences of that offense, and which is not the state in which it was at first in our first parents…” The clear implication is that “all” refers to “all men,” and that “our first parents” refers to Adam (and Eve). Your proposed reading is surely one which Pope Paul VI, when writing the Credo, never even considered.
When interpreting Church documents (or any other documents), I tend to favor an “originalist” approach. What they mean is what the original authors intended them to mean.
When I pointed out that The Catechism of the Catholic Church speaks of there having been a “first man,” and ascribes the Fall to “our first parents, Adam and Eve,” you replied:
First, the International Theological Commission has no teaching authority: it’s a group of theologians (not bishops) whose job it is to advise the CDF on current doctrinal questions. Second, the document you link to was composed over the period 2000-2002, or in other words, about eight to ten years after the Catechism of the Catholic Church came out. Third, the document you quote from seems to contradict what you’re claiming in paragraph 52, where it quotes from the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes:
For Adam, the first man, was a type of him who was to come, Christ the Lord. Christ the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling.
Your position, in the passage I quoted above, is that Adam is the first fallen man, who may have lived generations after the first man. Curiously, this contradicts what you write in your article, where you assign the name “Adam” to the first human being: “even if Humanity is descended from a single couple (Adam and Eve), generations may have passed before the appearance of sin” (p. 261). But let that pass. Your key point, I take it, is that the Fall may have occurred generations after the appearance of the first human beings.
You then put forward the following argument in support of your claim:
The passages you cite from Aquinas merely show that even in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve would still have had sexual intercourse and would still have had children. Nobody today disputes that, least of all myself.
Not for a moment would I maintain that Adam and Eve were predestined to fall. On the contrary: they could have rejected Satan’s temptation. When I wrote that “Neither the Credo nor the Catechism allows for this possibility,” I was referring to the possibility, after the fact, of the Fall (an event which we now know to have taken place in our past) having actually occurred several generations subsequent to Adam. I maintain that Church documents rule this possibility out. I was not discussing the possibility, prior to their fateful choice, of Adam and Eve deciding to do the right thing and choose God.
You also argue that Christ’s words in Scripture support your position:
This, I have to say, is a novel interpretation. In these verses, Jesus says nothing about “a little population,” let alone a registry of marriages. He cites Genesis 1:26-27 (“at the beginning of creation God ‘made them male and female.’”) and Genesis 2:24 (“‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’”), in order to illustrate his point that “what God has joined together, let no one separate.” I see nothing here to support the view that humanity is descended from a population rather than a couple.
I’d now like to address your remarks on the Council of Trent.
You are referring to the Nephilim, a race of giants who were declared in Genesis 6 to be the offspring of the “sons of God” and the “daughters of men.” You should be well aware that Dr. Daniel van Slyke, writing for the Dead Philosophers’ Society, discusses the Nephilim in an excellent article here, which I quoted from above when replying to @swamidass. Dr. Slyke points out that while there is no consensus of the Church Fathers on the subject, St. Augustine took the view that the “sons of God” were the descendants of Seth, while the “daughters of men” were Cain’s descendants. I might add that St. Thomas Aquinas was of the same view (S.T. I, q. 51, art. 3, reply to obj. 6). In fact, he even quotes from St. Augustine on the subject. Thus Augustine and Aquinas are both in agreement that this passage says nothing about “persons who biologically did not descend from Adam.”
Re biological reproduction: like you, I don’t hold that coition is required for the transmission of original sin. People conceived via IVF or (in the future) cloning will acquire it, too. The simplest and least problematic way to interpret the decree of Trent is as follows: any individual who is genetically descended from Adam is for that reason conceived in original sin, barring individuals (Christ and His mother Mary) who are specifically exempted by God’s decree.
I am glad to hear that you reject the view that sin spreads laterally from sinners to innocent persons. (I did not accuse you of holding this view, however; as I stated above, it was Ratzinger’s view.) I’d also like to apologize for not discussing Romans 11:32 earlier, so I’ll address it now.
According to Romans 11:32 it is not suitable for the sake of Redemption that people who need Redemption coexist with people who don’t need it; therefore after the first sin only people in need of Redemption can dwell on earth and, to ensure this, God creates any new person in the state of original sin; this happens as well for human persons God creates by replacing the animal soul of an adult Homo sapiens individual with a human spiritual soul, as for those He creates in concomitance with fertilization after coition. (pp. 289-290)
Look, I have no philosophical objection to the notion you propose. I readily concede that it would be rather messy having individuals who were free from Original Sin co-existing with individuals who were suffering from it, on this Earth. (Christ and his mother Mary are of course privileged exceptions.) But the question we are discussing here is whether this unilateral decision of God, after the Fall, can be described as “transmission by propagation,” even when it relates to individuals not descended from Adam. And I would say it can’t: the rules of English and/or Latin usage simply don’t allow for that. Nor does the decree of Trent require such a creative interpretation, as I’ve shown.
I’m not sure what you’re referring to, here. Could you please elaborate?
I’d like to conclude this post by making a general observation. Your original article seems to have been written as a reaction to Dawkins’ argument (which he lifted from Darwin’s Descent of Man) that if we could go backwards from present-day humans to the common ancestor of humans and chimps, we’d find a smooth and seamless transition, with each species grading imperceptibly into the next one. To counteract that argument, you propose that the first appearance of true, rational human beings coincides with a sudden cultural break (the dawn of Neolithic civilization), rather than a biological break. I have two comments to make in response.
First, we don’t know that the evolution of species is as smooth as Dawkins claims. Remember: he’s a self-described gradualist. Nothing in the fossil record excludes the possibility of a handful of beneficial mutations occurring at some specific point in the past, rendering the human brain fit for a rational soul. And if such an event occurred, it’s unlikely that geneticists would be able to pick it up, either.
Second, the cultural markers you point to didn’t happen overnight, either. For instance, it now appears that trial plant cultivation occurred as early as 23,000 years ago - some 11,000 years prior to the supposed “dawn of agriculture” in the Middle East, some 12,000 years ago. If you’re looking for a sharp, discrete cultural event, the ones you need to look for are the dawn of language and the dawn of pair bonding (or marriage). Those are likely to have occurred hundreds of thousands of years ago. And if I’m right, they only occurred because God Himself taught the first rational humans to talk. (But that’s another story.) Cheers.