I’m reading Word on Fire’s The New Apologetics, Defending the Faith in a Post Christian Era and one of the short chapters presented an apologetic for a historical Adam and Eve. The book is from a Catholic perspective and in this chapter Nicanor Austriaco (molecular biologist and Catholic priest) writes, “By all accounts, the Catechism appears to affirm the existence of an original couple from whom all of us are descended.” I think most Christians are of the same ilk in thinking that it makes better sense of Scripture and salvation history to accept a historical Adam and Eve, even if you see most of Genesis 1-11 in non-literal terms. While some may disagree with that, I am assuming that is true for the purposes of this discussion.
After providing a short argument for the fittingness of evolution and God, the author starts off noting a difficulty with accepting both evolution and a primordial couple. Namely that the ancestral population of humans never fell below 10,000 individuals. They spread from East Africa to the rest of the world around 70,000 years ago and we are all descended from them.
How can we reconcile this scientific consensus with the theological account of a unique beginning for our kind in an original human couple?
He proposed the following three steps:
His conclusion is modest:
Therefore, I claim that it is still reasonable to trace the origin of our kind to an original individual. He would have been the first anatomically modern human to have evolved the capacity for language that allowed him to think symbolically and abstractly. He would have been the first individual person belonging to Sapiens as a natural kind, living among a population of nonlinguistic individuals belonging to the biological species Homo sapiens. His name was Adam, and since we are all born with the capacity of language, we are all descended from him. Finally, it would have been fitting for God to have raised up another linguistic individual to be Adam’s mate. Her name was Eve. She was the mother of all those living today.
I personally think the best way to look at it is that Adam and Eve were the first couple that God spoke to directly on a personal level rather than just the generic “Go forth and multiply.”
My impulse has always been to take Adam and Eve as real, though the Garden stories themselves may be mythologized history as most of Genesis 1 - 11 is. The link to language is an interesting view I’ll have to ponder.
I take Adam and Eve as real, but this idea of a single couple being the origin of the human species just doesn’t agree with the evidence.
The consistent pattern of the Bible is God choosing individuals to communicate with to bring inspiration and change to all mankind. And so it makes sense to take Adam as the beginning of this pattern.
The fundamental problem with what the OP introduces and all these ways of making Adam and Eve our biological origin, is to overemphasize the importance of biology and the body, and thus to discount the importance and value of the human mind. It is hard for me to see any positive value in this. It frankly looks very useful in the transformation of Christianity into a tool power over others, reducing people to mere animals/bodies with little reason for them to think for themselves or to try being any more than that.
Furthermore, putting Adam and Eve at a point in history so long before human civilization is to take away all their historical significance. We know the species lived the same for millions of years before the beginning of human civilization (6 to 10 thousand years ago). And thus this is suggesting that Adam and Eve had no great impact on the species for many times the duration of human civilization.
Besides, the story in the text is much more consistent with an Adam and Eve 6 to 10 thousand years ago at the beginning of human civilization. It maximizes their significance and why would you trade that away just to reduce the importance of the human mind unless manipulating people was all you really need of Christianity anyway.
I very much agree with the critical importance of language for our humanity. And for a long time I was greatly tempted to believe that this began with Adam and Eve as a gift directly from God. However, this does not agree with the evidence which shows that language development was a slow process incrementally improved by evolution as well as social interaction, starting long before the homo sapiens species. I therefore concluded that the gift to Adam was wholly one of inspiration with critical ideas/ideals which brought the human mind to life. Thus we can still believe Adam and Eve are the beginning of humanity because humanity is more than just a biological species.
A big part of it was about how the evolution of language began non-verbally with gestures – something which chimps and bonobos can manage better than verbal language. And the evidence is this began 6 million years ago. Though this was greatly boosted 2 million years ago with bipedalism freeing the hands for sign language. Another interesting point is the development of verbal language freed up our hands a second time for a simultaneous (i.e. same time as speaking) use of hands for tools, weapons, and making things. And we can probably identify the beginning of our particular species around 100-200 thousand years ago with this advantage of verbal language.
The Wikipedia article on evolutionary linguistics is an interesting read. One of the things it makes clear is why memetics fell out of favor, which is a fundamental difference in development of language from evolutionary development. In short, there is no way to discount/exclude intelligent (human) design in/from language development. It also explains the general lack of evidence (so far) for the study of language evolution. This suggests I should change above claims to at most say that a sudden appearance of language is improbable. (though… I see some evidence of rapid changes in this area of research… so counting on a continuing lack of evidence is highly inadvisable)
In response to the good Catholic Priests conclusions…
It is almost impossible to Biblical reconcile the idea that there are two races of people…those from Adam and Eve and, another race of individuals outside the garden who were not also given the opportunity to recieve forgiveness for sin.
Whether we are willing to accept it or not, the Bible is absolutely specific about the consequences of Adam and Eves sin…that all creation was cursed by it (Genesis talks of physical consequences…its impossible to read that as only non physical).
Now the problem is, if dumbasses outside the garden are not included in the bible story, then salvation did not come to anyone prior to Christ who was not of the lineage of Adam and Eve because they are not included in the Bible story.
We cannot pretend that they are when the fact is, they are not. This tells us one of two things:
there were no others outside the garden and the bible seems to maintain that position right down to Christ’s own statements about it and also the Apostle Peter (both of whom describe literal reading of Genesis 1-11)
There were others, the bible is wrong, and God has no intention of offering salvation to hominids because they are too stupid to ask for and receive forgiveness!
The problem is, the entire account within the Bible does not support other civilisations outside the garden…it just doesnt. One cannot possibly go through more than 1500 years of writings from dozens of authors and not even one of them attests to the darwinian evolutionary claim there were hominids tens of thousands or even millions of years prior to Adam and Eve…its just not there.
Given the sheer number of prophets in the bible who received revelation from God directly about morality and the human condition, i find it absurd to accept that God didnt think to tell them about hominids who lived for tens of thousands or millions of years prior…that just does not make any sense.
Another issue is, if Adam and Eve were condemned and thrown out of the garden, and there were already failures out there where these two we sent…then the hominids were doomed with no hope of salvation…the argument could easily be made that these failures to which Adam and Eve were now grouped had happened numerous times before. Thats a pretty incompetent God that keeps cocking up creation all the time!
Oh theres one really big problem…if Adam and Eve are historical…the Noah is historical…if Noah is historical, then so is the global flood (the local flood claim isnt supportable theologically so that is a dead horse)
The question of Adam & Eve is still an open question, at least in my mind. We can approach that question by inspecting scientific data, what the text tells, and what would change if we would interpret A & E as mythical characters instead of real persons.
The scientific evidence suggests that if humanity had a common ancestor pair (genetical ancestors of all humans), that pair must have lived in the distant past, hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago.
The story includes details that give hints about other humans - no proof but questions like who did Cain fear and where did he get his wife. It is possible to imagine explanations that would not need other humans but how truthful are these explanations?
What would change if we interpret A & E as mythical characters, instead of being the original pair that are the ancestors of all humans?
A mythical interpretation would weaken the rationale of the teaching of ‘original sin’ as something that dooms even babies to hell (like in the teaching of the Roman-catholic church) or the teaching that all bad and corruption came on Earth because A & E took the forbidden fruit, literarily (like the supporters of YEC interpret).
For those that do not support these two interpretations, an interpretation that A & E were mythical characters in a story teaching about the relationship between the Creator and humans does not change the fundamental doctrines - we are judged and need forgiveness because of what we have done, not because of what A & E did.
I can’t think of any reason for assuming that the first mutation that allowed language capability - if there was such a thing - would have occurred in a male individual rather than a female. Nor is there any reason to think that if the first such individual was a male, they would have been given a similarly endowed female rather than the trait just spreading through the population naturally.
No reason has been given for assuming that the first mutation that allowed symbolic thinking occurred in the same individual as the first mutation that allowed language capability, or even that they occurred at the same time, or even that they both occurred in humans. Gorillas and chimpanzees have both shown capacity for symbolic thinking, in that they can use sign language.
Finally, even if there was a single mutation that could be considered the definite point where language became physically possible, the first person to possess that trait wouldn’t have been called Adam, for the simple reason that no-one else could have said it.
This is a ‘we call that “God”’ type argument, where some-one establishes the existence of some entity (such as the first cause) then arbitrarily declares that entity to be “God” - or in this case, “Adam”. It has all the signs of an ‘argument’ for which the proposer hasn’t even thought about checking for flaws before broadcasting. They should have invoked clause 12 of the evil overlord list:
“1. One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that they are able to spot will be corrected before implementation.”
Any attempt to take reality from the Garden Narrative is doomed to failure, and any scientist worth their salt can see that there is no scientific justification for only two progenators.
Thhere is no theologucal need for the garden to be anything more than metaphoric.
I think that is very uncharitable as you are approaching it from a completely different perspective (see below).
I find it irrelevant whether or not there is any known scientific (or other) reason that that first mutation occurred in a male. Neither do I think we should assign any moral or ontological value to whether or not this occurred in a male or female if it happened. Ancient audiences may have believed that the male came first and offered arguments from primacy, but it does not follow that such is the reason why God may have created in that fashion. Such is beyond our understanding.
The author is not trying to provide a scientific rationale for why a male developed that first. He does provide fittingness arguments for evolution but here the author is working with scriptural and scientific constraints and trying to find a way in which it’s still reasonable to affirm a first couple with some of the details as the Bible describes. Scripture clearly articulates the notion that Adam was formed first and Eve second. You can disagree with this, call it outdated or prescientific thinking. That is fine. But I am not sure the charge of “sexist garbage” is very useful. Is it also sexist garbage that Jesus was a man, chose 12 male disciples, called God father? Is it sexist garbage that God chose Abraham to be the father of a great nation and didn’t instead focus on Sarah as the mother of a great nation? Is it wrong God chose a male (Moses) to lead the people from Egypt? Or for a male (Aaron) to run the priesthood? At some point a lot of us have to decide how much of the Biblical narrative and salvation history we think happened and how much we allow ourselves to see as just a story before we just give up the whole thing. It is, as Knor mentioned, a matter of what we might lose by rejecting a literal Adam and Eve.
A reason is not needed if you are simply offering a way through scientific and scriptural constraints. They provide the reason for thinking things might have occurred this way. You are approaching the issue like a scientist would. That is not what this author is doing.
In a chapter of an earlier work he writes: “From a theologian’s perspective, biological evolution was a 3.5 billion year process, directed by God, to advance living matter until it was apt to receive a rational soul. This critical point in evolutionary history occurred approximately 100,000 years ago in southern Africa among a group of anatomically modern human beings when a handful of individuals evolved the neurocognitive capacity for language.”
Being Catholic the author accepts a version of original sin and a historical Adam and Eve. This is what the author is ultimately trying to do. Reconcile existing beliefs with science, not prove to you why a male must have been the first mutation. This is what the author argues in an earlier work (Thomistic Evolution, a Catholic Approach):
If the biological capacity for language presupposes the acquisition of a package of pro-language mutations in the human genome, as biologists assume, then I can imagine a scenario where two anatomically modern humans, each with a subset of these pro-language genetic mutations, mated and conceived children. Marriage often occurs between groups of hunter-gatherers dispersed over larger areas of land so I can imagine that the two mates would have come from two somewhat distinct but related gene pools each carrying distinctive language-related genes. . . .Their children would have inherited the complete package of pro-language genes, bringing together the genetic advantages of each of their parents, and as such, would have acquired a novel capacity for language. They would be the first instances of behaviorally modern human infants surrounded by a tribe of closely related anatomically modern relatives who would not have full language capacity.
In fact, the author seems to be open to different possibilities:
I am often asked three questions in response to this theological narrative. First, does the narrative presuppose a single or multiple original parents? Neither. It suggests that both possibilities can be reconciled with the theological data because the handful of original parents would have been contemporaneous and even related. In the same way that Eve led Adam to sin, it is not unlikely that one or more of the original speaking bipeds could have led his or her siblings to do the same.
He also says:
As we discussed in earlier chapters, it would have been fitting for God to have given the original speaking bipeds—our original parents—the super-natural grace and the preternatural gifts that they would have needed to attain their destiny to share the life of the Triune God. They would have been conceived in a state of original justice. However, once these infants had attained their maturity, they would have been given the opportunity to choose for or against God as the angels before them had been given the same opportunity. Tragically, they chose against him, forfeiting the gifts they had been given, not only for themselves, but also for their progeny.
The English language didn’t exist one million years ago. Were “trees” not still trees? I am not sure what you mean here.
You do not seem to be very versed in first cause arguments. There is nothing arbitrary about using logic to determine divine attributes from Cosmological arguments. You can disagree with the premises but to call them arbitrary shows you have never read them or only read amateurs on the internet or skeptics who caricature first cause arguments and raise very poor objections like “who created God”. I recommend Edward Feser’s Five Proofs.
This is a scientist (molecular biologists) that is trying to reconcile what we know from science with what we know from church teaching and scripture. Those are his constraints. You can disagree with his constraints and that is fine. But we all have constraints guiding our worldviews.
And whether or not there is a need for Adam and Eve being nothing more than metaphoric depends on how you see scripture and church teaching. Billions of Christians alive today and throughout history have accepted them as real and have accepted original sin in some form. This is still the dominant thought in Christianity today. So for most Christians today and the majority of the Church throughout history, the question of a historical Adam and Eve (which they mostly just took for granted) was essential to understanding the incarnation of Jesus because his death (see Romans) re-establishes what was lost.
You may have decided there is no original sin and maybe Jesus’s death is only meant to create solidarity and so on, but that is not the position of any major denomination or Church that I know of. Whether correct or not, it is a minority voice. I am sympathetic to it but we shouldn’t pretend an issue that would be important to the majority of Christins past and present is “intellectual fantasy.” There is no intellectual fantasy here. It’s about what serves as a constraining truth in your life? How high do you value science, scripture, sacred tradition, personal experience, philosophy, etc.
They are just as questionable as all the details of Genesis 1-11 (and the whole book to be honest).
Original sin as taught by the Church is poorly understood. The Catholic Church teaches that, “original sin is called ‘sin’ only in an analogical sense: it is a sin ‘contracted’ and not ‘committed’—a state and not an act. Original sin does not have the character of a personal fault in any of Adam’s descendants. It is a deprivation of original holiness and justice” (CCC 404).
We are not personally guilty due to Adam and Eve, we simply share in their inheritance in living in a fallen world outside a state of original grace. The best analogy I’ve seen comes from Reddit: “Imagine if your parents were the fabulously wealthy King and Queen. But they betrayed the kingdom, lost their roles and all of their wealth, and were exiled. So you are born without what would have been yours, the poor child of traitors, with no home.”
This is as real as it gets in life. Actions have consequences that affect others and can reverberate for generations. Some might claim this understanding of original sin is unfair and the Catechism agrees just in the opposite sense: "The victory Christ won over sin has given us greater blessings than those which Sid had taken from us: “where sin increased, grace also abounded all the more.” (Rom 5:20).
We got even more in the end. More than we ever deserved. So it’s certainly not fair. I find it hard to see how Grace can ever be fair. It is amazing but so undeserved I find it alarming.
Augustine himself understood the problem with unbaptized infants and hell: “Who can doubt that non-baptized infants, having only original sin and no burden of personal sins, will suffer the lightest condemnation of all? I cannot define the amount and kind of their punishment, but I dare not say it were better for them never to have existed than to exist there. ”
The Catechism is hopeful for unbaptized infants:
The Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God, as she does in her funeral rites for them. Indeed, the great mercy of God who desires that all men should be saved, and Jesus’ tenderness toward children which caused him to say: “Let the children come to me, do not hinder them,” allows us to hope that there is a way of salvation for children who have died without baptism. (CCC 1261)
I agree with you that original sin is the doctrine that makes the the question of Adam and Eve significant. If you dispense with original sin, it doesn’t matter much. But if like the majority of the Church today and throughout history, you do accept some form of a fall and original sin, this is an important issue.
Thinking the issue is trivial or unimportant would be like thinking its irrelevant if Jesus’s death was a sacrifice or not because we no longer believe that “life is in the blood” as it is outdated thinking. We might even further think there can be forgiveness without the shedding of it. We can turn Jesus’s death into an accident if we want. At the end, we all have to decide on how much tradition and scripture we are willing to “reinterpret.” I would like to just completely dump original sin but I feel scripture and tradition are telling me not to. But I am not interested in debating original sin here. I just didn’t want to let your comment about unbaptized infants and hell stand without proper context.
I was raised extremely sensitive to “sexist garbage.” It is behind the single utter rejection of a passage of the Bible: 1 Timothy 2:13-15. But it is nonsense to say something is “sexist garbage” just because it points out the sex of an historical person.
Jesus was male. Einstein was male. Newton was male. Galileo was male. Julius Caesar was male. Moses was male. These are simply facts. There is nothing sexist about it. We can certainly acknowledge that the role of women has long been overlooked and this may even include the accomplishments of these males. Though I have sometimes suggested that much of male contribution to civilization might well have been partially motivated by a male inferiority complex. We cannot give birth to children – just watch (or hide) as women do all the work of this rather critical task. Women simply had more important things to do than wandering around babbling about God, physics, and stuff.
Thus, I see NOTHING particularly sexist about the first human being male. After all, the point of the story is that this first human seriously messed everything up. But yeah, I definitely reject the “sexist garbage” which seeks to shift this responsibility to a woman (as does the above mentioned Bible passage). And in fact I identify this action by Adam as the first (original) sin (self-destructive habit).
Why should I care what a scientist claims about Scripture?
You have counted them, of course!.
Still Christused hyperbole so you are in good company.
No, most peeope do not see the Garden narrative as real. It can’t be. The whole thing is beyond credulity. right down to God’s so called curses!. One mistake and God loses His rag! You really are kidding!
You treat God as a human and a poor one at that. God is not that incompetatant.
Rubbish. The Passion does not need the fall. God forgives sins. That is the whole point. Why make it anything else?
The world is not fallen. Peopple are not corrupt. Yest there is evil and it gets publicised but there is at least as much good and most of it not done by Christians!.. It is fallacy to claim that humans cannot do good without God. God is still not that incompetant or vein.
You are only fooling yourself. It is intellectual claptrap to try and make something real when it clearly isn’t.
I will never understand the concordists who pick one element from the Genesis account that they decide has to be factual and then they throw out all the rest. Like if the “first human” thing needs to be the first human who used language that’s going to place Adam in time long before agriculture and human population of Mesopotamia, and a long time after pain in chlldbirth (which probably arose with bipedalism). Not to mention the idea of a first human language speaker is a stupid premise because language production and langauge processing arose in social groups over a long continuum of development and cross-generational cultural transmission because it depends on multiple physiological and cognitive developments, not “a mutation.”
If you can’t make the whole account concord with history, why insist on one element? I know why, it’s to try to rescue erroneous traditional doctrine that is based on taking the whole account as factual. Just bite the bullet and revise the doctrine, don’t take one little bit of the account as factual and the rest as wrong/not true. At least the metaphorical readers aren’t saying “It’s wrong/untrue” they are saying it’s just not meant to be factual and the truth is in the imagery. This approach actually values Scripture above man-made doctrines of Scripture, which is what the pick and choose concordists actually value most.
Lately, I have been leaning toward a provisional approach. Build a picture of what can be factually accurate as much as possible given the scientific findings, and if you still take it as metaphorical/mythical then that picture is still the one used to give the text meaning. At least that takes out the parts which are simply contrary to the facts and thus likely to give a meaning contrary to reality. I have always been a bit dubious of the approach which seeks the meaning given to it by the ancients who wrote it because it seems far too easy simply to project any meaning you want onto that.
The fact that the ancients believe d it as real does not mean that we have to also. That is not the purpose of Scripture. Scripture is supposed to speak to everytine.
The knack is to take the essence of what was being said and find the relevance to us. I see no relevance in claiming Adam as an ancestor.
If I could upvote this a million times I would. A similar thought came over me when driving to work today. Because my wife works from home and I am 3mi from my job, we have downgraded to one vehicle. She had to drive me to work and as we were driving I was thinking about the issue of Adam and Eve. She mentions to me she became sad yesterday because she saw a person sleeping outside in front of an entrance to a building when picking me up. As we drove by I saw presumably the same person there and it dawned on me. I’m wondering about a historical Adam and Eve while there are other Christians doing work that is so much more important. So I think you hit the nail on the head there. What is more important than giving life, raising a child, tending a home, etc.? Certainly not philosophical babble.
This is the consensus opinion of the Church now and throughout history. If you, as a member of the Church, don’t know why you should care about what it teaches, your difficulties are beyond my assistance.
Does this mean God’s forgiveness of sins does not need the Passion? What did Jesus’s death do in your mind?
The majority of all Christians, churches and denominations throughout its history disagree with you. They may very well be wrong but you seem to be unwilling to discuss different viewpoints in a charitable fashion.
You are assuming it’s not real then claiming I am silly for not doing the same.
Whether it can be salvageable as real or not is the issue under consideration.
I understand your point because I have the same general gripe with people who believe in a local flood. n my view the two intertwined flood narratives are cleary just retellings of other, older Mesopotamian myths. So I think we should just see what theology we can glean and completely ignore whether any aspect is factual or historical as we have no way of knowing. Accepting a historical flood is completely ad hoc and I even had a discussion with @mitchellmckain long ago where I listed all the things in the garden story and asked which specific elements he accepted about Adam and Eve and which he rejected. It appeared arbitrary to me at the time but it’s not really.
Adam and Eve are only being salvaged from a story we know is largely mythological because of Paul and Romans. The death of Jesus and his sacrificial work is tied into the sins of the first humans and it has been so in Christianity since the beginning (Paul is our earliest known author). I don’t think anyone is looking at Genesis and picking and choosing arbitrarily. But clearly Paul links Jesus an Adam together. One is undoing something the other brought about. I am unconvinced by “this is just a literary reference in Paul.” The force of his entire argument falls apart to me if Adam is not a historical person. So the issue of original sin and Adam and Eve tie into theories of atonement and what Jesus’s death actually accomplished for a lot of people.
Sometime facts matter. Christianity is about a God who actually became flesh in history to save humanity. Our scripture offers a tale of salvation history and I suggest we be wary of how many parts of that story we erase and deem theological fiction. Some elements are deemed essential to salvation history and a broader understanding of Christ’s work on the cross, baptism etc. And some people place greater emphasis on Church tradition and history than others. If I start rejecting most of what the Christian Church believed throughout history, I am not sure why I should bother retaining the name Christian? I am not required to believe all they did but taking sacred scripture and tradition seriously, and approaching with a hermeneutic of trust seems important to me.
Why would they? Why do you think the Bible is supposed to be about science? It’s only if they cared about science that anyone would have said anything about evolution. The Bible isn’t meant to teach us anything about nature other than that God is in charge; the Bible’s point is how man relates to God, or more importantly how God relates to man.
You want the Bible to answer twenty-first century questions, but the original audience didn’t care about those questions. But the real tragedy is that in trying to make the Bible fit your twenty-first century questions you throw out the theological message.
Adam, you really need to take a logic course. Noah could be historical with a flood as the Bible tells it, one that destroyed the known world.
What’s supported theologically is what the text says, and the plain use of language is against a global flood – the use of the Hebrew language, that is.
The setting?
A garden placed between four rivers, one of which cannot be identitified.
A garden containing every type of living creature (where is the ocean, or even a lake or river?)
Trees that have magical powers.
God walking around as a human.
A talking serpent.
God losing His tmeper for one transgression
God cursing with pain, weeds, enmity.
Where is the reality!
Where is this garden wth a flaming sword outside?
Show me the reality!
Even show me thaqt humans cannot do good (without Giod)!
SHow me your ratonalle other than clinging to a dubious doctrine.
Origianl Sin is false. Scripture itself denies it. God specifies that no one will be judged by their forebears, that must include Adam (if he existed)!
Did Christ preach Salvation?
or did Christ prreach frgiveness, They are not the same.
Did Christ tell people not to sin? How can you then claim it is impossible!
Why did Christ criticise the Pharisees? because they were sinners?
Or because they were self righteous!
Any Cristian who thinnks that by their actions they are made right woth God is denying Scripture> ANd that include a mental acceptance! That is still humans trying to save themselves. We can’t! So why try?
What is the point of trying to be all religious and good if it is impossible! WHy self sacrifice if it is a waste of time. God does it!..We are good because it is right, not for reward. We are entitltled to nothing!.
We are just sevants, we have only done our duty!
There is no point in obsessing over salvation. It is out of our hands!
The Garden stories can be taken literally without needing to say that Adam and Eve were the first and only humans – they can be “progenitors” the same way that Alfred the Great is the progenitor of all the English.
Nice analogy.
According to Gallup and other polls, most people do, or at least most Christians.
Scripture and experience both say otherwise. If people are not corrupt, then God is a devil, because that would mean He deliberately made humans not just capable of vile atrocities but bound to commit some.
You’re confusing two meanings of the word “good”, the theological and the civic. Jesus addressed then theological meaning when He said that only God is good. He didn’t mean that humans aren’t capable of kindness or compassion; in fact some of His parables indicate that humans are – which is where the distinction between two kinds of good comes from.