Sorry for the multiple posting above!
DeLano
But the Catholic has always and everywhere believed that Eve is the mother of all the living
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TOF
Just so. The atheists claim that modern genetics makes it impossible. Kemp and others showed that even if we assume modern genetics has it right, it does not affect the truth of the belief, only the facts of the story by which those beliefs are communicated.
>> Once again, it is right exactly here that your approach goes off the rails. No doctrine which has been held always and everywhere, by the whole body of the faithful, can ever be shown to be “impossible” by *valid* scientific reasoning. To surrender this is to surrender the Faith. To entertain this as a scientific possibility is to subject Revelation (God’s Own Truth) to the certification of unbelievers who rely upon contingent and fallible chains of supposition and inference, *or even valid deduction* (but from false first principles).
The correct response to all such claims is to subject the suppositions, inferences, and first principles to rigorous examination, so as to show them to be neither certain, nor valid.
Instead, you have stipulated to them, and set about reformulating Revelation so as to render it amenable to the suppositions, inferences, and first principles of scientific atheists who reject the very possibility of Faith.
In other words, you have it exactly backwards.
Unsurprisingly, even given the best of subjective intentions, you have failed on both counts. You have surrendered the Faith, and you have hewed out for yourself a broken cistern, which cannot itself withstand even the most basic critical examination.
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DeLano
A human being is, by definition, the union of a body and a rational soul. If the organism lacks a rational soul, it is not human. If it is not human, then it is not a descendant of Adam.
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TOF
Precisely. But that obviously allows for the union of a human-like body and a sensitive soul, as well as the union of a inhumanlike body and a rational soul.
>>Nope. It obviously does not allow for any such thing. You have ignored the necessary condition that all humans are descended from Adam, all of them. Should ET show up tomorrow, and you were to assert that ET had a rational soul, that would not suffice to make ET human, since ET would not be a descendant of Adam.
Again, you confuse categories in your eagerness to defend your novelty, which is not at all what the Church has taught.
TOF: To Augustine, the principle part was the rational soul and the physical form of the body was irrelevant.
>> Why do you accuse Augustine of such heresy?
CCC #365 “The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the “form” of the body:234 i.e., it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature.”
That is the Catholic Faith.
“Augustine says that a human being is “a rational soul which has a body,” he also says that “the soul which has a body does not make two persons, but one human being” (In Johannis evangelium tractatus 19.15). A human being can be defined as a single substance with a body and a soul: “If we should define a human being such that a human being is a rational substance consisting of soul and body, there is no doubt that a human being has a soul which is not the body and has a body which is not the soul” (De Trin. 15.7.11).”—Cambridge Companion to Augustine
Augustine and I hold the Catholic Faith, and you falsely impute to Augustine the broken cistern which you have hewed out for yourself.
It doesn’t hold any water.
You are floundering, sir.
TOF: If the organism lacks a rational soul, then it is not metaphysically human, but it may be biologically human, as examination of H. erectus or H. neanderthalensis may indicate.
>> Wrong again. A rational soul is the substantial form of the human body. No rational soul, no human body. Let the anthropologists confuse their bones with biology, but please do not compound their error by proposing a distinction between humans and non human humans.
You refute yourself in the very advancing of such a contradiction.
TOF: Obviously, those humans are precisely =not= the descendents of Adam,
>> And hence, obviously, are not human….....
so you have grasped that much of the essay.
>> I have grasped that your essay has shipwrecked.
TOF: However many others may have been in Adam’s troop of hominids,
>> Adam had no troop of hominids. That is a concoction, a fantasy. Adam had sons and daughters. That is the Catholic Faith.
TOF: they were obviously not his decendents, but his contemporaries.
>> They were, like blemyae and sciopods and ET, not his descendants, and hence not human.
TOF: But all subsequent “true men” (as Pius XII called them)
>> In anticipation of just such hypotheses as you have advanced here, no doubt…..
or “metaphysical men” (as the philosophers called them)
>> The philosophers would have done better to listen to Pius XII…....
TOF: are descended from Adam.
>> Alas, there are no non humans, and all humans descend from Adam *and Eve*, the mother of all the living. Your non human humans, blemyae, sciopods, and ET’s, all share a common characteristic. They serve the purpose in your narrative, which inflators, cold dark matter, dark energy, and multiverses serve in Stephen Hawking’s.
That is to say, they are hypothetical entities invented to bridge the otherwise insuperable gaps in logic in the narrative.
TOF The reason this monogenesis does not show up in the genes is:
a) a rational soul is immaterial and hence not something genetic in the first place.
b) and hence, biology can only “see” the biological ancestry of humans.
>> The correct answer is that the biologists read the genes from an assumption that junk DNA is junk, and that Adam was not created in a state of genetic perfection, from which we have fallen.
In other words, the correct answer is that the biologist (geneticist) reads the evidence from undemonstrated *philosophical* premises which exclude *a priori* the hypothesis that the Faith has it right. The biologist also assumes that he knows everything necessary in order to disprove the Faith, not, of course, on the basis of the evidence (the evidence is quite consistent with the Faith), but instead on the basis of the assumptions through which he interprets the evidence.
Very much the same sort of thing happened when Galileo stood up and insisted that the tides proved the Earth was in motion.
They didn’t, as a matter of science.
But how many Catholics know or care about that today?
Goliath is so large and frightening, perhaps we had better send out an embassy and negotiate an ecumenical arrangement with him…....
TOF: I hope you don’t plan to argue that the rational soul is something material or something biologically evolved! That would be a serious deficiency.
>> I will go ahead and leave the serious deficiencies to you, since you are adept at them.
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DeLano
Your fantasy of humans interbreeding with non-humans is exactly that- a fantasy, utterly unknown to Scripture, Tradition, Fathers, Doctors, Councils, or Popes.
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TOF
That there even are “genes” was something unknown to them.
>> I hope you are not suggesting that one must know of genes in order to be able to know what is a human. That would be a serious deficiency…....
TOF: So, too, the existence of Uranus and Neptune; of the Americas; of praesodymium; of heliocentrism, valence electrons, continental uplift, and so on.
>> None of which have the slightest connection to our discussion.
TOF: You mustn’t be too harsh on them because in the first and second century they did no have access to the scientiae of the 14th century, the 17th century, the 20th century. It was not their intention to teach facts about the natural world.
>> And we mustn’t be too harsh on you because you have departed the sure path of defending the Faith once delivered, because you are so dazzled by the narratives of the last decade, that you have imbibed them as if they somehow proved anything other than the obvious truth that one’s philosophical assumptions will determine one’s reading of a body of scientific evidence.
But I encourage you to examine the evidence, just for fun sometime, from the standpoint that the Church’s ancient and apostolic belief: God created Adam, then Eve from Adam, and all the human race descends directly from these two.
You will find that the evidence is supportive in surprising ways.
This is because there can be no real conflict between faith and science, just so long as we recall that Faith is above reason, though never in conflict with right reason.
TOF: “The writers of the Bible were illuminated more or less - some more than others - on the question of salvation. On other questions they were as wise or as ignorant as their generation. Hence it is utterly unimportant that errors of historic or scientific fact should be found in the Bible, especially if errors relate to events that were not directly observed by those who wrote about them. The idea that because they were right in their doctrine of immortality and salvation they must also be right on all other subjects is simply the fallacy of people who have an incomplete understanding of why the Bible was given to us at all.”
- Fr. Georges Lemaître
>> When it comes to biblical matters, Fr. Lemaitre makes a great cosmologist.
Unfortunately, he advances here a doctrine incompatible with the official teaching of the Catholic Church:
“For the system of those who, in order to rid themselves of these difficulties, do not hesitate to concede that divine inspiration regards the things of faith and morals, and nothing beyond, because (as they wrongly think) in a question of the truth or falsehood of a passage, we should consider not so much what God has said as the reason and purpose which He had in mind in saying it-this system cannot be tolerated. For all the books which the Church receives as sacred and canonical, are written wholly and entirely, with all their parts, at the dictation of the Holy Ghost; and so far is it from being possible that any error can co-exist with inspiration, that inspiration not only is essentially incompatible with error, but excludes and rejects it as absolutely and necessarily as it is impossible that God Himself, the supreme Truth, can utter that which is not true. This is the ancient and unchanging faith of the Church, solemnly defined in the Councils of Florence and of Trent, and finally confirmed and more expressly formulated by the Council of the Vatican.”
May God be merciful to Fr. Lemaitre for this is grotesque error, and may God deliver young Catholics from its disorienting effects.
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DeLano
The Scholastic distinction between biological human and metaphysical human has never been taught in any magisterial document of the Catholic Church in all of Her history.
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TOF
Duh? The Magisterium is unconcerned with matters of natural science, as such. It teaches that all humans today (all of whom are metaphysically human) are descended from the first metaphysical human.
>> The terms “metaphysically human” and “metaphysical human” have never appeared in any document of the magisterium. This is because the magisterium is wiser than you are, by the infallible decree of God Himself.
TOF: It was not necessary to make a distinction back in them days because no one had ever seen a human-like hominid lacking in intellect.
>> To the contrary, there is no such distinction necessary, since no “human-like hominid lacking in intellect” is human. Only those engaged in the fatal venture of “improving” on Revelation, will find themselves caught up in the thickets of illogic which result in confusing the two.
TOF: Heck, they had never even seen a gorilla. So it would never have occurred to them that a distinction was necessary. Modern humans are, so far as we know, unique in creation. (Though like I said, Augustine allowed as how there might be exceptions.)
>> The Church, being much wiser than you, saw gorillas and had not the slightest difficulty concluding they were no human. Augustine, as we have seen, recognizes, as you do not, that the rational soul is the form of the human body.
All you have demonstrated here, TOF, is your vast deficiencies in “improving” upon what the Church has taught.
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TOF: Meanwhile, it is amusing to note that three big scientific breakthroughs that have defined modern science were:
a) heliocentrism: Copernicus, a Catholic cathedral canon.
b) genetics: Fr. Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian monk
c) big bang physics: Fr. Georges Lemaître, a Belgian secular priest
>> All of which, as scientific hypotheses, have brought benefits, within their proper constraints. It is the tendency of some to imagine that heliocentrism is true, or that genetics can disprove Revelation, or that Big Bang physics correctly accounts for what we observe in the cosmos, that constitutes the problem.
It is the terrible, recent tendency of some neo-Catholics to propose that heliocentrism, genetics, or big bang physics somehow require the abandonment and reformulation of Revelation, that is the true catastrophe of our age.