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

Faith & Science Conversation
1044

Thanks Klax for contributing!

Scientifically speaking a spirit is an entity existing outside space and time, and therefore can be considered to have personal identity.

Consider you yourself: you claim to be the same ‘Klax’ when you are reading my reply today, as yesterday when you wrote your comment; to remain the owner of your property rights, credit card, and passport over years.

Certain features of yours change in time but your personal identity remains conserved:

You are an embodied spirit, a human person.

1045

Albert, with this comment you bring to light something that in my opinion is key for our debate.

Genesis 9:3-6 establishes a sharp distinction between the dignity of humans and that of animals, and proclaims the prohibition of murder because “God made humans in the image of God”.

This is supposed to be a universal commandment for the whole humankind and each single human being (as the sign of the Rainbow symbolizes) independently of someone knows or not the Old and New Testament.

Therefore, Genesis is telling us that each time God creates a new human person God engraves this commandment in her heart, exactly the same way as he did with Noah and his family. In other words, Genesis is revealing us, that there is a universal revelation of the principle enounced in Genesis 9:3-6, which happens everywhere and every time someone comes to existence, no matter whether or not the community within she/he is born reads the Bible.

Genesis 9:3-6 expresses an archetype of moral knowledge and law engraved in the collective unconscious of humanity, which is shared among all human persons.

Notice that Adam and Eve themselves are supposed to have acknowledged accountability to God “without help from the Old or New Testament”!

Good question!

I dare to ask on my turn:

When precisely did God establish the principle of Genesis 9:3-6 (the foundation of moral and law) and engraved it in human hearts for the first time in the evolutionary history?

Since we are assuming this principle holds for “aboriginal Americans” (~5,000 yrs. old) we are led to the following answer:

At a time when the difference between humans and great apes was as sharp as it was between “aboriginal Americans” and great apes.

If we rely on the expertise of recognized paleoarcheologists and computational geneticists, this time seems to be: about 15,000 yrs ago.

Our Cro Magnon ancestors who existed at this time, were endowed with sense of accountability to God, the same way as we are, and Adam and Eve were.

Cro Magnon ancestors before this time were as less endowed with such sense of accountability as their contemporaries Neanderthals were, or great apes today are.

I would be thankful for References advocating this view. I will be pleased to read them and discuss the issue more accurately.

1046

Hi Antoine, thanks, missed this!

Spirit isn’t spoken of scientifically anywhere I can find, or even philosophically although essence is one of its synonyms and that defines an entity or substance.

And I don’t follow the ‘therefore’.

:slight_smile:

I generically have human nature, essence; my essence is [in the spirit of] human. I’m not aware of having, being anything else.

1047

Hi Antoine

In the strictest sense, I cannot cite a reference to a scientific journal for the time the species, Homo, entered an accountability relationship with the Creator, for that lies outside the scope of science and in the realm of theology. The scientific works I have cited DO offer evidence for the latest date when at least some Homo sapiens surely meet our current standards of humanity, and that is more like + 30M Yrs ago rather than 15M. In two of Ian Tattersall’s books, “Becoming Human” and “Masters of the Planet” there are statements that meet these criteria as does Simon Conway Morris’ “Life Solution:” On the broad time scale used by paleontologists, some are comfortable using Jared Diamond’s term for the “advanced primate” -to- “humankind” transition as a Great Leap Forward.

I take it that you are NOT comfortable with this view (??)
Al Leo

1048

In my view “the time the first anatomically modern humans entered an accountability relationship with the Creator” can be ascertained by reading Genesis in the light of the scientific data :

  1. The founding principle of moral and law enounced in Genesis 9:3-6 requires that the difference between humans and non-human animals is as sharp as it is today.

  2. We are taught by science that such a sharp difference becomes established not earlier than 15,000 years ago.

  3. So, we are led to conclude that the time when God creates humans in God’s image, and therefore they enter an accountability relationship with the Creator and are called to respect the principle of Genesis 9:3-6, lies after 15,000 years ago.

  4. Since accountability relationship is clearly documented by the first pieces of cuneiform around 3,200 years ago, we can safely state that the fist accountable humans in the image of God are created not later than 3,200 years ago.

As argued above, the available scientific evidence leads us to conclude that “the standards of humanity” as defined in Genesis 9:3-6 are not met before 15,000 years ago.

Could you please tell us which particular statements in these books do you think meet the criteria of Genesis 9:3-6?

Without detailed quotations it is difficult to see whether or not the “criteria” you are referring to can be considered those of Genesis 9:3-6.

1049

@AntoineSuarez, If you are interested, Gregory, bishop of Nyssan, gives a detailed discussion of ‘created in the image’ and also the brutish attributes of mankind, in the work “On the making of man”. The point that I take from this work is a blurred distinction between man made for salvation, and the natural state of the world. Gregory is more interested in the attributes of mankind, which include those that interest evolutionists, and the distinct spiritual attributes of mankind, which are theologically interesting.

He also sees Gen 1 as dealing with all of mankind, and then the subsequent creation of A&E.

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1050

We are taught by quantum physics:

Not all what matters for physical phenomena is contained in space-time.

What comes from outside space-time originates from some spiritual (invisible, non-material) principle.

Consequently, what is visible comes into being through the invisible (spiritual).

When you celebrate birthday, you celebrate ‘someone’, who is the same ‘someone’, who was born from your mother some decades ago.

This ‘someone’ is what I call embodied spirit .

1051

Where does QM teach that?

I am continuous with all my former 0.2s selves, sure.

1052

Many thanks for the Reference to this great Greek Father of the Church. The writing of St. Gregory of Nyssa is really quite inspiring.

Yes, Gregory has the great intuition that “all humanity is included in the first creation”, all mankind is created in the image of God. I think his description contains already the idea that creation aims to produce humanity, which is called to participate to divine life by means of the incarnation of God. From this perspective evolution appears as preparation of the incarnation and part of the process to build the cosmic body of Christ (according to “the great vision of Teilhard de Chardin”, as Pope Benedict XVI refers to).

I find intriguing Gregory’s claim that before the fall humans would not have reproduced biologically by means of marriage but the multiplication of human race would mysteriously have occurred like the multiplication of angels by God.

On the one hand I reject the hypothesis that marriage was intended only for the time after the fall. On the other hand, I endorse the idea that even after the fall God has created humans the same way as he created Adam. These humans, like Adam, would be “without father or mother, without genealogy”, that is, they would be “sons of God”. This type of creation is referred to in Genesis 6:2-4, and happened as well before Noah’s flood as at the end of this catastrophic event.

1053

Hi Antoine,

From memory, I think the multiplication as angels refers to Adam and Eve and the garden of Eden only, and Gregory is asking, why than male and female, if when in the garden they were like the angels? He thinks that God foreknew that Adam would transgress and be evicted into the world, and that procreation by A&E would be required.

I find his discussion of human attributes informative, as he includes many that are compatible with the material/carnal/animalistic that we observe in humanity today, and also those that are consistent with the image of God imparted on humanity.

1054

You can have a look to this paper: [1905.06131] Defining what is Quantum: Not all what matters for physical phenomena is contained in space-time.

Here you find references to results confirming that:

Not all what matters for physical phenomena is contained in space-time.

Excellent!

The point is that the “continuous” you refer to cannot be material since space-time itself is not continuous but discrete, i.e.: quantized or pixelated.

Actually the big achievement of Sigmund Freud was to discover the “subconscious continuous” underpinning the conscious ‘I’. Unfortunately, he was still very much influenced by deterministic science and reduced the “subconscious continuous” to a material substrate. So Freud overlooked “the image of God” in us, precisely that what allows you “to be continuous with all your former 0.2s selves”.

1055

Definitely!
Gregory clearly distinguishes between the state of humanity before the first transgression and thereafter. Before transgression the attributes “consistent with the image of God” overpowered the “material/carnal/animalistic” ones coming from evolution. After transgression the latter took overhand over the former, and humanity entered the state of “need of Redemption”.

1056

@AntoineSuarez

Genesis 9 MAINTAINS the image of God categorization.

1057

Thanks George for this remark.

Yes, Genesis 9:3-6 confirms that even after transgression humanity is in the image of God.

I think Gregory of Nissa also advocates this view while stating that God “created all mankind in the image of God” and “in the Divine foreknowledge and power all humanity is included in the first creation”.

The reason is that all humanity is called to become one body in Christ united by the bound of love, according to Galatians 3:28.

Interestingly, Genesis 9:3-6 “maintains the image of God categorization” as the reason for the explicit universal prohibition of murder. Thereby Genesis 9 acknowledges that after the first transgression mankind remains in a state where love is strongly threatened by evolutionary animalistic-selfish tendencies. I think this is also the view of Irenaeus, Gregory, and all the Greek Fathers.

1058

I would like to distinguish two claims in the teaching of Gregory:

  1. God can multiply humans as he multiplied angels.

  2. This multiplication as angels was intended only for “the garden of Eden”, that is the stage before transgression, where there was no marriage.

According to me Gregory is right regarding claim 1, but not regarding claim 2. Indeed claim 2 clearly conflicts with the teaching of Jesus Christ in Matthew 19:4-6:

“Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

1059

I think you have misunderstood - Gregory is saying IF A&E ate of the tree of life they would live eternally and would not need to procreate through biological means - God however knew they would transgress and created them to procreate outside the garden. So they were created male and female and had to live in the world and die there.

1060

I agree that Gregory is saying that “IF A&E ate of the tree of life they would live eternally”, but he is also saying that:

if Adam and Eve had not sinned, humanity should not have multiplied through marriage. However, humanity would NOT have remained in the pair of the first-formed (Adam and Eve) because the increase of the human race would have taken place as the increase of the angelic race takes place.

(See “On the making of man”, ch. XVI, 1-2)

My view is that humans would have multiplied through marriage before their transgression as they did afterward. However, after the first sin till the end of the Flood, God also created humans the same way as He created Adam. And this can be compared to the way God multiplied angels. It is the whole episode of the “sons of God and the Nephilim” in Genesis 6:2-4.

1061

I think we agree on a number of points. Gregory is clear that Gen 1 refers to the human race created with the image divine, and A&E are a particular couple created to commune with God in a sacred place, After the transgression, A&E were placed in the world amongst the rest of humanity and Eve experienced the pain of giving birth. I read the rest as tracing a genealogy from Adam onward, so the sons of God mean to me those born from A&E (who were created by God, so the son and daughter of God).

Gregory discusses the attributes of mankind in detail and one could infer from these that mankind without grace is more or less a brute, but the image imprinted imparts an intelligence and spirit that enables spiritual attributes.

1062

In this I fully agree with you.

In Genesis 6:1-2 we read:

When human beings began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose.

Here “daughters of humans” clearly means women born from Adam and Eve.

Undoubtedly, as you claim, Adam and Eve were created immediately by God, i.e.: without intervening the procreation will of human parents. Accordingly, Adam ought to be called “son of God”, as it is the case in Luke 3:38.

Therefore it is fitting to assume that “the sons of God” in Genesis 6: 2-4 refer to humans created the same way as Adam was created, that is, the same way as angels were created.

As said, this assumption is in agreement with Gregory’s claim that in the beginning humans could have multiplied like angels did, but in disagreement with him regarding when this kind of multiplication happened.

1063

I apologize for insisting:

Evolutionary science itself shows that it is biologically impossible to determine when the species modern human begins with anything other than arbitrary criteria. The beginning of “human nature” cannot be established through a biological-evolutionary story alone, but requires invoking some influence that comes from elsewhere.

Such is the intervention of God referred to in Genesis 9:3-6, which states that “God has made humankind in the image of God” and therefore each human is accountable for the life of another human but is allowed to use animals for food.

Evolution laid the groundwork for this intervention by producing a clear anatomic difference between humans and animals through elimination of a hug number of intermediate varieties between humans and chimps.

This difference is the same we observe today.

So when we speak about human nature today we are in fact taking the moment referred to in Genesis 9:3-6 as definition of such nature .