There is a tract about this subject on this site, here:
catholic.com/library/Adam_Eve_and_Evolution.asp
The tract basically positions what Catholics can and cannot believe with regard to Adam and Eeve in an authoritarian way. It meddles in natural science. And it’s wrong. It’s basically setting up the Catholic faith for another embarassing fall.
One would have thought the Church would have learned from history in announcing this or that teaching that bears on the natural world and is subsequently shown by scientists to be wrong. The tract is riddled with such language:
‘the Church has infallibly defined that the universe was specially created out of nothing’
‘The Church has infallibly determined that the universe is of finite age’
'It is equally impermissible to dismiss the story of Adam and Eve and the fall (Gen. 2-3) as a fiction. The human race really did descend from an original pair of two human beings (a teaching known as monogenism) rather than a pool of early human couples (a teaching known as polygenism).
It is this last absurd statement that I would like to focus on, because it is one where the Church (yet again) is setting itself up for a prat-fall. In fact all the molecular and fossil evidence indicates that the human species is
not descended from an original pair of of two human beings. The evidence overwhelmingly points to a pool of early humans. There is no evidence for a population bottleneck of a single couple within the time that humans can be called fully human. The tightest population bottlenecks occur between 75,000 and 60,000 years ago when the early human population might have been as small as a few thousand. It is also the case that Y-chromosome Adam (the Most Recent Common ancestor in the strictly male line of descent) dates to about 75,000 years ago. Mitochondrial Eve, the Most Recent Common Ancestor in the strictly female line dates to 175,000 years ago.
Alec
Hi hecd2,
If your premise is that the teaching of the Church contradicts the findings of science, and we know that truth cannot contradict truth, then it would not logically imply that the position of science is valid by using its findings to refute that of the Church, for both positions could indeed be logically flawed, and it would be of no service to science to rest its power on implicit truthfulness relative to religion.
For if we take it as granted that science is superior to religion in discovering and knowing truth, that discovery did not come from science itself but by the humans that used logic to understand the material evidence that was extracted by scientific thinking and then using logic to compare it to the dogmatic assumptions of the Church.
The following two paragraphs being my personal premise, I would countinue in asserting that if a scientist and a thelogigan both observed a red rose, it would take no credentials in either field for both to come to a common agreement that the observation is shared by both with differing perspectives on the same universal truth, becuase the tools we use we have in common, but our explanations may differ due more to our own pridefullness than the literal difference in our spacetime coordinates.
And so Evil works on both parties and attacks both the dishonest theolgian and dishonest scientist in the same manner, by using pride to thwart their intial love of Truth which inspired them to choose their rightful profession in the first place by perverting that love into more an emotinal need to be right, than actually knowing the truth.
Myself or anyone living in the walls of a Cathedral or Caltech is not immune from attacks of the evil one. It is only by our faith in the Truth are we resistant. That Truth being universal, only one Truth is possible.