Answering Father Dwight Longenecker's Difficulties with Adam and Eve

I nearly felt like just uncharitably posting in the comment section the posts with the replies, I am posting them with this intro, trying to be charitable. And since comment section is not open, I am posting on my blog and linking to yours, here:

Patheos : Standing on my Head : Difficulties with Adam and Eve.

Father Philip Lynch, C.S.Sp. and R.I.P., would simply not have agreed at all. And he was handing on what Catholics know as Tradition, therein. Nor do I agree:

Crea vs Evolu : If Genesis Chapter One is Not History, Then What?

People like you are giving me trouble believing your Pope is the true Pope. Here is what I wrote to Rome, and hope one earlier correspondent there transmitted to the concerned:

Francis, are you Dealing in Life or in Death?

So far I have gotten no answer. Here is a quote from you:

My own theory is that there were other human-type creatures on earth, but that Adam and Eve were the first specially created humans with souls, with free will and perhaps the first with language. They were the first to have a relationship with God, and therefore the first parents of all who believe.

That is rehashed talmudism, thinking that people outside the people of God are not true people. It implies believing that it can talk like a man and walk like a man but still not be a man. Look like an image of God and yet not be it. Make no mistake, the men of Cro-Magnon, dated I think (and acc. to us YEC obviously misdated) to some 20.000 Before Present, looked exactly like us. The difference between them and modern Europeans is less than between Europeans and Asiatics. That much I do know about Evolution Theory as earlier having studied it with avidity. I am an ex-Evolutionist, you see.

No, it is vital to the pro-life cause, as well as to avoiding racism, that things that look like men are also men, created in God's image. The theory of pre-Adamites surfaced in a very ugly context, some Spaniards exasperated with Mexican human sacrifice or with their own greed being stopped by considerations of humanity, whichever it was, theorised that Mexicas were not men, but pre-Adamites. The Church pretty quickly condemned that theory of course - since back then there was no breach in the YEC Tradition.

Part of your trouble is what I would call a kind of Galileo Complex about standing up for things that your scientist Frank would consider ridiculous. Galileo was wrong, not only honour of the Church, but also coherence of YEC requires it:

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere ... on Young Earth Creationism Denying Gravity (with a certain levity towards the matter, thank God!)

Other part of your trouble is apparently not knowing (or possibly not caring) that Saint Thomas Aquinas would have given you exactly the same answer about Cain's wife as you were given back in your Evangelical days. It was his sister, and certain moral and medical issues about that were not there in the first generation after the first parents. That is all.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Paris, from Mouffetard Library
Pentecost Tuesday
(or Tuesday in Pentecost Octave)*
21-V-2013

*I love that episode about Paul VI trying to use white and being told to use green: "but we are in the Pentecost Octave" - "you abolished it, your holiness". Don't you?