Creation and the Human Family

Before asking where Adam belongs in the long history of life, we need to understand what this inquiry means by creation. Catholic faith holds that everything depends on God for its existence. Creation from nothing means that God does not begin with an independent world or a material already outside his power.

That dependence includes the processes through which living bodies develop. An account of biological change can describe something real about creation without explaining why anything exists at all. Divine providence concerns God's relation to that whole created order.

Catholic teaching also distinguishes the spiritual soul from a product of biological development. Each person's soul is immediately created by God. A scientific account of ancestry and bodily life therefore does not exhaust the Church's account of a human person.

These commitments matter when proposals introduce populations before or alongside Adam. Such proposals must explain what they mean by human, how everyone belongs to one family, and how the account relates to original sin. They cannot treat an inconvenient population as a lesser kind of person.

The book will consider an Adamic threshold as a possible model. Its interest depends on what it can explain, while its acceptability depends on whether it respects these commitments. The model is less secure than the teachings it seeks to bring into conversation with natural history.