I agree fully and think we can metaphysically demonstrate a sustaining cause (unmoved mover) metaphysically. I would question what you mean by natural causes. I am not saying I disagree but any account of the world lacking formal and final causality is going to be incomplete in my view.
I agree as well but would point out I distinguish between substances and accidents and would understand a star forming through natural processes as matter acting according to the inherent dispositions (active and passive powers) God gave it.
I would just use the terms act and potency. When you say âA phase is the subsequent natural unfolding of what has already become attainableâ that sounds to me like the actualization of a potential. But where I think this goes wrong is" An Act of Creation is a proposed root-level threshold at which a new range of what is genuinely attainable becomes available." For me, creation ex nihilo implies God is actively creating at all times.God is being itself and sustains all things. The threshold view seems to border on deism. God unlocks a threshold then lets nature unfold. I donâ think you believe this but your terminology or framework would be more robust in terms of act and potency
I think you are on the right track but lacking in ancient Mesopotamian context. My interpretation of Genesis 1 is here:
Where you call the creation of light in Genesis âthe gift of being and distinguishabilityâ I call it the creation of time.
. . . , God is described as separating light and darkness but if we view these as material objects, this becomes troubling. Croutons and tomatoes on a salad can be separated. Light and darkness cannot coexist and be separated. What does that even mean? One is generally understood as the absence of the other. In the account, light is called âdayâ and darkness is called ânight.â But both day and night are periods of time. The creation of light in Genesis is not about photons or electromagnetic radiation then, it is not about God nonsensically separating light from darkness, but about God creating time. I think Walton is convincing that âon day one God created the basis for time; day two the basis for weather; and day three the basis for food. These three great functionsâtime, weather and foodâare the foundation of life.â
Well, I would argue that abstract thought is immaterial and requires a rational soul.
You seem to be arguing for some form of âemergenceâ which I consider âmake believe.â No matter how many bricks I stack in a circle, they will not magically become a sphere. For me the principle of proportionate causality along with concepts like triangularity being immaterial rules this model out.That being said, I do not deny the development of the animal mind or the role the brain plays in human thought.
That is where modern Christians often show their scientific bias and you may have just done so. You have said:
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.
But Genesis is not a history textbook or a philosophy textbook either. That should suffice to dismantle your objection. God gives us two books:Sacred scripture and the natural sciences (including philosophy and history). We have the natural light of reason and special revelation. They work in tandem. There are numerous things not in some parts of the Bible. For example, Genesis 1 comes as close as possible to describing creation ex nihilo using the framework of its time. It is okay in my mind if it doesnât quite get there 100%. Or later authors saw the sepent as the devil. In context the devil is nowhere to be found but that doesnât make later revelation wrong. Rather, a fuller picture makes everything clearer. That is what philosophy and science supply.
You are correct that it is hard to know which parts are myth and which parts are not, We might say talking snake? Obviously that is a myth. But there are other talking animals in the Bible, Job is written from the perspective of a wager between an Adversary and God, Jesus is tempted by Satan who other verses tell us prowls about. Revelation calls the ancient serpent the devil that deceived the world. There is nothing impossible about the devil taking the form of a serpent in Christianity.
Much of it reads like myth though. Itâs okay to answer with non-liquet. I donât what might be history and what might be myth, What we should do though is try to discern its message either way. For example, you come up:
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.
I have stated above very clearly why I accept Adam as real. Beyond that I donât need to know what might be historical and what might not. Most of the Bible is inspired story written long after the events., Historically, it is all suspect though some parts stand up better than others.
So you think Adam was androgynous and that we need to return to that primordial state before the split?
It seems fitting to me as that is where a new human life begins physically: at conception. I donât think anyone can prove exactly when God infuses a soul. We work backwards and choose the most-fitting or appropriate time. Since Paul says death and sin came through one man and spread to all others, generation is quite natural as a reason for this universal condition.
The existence of the soul is pure speculation also. We cannot scientifically demonstrate it. (Scripture accepted)
Perhaps it is just human vanity or even need for it to exist.
Reproduction is a biological process. Some Christians and many naturalists think many things are purely physical, including human thought. There is nothing wrong with pointing out that such a view is incapable of fully reconstructing humanity due to the principle or proportionate causality.
âDemonstrateâ is a word that can have many meanings. For some, if it is not shown by modern scientific methods, it aint a demonstration. In the case of soul (not Soul), we have to use some other way.
Almost all others than materialists believe in something like a soul. Something that is beyond our material body and for most, it includes a belief that âsoulâ can exist even after the death of our mortal body. The big question is to define more accurately what the soul is and what exactly happens after the death of our body? Demonstrating that is a challenge.
Well, a challence at least if you are not sunk into the world of A-T philosophy (incl. hylomorphism) and interpret the world through that philosophical soup.
Mathematics also uses different criteria for âdemonstrationâ, as do logic and politics, but âTriangularityâ doesnât meet any of those standards either.
Vinnie, thank you for the detailed reply and especially for the link to your essay on Genesis 1. I read it carefully, and it helped me see more clearly several qualifications in your position that can easily get lost in a shorter forum exchange.
Let me begin with the question of deism, because I think the point at issue can be isolated fairly clearly here.
I do not understand how, while agreeing with the first statement, you arrive at the second. Continuous ontological dependence on the Creator is one of the modelâs starting premises. Created causes are genuine causes, while the created order itself continually receives its being from the Creator and depends upon Him.
God does not need to âmoveâ every individual atom directly in order for natural causation to be real. The created order possesses genuine causal powers without thereby becoming ontologically independent of God.
By ânatural causationâ I mean that created reality possesses genuine causal powers of its own; I do not mean a specifically mechanistic metaphysics in which only matter and efficient causes are real.
So I still do not see why the Act/phase distinction itself tends toward deism. The actual disagreement seems narrower.
A phase is the natural unfolding of what has already become attainable. In that sense I have no difficulty describing much of a phase in terms of the actualization of potencies. The term âAct of Creation,â however, is being used to ask an additional question: was the relevant novelty already attainable from the preceding order, or did the very range of what was attainable change?
What, exactly, does replacing âAct and phaseâ with âact and potencyâ explain that the former distinction cannot express? Does the language of potency preserve the question of whether a new range of attainability has opened, or does it already assume that the later possibility was a potency of the preceding order?
If Thomistic metaphysics can make the same distinction, I have no objection to that. In that case I would see the two vocabularies as potentially compatible at different levels, rather than one obviously needing to replace the other.
The same issue arises with your argument from abstract thought and proportionate causality.
Here it seems to me that your argument is directed against a different model. EPT does not derive the personal subject from an accumulation of cognitive complexity. Sentience, memory, learning, social cognition, and the development of the animal mind belong to natural history; the Sixth Actâthe ontological threshold corresponding to the sixth day in the proposed reading of Genesisâconcerns the emergence of the personal mode of being.
I also do not use the actual exercise of abstract thought as a test of whether someone is a person. An infant does not cease to be a person because abstract reasoning is not yet available to them, and severe cognitive impairment does not destroy status as a person.
So, to isolate the question, suppose I grant your argument that universal intellectual acts require an immaterial principle. That would be a serious argument against reductive physicalism. But EPT is not reductive physicalism either.
I understand that the immediate creation of each spiritual soul by God is Catholic doctrine. My narrower question concerns the structure of the inference: does the principle of proportionate causality itself establish that every numerically distinct human soul must begin through a new immediate creative act of God, or is that conclusion supplied by an additional Thomistic and Catholic premise? This is not a rhetorical question. I am trying to identify precisely where our metaphysical architectures diverge.
And this brings us to the point where the metaphysical question of the soul directly meets the question of what Genesis 2â3 is actually describing.
I think I now understand better why, within your model, the question whether God selected two already existing biological humans or created them de novo is not decisive.
If, following Walton, formation from dust is read primarily as an archetypal statement about natural human mortality, the two scenarios lead to roughly the same anthropological construction. God may select two already existing mortal members of a Homo sapiens population, or He may specially create them; in either case they are embodied beings whose nature is in itself mortal. God then gives them rational souls and a special gift by which they would not in fact have undergone bodily death. After the Fall, that additional gift is lost.
The vineyard analogy you cite from Feser fits precisely that structure: what belongs to nature remains, while an additional gift that does not belong to nature as such is no longer passed on after the failure of the first representatives.
This becomes especially interesting to me in light of your own approach to Genesis 1. In your essay you explicitly do not accept Waltonâs strongest functional version. You write:
âI wouldnât go as far as Walton and suggest the account has nothing to do with material origins.â
It seems to me that the same hermeneutical principle should be applied to Genesis 2â3: it is not enough to identify an archetypal or functional meaning of an image; we still have to ask whether that meaning exhausts its referent.
A broader question arises here as well. Within your own anthropology, the rational soul is what decisively distinguishes a properly human being from the preceding biological population. It is Godâs immediate creation of that soul that makes the two selected hominins the first human persons in the full metaphysical sense.
But if Genesis 2â3 is understood mainly in archetypal or theological terms, a rather striking disproportion appears. The text describes Adamâs origin in considerable detail: dust, the inbreathing, the garden, the command. It then describes Eveâs origin just as deliberately, but in an entirely different way, from the already given Adam. Yet the very ontological transition that, in your model, actually makes them fully humanâthe appearance of the rational soulâreceives no positive expression of its own in the narrative.
So if the soul is the central anthropological novelty, why does the account of human origins describe these other images in such detail while saying nothing about the origin of what, in your own model, constitutes the central distinction of the human person?
This does not prove that Genesis 2 must be describing the creation of the soul. But it seems to me that this possibility becomes hermeneutically serious. Perhaps the detail devoted to the dust, the inbreathing, and Eveâs origin reflects not only general archetypes of mortality, dependence, and human unity, but something more fundamental: the origin of the very soul-personal structure of the human being.
What changes if we suppose that the detailed Edenic scene is primarily not about the creation of two biological organisms, but about the creation of human soul-reality itselfâinitially as one personal ground not yet individualized into separate human souls?
That is the possibility I am exploring in EPT.
By âone Edenic personal groundâ I do not mean a collective consciousness, a sum of future souls, or one enormous person within which later human beings already exist as parts. I mean a primordial created personal ground of the soul, ontologically prior to the plurality of individual human souls. Later, each person receives not a part of that ground but a complete personal imprint; in more familiar Christian language, that complete personal imprint corresponds to the individual human soul.
On this reading, the image of dust acquires a substantially different referent.
âDustâ refers primarily not to the material of Adamâs mortal body but to the creaturely status of soul-reality in its primordial ground. It is not a part of God, an emanation of the divine nature, or an independently eternal principle. It is created and does not contain the source of its own being within itself.
The divine inbreathing can then be understood as the other pole of the same image: the gift of life to this created groundâthe gift of personal being, relation with the Creator, and the continued existence of that being, in effect immortality.
Here it is especially important to distinguish the immortality of the soul from bodily non-dying.
As I understand it, we both assume that the human soul is not destroyed when the body dies. So even within your own construction, the immortality of the rational soul and the special gift by which the first embodied humans would not have undergone bodily death are already two different things.
But if Genesis 2 is primarily describing the creation of soul-reality itself, its immortality no longer looks like an additional privilege temporarily attached to an already complete biological organism. It can be understood as the immortality of the once-given soul-being itselfânot as an independent property of a soul existing from itself, but as its continuous ontological dependence upon the Creator.
If the human soul continues to exist after the death of the body, then the Fall obviously does not abolish the immortality of the soul itself. This allows the alternative to be framed differently.
Perhaps the original gift of immortality pertains not to two biological organisms whose bodies were temporarily protected from natural death, but to the created soul-personal ground itself. On this model, the expulsion in Genesis 3:22â24 would therefore signify not the spatial relocation of the Edenic personal ground itself from one place to another, but the rupture of the former mode of communion with God and the transition of its individual embodied imprints into the earthly mode of human life.
One further distinction matters here: the one Edenic ground itself does not enter terrestrial biological history as one subject or one organism. The ground itself continues to existâif you will, âon the other sideâ of its earthly embodiments. Its relation with the Creator changes, as does the way in which the personal line is now realized in terrestrial history.
What enters terrestrial history are its complete individual personal imprints. In the transition from Eden to earthly existence, two independent embodied persons emergeâthe earthly Adam and Eve. Each bears a complete personal imprint of the one ground, including both its Adamic and Eveic internal distinctions. It is these embodied persons who enter the world of limitation, labor, and bodily mortality.
This also helps make sense of the unusual structure of Genesis 2.
At this point I also want to correct one misunderstanding in your reply.
That is not the model I am proposing.
The Adamic and Eveic distinctions are not male and female biological sex, not two halves of a future human being, and not two already existing souls. I leave their precise metaphysical character open. In terrestrial history Adam and Eve are two genuinely independent personsâeach with their own body, perspective, biography, freedom, and responsibilityâand each bears a complete, not partial, imprint of the primordial ground.
That is why I think it is insufficient to exclude the soul in advance from the referent of the Edenic text.
If we accept an already existing wider population of Homo sapiens, the scheme âGod selected two ready-made organisms and separately gave them two soulsâ is certainly possible. But it makes much of the detailed structure of Genesis 2 exclusively archetypal: dust no longer describes the origin of a particular body; Eveâs origin from Adam no longer describes a biological event either; and two very different scenes of human origin become primarily symbolic communications.
EPT asks whether this structure might preserve a more direct ontological referentânot at the level of producing biological bodies, but at the level of the origin of human soul-personal reality itself.
Why should the sequence âprimordial unity â internal differentiation â two independent earthly personsâ be a less natural referent of the structure of Genesis 2 than the scheme âtwo already existing organisms + two separately created soulsâ?
I do not think this argument proves EPT. It only shows that an alternative referent of the scene exists and can positively account for features of the text that, on the model of two already biological individuals, have to be treated largely as archetypal imagery.
And, as I wrote earlier, a weak analogy for the very possibility of âreal differentiation within a single subject without the production of several personsâ can be seen even in our own inner life. Within one and the same âIâ there can be tension, competing motives, inner dialogue, and something like negotiation between different impulses without the subject fragmenting into several persons. This is, of course, only a limited analogy showing that real internal differentiation is not meaningless.
Up to this point I have been discussing what may have been created in Eden. But once the earthly Adam and Eve appear, a different question arises: how does the personal lineage spread within a wider biological population?
And here, it seems to me, our models really do have a comparable open point.
But first I think it is important to distinguish two different claims in your model.
The first is the Thomistic claim that every individual rational soul is immediately created by God. The second is the additional rule that, within a wider biological population, it is specifically the genealogical descendants of Adam and Eve who receive such souls.
Before even discussing the genealogical rule, another question therefore arises.
In an earlier post you wrote:
I understand how that follows within Thomistic metaphysics. What remains unclear to me is where exactly it follows from Revelation itself.
After Adam and Eve, Genesis gives us Cain, Abel, then Seth and subsequent generations. The text speaks about their birth and descent, but it does not describe alongside each new person a separate new creative act in which God creates an individual rational soul for that person. This does not, by itself, disprove the Thomistic doctrine. But it does mean that the immediate creation of each new soul is already a metaphysical interpretation of human generation, rather than simply a repetition of what the narrative explicitly says.
What exactly in the biblical text, in your view, requires the move to the specific claim that âGod performs a new immediate act of creation of a rational soul whenever an individual human being comes into existenceâ?
This question matters to me especially because EPT proposes a different architecture. In it, the Creator does not create a new soul anew at each birth. The Edenic soul-personal ground is created once, and the individual human soul corresponds to a complete personal imprint of that ground. What remains open in my model is a different question: why genealogical continuation should be the condition for the appearance of a new complete personal imprint.
Here the symmetry between our models becomes real, but narrower than I had formulated it before.
As I understand this answer, the Thomistic doctrine of the immediate creation of the soul does not itself yet determine for whom, within the surrounding biological population, God must create a rational soul. You explicitly allow that God could create them for everyone. The genealogical limitation appears because it is needed to make your anthropological model fit your reading of Paul.
EPT has a different architecture, but the open point is comparable: the model posits genealogical continuation of the personal lineage, but does not reconstruct the mechanism by which kinship continuity results in a new complete individual personal imprint. In EPT, genealogical continuation is a working metaphysical postulate: if at least one parent already belongs to the human personal line, the child also receives a complete personal imprint. Why kinship continuity should be the condition of this continuation is not reconstructed by the model.
So I do not use the absence of such a mechanism as an objection to your model. What matters to me is applying the same standard to both: a working rule can be accepted without pretending that its metaphysical mechanism has already been reconstructed.
Am I understanding you correctly that the genealogical boundary in your model is determined not by the Thomistic doctrine of the soul itself, but by an additional theological requirement that you derive primarily from your reading of Paul?
I agree with you that Paulâs âone â manyâ structure cannot simply be reduced to the idea that each human being independently repeats the same archetypal sin. Paul connects the later human condition with a primordial Adamic Fall in such a way that the relation between them must be real rather than merely a literary resemblance.
But that still does not determine the ontology of Adam himself.
In EPT, this primordial Adamic source does not require us to understand the Edenic Adam as an already embodied biological male drawn from a Homo sapiens population. The Fall belongs to the one Edenic personal ground, within which the Adamic and Eveic distinctions are real. The rupture occurs within the ground of the personal lineage itself; later embodied persons therefore do not simply repeat the same act independently, but receive personal existence through a ground that has already undergone this rupture.
This is what EPT has to preserve in Paulâs âone â manyâ structure: not the biological status of the Edenic Adam and not the Thomistic mechanism of repeatedly creating souls, but the real priority of the Fall and the real connection between the subsequent human condition and that primordial rupture.
So the following question remains for me:
Which part of this more detailed causal architecture, in your view, actually follows from Paul, and which part comes from independent Thomistic and Catholic premises?
I am not claiming that Genesis or Paul disproves the immediate creation of each individual soul. My point is narrower: I do not yet see that they require this repeated architecture. That is why it matters to me to distinguish the content of Revelation from the metaphysical model by which we attempt to explain that content.
This brings me back to Genesis and your essay, because this is where I think the broader methodological difference becomes clearest.
I agree that the ancient Near Eastern context matters. Your essay is also more interesting to me than the simple formula âday one means time,â because, as noted above, you explicitly do not follow Walton all the way into an exclusively functional reading. You allow Genesis to speak both of material creation and of function.
That creates a question that the strongest version of Waltonâs position can largely avoid. If Genesis 1 is only about functional order, material origins can simply be located outside the subject matter of the chapter. But if both material and functional referents remain, their relationship has to be explained.
You wrote that Genesis is not a history textbook or a philosophy textbook either, and then said that beyond your reasons for accepting a real Adam, you do not need to know exactly what is historical and what is not. That seems to me a coherent stopping point for one kind of theological project. If the task is to determine the theological message while leaving much of the historical register unresolved, non liquet can be an intellectually honest answer.
But I am setting myself a somewhat different task.
I am imagining a reader who is not yet committed to Catholicism, Thomism, Walton, young-earth creationism, or EPT, but who has also not ruled Revelation out in advance. I want such a reader to be able to see where a proposed interpretation comes from and why a transition is being made from one interpretive register to another.
So my question is not whether elements of Genesis can be imagistic, archetypal, or functional. Of course they can.
The question is more demanding:
When you move from the wording of the text to a functional meaning, from a functional meaning to a temple meaning, or from an image to the conclusion that a material or historical referent is not being asserted, what exactly licenses each transition? The Hebrew wording? Literary structure? Another biblical text? An ancient Near Eastern parallel? Later Revelation? Or an independent metaphysical premise?
That is the bridge I keep trying to identify in your model and to build explicitly in my own.
Take day one. The text gives us light, darkness, their separation, their naming as day and night, and evening and morning. Walton interprets this functionally as the establishment of time. That may be a valuable observation. But identifying a temporal function and establishing that the text does not also refer to some real aspect of the created order are two different steps. The first does not by itself establish the second.
The temple reading raises the same problem.
I understand why Genesis, Eden, tabernacle, temple, divine presence, rest, and sacred space are brought into relation with one another. But the direction of the analogy matters. Later sanctuary symbolism may deliberately model itself upon Creation and Eden. If so, similarities between temple and Creation do not by themselves establish the reverse claim that Genesis 1 was originally constructed as an account of cosmic-temple inauguration.
This is not a minor distinction. âThe temple symbolically recapitulates Creationâ and âthe creation account is itself a temple-inauguration textâ are two different claims, and the first does not logically entail the second.
There is a second issue. A temple is not simply âa place where God is present.â A temple also marks a distinctive sacred domain; it separates inside from outside. This is precisely one of the points Walton himself now acknowledges.
In his 2025 conversation with Dru Johnson, Walton discusses precisely this objection: if the whole cosmos is a temple, there is no longer an inside and an outside. He accepts this as a legitimate point and acknowledges that the temple metaphor can be stretched beyond its proper metaphorical value. He now says he is more comfortable speaking of the establishment of sacred spaceâthat is, divine presenceâwithout extending the temple metaphor to the concept of boundaries.
He also acknowledges another limitation. In the seven-day account the language is shabbatâceasingârather than nuach, coming to rest. Thus the connection between the seventh day, divine presence, and temple rest remains conceptually possible, but is not simply an explicit statement of the text itself.
I do not take this to mean that Walton has abandoned the temple reading. He clearly has not: his 2025 book still contains a chapter titled âGenesis 1: Cosmic Temple and Rest.â
But precisely for that reason, his qualification raises a legitimate further question.
If the boundary-bearing aspect intrinsic to a temple has to be deliberately limited, while the textual connection between seventh-day rest and temple is acknowledged to be implicit rather than explicit, what explanatory work does the stronger phrase âcosmic-temple inaugurationâ continue to perform beyond the more modest claim that the text presents Creation as a sacred order characterized by divine presence?
This is not merely a question of terminology. The stronger temple thesis has been used to support further claims about the structure of the seven days, the meaning of divine rest, and sometimes the priestly role of humanity or of Adam and Eve. If the underlying metaphor is narrowed, those derivative conclusions do not automatically retain their former strength. They require independent support.
The same applies to Eden. In the nearby discussion, the priestly interpretation was constructed through a sequence roughly like this: humanity already exists in Genesis 1; Genesis 2 singles out a special pair; Eden is a special place of divine presence; that space is identified with the holy-place region of an ancient Near Eastern temple; therefore the pair are understood as priests.
That is an intelligible interpretive chain. But it is still a chain of several interpretive transitions, not a proposition directly stated by the text.
Which step in that chain establishes priesthood rather than merely making a priestly reading a possible theological interpretation?
Again, I am not saying that such a reading is false. I am asking about the criterion that turns a meaningful network of correspondences into the controlling meaning of the text.
This is also why I do not think the statement âGenesis is not a textbook of science, history, or philosophyâ resolves the difficulty. I agree with the statement itself. But genre does not determine reference.
A text can fail to be a physics textbook and still refer to physical reality. It can fail to be a history textbook and still make claims about real past events. It can use imagery while still intending the imagery to refer to something real.
So the question is not whether imagery exists. The question is what we allow imagery to do.
If, at a difficult point, the answer is simply that we need not know whether the referent is historical, that may be sufficient for a theology whose aim is to extract the message while leaving historical questions open. But if the task includes showing a reader outside our prior theological commitments how Revelation and the independently reconstructed history of the world can belong to one coherent account, the central bridge remains unbuilt.
That is the task I am trying to pursue in EPT. I am not claiming that Genesis secretly contains modern physics or philosophy. I am asking whether the sequence of its images may preserve a real structural relation to the history of the created world while remaining ancient language and ancient imagery.
And I want to apply the same standard to my own proposal. If I connect a biblical image with a transition in natural history, I have to show the bridge. If I call something an image, I have to explain what real referent I think the image preserves. If I do not know the mechanism, I have to say so. And if a proposed correspondence fails against either the text or the best available reconstruction of natural history, the correspondence has to be revised rather than the status of the evidence being reclassified in order to save the model.
Science itself is not a finished ontology, and I do not regard its present vocabulary as the final possible description of reality. But that is not permission to place God into scientific gaps. It means only that both sides of the proposed correspondence require epistemic discipline: the biblical text must not be rewritten to fit present science, and present science must not be inflated into a complete metaphysics.
It is this methodological question, more than any single disagreement over Walton or Thomism, that I am trying to clarify.
You may well be right that my understanding of the ancient Mesopotamian context is still incomplete. We did, however, try to explore Genesis comparatively alongside several other ancient cosmogonies in a separate essay
If the universe is a temple, then with Eden we have the three-fold division seen elsewhere â outer court, sacred space, holy place, with the outer court being the universe, the sacred space being the earth, and Eden being the holy place.
It was your use of the word creation and threshold which gave me pause. I retract the deism line (I only said it seems to border on it) because in rereading I think we have disagreement over emergence. I think your understanding of God as sustaining cause and there being genuine secondary causes is good and quite Thomistic. I think your act / phase is really just Act/Potency rephrased (I think at a deeper level it may get you into trouble) but I think the major difference between us is you are way too soft or keen on emergence.
I nestled a few comments because the thoughts overlap.
I accept it as being Catholic doctrine but would object if it was relegated to Catholic doctrine. I find it to be based on careful metaphysics of which the Catholic church does not hold a monopoly. So to answer your question, I would say yes, the principle of proportionate causality leads to this. I find emergence to be playing make believe. No matter how many bricks we stack in a square, they will not magically turn into a sphere. Now, the principle of proportionate causality alone does not make this true. In order to say every âdistinct human soul must begin through a new immediate creative act of Godâ it has to be accompanied by a demonstration of the immateriality of the intellect. Both together lead to this logically. So that is our chief disagreement. Matter cannot turn into a rational intellect in my view. There is no threshold secondary causes arrive at and then turn into something else that is categorically new (e.g. material to immaterial). This violates the PPC and I think special creation is a better term than natural threshold. As noted, I reject the concept of emergence entirely as a vague naturalism of the gaps.
We agree here. I would not use the actual exercise of abstract thought as a test for humanity either. I use it to show there is an immateriality to humanity. In my hylomorphic framework: âa human being is a unified substance whose substantial form is a rational soul.â We stick with Aristotleâs four causes and we believe the soul is the form of the body and it âimparts the nature of a rational animal to the individual from the moment of conception to death.â This is an ontological status we cannot lose nor is it one we achieve. Babies are human as are people who are braindead. Someone with cognitive impairments due to brain chemistry is no less a human than a blind person or your or me.
Genesis 1 and 2-3 have two very different authors. A priestly one who would make a good classical theist, and one with highly anthropomorphic images of God. I do not know how to make heads and tails of all of Genesis 2-3. I accept a literal Adam and Eve due to Paulâs punctiliar view of sin and death and a few other reasons. The metaphysics also supports this view in my opinion. I can no more deny them then I can the age of the earth.
There are a lot of ways to go with this:
[1] Sometimes things are revealed later. The OT barely speaks of heaven. That concept certainly evolved. Why canât souls be the same?
[2] The text does not get science right because itâs not a science manual. The same for philosophy. It attempts to express things as best it can from its own worldview. With this being said there is no reason for me not to see the infusion of the divine soul in Genesis 2-3.
The dust is the material cause. Maybe it represents the evolved, pre-existing, biological body of a non-rational hominid. The breath of life or inbreathing is then the special creation of the immaterial soul.
As aThomist, I subscribe to hylomorphism. This means I do not believe in a ghost in the machine type of platonic soul. The soul is the form of the body. So I think that is a fine canonical reading, especially since:
[3] My Lord and Savior seems to have accepted the existence of souls or some sort of immaterial aspect to humans. (fear not him who can kill the body). As a Christian, who accepts a full inspired canon, my understanding of Adam and Eve is not limited to Genesis 2 and 3. Heck, the words of Jesus and Paul are actually more important to me. I see thread after thread and response after response that apparently thinks Genesis 2-3 settles the issue alone. This is alarmingly myopic.
[4] We have to be careful to avoid a false dichotomy between archetypal and historical. Highly symbolic and analogical language can communicate real historical and metaphysical truths/events.
As for Eve, I just donât feel the text needs to repeat the in-breathing. How exactly she was formed I donât know. Specifically as the account says or does it communicate truth about the unity and complementarity of men and women? Or both? Even if the creation of Eveâs body is couched in mystery or symbolism, metaphysically speaking, her rational soul must have been created immediately (ex nihilo) by God just like Adamâs. I think the model you go on to espouse does not see the soul as the form of the body. Our metaphysics start to diverge sharply there.
I donât need to adopt materialism. Human generation is real but itâs limited to biology. The parents are the efficient cause that lead to the material cause (biology). The formal cause can only be supplied by God. A material process will not generate an immaterial soul (PPC).
