Vinnie, your last replies have helped me understand your position much more clearly. I think this may be a good point for me to lay out my own model more fully, rather than continue asking you questions one by one.
My starting theological premise is simple. The Creator is the source of the being of the whole created order, and everything that exists continues to exist because He gives and sustains its being. Natural causes are therefore real causes operating within a created order that is continuously sustained by the Creator.
At the same time, I fully accept the real cosmic, geological, biological, and evolutionary history of the world. Stars really form through natural processes. Life genuinely evolves. Homo sapiens has a population-level evolutionary history.
I call this position Evolutionary-Phase Theism (EPT).
“Evolutionary” refers to the real evolutionary history of creation; “phase” refers to the natural unfolding of possibilities once they have become available within the created order.
The central distinction is between an Act and a phase.
An Act of Creation is a proposed root-level threshold at which a new range of what is genuinely attainable becomes available. A phase is the subsequent natural unfolding of what has already become attainable. The Act does not replace natural causation, and a new phase does not abolish the previous ones. The structure is cumulative or nested: physical order continues within living order, biological embodiment continues within personal life, and so on.
The Act itself is not something that science observes. What science can observe and reconstruct are structures, processes, histories, and consequences. Calling a particular root-level threshold an Act of Creation is a philosophical and theological interpretation of that threshold, not the addition of another physical cause beside the natural ones.
I relate the seven creation days of Genesis to seven such Acts. For the first six, I propose working correspondences with root-level transitions or conditions in the real history of the world reconstructed by science. The seventh has a somewhat different, completion-oriented status. The fuller map is in Seven Acts of Creation, if you are interested.
It may help if I show you one example of how I approach the language of Genesis.
I receive Genesis as Revelation. But Revelation, as I understand it, is not a textbook of physics, cosmology, geology, biology, or evolutionary theory. It speaks through human language and through images available to human experience.
So imagistic language does not mean fictional language.
In another discussion I tried a deliberately rough conceptual paraphrase of Genesis 1:1–5 using modern physical vocabulary:
“In the beginning God created the universe. The universe was formless and empty; darkness was over the deep, and the Spirit of God moved over an undifferentiated high-energy medium. And God said, ‘Let there be the photon,’ and there was light. God saw that the light was good and separated the light from the darkness. And there was evening, and there was morning: the first day.”
I am obviously not claiming that the ancient author knew about photons, plasma, or modern cosmology, nor that this is the uniquely correct translation of the imagery. The point of the exercise is narrower: changing the conceptual vocabulary does not necessarily destroy the referent.
In the current form of EPT, the First Act itself is actually deeper than “the appearance of the photon.” Its core is the gift of being and distinguishability, and the opening of the possibility of physical history. Physical light is one expression within the physical order that follows.
This general approach becomes especially important when I reach the Sixth Act.
Up to that point I accept the evolutionary history of life, including the natural history of sentience. I do not place a separate Act at the first appearance of subjective experience. Animals may perceive, feel pain, remember, learn, and form attachments as part of the natural-emergent history of sentient life and nervous organization.
The Sixth Act concerns a different kind of novelty: the personal subject.
By this I mean a mode of being in which a lived history can belong to one and the same “I” as its biography; an action can belong to it as its deed; an obligation can bind it as its own obligation; and a relation with the Creator can become a free personal response.
I do not mean that one additional cognitive module is simply added on top of an already functioning animal mind. Memory, perception, emotion, learning, sociality, and embodied action remain part of the natural history of the organism. The proposal is rather that these already existing capacities enter a new kind of subject-level unity: they become the capacities of one personal “I” across a continuing biography.
This is why, in my model, the first persons are not the first Homo sapiens and not the first sentient beings.
And this brings me to the point where my hypothesis differs from the Thomistic account you have been describing.
I understand the Thomistic reasoning as you have presented it: the rational soul is immaterial; physical generation cannot be its sufficient efficient cause; therefore each rational soul is immediately created by God.
I also understand from your replies that, in your framework, this immediate divine act is not a miracle in the strict sense. It belongs to the ordinary order by which human beings come into existence: human generation disposes the matter, while God directly supplies the rational soul as its form.
That, by itself, gives me no reason simply to reject the Thomistic account.
What gives me pause is something narrower. I do not see the Genesis narrative itself making this repeated causal architecture explicit. Adam’s origin is narrated in a distinctive way: dust and the breath of life. Eve’s origin is narrated differently — she comes from Adam. Cain, Abel, Seth, and later human beings then enter the narrative through birth and genealogical continuation, and I do not see the text itself indicating that a new act of immediate soul-creation occurs at each birth.
I understand that your case for the immediate creation of each rational soul does not rest on Genesis alone. You have explicitly appealed to the immateriality of the rational soul, the principle of proportionate causality, and the Catholic rejection of traducianism.
My point is therefore not that Genesis disproves the Thomistic account. It is only that I do not see Genesis itself requiring this particular repeated architecture. That leaves me open to asking whether another metaphysical account can preserve the theological requirements of the text.
That is where my own Edenic hypothesis begins.
Before the trilemma, there is one route I set aside. One could read the Eden account as wholly non-historical or purely parabolic, without a real Edenic event behind it.
I receive Genesis as Revelation, but I do not mean by this that Revelation must always take the form of a literal physical report. In this particular case, however, my reading of the wider biblical witness leads me to take the Fall and the Adamic root of the later human condition as having a real referent, even if Genesis presents that reality through image-mediated language.
Among readings that preserve a real Edenic referent, I see three main possibilities.
The first is to read Eden as an ordinary earthly historical setting containing two ordinary biological human beings.
But then the same scene also contains the formation from dust and breath, the woman coming from the man’s side, the tree of life, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the speaking serpent, God “walking” in the garden, death “in the day” of eating, already sighted people whose eyes are “opened,” and an expulsion that radically changes their condition.
None of those details by itself proves that Eden was a different mode of existence. Taken together, however, they make me hesitate to read the scene as ordinary terrestrial biological life plus a few isolated figurative details.
The second possibility is a mixed reading: Adam and Eve are ordinary terrestrial biological human beings, while some surrounding elements are read figuratively or symbolically.
I think such a reading is certainly possible. My concern is narrower. Without some governing principle, the reader can decide element by element which parts are straightforward description and which are images, and then treat the resulting selection as though it were simply given by the text.
Why is Adam’s biological existence straightforwardly historical while his formation from dust may be figurative? Why is Eve an ordinary biological woman while her origin from the man’s side need not be biological? Why is the Fall real while the fruit may be an image? What tells us where one register ends and the other begins?
The third possibility is the one I explore.
I read the Eden account as a whole, up to and including the expulsion, in a unified image-mediated register.
That does not make Eden fictional.
The relation with the Creator is real.
The command is real.
Freedom is real.
The possibility of obedience and disobedience is real.
The Fall is real.
The loss of the former immediacy of relation with the Creator is real.
But I do not assume that an earthly image must be read as a direct description of an earthly mode of existence.
In fact, I suspect that imagery is necessary precisely because we do not possess a direct human vocabulary or conceptual apparatus for describing such a mode of created existence.
So before the transition into ordinary terrestrial human history, I do not picture Adam and Eve as two already existing Homo sapiens standing beside one another in a geographical garden.
I propose one created Edenic personal ground.
Within that one ground there are two real distinctions, which I call the Adamic and Eveic distinctions. They are real, but at this stage they are not yet two persons, two souls, two biological individuals, or two independently existing subjects. I also do not identify them with male and female biological sex, or with active and receptive principles. Their exact metaphysical character remains open.
For the model, the important claim is that unity comes first.
That is why the image of the woman coming from the man is so interesting to me. I do not read it as a surgical procedure performed on a male biological body. I read it as potentially preserving a deeper structure: the human personal lineage does not begin from two independent personal sources. Difference emerges within a prior unity.
There may even be a weak analogy to this in our own inner life. One and the same “I” can contain real tension, competing motives, inner dialogue, and even something like negotiation between different impulses without becoming several persons.
I am not identifying that psychological fact with the Adamic and Eveic distinctions. It proves nothing about Eden. It only shows that real internal differentiation does not, by itself, require a plurality of personal subjects.
Here I should clarify the metaphor of the seal, because I think it can easily mislead.
The seal is not a spiritual object, instrument, or metaphysical stamp stored somewhere and waiting for someone to press it onto later people.
The Edenic personal ground is not an inert thing. It is a personal reality capable of relation with the Creator, freedom, and therefore obedience or disobedience. The Edenic rupture belongs to that personal reality; it is not something done to an object by an external operator.
The seal metaphor will matter later only in describing the completeness of the personal imprint.
This also shapes how I read the images themselves.
Dust expresses creatureliness: the personal ground is created and is not an emanation of the divine nature.
The divine breath expresses the gift of personal being and personal relation with the Creator, rather than the first appearance of subjective experience as a psychological mechanism.
The garden expresses the immediacy of that relation with the Creator.
The tree of the knowledge of good and evil expresses a real divinely established boundary.
The fruit expresses the attempt to claim for oneself the authority to determine good and evil independently of the Source.
The serpent expresses temptation toward that self-separation.
The Fall is a real free rupture of the relation with the Creator.
The expulsion expresses the loss of the former immediacy of that relation and the transition into ordinary terrestrial history — limitation, labor, and bodily mortality.
These are interpretive proposals within the model, not claims that I have reconstructed the underlying metaphysical reality. I leave the exact referent of the tree of life especially open.
There is also one related point about mortality. In the wider model, the individual human soul — what I describe as the complete personal imprint — is the metaphysical ground of the continuity of personal identity through bodily death and toward resurrection.
So when I say that this personal reality is creaturely, I do not mean that it is a piece of divinity or that it exists by its own necessity. But neither do I mean that personal identity is simply annihilated when the biological body dies. Its continued existence would itself be a gift continuously sustained by the Creator.
At the same time, the human being is not simply a soul temporarily occupying a body. Human earthly life is genuinely embodied, which is why resurrection remains essential rather than becoming unnecessary once one speaks of the soul.
Then comes the transition into ordinary earthly history.
The one Edenic personal ground is not divided into two personal portions. Instead, two genuinely independent embodied persons arise: the earthly Adam and Eve.
Each has a distinct body, empirical perspective, memory and biography, freedom and responsibility. Their distinctness is real.
And yet each bears a complete personal imprint of the same original personal ground, including the fullness of both its Adamic and Eveic distinctions. Adam does not bear an “Adamic half” and Eve an “Eveic half.”
Here “complete imprint” names a relation of completeness, not a stamping mechanism or a division of some substance: the new person bears no mere fragment or separated portion of the original personal ground.
These earthly Adam and Eve are the first two embodied persons of the human personal lineage. They arise within a wider Homo sapiens population that already has a real evolutionary history.
From them the personal lineage continues genealogically through that wider population.
The working anthropological postulate of the model is that if at least one parent already belongs to the human personal line, the child also belongs to that line and bears a complete personal imprint.
I do not know why genealogical relation should be the condition of this continuation. I am not claiming a genetic mechanism, a hidden physical field, a store of memory, an unknown energy, or a second neurological process. The model names the relation; it does not pretend to reconstruct its metaphysical mechanism.
And I am not claiming that this construction is proven, or that it is the uniquely correct reading of Genesis.
It is a working philosophical and theological hypothesis — my attempt to hold together Revelation, a real Adam and Eve, a real Fall, the population-level evolutionary history of Homo sapiens, and a genuine novelty of the human personal mode of being.
Now that I have laid out the architecture more fully, I would be very interested in where you see its most vulnerable point.
If there is a place where you think the model becomes metaphysically incoherent, conflicts with something Revelation actually requires, or simply cannot do the explanatory work I am asking it to do, I would be very grateful if you pointed to that place.
That kind of criticism would be much more valuable to me than agreement that the model sounds plausible.