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.

Growing Into Morality

Last night I started reading Heather King's Redeemed, her conversion story, which picks up after Parched, the chronicle of her spiral into and final escape from alcoholism. (I read Parched a couple weeks ago and greatly enjoyed it, if that's the right term for a brilliantly written if at times harrowing memoir.)

One of the things that struck me in reading King's account of her conversion is the way in which she describes coming to understand and agree with Catholic moral teaching. She describes how during her time as an alcoholic she had engaged in increasingly promiscuous sex (until her drinking became so single-minded that even sex would have got in the way), taken birth control, had multiple abortions, etc., and how as she was drawn to the Church she came to see how empty and destructive these had been, and how true the Catholic understanding of these topics now seemed to her.

Drama always centers around change, and reading about Heather King's change on these topics both rings true and makes for dramatic reading. Yet it was also striking me how alien this line of discovery was to my own experience growing into an adult Catholic moral sense (something which still requires a certain kind of conversion, or at least adoption.) Both because of her own years away from any kind of religious belief, and perhaps also because she's describing her experience for an audience which is not specifically religious (Redeemed is out from Viking Press), King's growing understanding of morality during her adult conversion is very different from the experience I look back on as I grew from a youthful understanding to an adult one while living within the Catholic sub-culture.

Like most children brought up with a strong moral code, my earliest sense of morality was strictly one of heroes and villains. Bad things were done by bad people, and good people, nice people that you knew, clearly didn't do bad things.

Such illusions cannot last long, and so the next stage was a tribal one. People like us -- people who were Catholic and went to mass and believed in God and such, followed a moral code, and while all people sin, and so one could expect the petty lies and meannesses and betrayals as much in one's on circle as elsewhere, there we things we just didn't do unless we did so in total rejection of all that was good and right. People who did not belong to the tribe, of course, did not know or accept these rules. Those people might join gangs or do drugs or sleep around, but that was because, not being in the tribe, they didn't know (or rejected) what was right.

With a comparatively sedate set of close friends, this kind of illusion can last a long time, but when someone who is "of the tribe" strays, the sense of shock is extreme. How could someone who was one of us and knew it was wrong be so depraved as to sleep around? How could our people have a marriage fall apart? Or get involved in drugs? Or stop going to church?

When your sense of morality is still heavily tribal, the first few times a long-time friend violates the stronger prohibitions of that code the sense of betrayal is extreme. If "people like us" don't do those things, then clearly that friend is rejecting everything you are (and thought he was too) or he was never who you thought he was in the first place.

For me, the maturing process was coming to understand in a human, rather than an intellectual, sense the varying levels of culpability that exist, not only "outside" but within one's own tribe. And seeing that even those "following the rules" often understand them rather poorly.

While for those coming to the Church from unbelief, the difficulty may, at times, be coming to see certain acts (even those as seemingly understandable as using birth control or having sex with the person you love) can be objectively wrong in and of themselves; for those of us who grow up with "the rules" the difficulty is often going beyond understanding the difference between act and culpability to actually internalizing it. Most certainly, some acts are themselves more grave sins than others, and these should be recognized and avoided. But when the great saints accuse themselves of being horrible sinners, this is not merely a matter of excess scrupulosity. The variance in culpability is so great, that there can be those who have committed nearly "every sin in the book" who retain a certain purity of heart, and yearn for God (or, at least, The Good as they know it) while others who externally avoid all major sins can harbor a pride or hate which is no less for being expressed in petty ways rather than epic ones.

Catholic Fiction Podcast

JulieD (of Happy Catholic) has a new podcast up, she and Scott Danielson talk about fiction (mostly SF, F and horror, from where they've started) from a Catholic perspective at A Good Story Is Hard To Find.

I'll Drink To That

Israeli Spy Arrested by Saudi Arabia

Many have sought to question the Zionist narrative that Israelis are strictly the victims of Arab hate when it comes to Middle East conflict and their darkest fears are certainly confirmed by this story of Mossad perverting nature in order to spy on their neighbors:

Saudi Arabian security forces have captured a vulture that was carrying a global positioning satellite (GPS) transmitter and a ring etched with the words "Tel Aviv University." They suspect the bird of spying for Israel, Maariv-NRG reported Tuesday. The GPS and ring were connected to the bird as part of an long-term project by Israeli scientists that follows vultures' location and altitude for research purposes.

The arrest of the vulture - whose identification code is R65 - comes several weeks after an Egyptian  official voiced the suspicion that a shark that attacked tourists off the Sinai shore was also acting on behalf of Mossad. The incidents may reflect a growing irrational hysteria among Arabs surrounding Israel's military prowess and the efficacy of its intelligence services, possibly fueled by the Stuxnet virus' success.

Those vultures!

Books Do Furnish A Room

Oh friends, oh friends, oh friends: the home internet connection has been installed. I blog in comfort at a desk, using a keyboard, sitting in a comfy chair - all components of the compleat connectivity experience that I've been missing for the past three months. The computer is in the library, a cozy paneled room with built-in shelves and a radiator and a fireplace (gas, nothing currently hooked up).

This is a photo I took when we were viewing the house; somewhere in the jumble of boxes is the card reader for the digital camera, the chip of which has lots of newer pix.

When Darwin and I poked around the house right after getting the keys, we found that the previous owners had left the built-in shelves full of books. The collection was erudite: lots of collected letters or biographies of people I'd never heard of to know why their letters should be collected or their lives chronicled, and a great many novels that were considered Very Important the year they were written. Not much is newer than twenty years old; many books are much older. So far I have browsed a biography of a fellow named Trelawny, who I don't know why he's famous but he killed a crow when he was five; pondered biographies and autobiographies of Moss Hart, Zelda Fitzgerald, Tombee (a cotton planter, says the cover), and Julia Peterkin; browsed volumes of plays, letters, and journals; and considered the historical importance of Andersonville, the Constitutional Convention, Shaker furniture, Queen Victoria, and American Hymns.

A man's library is a window into his soul. Growing our own collection has always been important to us; we tend not to invest in the sort of books we wouldn't want to keep around. (Even Darwin's adolescent collection of SF is presentable, if somewhat lurid about the covers.) We're getting a sense of the previous owners through their books, and our impressions are favorable. And that's important, since they lived here for fifty years and left their mark on the house in many ways. I doubt any of our books will stay in the house whenever we move out (God forbid!), but I'd be fascinated to know what opinions a total stranger would form about us based on our library. And our bedrooms -- we keep books there, too. And our schoolroom. And our attic, and our living room... Our house is furnished and adorned with books; when you read our house, you read us.

A Question of Warmth

There are more substantive topics I should doubtless start a new year out with, but a quick practical question for those with more experience living in the frozen north than I (Californian turned Texan turned Ohioan that I am.) What do you consider a frugal thermostat setting during the winter? What is a normal one? What is a self indulgent one?

I'm much more used to managing cooling on a budget -- in relation to which I always thought of frugality being setting the thermostat to 80 or a little above. Normal as 78. And self indulgence as starting somewhere below 76. (The which could, in 100+ degree weather, result in electric bills somewhere between "wow" and "boig!")

When we moved into out glorious, rambling old pile the friendly lady as Columbia Gas helpfully informed me that our house had previously been set up as a commercial account because the owners used so much gas during the winter. (Said old pile is heated via a natural gas boiler powering hot water radiators.) This has, of course, had me watching the thermostat with the fascination which only a dedicated numbers guy can muster. Indeed, I'm thinking of installing one of those nifty digital thermostats simply for to satisfy my desire for more precise temperature metrics than those provided by the old mercury dial termostat.