A.Suarez's Treatment on a Pope's Formulation for Original Sin's Transmission!

[AntoineSuarez]

@GJDS

Antoine, you consider all humans instead of Adam and Eve, and Nature being essentially the product of evolution - please correct my impression if it is mistaken.

I clarify with pleasure, as “I have the impression” that “your impression [of my outlook] is mistaken”.

My view can be summarized in the following points:

1. God is love, and his love is so great that he decided to create non-divine personal beings, so that they may share in his divine love and have eternal life and bliss. Thus, God created the different orders of angels and humankind: the angels as pure spiritual persons, and humans as corporal persons or incarnate spirits.

2. In order humans can entirely become divinized, it is necessary that the whole human person, the human flesh included, becomes God. But this is only possible if beforehand God becomes flesh.

3. Accordingly, the aim of the whole corporal creation (the visible physical reality and the realm of life) is to bring about humankind and the flesh God prepares for His Son.

4. To create humankind and prepare a body for His Son, God considered evolution a highly convenient resource.

5. Indeed, God let things evolve till the difference between Sapiens and other species was sharp enough for each human being to can unequivocally distinguish which creature is human and which is not, as we presently can do. Such difference became as sharp as it is today by the end of the Pleistocene, about 12,000 BP, as we are taught by this article. (Notice that this article can properly be said to be a piece of “evolutionary science” as it is more than “mere evolutionary biology”).

6. The key tenet of my explanation is this:
   At some moment after 12,000 BP, God transformed Sapiens into “humankind in the image of God”.
   This is the transformation referred to in Genesis 9:3-6 and has three important implications:
   a) Before this moment Sapiens creatures were not “in the image of God”, notwithstanding their evolved intellectual skills. They may even have shared some form of primitive animistic religiosity, but were not ordered and called by God to eternal life.
   b) Since this moment each Sapiens creature is a human being called to have eternal life, endowed with moral responsibility and accountable toward God.
   c) The universal prohibition of homicide in Genesis 9:3-6 is accompanied by the permission to humans of using animals for food. This requires that humans can unequivocally distinguish between humans and animals: Evolution is the resource God used to bring this distinction about, namely by eliminating all the intermediate varieties between us and our nearest relatives (Chimps and Bonobos).

7. I would like to stress that the preceding explanation fits well to both:

• Robin Dunbar’s “evolutionary explanation of religion”, according to which before the Neolithic the Sapiens creatures shared animistic beliefs, so called “immersive forms of religiosity”. Such “animistic beliefs” can be considered “evolved animal religiosity”, the same way as one can speak of “evolved animal morality”, but were not yet the Doctrinal Biblical Religion, we consider to involve God’s Revelation.

• The teaching of Pope Pius XII in Humani generis, as quoted in the article you GJDS referred to, supporting that God can create “intellectual beings without ordering and calling them to the beatific vision.”

8. Clear and unambiguous signs of sense of moral and legal responsibility, as well as accountability relationship, appear with the emergence of writing at about 5,300 BP. And accordingly we can conclude that the Creation of humankind in the image of God as referred to in Genesis did happen later than 12,000 BP and not later than 5,300 BP, that is, it is concomitant with the dawn and subsequent explosion of civilizations.

9. A further important aspect of my explanation is that Genesis 9:3-6 can be considered a universal revelation God engraves in the heart of each human person coming into existence since this moment, i.e.: the moment of the re-creation of the world after the flood as it is today.
   On the one hand, this moment marks the moment at which Sapiens can be well defined. This means that the anatomical features or behavioral pattern defining Sapiens acquire meaning and distinctness only with relationship to the anatomical features and behavioral patterns of other species that are clearly different from that of Sapiens. You cannot define Sapiens looking at Sapiens alone, you need to have a sharp difference between Sapiens and the other animal species as we have today. As said, this difference becomes established at about 12,000 BP.
   On the other hand, the evolved primitive forms of “animistic religiosity” of hunter-gatherers can be considered sort of proto-religious stage in preparation of this universal revelation, and taken alone such proto-religions cannot be considered sign of the presence of human beings in the image of God, according to the divine Revelation in Genesis 9:3-6.

I think Christy has magnificently formulated the same idea of the preceding point 9 in the follwoing quotation:

@Christy

Just because the capacities for moral judgment, relationship, and religious inquiry and expression are evolved capacities, and religions are to some degree human constructs, that doesn’t “disprove” the idea that God revealed and reveals himself to humans. So Christians would claim that true religion is based on the true God’s self-revelation and intentional personal relationship and communication with humans. In that way, it can’t be entirely a human construct or a product of evolutionary development. It has input from outside the natural evolutionary system, so to speak. Science does not have the tools to investigate or describe divine revelation, since the supernatural is outside the realm science can investigate.

10. In Summary, I do NOT consider “all humans instead of Adam and Eve, and Nature being essentially the product of evolution”. I rather consider that humankind is the product of God’s love, and Nature and evolution are the means by which God creates human flesh and so prepares a body for his Son.
    In particular, my explanation highlights that evolutionary science (evolutionary biology, evolutionary anthropology, and evolutionary explanation of religion), Scripture, and the teaching of the Popes illuminate each other.

@GJDS

I cannot see where the fall fits with your outlook nor the sin of Adam within a place where he communed with God.

Adam was the first human being made in the image of God, and therefore ordered to unfold his love to God, and called to have eternal life and become like God by doing God’s will. To create Adam, God transformed a Sapiens creature into a human person endowed him with sense of responsibility and awareness of being accountable toward God.

God endowed Adam also with special gifts to kept him “from all corruption and evil”. In this state, Adam could master the Darwinian tendencies present in the Sapiens creature he was made from, so that “the flesh lusts against the spirit by the rebellion of the passions against reason could not occur.” So, Adam was within a place (paradise) where he communed with God, in the so called “primitive state of innocence or righteousness”.

However, after sin, Adam fall into a state “worse” than the pure animal state of Sapiens previous to paradise: The Darwinian tendencies merged with intelligence, and concupiscence took overhand, that is, “the urge to act selfishly no matter the cost to others”. This explains also why the universal revelation of Genesis 9:3-6 became little by little blurred, and horrible practices like human sacrifices and religious wars arose.

Genesis 9:3-6, and actually the whole Scripture (AT and NT), is the written formulation God inspired to make clear for all times and all people the content of the universal Revelation God engraves in the heart of each human person coming into existence.

If one keeps to the principle that humans have a special dignity, not shared by animals (or robots), it is crucial to restore again the universal revelation proclaimed in Genesis 9:3-6 as the foundation of morality, law, and religion, and enhance the belief that God made humankind in the image of God, by preparing a body for his Son (the Word) to become flesh.

Is it now clearer to you that the fall and Adam’s sin fit well with my outlook?

If not, which point of my explanation would you oppose?