After the interesting and informative answers to the first questions i asked (thanks everyone) i have a few more. I suppose its because im currently without a religion, but still feel that there is something higher out there who could be refered to as “God”. And growing up in England you dont hear much about catholicism other than we’ve split from them offically.
here are my questions:
1 - Whats the Church’s line on Adam and Eve? If they were the first man and woman wouldnt we run out of Genetic differences pretty quickly? Or does the Church feel its just a nice story?
2 - How old is the world? I have heard the Bible states it as 4000 years? (It must be obvious by now that i have never read too much of it!) If the Church maintains this what about all the evidence that it is older, Dinosaurs, carbon dating, etc?
3 - Should everything written in the Bible be taken literally? Or are the passages concerning Noahs Ark, Loaves and Fishes, Jonah and the Whale etc. recognised as inventions by the writers to illustrate the message of christ and god?
many thanks for the upcoming answers to these questions. Although please dont get too personal! In my last thread there were some invective remarks from both Belivers and Athiests to each other. I dont want to start an arguement here.
P.S. - This is not a related question but Voltaire once wrote that “The English are a people without religion” i think generally this is true. What do you think?
I will answer some of this as best as i can, according to what I was taught.
In Genesis, Adam and Eve are the first people. But, after the “dispute” between Cain and Abel, Cain goes out into the world and meets a lot of other people, and even founds a city. So, apparently Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel were not the only people in the world. Maybe Adam and Eve are the first people of their family line? What matters is not who was first. What matters is, they were judged for ambition and disobedience - wanting to have the same knowledge of good and evil as God, and disobeying the order to not eat the Forbidden Fruit (not necessarily an apple either).
The world is far more than 4000 or 6000 years old. Creation took more than 7 days - there are “people days” and “God days”. If you accept a God that exists outside of and independent of time itself, the number of “people days” becomes meaningless. It might be better to think of these “days” as simply 7 tasks or epochs. Genesis and other parts of the Bible were written figuratively, not literally. To simple farmers and shepherds, 4000 was as good as 4 billion. Either is just a “really really big” number. Likewise, people did not live 600 years, they lived a long time, and again the numbers are not necessarily literal. It is like our expression “older than dirt”. It is an exaggeration, in order to make a point. Dinosaurs are not mentioned unless you want to make a big stretch (“there were giants in the earth…”).
See above, item 2. It is not literal. The “message” behind the story is the important thing. Take Noah as an example. Given the dimension of the ark, it is impossible to say two of EVERY living thing on the planet sailed with Noah. There is disagreement as to what he did have on board - clean animals, unclean animals, local farm animals, etc. As for Jonah, was it a whale or simply a “great fish”? It doesn’t matter which. What matters is the lesson being given.
Since these stories are in the Old Testament, in the book of Genesis, any Catholic or Jew can probably answer your questions (and will probably give the same responses).
The Catholic Church does not have a history of supporting the Bible as a literal history of the world or of science. There have been individual Catholic leaders who have championed a literal approach to the bible, but they have not been the dominant tradition in the Church. As early as 401, St. Augustine of Hippo wrote
Catholics have been involved with investigations into geology and biology (including evolutionary theory) from the beginning, and there is no Catholic impediment to supporting the scientific investigation of the age of the earth or the development of life.
Rather than “nice stories” I would characterize the events narrated in Genesis as mythology (in the anthropological sense of a story that expresses a truth held by a people). The creation is not a scientific statement of how the world was created, but a declaration that the world is an orderly place with God as its author (regardless how He brought it about). The story of Adam and Eve indicates that humanity has been blessed by God, but, from our earliest ancestors–however they might have arisen, humanity has turned from God to look at shiny objects, distracting us from paying attention to what God has revealed.
Since the focus is on Catholic teaching, I’ll give what I understand to be the Catholic position-
The RCC acknowledges that evolutionary theory may explain the How, but Genesis explains the Who and the Why. Our first parents did fall from fellowship with God, but how literally to take the Adam & Eve account is negotiable.
RCC teaching has no problem with a 12B yr old Universe, 4.5 B yr old Earth, pre-4000 BC humanity.
Miracle stories- most all are basically truthful, maybe with a skewing of details
(a local flood could have destroyed the morally-rebellious & violent Adamic peoples with Noah’s family & the animals he gathered on his ship preserved;
Jonah could well have been swallowed by some marine life or even drug down by the deep, passed out & then washed up to complete his mission; and if a miracle is recorded as being done by Jesus, well, then He did it.) The core of the Christian faith is that God became human, died for us & rose bodily to give us Eternal Life. If you believe that miracle, and you must to be a good Catholic, then why question any of the lesser ones?
The church line is that “Eve is the mother of all.” I’m unaware of any theory that doesn’t ultimately come down to two common ancestors for the whole of humanity, as well as for every other species. Genetic differences occur whether we fret about them or not. Also, since Genesis states that Cain married someone in (not from) the land of Nod, there’s no excluding the possibility that he (and Adam’s subsequent sons) married his sibling sister. If I were writing the Bible, I’d gloss over that at lightning speed.
There are denominations that believe Darwin and Christianity are at odds. The RCC is no longer one of them.
I think they’d be more concerned that you think of Christ and God as distinct and different persons (as opposed to God the Father and God the Son, but let’s not dwell on the “Three-in-One” dilemma here). I consider the stories in the Bible as metaphors for a morality we strive for, but AFAIK, the Church interprets them pretty literally.
Genisis: i agree with all the other posters, but i feel obligated to point out a mundane obvious fact. no one was alive to write the story down. unlike most other biblical narritives, in which the narrator in a witness, no one observed creation. it’s all legend/mythology/guesswork. that’s all, i don’t feel like writing more.