Expert: Griff Ruby - 4/7/2007

Question
Hello  Griff..
I have a question that's been bugging me and my cousins for some time..
Does our human race come only from Adam and Eve (if this is correct are we all made in incest?) or it is a transferred meaning..like that God made earth in 7 days but in reality he made it in thousands of days.. Did he made lots of people with different races?

Answer
Adam's sin encompasses us all.  Only our Lady and her Son were specially and Divinely protected from the effects of Adam's sin by some miracle.  As for Adam and Eve themselves, they were not brother and sister but related in an extraordinary manner, with Eve being in some way "taken from" Adam's rib.
As to the matings of their immediate children, it is possible that they may indeed have cross-bred with brothers and sisters, though the Bible only states that they had "sons and daughters" without specifically stating that their sons married their daughters.  Even Abraham supposedly was married to his half-sister.  It is not until the Mosaic Law that marriage between such close relations was forbidden.  An individual instance of such a thing as a blood brother marrying a blood sister is really not such a bad thing, of itself, but the taboo serves a very important purpose in that, over the long term, humanity would become ingrown and defective if this happened very much.  So by the time it became reasonable for anyone wanting to marry to find someone sufficiently unrelated as to marry without risk of defective children, closer unions then became (rightly) forbidden.
I know feelings often run high on such questions as the relationship between the Biblical account and the scientific observations and theories current.  The Church takes a rather minimalist stance as to what we are doctrinally required to believe, and the rest one finds varying opinions among the Church Fathers.  We are required to believe that God, in some manner, is personally responsible for the fact of all existence, of the Universe, of everything that makes it up, and of ourselves.  There are no requirements as to what means God used, whether some dramatic direct Creation (Poof!  Here it is, poof! here it is...) or some more gradual or even natural process (intelligent design, guided evolution, etc.), nor are we constrained to any time schedule (instantaneous (Athanasius), 7 24-hour days (some simplistic Biblical literalists), 7 longer periods of some specific length (a thousand years, 7 or 10 thousand years each), or indefinite and even overlapping periods of time.
We are constrained to believe in a literal Adam and Eve who sinned in some way, whether the "forbidden fruit" was merely a literal fruit (e. g. an apple or a banana) or symbolic of something else (e. g. premarital sex?) or something unimagined by contemporary minds.  We are constrained to believe that all of us living today are children of Adam and Eve, but I think there is room for the possibility that others, perhaps some sort of evolutionary "proto-humans" intelligent and rational, but devoid of that Divine spark of moral choice and responsibility that God breathed into Adam (and also committed unto Eve by drawing her from him).  The "Nephilim" (mentioned in the Bible, but only in reference to pre-flood times) might well be some ancient racial memory of the Neanderthal Man (non-descendants of Adam), and there might well have been more humanoid non-descendants of Adam for some period of time.  But all of this is mere speculation.  It could also as likely be that everyone was absolute direct blood descendants of Adam and Eve.
What does it mean to say that Adam was made from the dust?  It could mean that he was shaped from a pile of mud like some big mudpie, or it could as legitimately mean that he was made from the dust in exactly the same sense that you and I are also made from the dust.  For apart from the initial fertilized zygote each of us began our existence as (and that has a similar origin, just a generation further removed), every molecule of our weight is from food, plants and animals.  The animals ate plants (or other animals which in turn ate plants), and the plants all grow from the soil, drawing their substance from it.  So we indeed are made of dust or dirt, every molecule of us.
As to different races, it is amazing how fast such differences can emerge by the geographic isolation of populations and natural evolutionary processes.  We races all could be directly from Adam, or (harking back to my "proto-human" speculation), the result of intermarriages between direct descendants of Adam and Eve and non-descendants.
Even with regards the flood, to say that the whole world was flooded need not mean (but it could) that the whole literal earth was covered with water (in the manner of the movie "Waterworld") or merely the "whole" world as known to the ancients, e. g. Asia Minor, or perhaps only the Eurasian continent, or a large portion thereof.
Hope some of this answers your questions, God bless!