And they get away with it.

I Said I Wouldn't Address Any More Hate Mail On This Till The New Year, Well, It's January 4th.

TRYING TO GET some grip on the subtle and detailed theology of Karl Rahner, sometimes it's clearer, or at least easier, to read what other theologians have written about it.  This passage from a paper, Karl Rahner and the Immortality of the Soul by Mark F. Fischer, has this interesting passage relevant to a bit of the hate mail that came in last month bridging what I said about religion and what I said about biology. The unadmitted similarity between the two is interesting to consider and fun to bring up.

The Immediate Creation of the Soul. This brings us to our second “catechetical” theme about the soul as created immediately by God, not produced by a child’s parents. This doctrine was taught in 1950 by Pope Pius XII but has a long history.  Scholastic theology held that God created each individual soul at the moment of its unification with the body, and rejected competing theories from antiquity, such as the teaching that the soul pre-existed, or emanated from the divine substance, or was generated by the child’s parents by means of “semen spirituale.”   The affirmation by Pius XII about the immediate creation of the soul took place in response to the polygenic theory of human evolution, that there were more than two “first parents.” Pius XII stated that faithful Catholics cannot accept the opinion that some human beings exist who did not trace their parentage back to Adam, or that the Biblical Adam merely represented a number of first parents.  Rahner proposed refinements to certain aspects of this teaching, and it is worthwhile to trace his thought.

The problem with polygenism is that it appears to undercut the doctrine of original sin. The Council of Trent taught that Adam’s first sin lost for him and his descendents both holiness and justice.  If there had been more than one first parent, then original sin would not have been transmitted to all, and human beings would exist who are untainted by Adam’s sin. To Pius XII, such speculation about polygenism seemed to erode the Church’s teaching.

I will point out that if Pius XII and, I'm guessing, the conservative German Jesuits who, it is reported, he regularly relied on to do his thinking for him had not considered that all human beings from shortly after speciation occurred (and there's really no good determination of when and what that would have been like) would almost certainly have been related to every other one of the new species. The population to mate with would have been very small and all of them would be interrelated to each other, before such a theorized speciation "event" and in the resulting new species.  That is certainly not something that is unknown as it's often asked by scoffers and believers alike where Cain's wife came from if she wasn't his sister. Not to mention Seth's. I sometimes wonder if that question being asked very early in the editing of the folk tales of Genesis might have led to the absurdly long life-spans claimed in the stories, to give the boys of later generations some cousins to marry instead of sisters.  Though it doesn't really work for that, either.  I will admit there are still fundamentalists and even "evangelicals" who choose to believe those life-spans are accurate reportage.  No honest believer believes that.  

This problem flowing from a misunderstanding that any of us is a result of a single line of inheritance might disappear if the idea of speciation wasn't so problematic, to start with. If you wanted there to have been a single human couple who were first ensouled by God, it couldn't have been more than a generation or several before the small number of their nephews and nieces mating with their children would have ensured that every subsequent human being would have such an Adam and Eve as ancestors.

That it may well have been German Jesuits educated in a naive 19th century conception of evolution who imagined up this problem wouldn't surprise me. The same naive conception of evolution born of British aristocratic snobbery was ubiquitous, it was the basis of eugenics and the Nazi's "racial hygiene" that had led to mass murder not five years before Pius laid down that doctrine.  That is a concept that didn't die even in science in the wake of the revelation of the Nazi genocides, it still is ubiquitous among college-credentialed people. I think it's probably something that is a given in the hegemony of the theory of natural selection.  It is rather stunning how shallow the thinking of the self-consciously truest of true believers can be about the very thing they will stake their respectability on.

It used to surprise me that that kind of cartoonish conception of evolution is ubiquitous among college credentialed folk, not only among some theologians but, also, many deputed scientists, some of them in topics in allegedly scientific evolutionary science.  What I have come to understand from my study of Dawinism is that it is not surprising if you look at how science really happens among actual, behaving human beings instead of the cartoonish idealized depiction of it which may, at times, be somewhat true in physics and chemistry when they deal strictly with what can be observed and measured. As soon as you get far from that, the idealized description of what science is becomes rapidly ever less true.

I suspect those scientists who consistently take that fact of interrelatedness as a basis of their thinking is a minority because it quickly becomes too complex to wrap your head around. It certainly fogs the idea of speciation which is legitimately plenty foggy to start with.  They certainly let that crude cartoonishness get taken as science without challenging it.  No doubt they'd save their derisive dismissal of the very same  idea when it is part of theological speculation.  

Theologically, I reject the problem because I reject the idea that only human beings have souls.  Jesus says that God is mindful of the lives and deaths of sparrows, even those hapless enough to fall into human's cruel hands and God is responsible for the splendor of wild flowers.  And what is in God's mind can be expected to be eternal. Jesus said that that is where human immortality lies, as well.  Human theologians might not believe that non-humans are significant enough to notice to start with but apparently Jesus thought they were, though he knew human beings weren't going to understand that. There are Old Testament citations that could be made as well.  And I absolutely reject the theory of inherited sin, which I'll get to in a while.  But first some more from the article:

Rahner never rejected monogenism in favor of polygenism.  But in his earliest article on the topic, published in 1954, he argued that monogenism is a metaphysical question. The concept of the “first man,” he wrote, “must not only be thought of as just temporally and numerically the first,” but must be understood metaphysically as “the transcendent humanity instituted by God.”  When the Church teaches that all human beings descended from Adam, it is not primarily making a natural-scientific argument. Rather, the claim pertains to metaphysics. Adamic descent means that the Biblical account of our first parents affirms the primacy of God as creator. The emergence of humanity was ultimately a divine act.

Twenty-seven years after his article of 1954, [and about sixteen years after the Second Vatican Council started the freeing of Catholic theology] Rahner returned to the doctrine of the “immediate” creation of the soul. He knew that Pius XII had insisted upon the soul’s immediate creation. The soul did not gradually evolve as primitive hominids became more human. No, said the pope, it was established in an immediate way, without the medium of human parents. This doctrine, Rahner suggested, is not meant to deny that human parents produce a human being. On the contrary, the doctrine must be understood metaphysically. God established a world, not in a one-time act of creation, but in a constant process of divine causality, that is, in a relationship that is being “continuously constituted” by God.  The divine causality, Rahner concluded, “can be identified with the ‘creation of the soul’ in the way in which Pius XII teaches.”  Rahner affirmed the teaching, showing that its deepest truth is not empirical but metaphysical.

I think Karl Rahner, who was always, self-consiciously, a CATHOLIC theologian, was struggling to make a papally set down doctrine cohere with what he knew as scientific knowledge and in the process he came to a useful distinction between things that can be understood on the basis of empirical, observed, knowledge and those things which can only be understood in a metaphysical manner, on the basis of thought,  but which frequently lack the possibility of observational confirmation.  

That is, of course, entirely related to my inconvenient observation about the fact that only the tiniest physical evidence of what and how evolution happened and what caused the myriads of later species to evolve will never, ever be available to inform our theories of it.

If you consider that "original sin," is a theory of human nature based on the fable of the forbidden fruit in Genesis 2 and given as an explanation of the Crucifixion of Jesus, it is a Just-so story told to explain human sinfulness and is taken as an explanation about the life and supposed fate of all of us, it's not that difficult to see that it's not only religious theologians who make the same mistake that Pius XII and his collaborators made, insisting on the nature of physical reality on the basis of an ideological theory, but, in fact, those deputed to be scientists in good standing make the same mistake.  But they call it "science."  And, having been ordained as scientists instead of ministers of religion, they get away with it.  

That's more true now than it ever was due to the Just-so storytelling  of, first, Darwinism and today's Darwinian fundamentalists (Stephen J. Gould's term)* currently among Sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists who explain a myriad of allegedly typical human and animal behaviors based on fictional connections between us, through the vast and forever unknowable lines of common and divergent descent between us and radically remote species.  By "fictional" I don't mean known to be non-existent, I mean they are unevidenced except in the imaginations of those scientists and those who buy what they're selling. It is not unreasonable to theorize descent from a common ancestor for remote species on the basis of commonly held bits of our genomes, it is entirely unreasonable to believe that the expression of those does more than make certain proteins that have a far more complex expression in very different species which have little in common.  It's even more unreasonable to pretend that you can link those to such things as behavior which cannot be shown to have a genetic basis.  If you realize that "sin" is, in any human conception of it, just such a "behavior" the theory of "original sin" being inherited is not any different from what Richard Dawkins made his allegedly scientific career on, coming up with something not that dissimilar from what Pius XII did.  And with about as much physical evidence to base that in.

I think there's a lot more in common between the theologians wanting to uphold the theology of the Council of Trent and the Darwinisms of those who believe in natural selection as an all encompassing explanatory doctrine of biology.

To start with a popular pseudo-scientific assertion growing out of the popular (mis)understanding of science in evo-psy winch I've dealt with here before.

If you start with the realization that the theory of original sin is a biological theory of human evil doing, a propensity to act in certain ways inherited from our theorized first parents and an explanation of, other things, why we develop, live and die as we do, the similarity to materialist-atheist-scientistic theories allegedly finding the same kinds of things from the unobservable and undocumented past of our species (in evolutionary biology, that is extended far more ambitiously than in traditional theology, asserting far more tenuously and unfounded causes for that) becomes interestingly obvious.

In the past I've used the example of the emeritus professor of Psychology at the well-respected University of Toronto and latter day YouTube boy-cult quack Jordan Peterson, when he validated his sexist assumptions about the real right way that human males and females should act on the basis of how lobsters mate.  

I got into several online brawls on that where I was able to point out that if you wanted to look for such pseudo-evolutionary models for how human females were supposed to act, as well as human males, the common ancestor we share with lobsters we also share with preying mantises among whom it's not uncommon to observe females pull the heads off of males wanting to mate with them, which they will eat as the soon to be dead males' bodies copulate with them. No doubt a sociobiologist or evo-psych would notice such a dim witted male would not be selected out of the breeding population, no doubt they would say he was propagating his stupid genes which would have to be called "smart genes." Or would they be selfish-genes? In one of those brawls I also pointed out that that same common ancestor is shared with black widows in which females similarly kill males of the same species.  I could have mentioned such species as spiders in which the offspring devour their mothers.  I don't think most female biologists of my acquaintance would ever want to have the boys think that was a feature of sociobiology that should be followed, though I can imagine some of the boys being OK with that.

I will point out, to clarify, that I choose to believe there is such a common ancestor of us and our lobster cousins, I not only deny but am absolutely certain that we can't know anything more than that about them than that they may well have existed.  I am, in fact, more certain that we cannot actually know those details about that ancestor and what they may or may not have passed down on the divergent lines of their offspring than I am of its existence because we can know that there is no real evidence of those ancestors. For all any of us knows, if some future tit bits of remote evolutionary time are discovered, they may lead to a future scenario that we can't imagine based on what we do have available.

I am certain that Jordan Peterson's idiotic conception of the implications of common ancestry is ubiquitous among those in the pseudo-sciences but also among a lot of more genuine scientists who concentrate on the academic study of evolution than should make us feel comfortable.  Especially when it's a question of behavior and a naively materialistic conception of what behavior has to come from. I doubt that behavior is merely an epiphenomenon of our genes. I'd like to say real scientists are much better than the idiot psych profs but, really, when it comes to making up stories about what we can't see, they are his equal if not quite so stupid about it.  E. O. Wilson, a far closer to legitimate scientist wasn't really much more sophisticated when he asserted similarities among other species, including human beings, and the ants he studied.  That absurd extended, attenuated line of speculation became hegemonically influential since the rise of "evolutionary psychology" in the 1970s, growing out of some equally absurd theories of the 1960s.  It became influential because it provided an alleged scientific explanation of many things for which there is absolutely no evidence at all. It is based on seeming plausibility, not real physical evidence.  Plausibility is not the same thing as knowledge, horse feathers can seem plausible and still be entirely imaginary.  I'd guess there were those who really believed in Pegasus or in other flying horses of other pagan mythologies.

One of the things those all have in common, something they share with a literalist or fundamentalist reading of Genesis is that they rely on telling stories about an unobservable past and make up stories out of it so as to explain human behavior and human life now and to make assertions about that based on not only the unknown but the unknowable.  I will say this for the Catholic practice that Pius XII was engaged in, he didn't pretend what he was doing was science and even if he did, the likes of Karl Rahner quickly distinguished between what a Pope said on the basis of theological orthodoxy and science.  That is a correction which I have yet to see become influential in biological science.

In mocking the eminently mockable Jordan Peterson and his idiot boy-cultists, I pointed out that there is a general estimate that the ancestor we share with lobsters lived about a half-billion years ago.  If I'd had my wits more about me I'd have put it into the question of how many generations of our direct ancestors that would have been.  It would certainly be in the tens or hundreds of millions. It would be a certainty that no matter what imagined species each member of that line every one of the belonged to, every one of them would have reached reproductive age and successfully reproduced.  My computer calculator, dividing 500 million by the 33.3 years definition of a human generation leads me to believe that that number of generations at that ridiculously long  definition of an average generation length in this problem  would be 15,015,015 generations.  If you consider that it is quite likely most of those generations for most of those species would be quite a bit smaller the numbers of those generations is far higher. If the average length of those generations was three years (I'm guessing that's still very long as such an abstracted "average"), that would be 166,666,666+- generations between us and our common ancestor with the lobsters. 

Among other things, I think the commonly held belief that "natural selection" was the one thing responsible for and the ultimate explanatory framing for understanding the successful sustained lives and reproduction of all those spectacularly varied species, sub-species, smaller groupings and individuals of those spectacularly different variations is absurd. I don't think, even as a thought experiment, you could possibly maintain a believe that there was any one "thing" like natural selection that was the knowable "force" or "mechanism" that explains that success AND THE FAILURE AS WELL because it is implausible based on the certain stupendous variability of the reality of those lives, instead of the scientific cartoon simplification of the problem.  I think it is as grandiose a claim of science as even the most outlandish claims of some of the dodgier of fundamentalist religion.  

That is, of course, a number of generations that even the best of science cannot validly guesstimate, at least I can't find that anyone has made such a guess at it.  Since those generations would have included a myriad of members of different species with very different numbers of years or months or weeks of life expectancy and reproductive maturity, most of which have certainly not left a single resolvable fossil for scientists to make up stories about, we have absolutely no basis for judging how like or unlike that entirely unknown shared ancestor the bodies of those ancestors of all of us were like or, as much or ever more so, how they behaved, how they lived, their habits, their success or failure to succeed, how many "by the skin of their teeth (or mandibles)" narrow escapes our line of life must have had, now many innumerable random chance events in which their survival or reproductive success had absolutely nothing to do with biological inheritance in why their line of life continued past them as individuals.

And, it's worth pointing out that whichever enormous number of generations that would get us back to that common ancestor would be, there is another unknowable and almost certainly far different number of generations that produced on the other branch that produced modern lobsters, mantidae, etc.  I think it can be confidently said that the two numbers of generations wouldn't be nearly the same but they would certainly be large numbers of entirely unknowable species and individuals. I think it's very reasonable to expect that the number would be far more than twice the number of generations in the line that includes us.

That such a relatively reliably estimated biological trait as the number of months or years to reproductive maturity is so drastically different among those species is strong evidence that something so unreliable as reported or, really, imagined "behaviors" and grotesquely unevidenced and entirely not obvious speculations of how those were inherited as vaguely but confidently asserted "genetic traits" should be about the biggest warning sign in science.  The idea that science could possibly discern such a thing as a "common behavior" within that maze is far more absurd than the most absurd assertion made by Pope Pius XII in 1950, his metaphysical speculation being dealt with by a young theologian four years later and now of little to no influence in Catholicism.  I never heard of it in well over sixty years when I might have heard about or seen evidence of it. I doubt many Catholic theologians ever heard of it, either unless they read that part of Rahner's enormous oeuvre.

* Certainly it's an indication of the impossibility for an informed scientist to be a strict Darwinist by the time Gould flourished. It's certainly true that many, perhaps most Darwinists have been of the fundamentalist type, certainly within the popular understanding of science, that's the case.  It's perhaps appropriate that as a representative of the naive, fundamentalist Darwinism that Dawkins was given that seat of atheist atheology at Oxford funded by a cyber jillionaire, to promote just such a naive "public understanding of science."  I suspect the theory of natural selection will, eventually, if we live long enough as a species, be scrapped and the past hundred sixty years will be seen as a quaint and dangerous folly. Though many findings of biology not dependent on the unseeable, unknowable, forever lost past will stand far longer.  It's regrettable how atheist ideology has forced what should have been a minor interest area in biology into such a waste of time and effort.