2. That is certainly how Christians read it. However, scholars maintain that Genesis I and Genesis II are alternative accounts of the beginning of all things originally from different texts, and I think that, as compared with Genesis II, Genesis I strongly suggests the pre-existence of shapeless matter ("the waters"). I think this is a widespread scholarly theory.
4. I do not think there is any specific Catholic teaching on this matter. Many Fathers took the living and aggressive paganism of their day to be powered by demons; they were facing something present and powerful, and took reports of miracles at shrines and such very seriously, so they could not but suspect demonic activity behind it. ON the other hand, Eusebius argued that all previous religious ideas had at least important features that were Praeparatio Evangelica, and wrote a gigantic historical work on this theme. But it must not be forgotten that Eusebius, however zealous and hard-working, died in the Arian heresy, and that his views may have been affected by its over-intellectualizing. The way I see it is this: first, we do not know where religions begin, since the vast majority of the human past - over a hundred thousand years against less than seven thousand - is beyond the reach of history. But wherever man tried to figure out for himself, without the supernatural aid of God, what reality was, man was bound to get something wrong. However close to reality man might come, the elements of wrong which inevitably crept into his ideas meant that ultimately his religious traditions, unless helped by the direct intervention of God, would ultimately tend to move away from rather than in the direction of reality, because if you build on error - even a small error - you get more error. Try changing a single digit on a mathematical calculation, see what you get. What happened in Palestine in the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius was, among other things, that God Himself took in hand the religious ideas of those who met Him. I think we may all agree that, however God-haunted the Jews themselves may have been, they would never by purely human reason have achieved such ideas as the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Eucharist, or the Atonement. You cannot get there from here, which is why Christianity is not just another school of Hebraism. Something entirely new has entered and altered the equation.
5) Probably, agnosticism: that is, a refusal to hold enough store by any account of reality to exclude opposing possibilities. In another sense, imbecility - the inability to achieve a coherent view of reality. In reality, I do not think that anyone has at least a sketch of reality at the back of his or her mind.
no subject
4. I do not think there is any specific Catholic teaching on this matter. Many Fathers took the living and aggressive paganism of their day to be powered by demons; they were facing something present and powerful, and took reports of miracles at shrines and such very seriously, so they could not but suspect demonic activity behind it. ON the other hand, Eusebius argued that all previous religious ideas had at least important features that were Praeparatio Evangelica, and wrote a gigantic historical work on this theme. But it must not be forgotten that Eusebius, however zealous and hard-working, died in the Arian heresy, and that his views may have been affected by its over-intellectualizing. The way I see it is this: first, we do not know where religions begin, since the vast majority of the human past - over a hundred thousand years against less than seven thousand - is beyond the reach of history. But wherever man tried to figure out for himself, without the supernatural aid of God, what reality was, man was bound to get something wrong. However close to reality man might come, the elements of wrong which inevitably crept into his ideas meant that ultimately his religious traditions, unless helped by the direct intervention of God, would ultimately tend to move away from rather than in the direction of reality, because if you build on error - even a small error - you get more error. Try changing a single digit on a mathematical calculation, see what you get. What happened in Palestine in the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius was, among other things, that God Himself took in hand the religious ideas of those who met Him. I think we may all agree that, however God-haunted the Jews themselves may have been, they would never by purely human reason have achieved such ideas as the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Eucharist, or the Atonement. You cannot get there from here, which is why Christianity is not just another school of Hebraism. Something entirely new has entered and altered the equation.
5) Probably, agnosticism: that is, a refusal to hold enough store by any account of reality to exclude opposing possibilities. In another sense, imbecility - the inability to achieve a coherent view of reality. In reality, I do not think that anyone has at least a sketch of reality at the back of his or her mind.