Creation Rediscovered by Gerard J. Keane
The same thing, however, can easily be done theologically, in a manner accessible to any well-instructed believer to whom it might seem the Creator could plausibly have formed Adam's body in any number of ways.
What should convince him that the narrative describing the actual formation of Adam's body should be taken "literally?" That not only were the souls of Adam and of Eve created, but that the body of Adam from the slime of the earth and the body of Eve from the side of Adam were formed miraculously by the Creator? That they were not the term of a natural, evolutionary process? Why is it that human nature is beyond the effective limits of merely material agents? It is this: The transcendent character of the human body in respect to any other living body, even the most sophisticated! That body, informed as no other by a soul capable of knowing and loving the Creator, is animated spiritually.
To be so animated requires a prior formation, something quite beyond the limits of any natural process - read Evolution - to produce. The transcendent character of the human body, the "image" of God as no other material being, is directly proportionate to its miraculous origin. It is not the term of a natural or evolutionary process, but of a miraculous action from on high, in which the Creator is the principal agent.
This is why God formed (not created out of nothing) the body of the first man from the virgin earth (as the Fathers unanimously understand "slime of the earth"), or inorganic matter, and why the Creator formed the body of the first woman miraculously from the body of the first man, so that there might be no misunderstanding of the different causalities entailed in forming a species, above all the human species, and its subsequent operation within its natural limits.
No human body can exist except by way of descent (generation, procreation) from the first man through the first woman. Man alone procreates; animals only breed. Human intercourse is not merely "biological." It is primarily a moral action. That is why fidelity is the essential component of the marriage bond, and why every aspect of marriage is affected by the presence or absence of this virtue.
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