Fr. Gaine OP is presenting arguments for not taking Neanderthals or even all Homo sapiens as rational and as image of God. He is, however, at the end coming out on the end of favouring their rationality and full humanity. I am answering, somewhat harshly those arguments, and mistaking them for his pov, but this should be taken as ... sorry, at the end (57 minutes and some) he does in fact admit the possibility, which should be condemned, of non-rational biological humans.
Did Christ Die For Neanderthals? | Fr Simon Gaine, OP
14th Febr. 2020 | The Thomistic Institute
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKcwCpWOZhk
26:29 Solution.
Eve was a clone of Adam, but with one X chromosome doubled and the Y chromosome taken away.
The Y chromosome was then kept and Our Lord is a clone of Our Lady, with one X taken away and that Y chromosome from Adam added instead.
27:57 What about Neanderthals and us being the same KIND, descended from Adam and Eve, and "species" in Linnean sense being more or less a buzz word?
In Linnaeus' time, I think we had canis lupus and canis canis registered as two separate species, you only need to read Phantom of Bengali to know they are interfertile ... as modern classification reduces the difference to one of subspecies.
30:03 If we accept that one couple was theologically human and their offspring married the children of contemporaries biologically human, we are saying that these children of Adam and Eve actually raped a kind of beasts who were not able to consent.
You are
If on the other hand you imagine that theologically non-human biological humans could communicate with language like us, could have social interactions on a voluntary and contractual basis like we, you are demoting the "imago Dei" to the rationally unknowable, you are making it a simple extra serving no actual purpose in everyday life, an "asset" to get some part of us an eternal fate. You are destroying the anthropology of St. Thomas Aquinas, as well as that of Aristotle and Plato.
Neanderthals could speak. They had hyoid bones like we, and the hyoid bone from an exemplar of Kebara (forget if it was 1 or 2) showed by an ultrasound scan it had been used much the way we use our hyoid bones. That Neanderthal had used oral communication. Neanderthals and Heidelbergians - to a lesser degree Solo man - had the same hearing range as we. This means they could hear consonants. This means they were created for the same kind of communication as we are. One in which sentences are built up by adding different morphemes (I am not saying words, the morphemes for the subject and even object can be incorporated into the word with a morpheme for the verb action, as in Latin, Hungarian and Greenlandic), and one in which morphemes are built up by adding together phonemes, vowels and consonants. There have been some speculation, since then corrected, that Neanderthals could not pronounce all vowels, they could have pronounced ee or oo, and üh and ur, but not ah, aw, ay, this is no proof to the contrary, it just means, if true, they spoke another language than we, one in which no words contain ah or ay or aw. But this kind of communication for which I have given mathematical coordinates is very different from one in which a sentence is a morpheme is a phoneme or at best an alternation between two phonemes (which could also count as one, consider "ts" is one and not two phonemes in Greek) only makes sense if you need to be able to pronounce an infinity of different sentences. Beasts can pronounce and understand up to 500 different sentences that are usually words that are usually sounds, with or without repetition. That is what you want to a purely pragmatic communication, as that of beasts. The traffic signs in US are purely pragmatic, and there are 500 of them.
30:22 "If it suffices with only one parent with an immortal soul" .... then the other parent is a rape victim. Besides being an ontological anomaly, created anatomically for human communications which are only possible if you have concepts, which are only possible if you have a rational soul (or are an intelligent angel). But even so not having that which biologically it is created for.
32:38 And the fact that Neanderthals were created to pronounce and understand an infinity of sentences, including "the soil is brown" means that they had immaterial pursuits.
The beings that have only material pursuits have no sense of the subject of a verb, no sense of an object apart from an immediate action, often enough simply point at the objects and have very standardised sounds for the actions. A beast can say "let's chill" or "let's eat" or "come here" but there are only a very limited amount of actions to be taken about purely material things, therefore an irrational animal has no need or point in the full human hearing range or in Broca's area (Solo man has Broca's area, but of the speech sounds, he might have had trouble with very high pitched consonants like labial or dental stops and fricatives - same solution as for the case if Neanderthals had been handicapped as to low vowels).
The clear non humans pretended to be in our ancestry are Paranthropus and Australopithecus, a hearing range incapable of consonants and a hyoid bone meant to carry air bags of resonance as in apes. And there is no evidence that they actually left us any genes.
In other words : Australopithecus, Paranthropus, part of Homo habilis (not rudolfensis ones) are not the image of God.
Rudolfensis and Solo man are the image of God physiologically damaged, reduced speech capacities.
Neanderthal, Denisovan and Sapiens are the image of God with normal speech capacities.
And by the way, since Antecessor in Atapuerca is morphologically Heidelbergian and genetically close to Denisovan, Denisovan = Antecessor = Heidelbergensis. We don't have the Denisovan morphology in the Denisova cave, but we can supplement it from Atapuerca and Heidelberg (with Terra Amata). We don't have the Heidelbergian genetics, no one did so far an palaeogenetic investigation of Heidelberg man, but we can supplement it from Atapuerca and Denisova cave.
If Heidelbergians are a bit closer to Solo man and Rudolfensis man than Neanderthals or sapiens are, we can conclude the Nephelim were perhaps not all Denisovans, but within the Denisovan population, and probably Solo man and Homo rudolfensis correspond to Baruch 3:26-28 There were the giants, those renowned men that were from the beginning, of great stature, expert in war. The Lord chose not them, neither did they find the way of knowledge: therefore did they perish. And because they had not wisdom, they perished through their folly.
Daniel Everett considers the average brain capacity of adult Solo men as that of ten year olds ... they were tribes with big muscle, small brain, and probably used as war machines rather than philosophers.
34:58 Non-human animals all lack one specific "sophistication" - speech.
A parrot repeating "dirtbag, dirtbag, dirtbag" doesn't speak any more than a grammaphone doing so. An ape cannot hear or pronounce "dirtbag" even. No observed natural communication has the triple levels by double articulation, the level sentence articulated into several morphemes, the level morpheme into several phonemes.
No non-human animal has Broca's area in the brain. Or Wernicke's - but it seems that one is more inferred from Broca's than directly attested in the skull.
35:47 Any pretence that human language has been found in some form in birds or in whales is false.
Birds and whales communicate in intervals, and therefore in more than one tone. And many intervals may be stringed together to form a name. But a name is not a sentence.
A bird cannot say "it is I who ate the birdseed" - it cannot say "it is I who" anything at all, since beasts only have verbs in the imperative or other jussive type moods, and the subject being the one adressed is not expressed. And it cannot say "ate" in the past tense, given that it can only adress other birds for present or imminent future purposes.
A bird cannot say "the soil is brown" ... man can, because man is created to classify things like the qualities of objects. The first act Adam was called on to perform was name the animals, that is an act of classification. Not of social naming of one's social surroundings, as "names" in birds or whales.
And only by classification do you get a physiological need to communicate more than 500 sentences for each of which a sound (or an interval) will suffice.
37:36 I can imagine a role for a disabled in a rational group - teaching the small to speak.
This lacking, I don't know how you can imagine a role for the disabled in a non-rational group.
If men in a zoo keep disabled individuals alive, that's another matter. Or if the handicap was not truly disabling.
However, you seem to find excuse after excuse to deny that Neanderthals were human ... like certain founders of a Synagogue of Satan found excuse after excuse to deny Our Lord is divine. After a miracle He made, they asked "show us a miracle" ... meaning the one He just did was not good enough.
Chesterton's Everlasting Man was so right to start one part with a man in the cave and the next part with God come down to one in Bethlehem.
38:38 You have totally missed the kind of communication all sorts of animals are capable of.
No beast is made, and therefore no beast is formed physiologically, for forming an infinity of sentences by rearranging a set of speech sounds.
39:07 And Neanderthals, like even Solo men, had Broca's area, helping us to analyse sounds in a way unknown in the animal kingdom outside God's image.
47:05 Neanderthals, Denisovans, Sapiens in their times prior to carbon dated 40 000 BP had certainly heard the proto-Gospel - Genesis 3:15.
Those of them that were saved were so by belief in the woman and her seed who were to crush the serpent's head and in preferring the ways of Abel to those of Cain.
Those who weren't were however damned for violent lives or fearful lives or for acts of black magic (Cannibalism in Atapuerca), but not for idolatry of types like Hinduism or Shintoism.
How is this possible? Well, fairly easily if their lifetime was during the pre-Flood era, between 5199 and 2957 BC.
Not at all if they lived tens of thousands of years after Adam and Eve, or if they did not even belong to their lineage. Hence the interest in rejecting modern dating methods at least as far as when they conflict with the Biblical chronology.
50:31 The appearance of inbreeding can be due to mirage of tens of thousands of years.
If two individuals share as many genes as a grandparent and grandchild and are tens of thousands of years apart, they arguably had much inbreeding in between. If they share as many genes as that but lived close to each other in time, they could have been ... grandparent and grandchild.
50:56 If all carriers of Neanderthal genome and of Denisovan genome on the Ark were halfbreeds with the race called sapiens, mystery solved, pure Neanderthals and Denisovans died from the Flood, any who had survived up to it.
This also would mean 40 000 BP is the raw carbon date for the actual years 2957 BC.
52:03 "there would have been rational beings not descended from Adam, who are in the ancestry of Christ"
Namely, if Neanderthals really lived 600 000 to 40 000 (perhaps 28 000) years ago.
B U T if they lived from some time after 5199 BC to 2957 BC, this does simply not follow.
If it were true, instead of a rape of non-theological humans, you have non-Adamite theological humans, or theological humanity separated from rationally analysed ontological humanity. All of which are no-nos to Catholics.
Remember, some Neanderthals lived very harsh lives, for instance the man without an arm in Shanidar (Iran). Impossible, theologically, before Adam sinned. See Trent Session V.
52:26 "an Adam that is ancestral to a population ancestral to both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals"
Ah, Fr Simon Gaine starts speaking sense.
Yes, indeed. This is the only thing sensible according to Trent Session V on Original Sin.
However, this can only be on one of two conditions, excluding each other:
- Adam lived hundreds of thousands of years ago
- or no Neanderthals or Homo sapiens lived that long ago.
The first of these would make the historical transmission of Genesis 3 more than just moot. The latter of these poses no problem to theology, and no real big ones to those who look closely at the dating methods.
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