Introduction
All four gospels in the Christian New Testament describe Jesus’ trial before Roman governor Pontius Pilate. In this scene, a puzzled Pilate asks Jesus whether he claims kingship over the Jews. In John 18:37-38 (NAB), they have this exchange:
So Pilate said to him, “Then you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say I am a king. For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”
Pilate said to him, “What is truth?”
Sadly, John’s author did not provide an answer from Jesus, nor did he add stage notes to clarify how Pilate posed this profound question. Did Pilate sneer in Jesus’ face and guffaw, “What is truth?” Or did he slowly turn away from Jesus, squint into the distance, and then whisper through a world-weary chuckle, “What is … truth?”
As if they were answering Pilate’s question, philosophers and theologians have debated definitions of truth for centuries. A straightforward definition that I favor is the correspondence theory of truth, which is that a statement is true if it corresponds to reality. This is the same definition used by a pair of Catholic apologists that I’ll be citing later, Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli, in their book Pocket Handbook of Christian Apologetics:
The definition we offer here is commonsensical; it is what most people and cultures in all times and places mean by truth…. Truth means the correspondence of what you know or say to what is. Truth means “telling it like it is.” (Kreeft & Tacelli, 2003, p. 134)
Though many skeptics and believers might agree to this definition, the fireworks begin when theological truth claims are tested against reality. For example, is there truth in the Christian doctrine of original sin, which is based primarily on the creation story found in Genesis chapters 2 and 3? In chapter 2 God reveals the good news of the creation of the universe, Adam, the Garden of Eden, animal life, and then Eve. In chapter 3 we get the bad news. Adam and Eve disobey God by eating fruit from a forbidden tree—at the prodding of a talking serpent. Appalled, God heaps punishments on all three and expels Adam and Eve from Eden. Christians refer to this narrative overall as the Fall of Man, and Adam and Eve’s act of disobedience as Man’s original sin.
The importance of the Fall to Christianity’s salvation theology cannot be overstated. The Fall separated us from God and made us subject to death and suffering. Original sin crippled us with the inclination to do evil. To restore our union with God, God sent his son Jesus to atone for our sins on the cross. Christians see the Fall and Jesus’ crucifixion not only as divine truths, but also as historical bookends, as both events must have actually happened for their salvation theology to make any sense.
But how can the Fall be a real historical event, given what we know about human evolution? Evolution has long divided Christians. At one end are the believers who would stand atop that Noah’s Ark replica in Kentucky and throw tomatoes down at any evolutionist who tries to get in. They take the creation stories in Genesis literally, so when science conflicts with faith, their solution to the dissonance is to reject the science. At the other end are the Christians who want to embrace modern science, but only to the extent that it can be reconciled to faith. In its current iteration, the Catholic Church (hereafter the Church) takes this accommodationist approach to the Fall story. The Church read it literally for centuries, but it now sees it symbolically, and it permits scholarly speculation into how evolution fits into the narrative.
But the Church will find that this speculation is a dead end. After discussing what biblical scholars have to say about the authors of the Fall story, I will explore several Church teachings on the Fall and evolution. As will be seen, the Church has failed to extract the Fall’s historical truth from our hominin history, and its speculations on evolution raise more problems for its complicated theology than they resolve. Once the Church recognizes that it can accept human evolution or the Fall story, but not both, I foresee a future Pope trudging to Kentucky with his own bag of tomatoes.
Who Wrote the Fall Story?
Christians call Genesis the first book of the Old Testament, but the Old Testament is simply a copy/paste of the true source, the Jewish scriptures, or Tanakh. I will note here that Judaism never embraced an original sin doctrine nor, as the world knows, Christianity overall. To avoid any Christian tilt in the English translation of Genesis, in this essay all citations are from the Jewish Publication Society’s The Jewish Study Bible, second edition.
Genesis is in the Torah (“instruction”) section of the Tanakh, and much scholarship has focused on the Torah’s authorship. In the 19th century the “documentary hypothesis” emerged, which broke down the Torah’s DNA into four suspected “JEPD” sources: J (Jahwe), E (Elohim), P (Priestly), and D (Deuteronomist).[1] Biblical scholars still debate JEPD, but there is general agreement that Genesis contains two creation stories, composed at different times by different authors:
- The Fall story, Genesis 2:4 to 3:24, comes from the J source and is the older of the two, perhaps composed as early as the 10th century BCE.
- The six-day creation story, Genesis 1:1 to 2:3, was from the P source, likely composed in the 6th century BCE, a period which included the Jewish exile to Babylon and the rebuilding of the Second Temple. The P source was focused on priestly matters such as ritual laws and temple worship, and you can almost smell the incense as you imagine priests chanting the days of creation in the rebuilt Temple.
Both stories seek to describe the creation of the universe, life, and humans; cultures all over the world were inventing such creation myths in these ancient times. The one universal truth that can be applied to all of these myth-makers is that none had a clue what they were talking about. All were ignorant of the scientific findings yet to come, like the universe’s age (about 13.7 billion years), when the Earth formed, or how life evolved. This ignorance is apparent in both creation stories in Genesis, as the authors failed to get any salient details right of the distant past. We study the creation myths from past cultures to understand how ancient peoples saw the world around them, not because we think that the myth-makers had any real insights into the science of star formation and the like.
One interesting detail in the Fall story was its emphasis on God’s agricultural purpose for humans, which at least tells us that the J author’s world was one of farming. Genesis 2:5 says that there were no shrubs or grasses on the Earth because it had not rained yet and “there was no man to till the soil.” Apparently, God saw no point in creating plant life until he made a farmer first. After creating Adam and depositing him in Eden, God told him to “till it and tend it” (Genesis 2:15), but then realized he needed a “fitting helper” (Genesis 2:18). After putting Adam through the pointless exercise of evaluating all of the unworthy animal candidates, God created a helper by forming Eve from Adam’s rib (Genesis 2:19-22). When the time came to punish Adam and Eve and expel them from Eden, what did God sentence Adam to? More farming! God just made it more difficult—he cursed the ground with thorns and thistles and directed Adam to sweat profusely as he farmed grain for his bread (Genesis 3:17-19).
This farming emphasis presents the first problem with the Fall story. If historical, it must have happened late in human history. Biologists estimate that our genus Homo emerged about 2.8 million years ago, and that our species Homo sapiens emerged about 300,000 years ago. We subsisted as nomadic hunter-gatherers for nearly all of our history.[2] It was not until about 12,000 years ago, after the last Ice Age, that humans worldwide started to abandon hunter-gathering and embrace agriculture. Thus, if the expulsion from Eden coincides with the start of farming, then the Fall was about 12,000 years ago.
It is difficult to see how theologians can shoehorn our hunter-gatherer past into any historical truth about the divine punishment for original sin. It would make little sense to argue that Eden symbolically represented our hunter-gatherer phase while farming represented our punishment phase. Chasing mammoths and fleeing saber-tooths was hardly the good life, and farming was a less punishing way of getting food. Perhaps it was a divine omission? Yes, Eden was a paradise, and the Fall was a sentence to a thorny farm field prison, but the sacred account left out the trivial details of what humans did as they moved from one to the other. But, theologians, why would God kick humans out of Eden, and then allow them nearly 300,000 years to hunt and fish before reporting to jail?
Original Sin—A Catholic View
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), paragraphs 385 to 421, discusses the Fall and describes original sin as “an essential truth of the faith,” a truth central to two Catholic sacraments. In the sacrament of baptism, “all sins are forgiven, original sin and all personal sins, as well as all punishment for sin” (CCC ¶1263). Yet, in the sacrament of penance, Catholics must still trek to the confession booth because baptism “has not abolished the frailty and weakness of human nature, nor the inclination to sin” (CCC ¶1426). Only one human escaped this inclination: in a papal bull in 1854, Pope Pius IX proclaimed that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was free from original sin from the moment of her Immaculate Conception.
The Church asserts that the Fall was an actual historical event, albeit described symbolically (CCC ¶390):
The account of the fall in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man. Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents.
Catholic writings on original sin could fill libraries, so for this short essay I want to highlight just three topics:
- The Church’s over-the-top interpretation of a single verse in Genesis 3;
- a 1950 papal encyclical concerning evolution and the ancient stories in Genesis; and
- a proffered dating for the Fall from Catholic scholar Father Robert J. Spitzer.
The Protoevangelium
In Genesis 3, after the forbidden tree incident, God inflicts punishments on the serpent, Eve, and Adam. He first curses the serpent to crawl on its belly, rendering it a proper snake, and to eat dirt for the rest of its life, a curse that snakes worldwide have ignored (Genesis 3:14). He then adds this punishment (Genesis 3:15):
I will put enmity
Between you and the woman,
And between your offspring and hers;
They shall strike at your head,
And you shall strike at their heel.
The Church has found a startling number of divine revelations in this one verse. According to CCC ¶410: “This passage in Genesis is called the Protoevangelium (‘first gospel’): the first announcement of the Messiah and Redeemer, of a battle between the serpent and the Woman, and of the final victory of a descendent of hers.” This verse reveals Jesus as the “New Adam,” who died on the cross to make amends for Adam’s original sin, and his sinless mother Mary as the “new Eve” (CCC ¶411). The serpent is interpreted as a symbol for the Devil (CCC ¶397), and Mary’s son Jesus is the offspring that would defeat him. Indeed, Catholic paintings and statuary often depict Mary standing on a snake, literally striking it with her heel.
Obviously, none of this extravagant symbolism can be reached by a plain reading of the verse, or on a moment’s reflection as to what the J author intended. The J author obviously never heard of Jesus since he wrote about 900 years before he was born. The verse says nothing about Jesus or Mary, nor of a final victory of the woman’s offspring over the snake’s offspring. This verse is simply an example of how early Christians proof texted the Tanakh for verses to support their salvation theology. Just as hammers argue that everything looks like a nail, Christians argue that hundreds of Tanakh verses look like hidden prophecies for Jesus, once the proper (and imaginative) interpretation is applied.
My interpretation is much simpler. The J author was offering an explanation to his peers for the antagonism between snakes and women that must have existed in his time. But he was wrong—rather than a divine curse, the real culprit was farming again. How so? In the J author’s day, the presumptive division of labor was that the men harvested, threshed, and stored the grain, while the women fetched the grain to make the daily bread.
But who else came to fetch grain daily? Rodents. Who came for the rodents? Snakes. Probably every day, women found themselves picking up a basket or moving a jar at the granary, only to find a startled snake lunging at their feet. The J author labeled this a curse on the snake, but I suspect that was in jest, as eternal conflict with snakes was more a curse on Eve and her female progeny. Seen in that light, the J author’s curse ratio was really 3-to-1. Women got snake combat, pain in childbirth, and subservience in marriage (Genesis 3:16). Men got farming. You might as well add a fourth curse for these wives, namely having to listen to their sweaty husbands whine every day about those darn thorns and thistles.
Papal Encyclical Humani Generis
In August 1950, Pope Pius XII issued the encyclical Humani Generis (the human race). Ninety-one years after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published, the Pope finally gave Catholics some guardrails for discussing human evolution:
- The Church “does not forbid” scholars from looking into how the human body may have evolved from earlier life forms, but the Church is the final judge on any opinions impacting the faith (¶36).
- The Church does forbid Catholics from embracing any notion that Adam and Eve represented some number of first parents, because “it is no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with … original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own” (¶37).
- Catholics are obliged to believe that souls are created by God (¶36).
In an October 22, 1996 message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Pope John Paul II went a bit further by recognizing evolution as “more than a hypothesis,” but reaffirmed Pius XII’s position that “if the origin of the human body comes through living matter which existed previously, the spiritual soul is created directly by God.”
A brief word about Catholic views on souls generally (see the referenced Karlo Broussard article). Thomas Aquinas, Doctor of the Church and Catholic Saint (13th century CE), embraced a philosophical idea from Aristotle, namely that the soul is the life force in all living things. Souls fall in a hierarchy of three orders, the vegetative (plant souls), sensitive (animal souls), and rational (human souls). The Church sees plant and animal souls as incapable of sin because they are neither rational nor have a moral sense. These souls also die when the organism dies. Human souls are rational, spiritual, and immortal (CCC ¶362-368). The creation of the first human soul was described in “symbolic language” (CCC ¶362) in Genesis 2:7, when God breathed life into Adam from the dust of the earth. We can call this event the Ensoulment of Man, the great penultimate event that preceded the Fall. This is to be distinguished from the other concept of ensoulment that Catholicism teaches (often shrilly in its pro-life advocacy), which is that humans are ensouled when egg and sperm meet to form a zygote, aka conception.
The Pope was right that the idea of humanity having multiple parents at its origin conflicts with original sin, but wrong to reject it. In evolution, new species emerge when minor genetic changes in a prior species accumulate over a lengthy period of time. As Homo sapiens gradually emerged, there were a lot of them about, so there must have been multiple breeding pairs. Some Christian apologists push back on this by citing genetic research into the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of humans. Biologists estimate that a woman living in Africa some 140,000 to 200,000 years ago was the matrilineal mother of all humans today, based on her mitochondrial DNA (mt-MRCA). Her patrilineal counterpart was the Y-MRCA (for Y-chromosomal), a male who lived in Africa some 200,000 to 300,000 years ago. The thinking goes that, since they may have overlapped around that 200,000-year estimate, and both lived on the same continent, then obviously they must have met, mated, and started the human race.
However, it was popular media that informally dubbed this pair as “Y-chromosomal Adam” and “Mitochondrial Eve,” not the scientists. The scientific consensus is that the MRCAs were not a mating pair, as there was no need for them to live at the same time, and they were not the only humans alive when they lived. In addition, the MRCAs will move forward in time as lineages die out, so it is possible that humanity’s next mt-MRCA or Y-MRCA is reading this essay right now (for an interesting read on common misunderstandings on MRCAs, see the referenced Joshua Rapp Learn article).
The Humani Generis also discussed Genesis chapters 1 to 11 and how the Holy Spirit led the ancient sacred writers to divine truths, despite the forest of ancient myths that they wandered in:
- Genesis chapters 1-11 are not historical in the modern sense and were written “in simple and metaphorical language adapted to the mentality of a people but little cultured” (¶ 38).
- The sacred writers may have used popular narrations, but if so, they did it with “divine inspiration, through which they were rendered immune from any error” (¶38).
- These popular narrations “must in no way be considered on a par with myths or other such things, which are more the product of an extravagant imagination,” because the ancient sacred writers were striving for truth and were thus “clearly superior to the ancient profane writers” (¶39).
The truth-definers discussed earlier, Catholic apologists Kreeft and Tacelli, also brought up myths in their apologetics for the Fall. They offered “two powerful arguments” for the Fall’s historicity: (1) the myth of a paradise lost is universal, in that “nearly every tribe, nation, and religion throughout history has a similar story,” and (2) all humans have unconscious longings for three perfections (happiness, certainty, and wisdom) that come seemingly from a memory of “a better state” (Kreeft & Tacelli, 2003, pp. 48-49). I see these as one argument—humans have some kind of memory of Eden, so Eden must have existed.
But the authors are not “telling it like it is,” as no such Eden memory exists in the naturalistic sense. First, detailed memories of past events cannot be inherited genetically via our DNA, and the Fall story contains many details. In addition, if the Fall happened some 300,000 years ago, then oral tradition could not be its source. Early humans at that time lacked the language sophistication to tell the Fall story to each other, let alone pass it down accurately via oral tradition to us. It is also obvious that the J author’s Fall story says too little about Adam and Eve to support that they exhibited perfect happiness, certainty, and wisdom in their short time in Eden.
I would say Pope Pius XII, along with Kreeft and Tacelli, take a “heads I win, tails you lose” approach to myths. If a story made it into Genesis, it is truth. If a pagan myth has a story element that vaguely resembles something in Genesis, such as a paradise lost, it too is truth. But if other story elements of that same pagan myth disagree with Genesis, they can be dismissed as “the product of an extravagant imagination” of an ancient profane writer.
Father Spitzer
The Catholic Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN, www.ewtn.com) offers many shows where scholars and clergy revel in the inexhaustible details of Catholicism. One such show is Father Spitzer’s Universe, which addresses questions “at the intersection of faith and reason.” Among other titles, Father Robert J. Spitzer is the former president of Gonzaga University and president of the Magis Center of Reason and Faith, which seeks to fight unbelief with science-based evidence (www.magiscenter.com). I do not know where Father Spitzer ranks in the pantheon of Catholic scholars working on the evolution question, but I highlight him here because he has ventured a historical time frame for the Ensoulment of Man.
Since Humani Generis, the Church has not specified doctrinally when human ensoulment occurred historically, and it likely will not do so until it fully embraces evolution. Perhaps another problem holding the Church back is that ensoulment is a theological feature of humans, not a physical one, so direct evidence of ensoulment from hominin fossil remains is not possible. The kind of speculation that Father Spitzer offers for the Church’s consideration is circumstantial evidence of ensoulment after it took place. This would involve identifying some tell-tale skill, some advancement in hominin behavior or technology that evolution cannot explain, but that ensoulment can.
But some skills are theological land mines because they place our first parents too far in the past. Stone toolmaking? In that case, Adam and Eve were hairy four-foot-tall bipeds who called each other “Ugh,” as that started about two million years ago. How about control of fire? Again, not a good choice, as hominins have been doing that for at least 400,000 years, with the opportunistic use of natural fires perhaps a million years before that. But what if the Church uses an actual biblical clue and picks the thorn and thistle farming discussed earlier? Humans started doing that only about 12,000 years ago, so the problem then becomes that intelligent humans were all over the planet already. It was too late for the whole human race to descend from a single pair of ensouled parents, as Humani Generis demands.
Father Spitzer claims to have found a land-mine-free solution. He argues that ensouled Adam and Eve likely lived about 70,000 to 100,000 years ago in Africa. In his May 2016 paper “Evidence of a Transcendent Soul,” he identified twelve capacities unique to the human soul that animals lacked, such as free will, moral reflection, and self-consciousness (2016, pp. 72-73). Another was our capacity for conceptual ideas, which permitted language, and it is language that Father Spitzer identified as the tell-tale skill. For support, he placed great weight on the studies of linguistic philosopher Noam Chomsky and MIT scientist Robert Berwick (citing their 2016 book Why Only Us: Language and Evolution), and said that their studies showed that the capacity for language was “completely unique to human beings, and enigmatic in its origins 70,000 to 100,000 years ago” (p. 72).
He also argued that this dating provided sufficient time for a single couple to sire all humans: “All that is required, if Chomsky’s and Berwick’s discoveries are correct, is one couple who could have propagated progeny over hundreds of generations to give rise to 10,000 or more human beings before their migration out of Africa” around 60,000 years ago (2016, pp. 81-82). Interestingly, Father Spitzer did accept that mt-MRCA and Y-MRCA were our genetic first parents, living about 200,000 years ago (p. 80), but he thought it unlikely they were our ensouled parents, as they probably never knew each other.
Evolution or the Fall, not Both
With the Humani Generis, Aquinas’ soul hierarchy, and Father Spitzer’s musings now in hand, I can sum up why I see the Church’s dalliance with evolution as a dead end. As I noted in the introduction, the Church currently takes what I call the accommodationist approach to evolution, exploring how it might be reconcilable to the symbolic narrative of the Fall story. Millions of Christians besides Catholics fall in this camp, as it includes anyone who wants to embrace modern science without giving up their belief in original sin and salvation. But this approach fails on both a scientific and theological level.
On the science side, I would reiterate the uncontroversial point that the human species, Homo sapiens, emerged about 300,000 years ago. Thus, if the Church is serious about reconciling “the beginning of the history of man” (CCC ¶390) with our hominin history, it must start the clock around 300,000 years ago. But the Fall story itself and the Church’s interpretation of it largely ignore this time frame. The Fall story is silent about our hunter-gatherer past and suggests, erroneously, that the human race started out as farmers. The Protoevangelium shows how much the Church’s theology rests on teasing absurd prophecies from the Fall story, which the 10th-century BCE J author never intended. The Humani Generis, while opening the door a crack for evolution, quickly shuts it by ruling out any suggestion that the human race had multiple parents at its origins. And as for Father Spitzer, he radically shifts the start of human history 200,000 years later, by positing a special subset of humans. His speculations boil down to a god-of-the-gaps argument, in that he sees the Ensoulment of Man as the only possible explanation for humanity’s rapid advancements in language and technology over the last 100,000 years. But many factors can explain these changes, such as population growth and new environments prompting new innovations (see the referenced Nick Longrich article).
But in my view, the Church’s speculations about evolution do the most damage to the Church’s theology on original sin itself. The original sin doctrine is also a god-of-the-gaps argument, as it claims to be the sole explanation for why humans are so often horrible to each other. But if you embrace the possibility that humans evolved from lower life forms, then you introduce an enormously long animal heritage that factors into human behavior. Evolution gave us many useful traits, but it also gave us aggressiveness, tribalism, territorialism, and raging hormones. Much of what Christians call sin today are simply manifestations of these inherited behaviors, so a Fall event is unnecessary. A related problem is that Aquinas, when he embraced Aristotle’s soul hierarchy, could not have foreseen that the Church would need to explain someday how animal-souled humans transitioned to human-souled ones. Father Spitzer’s timeline of ensoulment 100,000 years ago burdens the Church with providing such an explanation.
Bible literalists, of course, avoid all of these headaches by rejecting evolution altogether. In fact, Bible literalists and secularists can join forces to make sport of the difficulties for the Church’s accommodationist approach by ruminating on the theological slippery slopes that they lead to. None of the musings below are any more outlandish than the Church’s tortured overreach with the Protoevangelium:
- In Genesis 1:27, God created man in his image. Because God has no body, this resemblance could only come from our human souls, not our bodies. But if our physical form is just a vessel, then God could have chosen any animal to ensoul with Father Spitzer’s twelve capacities, and that animal would have been made in God’s image. It could have been chipmunks, or dung beetles, or octopi. Imagine a chipmunk Pope writing Chipmunki Generis in such an alternative reality!
- For 200,000 years, humans had animal souls and were thus animals, symbolically described in Genesis 1:25 as the “wild beasts of every kind” that God created on the sixth day. And wild we doubtless were. Like many animal species then and now, we killed our own kind, stole from each other, and fought over territory and females. At the end of “Evidence of a Transcendent Soul,” Father Spitzer acknowledged that death and suffering existed before the Fall (2016, pp. 83-84), but he did not address this sinlike behavior. If you add this savagery, then you have humans experiencing the whole trifecta of original sin consequences—death, suffering, and sin—for 200,000 years before the Fall. Once more, Genesis 1 keeps insisting that God’s daily creations were good, so this pre-Fall death, suffering, and savagery were also good.
- The Church would object that animal-souled beings are incapable of sin. But this view sets up a double standard for human sinful behavior, as Father Spitzer’s research has human-souled humans lived alongside animal-souled humans for thousands of years. Both groups no doubt engaged in the same bad behavior countless times, but apparently only the human-souled humans were doing anything wrong. Thus, when Cain killed Abel, it was the terrible sin of murder (Genesis 4:8). But if a mile away, some animal-souled human named Gog killed his brother Magog, then that was just an animal being an animal.
- To perform the first human ensoulments, one supposes that God could have just zapped two humans strolling in an African savanna and switched out their animal souls with human ones, like a software upgrade. But the Church’s doctrine that ensoulment happens at conception requires that Adam and Eve be ensouled at the zygote stage, when they were in the body of an animal-souled female human.
- Further, Genesis 2:21-23 symbolically describes Eve as created from Adam’s rib, so initially they were of one flesh. Is the historical truth behind this symbolism that they came from the same zygote (one flesh) from the same mother? This zygote then split into male and female zygotes (rare, but it happens), which were then ensouled by God. We must remember that Humani Generis posits that Adam and Eve sat atop a human-souled genealogical pyramid. Of necessity, their children and grandchildren mated via incest, with only later generations getting more separation. Accordingly, it is not a stretch to accept that our first parents were identical twins, brother and sister, who mated with each other to start humanity.
- Because the unknown mother of humanity’s first parents had an animal soul, she was conceived without sin and was incapable of sin during her entire life. Obviously, this startling similarity by an animal to Mary and her Immaculate Conception must mean something theologically, but what?
- In “Evidence of a Transcendent Soul,” Father Spitzer offered no bracing speculation on the early lives of Adam and Eve. He doesn’t describe what their Nativity may have been like, being born in Africa to a tribe of animal-souled humans. He ignores the Lost Years of Adam and Eve, that time between their birth and their entry into Eden. Movie analogies come to mind—did their animal tribe love and embrace them, like Tarzan among the apes? Or did the tribe view these strange newcomers with mounting dread, like those spooky white-haired children in that 1995 John Carpenter movie Village of the Damned?
- Genesis 2, verses 10 to 14, are specific that the location of Eden was somewhere near the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which flow from what is now eastern Turkey through Iraq to the Persian Gulf. Although it was the Holy Spirit that revealed these sacred river coordinates to the Fall’s human author, Father Spitzer ignores them in “Evidence of a Transcendent Soul,” and he does not proffer any other location for Eden. No doubt that this is because the revealed location gums up his whole theory that ensoulment occurred in Africa, prior to human migrations to other continents. If pressed, Father Spitzer would likely place Eden in some pleasant valley in Africa.
- Once in Eden, Adam and Eve committed some heinous act, but what was it? The symbolic account said that the serpent tempted Eve with the power to become divine beings via the forbidden fruit (Genesis 3:5). In “Evidence of a Transcendent Soul,” Father Spitzer also attributed the first sin to a desire for the wisdom and power that was God’s alone (p. 74). But I disagree with both the serpent and Father Spitzer. The original sin was not that Adam and Eve wanted to be gods; it was that they wanted to stay animals. Adam and Eve embraced their animal roots, as secularists do today, so they rejected God’s offer to spend eternity in Eden. They were not kicked out of Eden, but walked out on their own accord. They went home to hug their parents again, laugh with friends, and enjoy a good boar roast around the campfire.
- After leaving Eden, Adam and Eve would have started a family. As noted earlier, they and their descendants lived among large numbers of animal-souled humans for millennia, so opportunities for interbreeding were ample. But neither Aquinas, nor Humani Generis, nor Father Spitzer fully considered this question: if a human-souled human mated with an animal-souled human, what kind of soul would their offspring get? If a fully human soul, then well and good, as that eliminates the need for continued inbreeding and greatly accelerates how quickly human ensoulment would spread. That mystery wife of Cain’s (Genesis 4:17) could have been an animal-souled woman he hooked up with in the land of Nod, rather than his sister.
- But I would defer to Aquinas on this question, and my best guess, after lightly scanning his writings for several minutes, is that he would have created a fourth order of soul—the chimera, a human/animal-souled hybrid. A chimera soul could be the answer to how original sin is transmitted, which the Church says, “is a mystery that we cannot fully understand” (CCC ¶404). It could be that all humans today are walking around with chimera souls, with our propensity for animal savagery greater or weaker depending on the purity of our human soul lineage back to Adam and Eve.
Once the Church starts struggling with these absurdities in its seminaries and Bible study classes, I foresee it giving up the ghost on human evolution and switching back to the literalist position. But I am hopeful that the more casual, science-minded Christian accommodationists out there will see the light and embrace the secular position instead. As evolution improved our rational brains over the past 300,000 years, we have struggled to tame our worst animal instincts while embracing the beneficial ones. Humans are smart animals with issues, not ensouled humans crippled by original sin.
Notes
[1] Information on the documentary hypothesis and JEPD was taken from The Jewish Study Bible‘s “Introduction” to the Torah section (pp. 3-5) by Marc Zvi Brettler.
[2] See the online Encyclopedia Britannica‘s entries on “Homo,” “Homo sapiens,” and “hunter-gatherer.”
References
Broussard, Karlo. (2021, August 3). “What is the Soul?” Catholic Answers magazine website. <https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/what-is-the-soul>.
Jewish Publication Society. (2014). The Jewish Study Bible, 2nd ed. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Kreeft, Peter, and Ronald K. Tacelli. (2003). Pocket Handbook of Christian Apologetics. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.
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