Can Catholics Believe Theistic Evolution? w/ Jimmy Akin
Reason & Theology, 15.III.2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bw0zdWZDK-k
I jumped straight to "Romans 5:12 on the historical Adam" ... so all my comments are after the first hour.
1:10:24 "the federal head of the human race"
1) When? You accept the evolutionary timeline and put Adam early he can realistically be ancestor to all, but we can't have realistically historical memories of Genesis 3, and no one in tradition pretended Genesis 3 is known by a revelation. You put him late and you have clearly human people dying before Adam, plus it's hard to imagine how pre-Columbian Americas and pre-Tasman Oceania descend from him.
2) The traditional theology is not he was "federal" head of the human race, but he was head as in actual common ancestor to all - including all of his contemporaries (if you call him Eve's "ancestor" that is not common usage, but she too was from him).
3) If "all men living in his time" (Akin's hypothesis) were God's image, why would their continued righteousness and conditional immortality depend on the behaviour of a "federal head"?
4) And with any chance of Genesis 3 being historical this would leave lots of God's images "before his time" (Akin's hypothesis X Adam sufficiently recent) dying in pains despite being God's image. And despite not yet having original sin.
"cause there is Eve"
Who was from his side.
Very different from being part of a larger population most of whom were not from him in any way.
"what does Genesis mean on its own terms"
1) The idea of intention being ahistoric is simply dumb, it doesn't the least follow from a comparison with ANE mythologies, because we have no reason to believe these were, when dealing with men, intended to be ahistoric, besides there are no ANE parallels to Adam and Eve.
2) It is also a reconstruction, and putting your reconstruction above St. Paul's inspired faith in the tradition from Genesis is making "science" a magisterium superior to Revelation, which is the one thing we actually have a magisterium in.
We don't have to reinvent the wheel, Genesis on its own terms, and as taken by St. Paul means there was a first man, from whom all other human beings come.
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1:11:23 "what the author asserts, not what he assumes"
In fact, while the concept "what the author asserts" is §§ 11 and 12, Jimmy Akin's counterdistinction about "not what he assumes" is simply not in the text.
The text of what you take as a conciliar document counterdistinguishes things like figures of speech and literary forms.
a) sth difficult to analyse, if one assumes it has been lost over time to the actual tradition;
b) the most reasonable analysis as well as traditional interpretation is Genesis is as a literary form "history" and nothing else (not prophecy, not wisdom literature, not literary dialogue as some have tried to make Job a parallel to Consolation of philosophy);
c) some having proposed an alternative genre for the first 11 chapters being "myth" - and I don't care for their analysis of Homer or Virgil or the Tragedians.
Jimmy Akin is probably resurging the theory of "obiter dicta" not being inerrant. But a whole narrative cannot be an obiter dictum, whatever the merits the theory could otherwise have. Which actually is better suited for analysing infallible Church documents than inerrant hagiography.
1:11:41 "his assumption"
No, that's not how inerrancy in hagiography works, and it is also not what Dei Verbum even actually said in paragraphs 11 and 12.
1:12:32 Again, Jimmy Akin is heavily overdoing what Dei Verbum permits.
An author can assume "God's hand" means God's activity and in that manner not mean to assert that God (in His Godhead and apart from specific theophanies) is a physical being with a hand or two. That's assuming a figure of speech will be understood.
But assuming a fact to be true, on the part of a hagiographer, is also meaning to assert it - unless one just barely fails to verbally assert it.
In fact, a more reverent attitude towards hagiographers is assuming they knew what they were talking of. I e, if the Antichrist can be identified by ASCII gematria, we can assume St. John understood ASCII through some kind of time travel of information on Patmos. If Göbekli Tepe is Nimrod's Babel, and Classical Babylon is just a "relocation" and standin (like Rome for Troy), we can assume Isaiah and Jeremiah used the perfect form as about a past event already happened, not as a future tense only. If either Neanderthals or Denisovans were the Nephelim, we can assume Moses intentionally didn't use specifics about height in Genesis 6. If Nimrod's project was a rocket project, we can assume Moses knew that and deliberately said nothing about carrying stones to the tower to be built.
But assuming that St. Paul assumed Adam to be historical, and because this was not controversial, somehow did "not mean to assert it" is balderdash.
That's not how texts are interpreted. And Dei Verbum actually never directly says anything like the Holy Ghost not asserting such facts as the hagiographer for human reasons "assumes" ...
Again, Dei Verbum isn't authorising to state "Peter assumed the Flood was global, but didn't mean to assert it" ...
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1:12:05 "I can appeal to a text without thinking the text is literally true"
This was definitely not the tradition about Adam and Eve among the Jewish nation of St. Paul's time.
The tradition definitely was, as reflected in Luke 3, Adam was a real person. Not a symbol.
Plus, if St. Paul had even remotely meant Adam as a symbol, he would have overdone his case and been misspeaking, by using the phrases in italics here:
Wherefore as by one man sin entered into this world, and by sin death; and so death passed upon all men, in whom all have sinned
For as by the disobedience of one man, many were made sinners; so also by the obedience of one, many shall be made just. [Romans 5:12,19]
If Adam were the symbol of the sin of many men, it would instead be true that by the sin of many, many were made sinners.
1:12:18 The case of "Sherlock Holmes is a great detective" ascribes a certain quality to the fictional character.
But a better parallel would be "Sherlock Holmes was my professor's professor's professor in criminology" - which would (falsely in Sherlock Holmes' case) ascribe to him a certain causal role in the real world. Because obviously, it is for sinners in the real world that Jesus came to atone.
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1:13:14 If the Psalmist assumed the Sun was actually moving around us, then he also asserted it, and it is true, and Galileo lost a trial for saying otherwise.
1:13:25 "Just as the ancients assumed that the sky was a metal... a firm structure"
Thanks for not overdoing your assumptions on what the ancients assumed.
There was no such thing as a commonly accepted, supraconfessional, science, which all assumed to be true, like there is one now, which all assume to be true if you count out fundamentalists. So what "ancients assumed" is a totally moot point.
As to firm. Suppose "firm" can have meanings that do not equate to physical solid + non-brittle + not very pliable. Suppose heavens move around earth, as the Psalmist asserts. Then the "matter of place" - or aether - would be firmly holding stars and (classical) planets in their places at very high speeds (6.28 times the speed of light at star level), and it would really be firm, even if it only means non-brittle + not very pliable. Without the connotation to physical solid.
1:13:40 "they assumed a flat earth"
No text for that one.
Egyptians and possibly Babylonians did. But if Moses didn't, there is nothing in the text to contradict that. And yes, I have been over every type of passage (if not every single passage) which some have pretended proving the Bible expressed a flat earth belief or assumption.
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1:14:20 "authority delegated to him by Christ"
You are aware that that delegation only works onto persons that are actually Catholic?
St. Robert Bellarmine considers, if a Pope openly lost the faith, he would cease to be Pope, but this could not happen - however an invalid pseudo-election could happen if a candidate was heretical prior to election.
St. Francis of Sales considers a Pope openly losing the faith, he would cease to be Pope. Period.
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1:15:07 Pius XII to the PAS in 1941 stated, if Adam had physical ancestry, they would, as non-human, not be real parents.
This is a huge difference with the compromises he could envisage from what Jimmy Akin is proposing.
He arguably hadn't thought through what it meant, since that would mean God mistreated "baby Adam" before adult Adam sinned. But mistreated him very severely.
I think the clergy who started certain types of abuse against young boys in the forties believed in that type of "God" ... (see Romans 1).
What Jimmy proposes is sth very different and means Adam simply wasn't the first man. Which makes nonsense of original sin instead.
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1:23:07 I find it totally unimportant what Jimmy Akin considers "dicey" ground scientifically, as long as Jimmy Akin refuses to take a debate about the scientific methods and evidences involved.
Visually, Earth is the centre of a movement of the cosmos. So, prima facie, the Earth is in the centre because it's what the stars revolve around.
This prima facie impression holds, as long as the opposite is not proven - sth which is much easier for an atheist than for a Christian.
We can all agree, that if the famous Newtonian model of orbital mechanics were all there was to it, Earth would have to orbit the Sun, and not the reverse. But if God and angels are involved over and above physical factors that Newton accounts for, then this conclusion does not hold. Whenever I take the debate with an atheist, he shifts the ground to asserting God and angels don't exist.
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1:36:49 Mendel's laws have what kind of implication favouring molecules to man evolution or for that matter apes to man evolution?
By the way, if your one parent has brown eyes as he can have one brown-eye and one blue-eye gene, you could actually get his blue-eye gene and end up with two blue-eye genes, like your other parent.
I was taught Mendel's laws by a med school student mother who is also Young Earth Creationist.
Well, at least the most common ones (like laws for how recessive and dominant genes work).
1:41:28 So, Akin asserts we have vitellogenine producing genes, like recessive genes.
What do David Brawand et al assert?
"Embryonic development in nonmammalian vertebrates depends entirely on nutritional reserves that are predominantly derived from vitellogenin proteins and stored in egg yolk. Mammals have evolved new resources, such as lactation and placentation, to nourish their developing and early offspring. However, the evolutionary timing and molecular events associated with this major phenotypic transition are not known. By means of sensitive comparative genomics analyses and evolutionary simulations, we here show that the three ancestral vitellogenin-encoding genes were progressively lost during mammalian evolution (until around 30-70 million years ago, Mya) in all but the egg-laying monotremes, which have retained a functional vitellogenin gene. Our analyses also provide evidence that the major milk resource genes, caseins, which have similar functional properties as vitellogenins, appeared in the common mammalian ancestor approximately 200-310 Mya. Together, our data are compatible with the hypothesis that the emergence of lactation in the common mammalian ancestor and the development of placentation in eutherian and marsupial mammals allowed for the gradual loss of yolk-dependent nourishment during mammalian evolution."
That's the quotable abstract for PLoS Biol
. 2008 Mar 18;6(3):e63. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0060063.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18351802/
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