The pope did not say an infallible statment, this is just an opinion. And because it is an opinion it can be objected: Magisterial Teaching on Creation
Both the Council of Trent and Vatican Council I taught that no one is permitted to interpret Sacred Scripture “contrary to the unanimous agreement of the Fathers.” In the words of Fr. Victor Warkulwiz:
The Fathers and Doctors of the Church unanimously agreed that Genesis 1-11 is an inerrant literal historical account of the beginning of the world and the human species as related by the prophet Moses under divine inspiration. This does not mean that they agreed on every point in its interpretation, but their differences were accidental and not essential. Pope Leo XIII, following St. Augustine, affirmed the Catholic rule for interpreting Sacred Scripture, “not to depart from the literal and obvious sense, except only where reason makes it untenable or necessity requires.”
For the first five centuries of the Church, all of the Fathers believed and proclaimed:
that God created the different kinds of living things instantly and immediately
That Adam was created from the dust of the earth and Eve from his side
that God ceased to create new kinds of creatures after the creation of Adam
that the Original Sin of Adam shattered the perfect harmony of the first-created world and brought human death, deformity, and disease into the world.
This patristic teaching on creation was implicit in the words of the Nicene Creed, “I believe in God, the Father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.” Not until the Middle Ages when the Albigensian heresy denied the divine creation of the material universe did an Ecumenical Council elaborate on the first article of the creed in the following words:
God…creator of all visible and invisible things of the spiritual and of the corporal who by his own omnipotent power at once from the beginning of time created each creature from nothing, spiritual and corporal namely angelic and mundane and finally the human, constituted as it were, alike of the spirit and the body.
Advocates for theistic evolution will object that cosmological or biological evolution are hypotheses in natural science and cannot be excluded by the Church’s creation theology. And it is true that Pope John Paul II believed his scientific advisors when they asserted that everything in the universe (except for man’s soul) could have evolved through natural processes after the creation ex nihilo of some material elements and natural laws in the beginning. But the Pope never cited any evidence that their opinion was true beyond a reasonable doubt. Moreover, Pope John Paul II’s endorsement of the evolutionary hypothesis was always tentative and never obliged our assent. For example, in one Wednesday audience he stated:
It can therefore be said that, from the viewpoint of the doctrine of the faith, there are no difficulties in explaining the origin of man, in regard to the body, by means of the theory of evolution. It must, however, be added that this hypothesis proposes only a probability, not a scientific certainty.
Furthermore, in his famous speech to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1996, the Holy Father admitted:
A theory’s validity depends on whether or not it can be verified; it is constantly tested against the facts; wherever it can no longer explain the latter, it shows its limitations and unsuitability. It must then be rethought.
One of the main reasons why evolution still appears to many Catholics to be a credible hypothesis is that it has not been subjected to rigorous critical examination in the public forum. In his encyclical letter Humani generis in 1950, Pope Pius XII asked that Catholic scholars examine the evidence for and against the hypothesis of human evolution. However, in the last 62 years only a handful of Catholic universities and research centers have given any attention to the serious shortcomings of the evolutionary hypothesis. On the eve of his election to the papacy, then-Cardinal Ratzinger approved the publication, in English, of his work Truth and Tolerance in which he observed:
There is . . . no getting around the dispute about the extent of the claims of the doctrine of evolution as a fundamental philosophy . . . This dispute has therefore to be approached objectively and with a willingness to listen, by both sides-something that has hitherto been undertaken only to a limited extent (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), pp. 179-181).
This statement was all the more remarkable in light of the fact that the Pontifical Academy of Sciences has long refused to give any serious consideration to the scientific evidence against the evolutionary hypothesis, while defending a number of positions on other issues that are highly questionable from a Catholic point of view. (Questionable positions advocated by publications of the PAS include limiting family size to two children; using the so-called “brain death” criteria to determine human death; and using GMO food to combat world hunger.) During the Darwin year, the organizers of a PAS conference on evolution refused to allow any scientists to present compelling scientific evidence against the evolutionary hypothesis, even when Ph.D. level Catholic scientists offered to do so at their own expense (Cf.
www.sciencevsevolution.org ).
) of the absurdity of materialist evolution which brought me to a real belief in God and started me on my path to the Catholic Church in which I had been baptized.
Have you even read the bible?