Child Adam?

Theological Consequences · Jimmy Akin on Patristic and Scientific Expertise. · Child Adam? · Archaic Actual Humans or Apes in Human Shapes? · What If Adam Became a Man - When he Became a Man? · Tolkien's Elves Are Not the Key to Cain's Wife or Adam's Growth

BioLogos has the good sense to show off their knowledge of the traditional doctrine that they reject:

In a common traditional view, Adam and Eve were created de novo—they were created by God as fully formed humans (Homo sapiens), roughly 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. God made them quickly and completely as fully formed humans with no biological ancestors. In this traditional de novo view, Adam and Eve are “sole progenitors”: they were the first two humans, and they alone gave rise to all other humans. The Genesis account is taken to be a record of real events similar to the way a journalist would record them today.

If we change the job description from "journalist" to "involved actors" and the recording mode from detailed reportage to scaled down easy to recall narratives, yes, that is how I, as a proponent of the traditional view see this. Here is the article I cited by the way.

Were Adam and Eve historical figures?
https://biologos.org/common-questions/were-adam-and-eve-historical-figures/

Now, they proceed to state that and why they don't share it. Genesis 4 refers to Cain's wife who along with the people in his city "do not seem to be descended from Adam and Eve", Genesis 2 and 3 suggests archetypes, but above all they are Evolutionist.

If you accept Adam and Eve as archetypes only, you are not Catholic, Session V of the Council of Trent makes it abundantly clear that Adam was an individual, the first human sinner and by that fact and the fact of approaching the sin from a sinless state, the origin of original sin. Now, what about their other options?

Now, they give two views on how to reconcile Evolutionism with a more than just archetypal existence of Adam and Eve. And since both of these make them part of an already existing Homo sapiens population, both will involve Adam, if not Eve, having been a child of some biological ancestry not sharing his relation with God. Now, there are problems with each, I'll state these first, but there is also this common problem, which I will come back to.

Some Christian leaders (such as Billy Graham) are open to models that see evolution as compatible with Adam and Eve as real historical people. In one version, suggested by theologian Henri Blocher and others, God entered into a special relationship with a pair of ancient historical representatives of humanity about 200,000 years ago in Africa. Genesis retells this historical event using cultural terms that the Hebrews in the ancient Near East could understand.

Genesis 3 is history. More precisely, it is not history as revealed by a revelation, it is more like the Exodus event a history known historically and in which God reveals Himself in the actual events (obviously, Genesis 3 includes a revelation by God to Adam, to Eve and to the serpent, but this does not make the events something only Moses was told of. Haydock in the famous Haydock Bible had facing pages Douay Rheims in the Challoner revision, facing pages comment he provided by compilation and own learning. Attached to his comment on Genesis 3:24 is this, which actually is his own comment - signed H. - to the whole chapter:

Concerning the transactions of these early times, parents would no doubt be careful to instruct their children, by word of mouth, before any of the Scriptures were written; and Moses might derive much information from the same source, as a very few persons formed the chain of tradition, when they lived so many hundred years. Adam would converse with Mathusalem, who knew Sem, as the latter lived in the days of Abram. Isaac, Joseph, and Amram, the father of Moses, were contemporaries: so that seven persons might keep up the memory of things which had happened 2500 years before. But to entitle these accounts to absolute authority, the inspiration of God intervenes; and thus we are convinced, that no word of sacred writers can be questioned. H.

With the primeval longevity, the 2500 years from Adam to Moses in Masoretic chronology or the 3000 years from Adam to Abraham in LXX chronology are not a huge problem. They become comparable to the 400 years between the Trojan War and Homer's composing the Iliad. But with 200 000 years lapsing, not only is the probability far less of a correct transmission, the transmission would also be shown incorrect by Genesis 5 and 11 showing, not so much a genealogy with some gaps, comparable to Matthean genealogy, as more gap than genealogy. In other words, we would be asked to believe a transmission not just incredibly long for a purely oral one that's still correct, but also one even shown incorrect through the faulty transmission of genealogies.

In another version Adam and Eve are recent historical persons, living perhaps 6000 years ago in the ancient Near East rather than Africa. By this time Homo sapiens had already dispersed throughout the earth. God then revealed himself specially to a pair of farmers we know as Adam and Eve. God could have chosen them as spiritual representatives for all humanity. Genealogical science suggests that a pair living at that time and place could be part of the genealogies of all humans living today.

First, there is not just a question of Adam being an actual man, but also of his being the first such.

But second, suppose you waver that problem for a moment, how is Adam supposed to have been ancestor of all First Nations in the Americas and all Aborigines of Australia, not now, but back when Vikings arrived to Vinland and van Diemen to Tasmania? You see, Americas are in the uniformitarian line supposed to have been peopled c. 20 000 BC, and Australia's Mungo man or Mungo woman would carbon date about the same, but a thermoluminiscence date has given Oz the added prestige of a 40 000 year old human settlement.

The second solution therefore flirts with the idea of pre-adamism, which is also condemned by the Catholic Church, the specific reason why Isaac La Peyrère got in trouble with Church Authorities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Adamite

And it seems some "Catholic" old earthers, notably Jimmy Akin, buy into this idea too. Even if he is not explicit when his Adam and Eve are supposed to have lived, he clearly says they were not all the men there were, even if they were the first two modern men with modern human souls.

Here we must consider for a moment the history of Old Earth ideology among Catholics. The Day-Age paradigm was held by Sulpîcian Father Fulcran Vigouroux, and this may be the exact same scenario as held by Pius XII. It goes like this: add lots of time in the creation days by making each an age, but only up to creation of Adam. From then the Biblical timeline, at least in the LXX version, holds, though one could imagine it to hold some gaps in the genealogies (notably Genesis 11) apart from the II Cainan omitted in Masoretic. But for the moment, he didn't need that. He was also the man who on behalf of the Papal Biblical Commission in 1909 authorised Day-Age as an option. And note, just as an option.

Now, since certain dates - carbon for El Sidrón Neanderthals, others for Homo sapiens 200 000 pretended years ago - have been made, this is no longer an option. One must either defend a Biblical timeline by saying no to these dates, which would involve saying no to the Old Earth overall, or, buying into Old Earth, accept these dates, which will involve the named and also other problems. I already said : since both of these scenarios make them part of an already existing Homo sapiens population, both will involve Adam, if not Eve, having been a child of some biological ancestry not sharing his relation with God.

The one version is therefore pre-Adamism - others were truly human, if not modern human before Adam and Eve. But this is condemned. In Humani Generis, Pius XII speaks of:

For these reasons the Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter - for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God.

So, he doesn't speak of men before Adam, he speaks of "pre-existent and living matter"? In other words, the parents of Adam would have been non-human. Indeed, there seems to be a piece from 1941, adressed to the academy of sciences, in which he says as much - they would not have been truly his parents, since not truly human.

And this poses the question of how Adam fared as a child. A human being with a rational soul - and let's underline, what's special is not a special relation with God not shared by other beings with equally rational souls, what's special is having a rational souls in the first place, some relation to God follows from that - can be a parent, can teach his children language, does have language. A non-human can't, and isn't.

If Adam was human, and the testes and ovaries he came from belonged to non-humans, it is impossible that they had real human language, and therefore impossible that they taught Adam such. Indeed, they could not have anything remotely like it. Human language has a double articulation into three levels : sentence, morphemes, phonemes. This can produce an infinity of sentences, and is only motivated if a rational being has an infinity of rational observations to make. The pragmatic observations of beasts come into the range of sth like 500 complete messages - about as many as the traffic signs, which are also purely pragmatic.

And man is created to receive a first language (possibly two first languages at the same time) at a certain stage in his development. For an adult it is too late. So, Adam would have been a feral child. No language.

Or one could say Adam got a language from God, while aware of not sharing it with his genitors. How good is it to feel quasi infinitely superior to one's parents? No. Adam getting his language as a miracle sparing him from being feral isn't an option either. Only Adam being created with an adult and getting language miraculously from start is theologically viable.

But could Cain at least have married an anatomical human not his sister, if by his doing so she was also endowed with human rationality? I have already answered that years ago:

Creation vs. Evolution : Scenario impossible
http://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2014/01/scenario-impossible.html

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Monday after Quinquagesima
28.II.2022