What Are Your Views on Adam and Eve?

Faith & Science Conversation
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That statement rests on materialism.

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Maybe the confusion is that I am not talking about the generation of humans in total. By human generation I simply mean the role humans play in the creation of a new human (efficient causes). Let me put it another way. Human sex does not and cannot create immaterial souls.

Vinnie

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Why is that not materialism?
Human sex can make two into one.

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Vinnie, after your latest reply, I think it may be more useful not to broaden the discussion further, but to return to several very specific questions from my previous comment.

First, one clarification. You initially suggested that my model bordered on deism; after rereading my explanation, you withdrew that objection. That matters to me. If it turns out that a criticism was directed at a position the other person does not actually hold, I think the criticism should be withdrawn. I regard that willingness to revise one’s own objection as a normal part of critical discussion.

But after that I see a different problem. In several places you respond to positions that I explicitly excluded in my previous post.

For example:

After that you again explain:

But I am not proposing that transition.

So at this point I am not sure which claim of EPT this objection is directed against. If you think such a transition is in fact part of my model, please show me where.

I would also like to clarify what you mean by “emergence” in this objection. You write that you reject emergence entirely. Does that include ordinary systemic emergence—for example, macroscopic properties of water that no individual H₂O molecule possesses?

That distinction matters to me. EPT allows emergent novelty within natural history, but it does not claim that an immaterial soul or a personal subject is simply produced by accumulating material complexity.

The same issue arises with what, for me, is the more important question of the immediate creation of each individual soul.

In my previous comment I asked:

You replied:

It is precisely that logical transition that I still do not see.

I am not disputing here the claim that purely material causation by itself cannot produce an immaterial principle. But from the claim:

we still have to reach the further conclusion that I formulated in the previous question:

It is the basis for that second step that I was asking about.

You say that the immateriality of the intellect and the PPC together logically entail this conclusion. It is precisely that logical connection that I am trying to see.

The same question arises directly from your reading of Genesis.

But then my earlier question remains:

What exactly in the biblical text, in your view, requires the move to the specific claim that “God performs a new immediate act of creation of a rational soul whenever an individual human being comes into existence”?

If the inbreathing in Genesis 2:7 is the positive textual expression of the creation of Adam’s soul, the text does not describe an analogous event for every subsequent soul.

With Eve:

That is possible. But this is precisely where my question lies: if the repeated immediate creation of each new soul is no longer being derived from an event actually described in the text, where exactly is it being derived from?

The same applies to Cain, Abel, Seth, and everyone who follows.

This is not an argument from silence of the form, “The text does not say it, therefore it does not happen.” I am not making that argument.

My question is different:

Is the repeated immediate creation of every numerically new soul itself part of the content of Revelation, or is it an additional metaphysical construction through which Thomism explains content already accepted from Revelation?

If it is the latter, that is a perfectly definite position. But then the grounds for that metaphysical construction are precisely what our disagreement concerns.

There is another question from my previous reply for which I still have not seen a substantive answer:

You again set out your own reading: dust may refer to the biological body, inbreathing to the creation of the rational soul, a separate inbreathing for Eve need not be described, but metaphysically her soul must still have been separately created.

I understand that this is your metaphysical reading of the text.

But it does not yet answer the comparative question I was asking. I was not asking how Genesis can be read within Thomism, but what makes the alternative referent I am proposing impossible, internally contradictory, or less well supported by the text.

I regard Thomism as a serious and intellectually developed metaphysical tradition. But the age, influence, and internal sophistication of an interpretation do not by themselves establish either its truth or its completeness.

I want to apply the same critical standard to it that I apply to my own hypothesis. If a philosophical system is being used as the starting standard against which alternatives are evaluated, then it is worth asking separately which claims within that system have actually been established and which remain metaphysical premises of the system itself.

For a Christian, Thomism, however valuable, remains a philosophical-theological interpretation rather than Revelation itself.

Here I do not have a fundamental disagreement with you. The words of Jesus and Paul are no less important to me.

But that is precisely why I am asking: where exactly do Jesus or Paul state that the Creator performs a new immediate act of creation of an individual soul whenever a new human being comes into existence?

Later Revelation may give us grounds for affirming that the human being is not exhausted by the material body and that human existence has a spiritual dimension. But that is not yet identical to the specific metaphysical model of a repeated immediate creation of every new soul.

If you see that more specific conclusion in the words of Jesus or Paul, please show me the text and the inferential step on which it rests.

Finally, the same applies to the distinction between Act and phase.

I had already asked:

You replied:

That may well turn out to be true.

But I need the deeper argument itself.

If there is a contradiction here, a violation of some causal principle, or a hidden premise that makes the distinction untenable, please show it. That is exactly the kind of criticism I am interested in.

Perhaps I should explain why I keep asking these questions.

By critical thinking I mean, above all, not merely the ability to find grounds and arguments against another person’s position—that is only one part of it—but the willingness to subject one’s own starting assumptions, arguments, and conclusions to the same scrutiny.

That is how I try to approach EPT.

I do not claim anywhere that my model has been demonstrated or that it must be true. I am proposing it as a hypothesis and trying to find out where it fails under criticism.

If you show me a real problem—logical, metaphysical, textual, or connected with natural history—that is exactly the kind of result for which I brought the model into public discussion in the first place. Perhaps I will find an answer. Perhaps I will have to revise the model. Perhaps I will have to conclude that it fails. Any of those outcomes would be substantive for me.

But then I want to apply the same standard to the alternative construction.

If the immediate creation of every new rational soul is a necessary conclusion, I want to see the necessity of the inference.

If my Edenic construction is impossible, I want to see where exactly it breaks.

If the Act/phase distinction creates a problem at a deeper level, I want to see the problem itself.

And if you simply do not have the time or inclination to go into all of this in that level of detail, I see no problem with that at all. This is a forum discussion, and no one is obligated to spend more time on it than they want to.

But in that case I would simply leave our positions here. Repeating the Thomistic construction, or suggesting that my model may encounter problems “at a deeper level,” does not by itself give me the substantive criticism I am trying to find.

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I disagree it is materialism. What a thing is (its essence) and how it came to be are different questions to me. One concerns form and the other efficient causation.

Material parts producing material results obeys the PPC. When it comes to category shifts, I reject it entirely. Oxygen and hydrogen can combine to form water. But for me water has its own substantial form. The oxygen and hydrogen are not like legos, still fully there as independent substances. They are not annihilated either. Thomists see them as virtually present. For me, wetness doesn’t magically emerge. Water simply has its own substantial form. It’s a new substance, not just an artifact of hydrogen and oxygen gas with different physical properties. Since you seem familiar with Thomistic thought, I take it you know we distinguish between natural substances and artifacts (e.g. a spark plug remains fully a spark plug in a car). If someone attempts to frame the rational intellect in terms of emergence, I disagree completely. I think this is materialism of the gaps that also likes to use software/hardware analogies (artifacts!) too. So you claim to not do this. Good.

So then what does it claim? If the personal subject is not produced by accumulating material complexity, then it cannot be generated by natural history. In my mind this leaves direct creation ex nihilo by God. I went back and sorted all the posts by your comments because I did not read all the comments in this thread. You accept a genealogical Adam and Eve. I say good again. You said this:

Maybe this is where our metaphysics diverges because what you articulate here is impossible in my view. I may misunderstand you and you can clarify, but being immaterial. the soul has no parts, it is not going to undergo some sort of mitosis and split into two. Now whether Adam and Eve were already existing, or whether both were is debatable. I might accept Eve was made from Adam’s side. I’m just not sure what to make of all parts of the narrative.

One way to read Genesis is to note that God does not take the breath of life from Adam, he takes a rib or matter. Since Eve’s physical body is derived from Adam’s, this preserves monogenism and our theological unity. I just don’t see how you are internally differentiating and dividing an immaterial soul like a rib – if that is what you are doing(?). God must directly supply Eve’s soul. The text even links their unity to the flesh: “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh”, not some shared primordial soul-ground (I honestly have no idea what that is).

For me all substances are composites of matter and form (co-principles). Even the soul awaiting the resurrection of the body is an incomplete substance because it lacks matter. I would say your model forces (presupposes?) immaterial realities to behave like divisible physical matter. In my view, a human soul cannot exist as a free-floating ‘ground’ waiting to be individualized. You and me are distinct persons because our souls inform specific biological bodies (hylomorphism). The soul is the form of the body and when separated from our bodies, they remain incomplete as they await the bodily resurrection.

Nowhere. I am pointing out that my interpretation of Adam and Eve and souls are not limited by Genesis 2-3. We have the rest of the Bible and all of natural sciences including philosophy informing us. I also have the Magisterium. My argument would use scripture and science as helping or constraining (e.g. Paul’s punctiliar view of sin and death and evolution) but a significant portion comes from metaphysics. It might run something like this.

  1. The intellect is immaterial (triangularity, justice etc)
  2. The soul as the unifying form of the body must also be immaterial
  3. The PPC restricts an immaterial reality as emerging from material parts
  4. Being immaterial, each soul as the form of the body must be created ex nihilo
  5. Only God creates ex nihilo.

Thus, for me, it is inevitable that God creates each individual soul and I think conception makes the most sense. Aquinas had mistaken biology and delayed infusing, but I believe we now know from genetics that “at the exact moment of fertilization, a zygote is a genetically complete, highly organized, distinct human organism with the active, intrinsic teleology to direct its own development.”

Act and phase reads to me as historical and chronological. Act and potency seems more ontological. I can’t put my finger on it fully yet but in A-T metaphysics, biological matter has absolutely no natural potency to become an immaterial spirit. Granted that potency or potentiality idoes not exist in the “preceding order,” I suspect the new reality you posited cannot be a “subsequent natural unfolding.” Of course, you are allowed caveats and nuance and can shape this as I did. After all, I claimed the soul is a direct and immediate act of God, but not a miracle. The infusing of the soul is not a natural process but it is part of the natural order. I would extend that same possibility to your view.

So I think I have given you some pushback . These responses are long so I agree focusing on one or two issues is better. Less can be more here in terms of effective and fruitful dialogue.

Vinnie

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Vinnie, thank you. I found this reply substantive and genuinely interesting, especially the five-step argument you laid out for why, on your view, each individual soul must be created ex nihilo by God.

I think it is useful to state at the outset that I agree that the human soul is immaterial and does not arise from material parts as their product.

And I agree with your final point: in a fruitful discussion, less can indeed be more.

So I suggest that, for now, we set aside Act/phase and the other branches of the discussion and focus only on the soul and on one distinction that is important in EPT: a subject of experience is not the same thing as a personal subject.

I would rather not assume in advance how that discussion should proceed. What kind of exchange would be most useful for you? We could take one narrow question at a time, ask and answer questions as we go, or first give a fuller account of our respective positions and then compare them. Any of those approaches works for me, provided it lets us discuss the issue substantively without having to reopen the entire model each time.

And as for where to continue — here, in a separate thread, or by private message — I am equally comfortable with any of those. Whatever is most convenient for you.

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Continue here with a smaller scope as time permits.

I may have missed it but I put forth my view that souls are created at conception by God. So in your model how does the immaterial soul come about? I am curious if you are a dualist?

I also distinguish between sentience (subject of experience) and rationality (personal subject). For me this is an animal soul vs a human soul.

Now I’m a full blown proponent of hylomorphism. Things are composites of form and matter. This means I reject platonism and naturalism on opposite ends.

For me, a living organism can only have one substantial form. God doesn’t add a soul to a human like a software upgrade. It’s a complete overhaul that makes a completely new rational form. You can’t just imprint a soul on an animal—as if you are adding more to it. I believe humans are single, unified substances following Aquinas. The soul is the single formal cause that does both the thinking and the biological experiencing. That the sheer beauty of hylomorphism.

So what is your view? More specifically, if your model rejects direct creation *ex nihilo, how does is avoid treating the personal subject as just a dualistic add-on?

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In the broadest possible sense, if by dualism you mean that personal reality is not reducible to physical processes, then EPT is certainly closer to dualism than to either physicalism or idealism. But I suspect that you mean something more specific by the term, so I would be interested in how you are using it here.

In particular, I am not proposing a picture of a biological robot with a little soul placed inside it. In earthly embodied existence, EPT understands the human person as an embodied unity of body and soul, not as two independent agents temporarily occupying the same place.

Genesis 2:7 is important to my own starting point here, although my reading differs from the assumption that Eden already contains an earthly biological human organism.

I am not claiming that my reading is the only possible exegesis. But in EPT I do not read the dust in Genesis 2 as a biological description of a Homo sapiens body being produced in Eden. In my reading, the dust signifies the creaturely status of the Edenic Adam; the divine inbreathing signifies the gift of personal life — or, if one prefers the stronger term, the immortality of the soul as a gift sustained by the Creator — and Adam becomes a “living soul.” I take this as imagistic language for the creation of the Edenic personal ground, or, in more familiar terms, the soul-personal reality.

Explicitly earthly embodiment comes later in the model. With the transition into earthly human history, the earthly Adam and Eve become two genuinely distinct embodied persons, each entering a concrete biological history. It is there that EPT places the unity of biological embodiment and the personal ground.

That is one reason I would hesitate to assume that the biblical picture itself requires the sequence: first a biological organism, then a separately created individual soul, and then the union of the two. That may be a coherent metaphysical account, but I do not think Genesis 2:7 by itself settles that metaphysical question.

Paul gives me a second reason for caution. In 1 Corinthians 15 he distinguishes the body that is sown as a natural or “soulish” body from the body raised as a spiritual body.

I do not claim to know the precise metaphysical constitution of the “spiritual body.” That seems to me a large question in its own right. But Paul at least distinguishes resurrected embodied existence from our present corruptible biological mode of embodiment.

So I would hesitate to assume that our present body–soul relation, however we describe it metaphysically, already gives us an exhaustive account of every possible form of embodied personal existence.

Vinnie, I think your hylomorphic account gives us a useful point from which to continue before I try to answer your question entirely within the categories of my own model.

Earlier you wrote:

But if those hominids were already living and sentient organisms, then within a hylomorphic account they would presumably already have had an animal substantial form. You now say that a living organism can have only one substantial form.

So what exactly happens at that transition?

Does the previous animal substance cease to exist, with a numerically new human substance coming into existence when the rational soul is created? Or would you describe the transition differently?

I ask because this seems directly relevant to your question about my model. Before deciding whether one of our views is adding something to an already complete organism, I would first like to understand what happens, in your own account, to the already living and sentient organism when it becomes a rational human being.

I do distinguish a subject of experience from a personal subject, but I would not simply equate that distinction with sentience versus rationality.

Sentience corresponds fairly closely to what I mean by a subject of experience. Rationality, however, is not identical with the personal subject in EPT. Rational thought can be one expression of personal existence, but rational performance is not what confers personal status.

This also makes me curious about your distinction between an animal soul and a human rational soul. On your view, does the animal soul cease to exist with the death of the animal, whereas the human rational soul continues after bodily death? I ask rather than simply assuming the Thomistic answer, because I want to understand exactly what distinction you yourself are making between the two kinds of soul.

There is also an epistemic reason for my caution.

I have immediate first-person access to myself as a subject: I experience, think, intend, remember, and act. I also have a strong first-person sense of myself as an enduring personal subject, and I would not rule out describing some aspect of that experience as a sense of one’s soul. But I do not directly observe my own soul as another object within experience, still less the soul of another person.

So when either of us moves from the reality of the subject to a particular metaphysical account of the soul, we are doing philosophy. That does not make such an account arbitrary or merely speculative. Thomistic hylomorphism is a serious and highly developed metaphysical account, and EPT also makes metaphysical claims of its own. But I think it is useful to distinguish the reality we are trying to explain from the particular metaphysical vocabulary through which we explain it.

Sorry this ended up a little longer than I intended. But you are asking about something close to the foundation of the model, and I could not find a way to answer both briefly and substantively without leaving out distinctions that seem important. So this is about as compact as I could make it.

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I meant a Platonist conception of the soul. I can’t pin your view. It initially seems to me that you think of souls as an immaterial component added on to an already existing substantial form (material being). I do not accept this view. But neither do you it seems: “I am not proposing a picture of a biological robot with a little soul placed inside it.”

It may be that the EPT, while making significant strides towards truth, simply lacks the proper philosophical architecture to fully nail down these concepts. It may benefit from hylomorphism because this looks like you wanting to have your cake and eat it too. You can’t just declare the body and soul a unity if your methodological framework doesn’t allow for it. An animal has its own substantial form. We don’t append a soul and have another substantial form. That is not a unity. I see two options:

a) There is a hominid animal (sensitive soul) that is its own substantial form. This stays the same and the rational soul is added on top. This is the “biological robot with a little soul placed inside it” of the ghost in the machine dualism/platonism which you said you are close to.

b) The rational soul replaces the animal soul and a new substantial form is born. If this is your view, I’d welcome you to Thomistic thinking.

What is an Edenic personal ground?

How is this not robot in the machine? You have a creaturey Edenic Adam that is given the breath of life.

How is the soul of each person generated or how does it come to be? You have stated you see the soul as immaterial. Does generation via biology alone create each new soul?

When you say soul-personal reality and Edenic ground I am more convinced that the underlying metaphysics of EPT get far but eventually run out of gas.

You also see dust as a creaturely Adam. For me, dust is not alive nor is it a creature. For me the dust is the matter. Adam is not alive until the soul becomes the form organizing the matter (breath of life). Again, hylomorphism.

If God used a pre-existing hominid, the previous animal is corrupted and something totally new is made. The soul is not an add on, it’s the form of the body. I am not just a soul piloting flesh; I am a unified composite of matter and form—a singular me. The bottom line for me is the rational soul isn’t a gift given to an existing creature. It is the the formal cause that makes the creature exist as a human in the first place. We can question what matter God used (a pre-existing hominid, the dust or de novo creation) but the soul organizes it. The alternative is ghost in the machine Platonism which you both seem to affirm and deny.

Another valid question to ask me would be how can the soul survive biological death if it’s not a Platonic add on? I’ll forestall the question. The answer is because action follows being in Thomistic thought and the soul is immaterial. Since the rational soul exercises operations that are independent of matter, its existence (its being) must also be independent of matter. This it how it can survive the material corruption of the body but it is entirely impoverished without it. Souls in heaven exist in a disembodied state and that is why the resurrection of the body is virtually demanded by the Thomistic view of the soul. Which is exactly what we find in Scripture which is quite elegant, reassuring and beautiful.

So I am really confused because you say this but earlier said this: “In my reading, the dust signifies the creaturely status of the Edenic Adam; the divine inbreathing signifies the gift of personal life.”

I’m still not sure exactly what you believe here.

Paul was a 1st century Pharisee and that alone makes it extremely likely he shared belief in a material bodily resurrection. Not to mention verses in Thessalonians where they are explicitly awaiting this. Jesus is the first fruits of the general resurrection of the dead.

I think you are misreading Paul. My knowledge of Greek is limited but Paul is not so much describing what the body is made of (some ghost-spirit stuff), he is describing what drives it. He used the word body (soma) as far as I know and thus, spiritual body probably means spirit-led body. The resurrected body is a body, but it is transformed, energized, and driven by the Holy Spirit (pneuma).So it is glorified but a solar power car is none-the-less a vehicle even if powered by the sun. We see this with Jesus, whose glorified body still had flesh and bones. He could eat and be touched.

Paul is teaching exactly what Thomists believe: “In this life, the spirit is dragged down by the flesh; in the resurrection, the flesh will be perfectly elevated and subject to the spirit.” Our conception of souls ties into how we understand heaven (e.g. could we be free and not sin in heaven?).

Yes. Animals souls are entirely material. When the matter of the animal is corrupted the animal no longer exists. The soul has immaterial operations and its existence is not contingent solely on the material world.

We are both doing philosophy but I have to push back quite hard here. You seem to be thinking reality is some neutral ground and our metaphysical vocabulary is just an optional linguistic lens placed over it. Your entire “reality of the subject” is steeped in metaphysics. In fact, in suggesting that we can access the ‘reality of the subject’ distinct from a metaphysical account of it is itself a massive metaphysical claim. Using terms like subject, phase and reality rely on some heavy duty metaphysical concepts. If we aren’t engaging in philosophy, we aren’t seeking truth.

My metaphysical vocabulary is based on the notion that I think hylomorphism objectively maps onto reality. If I were to ask you if the ‘Edenic personal ground’ is a substance, a form, or an accident, I am not just asking you to translate your vocabulary into mine. I am really asking what that reality actually is ontologically speaking

Compact posts will be a problem for both of us!

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I think this distinction actually helps bring our disagreement into much sharper focus.

First, briefly, on the word dualism. I would not oppose “dualism” and “hylomorphism” as such. In the broader philosophical usage, Thomistic hylomorphism can itself reasonably be regarded as a distinctive form of dualist position: it does not eliminate the fundamental distinction between the material and the immaterial, but proposes a particular metaphysical architecture for their unity. The category of “hylomorphic dualism” is itself well established in contemporary philosophy.

Likewise, the claim that one living organism can have only one substantial form is itself a substantive metaphysical premise. The unicity and plurality of substantial forms were debated even within scholasticism. So I do not think the principle of one substantial form can simply be taken as a metaphysically neutral starting point from which all possible alternatives are exhausted.

Here I think it may help first to separate our vocabularies.

When you speak of an “animal soul,” I understand that as a technical term within your hylomorphic framework. In EPT, I would describe the corresponding experiential level in terms of a naturally emergent psyche and a subject of experience.

An animal perceives, feels pain and pleasure, remembers, learns, and forms attachments. In EPT, all of this belongs to the natural-emergent history of sentient life, nervous organization, and psyche. The model does not introduce a separate immediate creation of an immaterial soul in order for such a subject of experience to arise.

This also seems consistent with your own later clarification:

So, to avoid mixing our vocabularies, I would leave “animal soul” as your Thomistic term, while in my own framework I would speak of psyche and subject of experience. I would reserve the word soul for the human personal level.

And that makes your answer about the original hominid especially interesting.

For EPT, continuity is crucial at precisely this point.

The Sixth Act does not destroy an already existing subject of experience. The personal mode of being opens within an already existing experiencing subject, preserving its naturally emergent psyche, embodiment, and sentient history. In a human being, traits belonging to the soul are present without cancelling the animal traits.

So my question here is very specific:

In your model, is numerically the same subject preserved across the transition from a sentient hominid to a human being with a rational soul?

If so, I would like to understand how that is reconciled with the claim that the previous animal is corrupted and “something totally new” is made.

Now to the human soul.

In working language, I can call it an impersonal soul directly created in Eden.

By impersonal I mean that it is not yet an individual earthly person with its own embodied biography, individual first-person perspective, and separate history.

Initially, this single Edenic ground is represented by the Edenic Adam. Within it, a real distinction emerges as the Adamic and Evic principles.

Each subsequent human person bears a complete imprint of this single ground. In ordinary Christian vocabulary, such a complete imprint corresponds to an individual human soul. In Thomistic vocabulary, the nearest analogue would be the individual rational soul as the human substantial form.

If you are asking what the precise metaphysical nature of this ground is, and exactly how the complete imprint is related to a particular embodied person, my answer is: I do not know.

But then I would ask the same question of your model: what is an individual human substantial form ontologically, and exactly how is this immaterial form the form of this particular body?

Here I think you are moving a little too quickly.

Before we move to Paul, we already have Genesis 2–3, and your treatment of those chapters raises a question for me.

You wrote earlier:

But at the same time you say quite confidently:

Why?

What establishes that “dust” in the Eden text should mean matter in the ontological sense you then employ in your hylomorphic reading?

As I understand your replies, you also take the Edenic Adam and Eve to be embodied human beings in a fairly ordinary physical sense. If I am understanding you correctly, what gives this particular element such a definite physical-historical status?

I see an asymmetry here. With some of the imagery, you explicitly acknowledge that you do not know where the line between historical and imagistic language lies, while you use “dust = matter” and the physical status of the Edenic Adam and Eve with considerably greater confidence.

What is the criterion for that distinction?

So far, I do not see it in your account.

And then:

I am not yet prepared to regard either the first interpretation, much less the second Thomistic conclusion, as established by the text itself.

I see that Paul uses the word body. But the presence of that word alone does not tell us the ontological or physical nature of what he calls a spiritual body.

When Paul speaks of the natural or soulish body, we have direct experience of the relevant mode of embodiment: our present earthly biological mode.

When he speaks of the spiritual body, we have no comparable independent experience.

The expression spiritual body does not tell us what such a body is made of, what laws govern it, or precisely how it relates to space, matter, or the physical order we presently observe.

I am not proposing some alternative ready-made physics of the spiritual body.

I am saying that I do not know it.

But then a symmetrical question arises: does Thomism know it, or does it offer one metaphysical interpretation of what Paul leaves undescribed at this level?

Likewise, I do not know whether our ordinary earthly opposition between “embodied” and “disembodied” applies to the Edenic mode of being in exactly the same sense in which we use it now.

When I call the human soul immaterial, I mean that it is not a physical object within the observable physical order of our earthly world.

But that does not mean that we already know exhaustively how it exists outside our present mode of earthly embodiment.

So I do not see an external arbiter that would allow us to derive either your metaphysics or mine uniquely from the expression spiritual body.

Still less do I think the claim that Paul “is teaching exactly what Thomists believe” has yet been established.

The fact that Thomism arose much later than Paul proves nothing by itself. A later philosophical system may indeed correctly articulate earlier content.

But then an argument is needed to establish that correspondence.

The compatibility of Paul with Thomistic metaphysics does not by itself mean that Paul is already teaching the unicity of substantial form, the Aristotelian relation of matter and form, a particular account of the separated rational soul, or other specifically Thomistic commitments.

So I would put our difference more simply.

You emphasize the word body.

I am also paying attention to the word spiritual.

I see no reason why either emphasis should cancel the other. But neither do I see why the conjunction of those two words should already give us a ready-made physics or a final metaphysics of resurrected existence.

At this point it may be useful to return to a deliberately rough paraphrase I used earlier, but for a somewhat different purpose.

Earlier I used this example to suggest that changing conceptual vocabulary does not necessarily destroy the referent.

Now I am interested in another feature of the same example.

The words photon, universe, and high-energy medium receive their content independently of my interpretation of Genesis. Even if my proposed correspondence turned out to be completely wrong, the physical meaning of photon would remain unchanged. There are physical theories, mathematical structures, observations, and experiments independent of my hypothesis that determine the content of that concept.

When we speak about the soul, the Edenic ground, or substantial form, our epistemic situation is different.

I am not demanding that metaphysics be confirmed by physical experiment. That would be a category mistake.

My point is narrower: the content of photon is fixed by an independent research practice. The content of metaphysical concepts such as substantial form or Edenic personal ground is not fixed by an independent research practice in the same way.

So when you ask whether the Edenic personal ground is a substance, a form, or an accident, I understand the question. But I also see that the form of the question already presupposes an Aristotelian-Thomistic classification.

If that classification objectively maps onto reality, as you believe, then my model must ultimately either prove compatible with it or be wrong.

But that correspondence is precisely what still needs to be established.

And here we can locate quite precisely where our real disagreement about the human soul begins.

You previously wrote that Catholics reject traducianism because the soul is immaterial and physical generation cannot, by itself, produce an immaterial soul.

At that level, I agree with you.

EPT likewise holds that the human soul is immaterial.

EPT does not hold that biological reproduction itself produces an immaterial personal reality.

EPT does not suppose that some fragment breaks away from the parents’ souls and passes into the child.

So up to this point, our disagreement is much smaller than it may initially appear.

It begins at the next step.

You move from the immateriality of the soul and the insufficiency of biological causation to the conclusion that each new individual soul must be separately and immediately created by God.

It is precisely this additional step that EPT does not regard as established.

I understand its internal Thomistic logic. I deliberately tried, for a time, to reason as though the Thomistic system were my own.

If one accepts that each individual human soul is the immaterial substantial form of a particular new human being, and that no material cause can produce it, then the immediate creation of each soul by God becomes a very natural conclusion.

But to me there is an important difference between these two claims:

“If the relevant Thomistic premises are accepted, the immediate creation of each individual soul follows.”

and

“We have independent grounds for regarding it as established that God in fact immediately creates each individual soul in precisely this way.”

It is the grounds for the second claim that I would like to understand.

And my alternative does not arise merely from a desire to avoid the Thomistic conclusion.

Above, Genesis 2–3 were the basis of my question about your reading; here they become the basis for my own reading.

In my hypothesis, Genesis 2:7 concerns the original immediate creation of a single impersonal soul — the Edenic personal ground. Within this ground, the Adamic and Evic principles become differentiated. In the transition to earthly history, two independent embodied persons emerge, each bearing a complete personal imprint of the single ground. The human personal line then continues genealogically.

I am not claiming that this is the only possible exegesis.

My claim is different: the immateriality of the soul does not by itself establish that the repeated separate creation of every new individual soul is the only possible metaphysical architecture.

And here we return to your own statement:

So I think it is useful to place our two models side by side and apply the same standard to both:

what ontological reality does each model take as basic?

what grounds do we have for thinking that reality is in fact as the model describes it?

what actually follows from the model’s starting premises?

what does the model explain, and what does it so far merely designate?

and at what point must each model honestly say:

“Beyond this, I do not know.”

I think that comparison would make it much clearer whether EPT really lacks something that hylomorphism has already explained, or whether, at some of the points we have been discussing, both models reach the same epistemic boundary while using different metaphysical vocabularies.

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So is George Washington an historical human being or a symbol of republican virtue, military restraint, and the birth of American democracy?

My point is that these are hardly contradictory categories and forcing a choice and insisting on something just being a symbol only is thus to make an assertion which is nearly impossible to substantiate and a little overreaching. I tend to think that most legends very likely have a basis in a real person (or blend of persons) existing some time in history as just a part of how legends begin – from Santa Claus, to king Arthur, and Robin Hood. Of course not all things attributed to them in stories are true any more than the story of George W chopping down a cherry tree.