Posted by Hemant Mehta in What happens when you put a Catholic priest, Father Jonathan Morris, on FOXNews and let people ask him religious questions?
Entertainment. Puzzlement. Confusion.
Were you expecting anything different?
This is a great clip to watch 
He doesn’t know the answer… so he asks to use a lifeline. (It’s not like the Pope would know any better.)
My favorite line from Morris is this:
You know… the fact is that we don’t know *exactly* how things happened…
And yet, religious people somehow “know” that Adam and Eve existed, and Genesis is true, and there was a talking snake, etc.
Even Christians who don’t take Genesis literally “know” that God played a role in the process.
But call them out on it — or have them explain what it is they believe — and their explanations fall flat.
Morris dodges the question completely by saying we don’t know what happened… and then proceeds to tell us what he believes happened. It’s ridiculous.
Which is probably why it’s on FOXNews to begin with.
(via Atheist Media Blog)
Ok, that was weird. So far as I know, the Catholic church accepts evolution, and has retreated to the position that at some point God inserted souls. (Maybe that’s Adam and Eve?) Anyway, if the Adam and Eve story is taken at face value, then saying we don’t know is kind of nuts. I mean, it obviously had to be brother and sister going at it, or Adamn and daughter or Eve and son… ok, maybe you don’t know which icky option it was, but it was one of them, right? So say so, if that’s what you believe, instead of making a ridiculous attempt to commit suicide by embarassment.
Was going to edit my comment above, but the comment editing software is grounds for shooting the programmers of same, so another comment instead.
Ok, now that I think about it for a few moments, I recall that Adam and Eve had Cain and Abel, both boys. And they found “wives” somehow. So, that rules out the sister/daughter option. Guess it was that sinner Eve, eh? Or, maybe some more rib-women were made.
Actually it doesn’t rule out sisters since the Bible also says Adam and Eve had other children. “The days of Adam after he became the father of Seth were eight hundred years; and he had other sons and daughters.”
The Christian interpretations I’ve heard range from the story being pure metaphor for humans in general. In other words Adam and Eve are us and eating of the fruit means us becoming aware as we grow up of our actions and thoughts and being ashamed of some (Cain in this case is metaphor for the human tendency to disclaim responsibility for our actions). Another is Adam and Eve stand for the point in evolutionary history where humans gained souls and then started questioning and being aware (in this case ‘death’ means spiritual death because biological death already existed). Those who insist on a single Adam and Eve in this scenario might say the children married other humans who did not have full fledged souls (but the children of the mixed marriages would). The literalists generally say Cain and Seth married their sisters.
I think the most important thing to note here is that, even in the face of his own ignorance, or lack of understanding, he never once says “you know, we don’t know how it works, and that’s ok.” Never once does he say, “You know, you are right. That doesn’t really make sense, and I am going to investigate that, and if I find that there is not sufficient evidence that such claims are possible, then I won’t believe in it”. His blind faith worries me that these people, who so many of our nation’s children are being taught by in churches around the country, are dim future for truth.
And in response to the comment above mine, I am a little curious what you mean by
Nowhere have I ever heard any biologist or other scientist talk about the point in time when human beings gained souls, or even of the existence of souls.
The human tendency to disclaim responsibility for our actions? Please explain to me what asking forgiveness is then? A murderer can kill 100 innocent people, and then ask god for forgiveness, and his slate is wiped clean? How is that for disclaiming responsibility for our own actions.
TST, Erp was merely sharing with us the various Christian “explanations” he’s encountered; nowhere does he so much as imply that he finds any of them in any way valid. If you want expositions, you’re going to have to track down some folks who actually accept these ridiculous rationalizations and see what they have to say.
‘Ancient legends aren’t required to make literal sense, they’re just good stories.’ There. Why can’t all educated Christians accept that? Are they so scared that the whole thing is a house of cards and will be knocked down by a slight breeze of truth?
Of course, the Gospel according to Luke has all these people as real ancestors of Jesus.
I guess the Catholic Church knows how to interpret the Bible better than the Biblical writers did , or even better than Jesus did.
After all, just as science has advanced in the last 2000 years, and we now know things that Jesus did not, so has theology advanced in the last 2000 years, and people of today have a more accurate theology than Jesus did.
Unless the point of theology is not to make any progress in 2000 years, so that people still believe what Jesus did?
But why would universities have theology departments if the point of theology is to freeze theology at the place it was 2000 years ago?
The even bigger irony is that there is an official Catholic answer these days: That Genesis is not literal, but rather is a metaphor for humanity’s sinful state.
Of course, this introduces new problems: Why would there be original sin if there was no original sin? If there is no original sin, why would Jesus’ sacrifice be needed?
Still, it’s embarrassing that he took Genesis more or less literally in 2009 as an official representative of an organization that does not.
I like how he switches over to a strawman with the belly button thing once he realizes he doesn’t have a clue.
I read a Christian apologist site somewhere once that tried to answer this. I don’t remember where it was or know if it even still exists.
Remember, this isn’t me, this is a Christian that came up with all this.
Adam & Eve had daughters and that’s who Cain & Abel chose as wives and people just happily married their other family members for several ages.
God made humans perfect, so they could get away with that. But because of Eve’s sin, our DNA started to develop flaws. Over many, many generations, the flaws built up to the point that God had to put a stop to incest, so he made it taboo.
The same site had all sorts of crazy answers to these questions that are difficult to answer. I wish I could find it again.
Top tip: Don’t ask a Catholic Priest any questions to do with reproduction.
Kevin Horrigan of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has an amusing op-ed piece in today’s paper, “Fox and Friends is comedy gold.”
I’m sure that many of us remember the opening theme song for “Mystery Science Theater”:
This attitude probably applies to the Bible as well.
The Bible not a movie — but it does appear to be a collection of “fan fiction” written, collected, and edited over many hundreds of years where familiar characters like “God,” “Adam,” “Eve,” etc are used by the story creators to comment on life.
I don’t know how “literal” the original story creators were with the Bible, but the move towards Biblical literalism appears to a relatively recent development in Christianity.
A recent Newsweek article discusses the connection between Biblical literalism and slavery in the US:
***
Source:
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2008/10/unbuckling_the_bible_belt_from.html
I don’t hold with the views I describe.
For special creation of the souls even in an evolutionary setting, see
http://www.catholic.com/library/Adam_Eve_and_Evolution.asp
The Catholic position does not allow the story to be seen as pure metaphor
Liberal Anglican theology can go a bit further.
Didn’t he watch the final episode of BSG? They mated with Cylons.
What I find so bizarre is that the Fox News hosts kept laughing at him for not answering, or that they even let the question through in the first place. Don’t they read their memos?
Actually, at least some scientistdid write about humans getting souls at some point in our evolutionay history, Carl Sagan in The Dragons of Eden. Of course, Sagan was being metaphorical, he did not believe that we at some point acquired magic soul-stuff. The main theme of Dragons is that moral and existential problems addressed in The Bible are better understood through biology and evolutionary history. It’s a good read, though a little dated.
As for the fundies, they usually say incest was not wrong until God said it was wrong in the Law. Nor was there much reason for incest to be wrong as the perfect genes of Adam, Eve, and the first few generations of humans made there be no risk of birth defects. Only later generations faced this risk. Of course this does not explain why Leviticus forbids step-incest with such vigor, though it does make sense that in a polygynous society stepsibling and stepmother/stepson (no squicks,they could be the same age) could really mess with the power dynamics.
It’s a logistical question that I’m sure has been asked many times before, just not on Fox News. he he
Seriously, Morris appears to know the answer from a “connect the dots” point, but refuses to answer because he’s not interested in equating religious belief with anything incestuous.
Unless of course his “we don’t know exactly how everything is” can include the possibility that Adam and Eve conceived girls.
The bigger question is: who was there to document Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel’s life back then? Was it the talking snake that was the narrator?
Being a priest does not ensure that you are well-read in all theological/scientific issues. The question is addressed quite well here: http://biologos.org/questions/evolution-and-the-fall/
Father Morris is not up on his Genesis, since it is clearly stated that Adam and Eve had other sons and daughters. I would give the chapter and verse, but I don’t own a bible.
According to the genealogy in The Forgotten Bible by J. R. Porter on page 20, Cain mated with “his wife,” while Seth apparently has a son (and a string of descendants including Noah) without the credited involvement of a female.
We are left with two possibilities: There was, out of necessity, incest, or we can’t take the Bible seriously on at least this issue.
My mother has told me before that incest was not considered wrong until after Noah’s time. The gist is that until we started living sinful lives, we all lived to be hundreds of years old, and could marry our siblings because there was no disease. This also somehow relates to the Bible recommending a low-fat diet. What? I have no idea.
So… Lot and his daughters isn’t weird, for some reason.
OK, so this is completely inappropriate and off the point, but does anyone else think that the priest is cute?
Can the Catholic Church not just admit that the ‘Adam and Eve’ story is just a sweet mythical story about the creation of life. Perhaps if it was accepted as a metaphor for humanity, people wouldn’t think of it as such a joke. And then there wouldn’t have to be answers to stupid questions such as “Did Adam have a bellybutton”.
Rocket Stegosaurus Says:
I was reading the blog of a liberal Protestant seminarian and she mentioned a passage from her Old Testament texbook — the textbook author said that the presence of a talking snake in the Genesis story should tell even the most casual observer that the story is allegorical in nature.
[...] opposed to the theory of evolution, but only 58% percent of American Catholics believe man evolved, a priest on Fox news seems to take Genesis’ creation stories literally, and anecdotally some of my Catholic family [...]
Surely this amiable looking young man in a dog collar represents a hugely credulous and semi-literate portion of the electorate. WTF does it matter if Cain and Able were dead/unable to have children, whatever? This is, IMHO the whole rotten thing about futile fundamentalist religion. A whole lot of sagas, just like the Nordic sagas, were written down by scribes for groups of wandering and illiterate shepherds. They enjoyed the stories of great and powerful leaders, adulterous women and a magic god with an implacable mien.
The great crime committed by the people who mindlessly follow these arcane beliefs is the fact that they want to impose a moral code onto the rest of humanity based on a book which is over THREE THOUSAND years old. And despite the amazing truths being revealed by scientists, biologists, zoologists, anthropologists and every other sphere of discovery these people are dismissed as being heretics. The thuggish behaviour of people such as the pope and all his princes and cardinals, never cease to demand their followers to believe in a world which is five thousand years old. So stupid are the people who follow this and every other religion which hangs onto the past-to delay the present- they are able to look at a TV program and see a creature which could be a link between primates with tails and human beings which existed forty-seven million years ago.
Which is the greater miracle? This creature or the clown who would deny its existence?
‘the textbook author said that the presence of a talking snake in the Genesis story should tell even the most casual observer that the story is allegorical in nature.’
so why does Luke’s Gospel have these as real ancestors of Jesus?
I guess people of 2000 years ago had no idea about theology.
Perhaps Father Jonathan simply doesn’t understand how anybody has kids? As a good Catholic priest, he must be a virgin, right?
The bible is wrong anyway because it offers TWO different stories on creation: 1 being ‘first day god created the heaven and the earth’ or whatever and ‘2nd day separated the water from land’ and ‘created the plantes,’ ‘animals,’ etc and on the 7th day he rested, THEN there’s the story about adam and eve. Right off the bast they offer two different accounts of creation; both of them can’t be right.
I’m not gonna get any further into it because the bible is full of contradictions. People have created entire websites outlining the contradictions in it.
And I apologize for my few typos but that’s what happens when the crummy editor can’t keep up with someone who can touch-type.
Does anyone know the truth about this question ?
Also, why is the question being asked from the standpoint of judging God, where the truth is exactly opposite : God is judging.
Why ?
How do I add the picture to my handle ?
Does Fox take these questions from members of the public? :evil grin: ’cause if they do then, you know, I can think of one or two questions that might make Father Morris look like an idiot…more of an idiot.
your question is how did adam and eve’s kids have kids / did you miss out on the birds and bees conversation / if you mean incest its not because that law from God did not come until many generations later in leviticus / if u mean birth defects because of the gene pool that would not have happened because adam n eve were made physicaly perfect there would not have been mutations that early on