What About the Fulcran Vigouroux Solution?

Several Catholics too traddy to be fully evolutionists are at least "in the know" about "proofs" for long ages.

This means, they appeal to Reverend Fulcran Vigouroux, a Sulpician from Paris.

Now, his full solution (back then to geological arguments mainly) is:

• LXX rather than Masoretic / Vulgate
• Day Age
• Limited Flood (to the continent where mankind was)
• Possibly Elastic Genealogies for Genesis 5 and 11.

Now, LXX timeline is unproblematic. It is still within the Biblical Inerrancy.

Day Age got a "green light" canonically when he was himself judge in the Pontifical Biblical Commission in Rome, 1909.

He did not in that time in 1909 get an opportunity to greenlight also Limited Flood or Elastic Genealogies. He did greenlight use of unproper or uncommon senses of words, and he did greenlight day age, and I already quoted and personally translated the decision in this blog post:

I have been Asked if Kent Hovind didn't have Talmudic Positions?
https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2017/07/i-have-been-asked-if-kent-hovind-didnt.html

Note well, the one asking me whether Kent Hovind had Talmudic positions was a Paris Catholic traddy enough to be a Church Goer in St. Nicolas du Chardonnet. And the one position he was sure to know was, he is Young Earth Creationist, so he was erroneously classifying Young Earth Creationism as a Talmudic error.

But, the one single position clearly greenlighted apart from the traditional (actually traditional, not "Traditional" movement) ones, is : day age.

This means that we can't have some human populations being around independently of Noah since before the Flood, since Limited Flood was not greenlighted (note, his own version of Limited Flood would not have helped such an idea, since he considered the Flood as limited to all of mankind, while Koalas and Kangaroos, Grizzly Bears and Pumas would have made it without the Ark - he was a species fixist and not a Baraminologist and miscounted what all land living animals alive today being from the Ark would imply), and one can neither extend the Flood to Abraham time of Genesis 11 beyond LXX, nor the Adam to Flood time, since Elastic Genealogies weren't greenlighted either.

For instance, if we admit some small elasticity to the Genesis 11 genealogy so that it gets a second or a third "second Cainan" omitted, on top of the one who is in standard version of LXX but not in Masoretic, this is not all that problematic theologically, since it still allows for the events in chapters 2 to first part of 11 to have been historically faithfully transmitted, so that it does not attack the historicity of Genesis 3.

Note very well that his Latin answer to the idea of not full historicity of first three chapters was "negative ad utramque partem" ("nope" to both parts of the question, even if there were actually three parts to it). As Catholics we must hold Genesis 1, 2 and 3 are fully historical. We may hold they coincide with myths, we may not say that rather than factual accounts they are taken over from (non-factual) myths.

And this means, we need a full blown transmission of the historic accounts, and while there would be a case for allowing to admit one or two generations more in the transmission, admitting several more to add over thousand years more clearly breaks the limits of a reliably conducted transmission, especially as it means incorrectness in the transmission of the genealogy, so it would itself be showing a lack of full human historical reliability.

But wouldn't the omitted second Cainan, if real, also do so? No, we would be dealing with a "ritual" omission, a condemnatio memoriae, with second Cainan not being mentioned in the Hebrew genealogy, since he was a cursed generation - and obviously adding too many of those will not help in admitting God took full care of mankind through guarding truth in the patriarchal line up to Abraham. Which we need to admit. The other possibility is, there was no omission, both Luke 3 and the exclusively Christian manuscripts of LXX, all manuscripts that have the second Cainan, depend on a scribal error (probably in Luke 3, transferring from the part of the Luke 3 genealogy that came from Genesis 5).

Now, what does this mean for trads?

They can't accept men lived 40 000 years ago. And carbon dated human bones suggest clearly they either should do that or ditch old age, by admitting carbon dates reduce to shorter ages, due to - for instance - initially lower and then quickly rising carbon levels in the atmosphere, samples beginning with lots less than 100 pmC.

So, if they accept the 40 000 years date as a true one, what are their options? Three:

• Apparently human bones from 40 000 years ago were actually from non-human humanoids, including those from Cro-Magnon men : impossible; God has given the rational and irrational versions of "animal" distinctive biological kinds, so that an anatomic human needs to be a theological human, an image of God. Also clearly some of their activities show they had language, and it is impossible for mere irrational animals to have real human language.
• Adam was created c. 6000 - 7500 years ago, pre-Adam humans were fully human, but all humans now alive descend from Adam : improbable in the case of a limited Flood and Indians and Aborigines all descending from populations separated from the Old World 20 000 years ago or more, and the ban on believing in non-Adamite humans was specifically put in place to guarantee full humanity and redeemability of Negroes, Indians, Australian Negroes.
• Adam lived more than 40 000 years ago, and this brings us to genealogies being treated as so "elastic" that they break down the chain of historic transmission, at least credible such, completely.

In other words, each option has a specific damning flaw, and on top of that, the elastic genealogies part of Fulcran Vigouroux' solution, back from before his days in Rome, back in 19th C. Paris, was not greenlighted.

Some might here opt for the worst option : claiming human bones are non-human. Sacraments depend on man being set aside physically (remember, when C. S. Lewis imagined another world in which some rational creatures shared the physical appearance of brutes, that world had no sacraments), for instance in the case of a miscarriage, whether one can baptise what comes out or should consider it a non-human monster, even with very non-human appearance, if it is still alive, it should count as at least possibly human and be baptised, at least conditionally "si homo es, ego te baptizo in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti". So, counting Cro-Magnons or even Neanderthals and Denisovans as non-human is a no no for Catholics.

While we are speaking of this barbarous solution, it was accepted by some Seminary teachers in the days of Pius XII, and the argument back then seems to have been "if a creature spends 10 000 years or more without inventing agriculture, it can't be human". The problems with this are several :

• while being an agriculturer is a clearly human act, it must be an optional one, since city dwellers, hunters, nomads are also human - one should never pinpoint any one human act as the compulsory sine qua non for being human;
• some evolutionists have pinpointed the reason for agriculture to develop as less moisture, meaning, the 10 000's or 20 000's or 30 000's of years without agriculture would have been due to a climate making life agreeable enough without it;
• while we know they hunted and fished, we do not know they and all like them (some of which we have not found) had no agriculture;
• and above all, if we reduce the carbon dates duly, like 40 000 years BP reduced to year of the Flood or somewhat before, we do not have all that many post-Flood centuries without agriculture, in my latest tables, I have Göbekli Tepe starting when Noah dies in 350 after the Flood (Peleg born 401 after Flood in Roman Martyrology), meaning the lack of agriculture is very transitory.

In other words, the wise guys who think they are more sophisticated in accepting Fulcran Vigouroux rather than Young Earth Creationism really are missing several points, and very probably depend on treating the issue more rhetorically and politically (I recall having heard an approachment between Young Earth Creationism and Zionism, even!) than as a matter where truth and falsehood and therefore reasons and arguments, apply.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Cajetan
7.VIII.2020