Many Parents, One Sin

This started out as a comment on Kyle Cupp's post, in which he asks about original sin in light of polygenism, however it quickly became clear I was writing too much for it to be a comment, and I haven't written a good post on the intersection of evolution and theology in a while, so I decided to turn it into a response post instead.

Just to frame up the question briefly, let me quote the same passage Kyle did from Pius XII's 1950 encyclical Humani Generis, in which Pius addresses the question of the Church's understanding of human origins in light of modern (evolutionary) science. In summary, Pius sees no conflict between a Catholic understanding of humanity and evolutionary science, but he does lay out one possible area of conflict:

When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to 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.

So while Pius XII is quite comfortable with the evolutionary account of human origins so long as there is one clear ancestral couple who were first infused by God with a soul, and who are described in the Bible in the story of Adam and Eve, he expresses grave reservations as to whether we can accept a view of human history in which not all humans are descended from a single ancestral couple, who fell and thus bequethed us original sin. However, as Kyle points out, modern evolutionary science (sixty years further down the road from Pius XII's encyclical) suggests with near certainty that there was at any given point in time a population of humans from whom the subsequent generation was descended -- there never was a population bottleneck after which all subsequent humans were descended from one ancestral couple. (There are single ancestors, and doubtless single ancestral couples, whom all modern humans share as an ancestors, "Mitochondrial Eve" and "Y-Chromosomal Adam" for example, but in the generations immediately after these individuals there were many humans who were not related to them. It was only over tens of thousands of years of genetic mixing that we reached a point where all humans shared those single ancestors.) Further, there is very strong genetic evidence that on a few (rare) occasions, archaic human populations in various parts of the world interbred with the ancestral modern human population which spread out of Africa and which all humans share. Thus, those of European descent have a tiny genetic contribution which appears likely to have derived from Neandertals, but people who no European ancestry do not share this genetic heritage. Thus, mixing with Neandertals clearly came at some point after the otherwise common origin of all humans.

Let me see if I can step back to the basic question here (whether our understanding of original sin is modified if we accept a scientific understanding that we are descended not just from one unique pair of original humans, but rather from a population of original humans) and take a run at it, because this is something which has always seemed pretty straight-forward to me whereas many people find it rather worrying. (Whether this means I have any particular insight on the matter, or if it simply means I'm theologically tone deaf, you shall have to tell me. I hesitate to find little difficulty where a recent pope found much -- but perhaps there are some areas in which the passage of time is helpful.)

If I were to summarize the doctrine of Original Sin as I undertand it, leaving all questions of evolution aside, I would say: Original Sin is a stain, defect, or corruption which marks the soul of every human born since the fall. We are born with it, and it inclines us to sin. All humans (Mary aside) have been born with Original Sin since the sin of our first parents, Adam and Eve.

Now, let us bring into mind the apparent scientific truth that there was never a single "first" human couple (at least in the biological sense) from whom all modern humans are descended, but rather that there was a small population of humans who are the ancestors of all of us, some descendants of whom on a few subsequent rare occasions appear to have mixed with some regional archaic human populations elsewhere in the world as they spread out.

What of the above definition of original sin would we need to change in light of this? To think about it, I'd like to break the definition into two parts:

a) Original Sin is a stain, defect, or corruption which marks the soul of every human born since the fall. We are born with it, and it inclines us to sin. All humans (Mary aside) have been born with Original Sin

b) since the sin of our first parents, Adam and Eve.

First let us address a). It seems to me that within a Catholic understanding of God's revelation to us, we probably do not need to see any problem with a) as a result of accepting a scientific account of the history of humanity in which there was never a single original couple whose children made up all the rest of humanity.

On the face of it, one might ask, "But if our understanding of original sin is derived from thinking that the story of Adam and Eve was a basically historical account, doesn't that mean that with Adam and Eve removed, we must revise our understanding of what original sin is, or if it exists at all?"

I think, however, if we take a Catholic approach to scripture and to Church teaching, this is not the case. First, we understand that the Bible consists of a number of genres and that they contain several levels of meaning. I would propose that the opening chapters of genesis belong to the genre of mythology. This does not mean (as some people seem to take the word to mean) that they are nice stories to read to children under the age of ten but are essentially false and of no relation to "reality". Rather, mythology is a way of expressing deep truths about ourselves and the world through a narrative which may well not be historically true. However, myths are not "just a story", nor are they "false". They're simply not meant to be true in the same way that a history book or a newspaper story is meant to be true.

While many in the history of the Church may have assumed (for lack of any reason to think otherwise) that the story of Adam and Eve (and other Genesis stories such as the story of Cain and Able and the story of Noah) was historically true -- our understanding of what scripture is does not require that we believe so. Further, as Catholics we believe that Christ instituted the Church in order to safeguard His teachings, and sent the Holy Spirit to guide the Church and protect her from teaching error.

Now, if original sin were just some theological gloss which people had proposed in order to explain certain elements of the Genesis story, then I could see proposing that it needed to be revised or abandoned given a change in our understanding of the genre and historical accuracy of parts of Genesis. However, original sin is clearly a doctrine of the Church which has been taught authoritatively since the time of the Church Fathers. If we believe at all that the Holy Spirit prevents the Church from teaching error, then clearly we can accept the Church's basic account of original sin as correct -- even if it was in part arrived as through taking a mythological narrative to be more historically accurate than it now appears to have been.

Because of this, it seems to me that everything contained in a) can be taken as true, regardless of whether one takes the story of Adam and Eve literally or mythologically.

Now as to b), here it seems that we have several possible ways we can consider the story of Adam and Eve as presented in Genesis in light of what we currently believe we understand about the history of the human species due to the discoveries of modern science.

1) We could hold that at some point in the distant past, God chose a single pair of humans and made them like himself by infusing them with immortal, rational and moral souls. These first parents fell in some way which was best described to God's chosen people through the Genesis story. Their children all had souls, and at some points interbred with the rest of the early human population, with the result that at some point in the still quite distant past all humans had "Adam and Eve" as one of their ancestors and possessed a soul.

2) We could hold that at some point in time God infused the entire population of humans with souls, and one couple from among them were tested and fell. Given this eventuality, one could hold either that 2.a) as a result of the sin of the representative couple, all humans were stained with original sin at once or 2.b) only the descendants of this fallen couple had original sin, but through some sequence of events, all of us are direct descendants of them. (It strikes me that this leaves the most room for a really fascinating set of fantasy novel plots.)

3) One could hold that they may well never have been a single couple who went through a fall, but that this mythological story was inspired or guided in development by the Holy Spirit in order to describe to the Israelites (and eventually to us) the fallen nature of humanity and the nature of humanities relationship with God. In this way of thinking, we pretty much have to admit that while there was clearly some "fall" at some point after humans came to have souls and be able to have a moral consciousness and awareness of God, and after which humanity possessed original sin and all that that entails, we really have no idea what it was that happened other than that God chose to describe it and its results to us via the story of Adam and Eve.

To the extent that I have an opinion on the matter, I might lean towards 3), but honestly I'm a bit hesitant to even pick one. This is in part because, given the stance outlined by Pius XII above, I don't want to head off in directions which are in any way incompatible with our Church, but more so because I really don't think that it matters. What we do have in Genesis is the story that God chose to place (or allow to develop, depending on how you want to look at it) in the sacred writings of His chosen people. As such, I'm fairly confident that it tells us what we need to know about our nature and our relationship with Him. And given that we, at this remove, have no way of actually finding out "what really happened", I can't see that it's worth speculating much over or putting deep thought into. After all, the best we could do is build our own "just so" story, based on what we think most likely, and unlike God, we don't have the benefit of having been there.

Coulter, Evolution and Catholicism

Reader Literacy-Chic linked in the comments to an article over on Roman Catholic Blog regarding Ann Coulter's discussion (perhaps a mild word when it comes to anything originating with Coulter) of Darwinism and atheism/immorality in her recent book, Godless.

Thomistic, the author at RCB, rightly notes that there is certainly no inherent conflict between Catholic doctrine and either an old Earth or the gradual development of species. However, he does seems concerned by some of the points that Coulter brings up, as do some of his commenters.

The anti-evolution arguments that I'd like to cover based on the post are:

1) Evolution is the intellectual justification for genocide and totalitarianism by 20th century figures such at Hitler and Stalin.

2) Evolution is problematic for Catholic doctrine because the doctrine of Original Sin requires that there be a single historical Adam and Eve, and evolution makes this problematic.

3) The evidence doesn't even support evolution, since no one has ever found a fossil of an animal halfway in between species.

-- 1. Evolution as Justification for Evil --

Thomistic quotes an article about Coulter's book which summarizes this line of argument as follows:

As Coulter puts it, "From Marx to Hitler, the men responsible for the greatest mass murders of the twentieth century were avid Darwinists." As evidence of this, one can cite Richard Weikart's book From Darwin to Hitler, wherein the author traces the evidence that eugenics organizations in Germany at the dawn of the 20th Century touted "scientific" theories of the laws of evolution.

To start with, Coulter is indulging in some sadly characteristic sloppiness when she labels Marx as an avid Darwinist. Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto in 1848, eleven years before Darwin published the Origin of Species in 1859. What Ms. Coulter (and perhaps Mr. Weikart, if his guilt may be determined by association) seems to have missed in her cultural analysis is Marx and Darwin were drinking from the same pool of cultural fascinations rather more than directly influencing one another. The mid to late nineteenth century was teaming with notions of golden ages, progress, regress and rebirth. In many ways, the notion of progress of some grand, world-transforming sort was taking the place which salvation had once filled, for what was already a secularizing Europe. Indeed, one of the ideas that it took nearly a hundred years to purge out of evolutionary thought was the idea that evolutionary change was necessarily directional: "upward" from simpler, baser creatures to more complex, "better" ones.

As science replaced religion as the key to deep knowledge (there is, I think, a certain gnosticism about the popular attitude towards science from the mid nineteenth century through the Great War), scientifically framed ideas of progress came into vogue. And from them (with a generous splash of poorly absorbed evolutionary theory) came the fantasies of eugenics or breeding a "super race" which fascinated the likes of Hitler (and Margaret Sanger and Oliver Wendel Holmes and many others).

The theory of evolution provided a certain fodder to the evils of the 20th century, but I don't think one is any more reasonable to dismiss the theory qua theory because of it than one would be to reject Newton's physics because they helped create the cultural climate of the Enlightenment, and thus fed the blood-fest of the French Revolution.

-- 2. Adam, Eve, Evolution and Original Sin --

From a doctrinal point of view, the most commonly cited objection to evolution based on Catholic doctrine is the question of original sin and whether all of humanity is indeed descended from a single set of parents who fell from grace and caused the original rupture in the relationship between God and humanity.

In the encyclical Humani Generis, Pope Pius XII wrote: "[T]he faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains either that after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parents of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. ... [I]t is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled... with regard to original sin which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam in which through generation is passed onto all and is in everyone as his own."

I think in regards to this kind of thing it's important to keep clear in one's mind what elements of the Adam and Eve story are essential de fide and which are not. I think that the essential elements are clearly that:

• God created two first humans, who are the parents of the whole current human race.
• These first parents sinned directly against God, despite their originally having a more direct relationship with him than we do.
• We all bear the mark of original sin: both a tendency to do wrong and a gulf that separates us (as a tribe) from God.

As Pius XII observes elsewhere in Humani Generis, it is certainly not impossible that God created our first human parents by infusing souls into already existing, man-like creatures, the product of a long natural process. Nor, from a scientific point of view, is it by any means impossible to believe that all modern humans are descended from a common ancestor. Indeed, there are at least two points at which all living humans can be traced to a single biological ancestor: Mitochondrial Eve (about 150,000 years ago) and Y-chromosomal Adam (60,000-90,000 years ago).

The idea of there being other human-ish creatures wandering the Earth at the same time as Adam and Eve doesn't fit well with the standard Sunday school version of the story, but the Bible itself is slightly odder than the children's version. Recall that at several point in the early chapters of Genesis people are mentioned as going off and interbreeding with other creatures (giants, 'the sons of heaven', etc.) Indeed, after the initial description of the time in the garden itself, one doesn't necessarily get the impression that Adam and Eve are alone in the world. (Why, for instance, does Cain fear that when he is banished people will kill him? He's just killed one of the four named people in the world up to that point, and the other two are his parents.) Rather, Adam and Eve seem to be described tribally: as the tribe of true humans, but not necessarily the only creatures on Earth. Now, the idea of early (ensouled) humans interbreeding with (soul-less) human-ish creatures is unappealing. But then, the idea of Adam and Eve's children having no options other than incest isn't exactly appealing either.

I think it's important to remember that (without denying the truth of the stories of the creation and fall) the early parts of Genesis were never meant to be anything like a historical or scientific test. The stories about Adam and Eve and their children convey a number of important truths, but in other senses the narrative is sketchy and disjointed. I don't think it's meant to answer questions like: Who did Adam and Eve's children marry?

From a Catholic point of view, we have the doctrine of Original Sin, and that that sin is the result of a transgression committed by our first parents. Beyond that, I don't think that part of the Bible is meant to satisfy the historical and scientific areas of our curiosity.

-- 3. There are no fossils of transitional forms --

This isn't really a question with any specifically Catholic relevance, but one of the commentors over on RCB brought it up, and it's a favorite of anti-evolution writing. Coulter, characteristically, deploys a particularly loud and uninformed example of this set of claims in Godless.

I won't spend a ton of time on this here, since the post is already so long, and I've already covered the issue of speciation a bit here. However, let me just take the time to point out that the most basic flaw in this line of reasoning is that it fails to take into account how paleontologists do their work. When a paleontologist finds fossils from a given individual, one of the things he seeks to do is classify it as belonging to a species. If it seems very late or very early (in relation to the time period during which the species is generally found) or if its characteristics seem on the edge of what would be considered normal for that species, he may consider classifying it as belonging to a different but similar species. Or he may classify it as belonging to a known species, but as an outlier within the set of characteristics generally found in that species.

What he won't do is say: "Well gosh. This critter doesn't seem to be in a species. What we have here is a transitional form. I better not put this one in a species." Everything is assigned to a species, because it is by classifying it as belonging to a particular species that the paleontologist can convey how he believes that individual is related to other populations of creatures.

Thus, the argument that evolution is disproved because scientists have only found fossils of creatures that belong to species, not transitions creatures, isn't a "gotcha", it's display of basic ignorance.