So after reading this entire thread, which was a doozy, I have a few comments that no one probably cares about but here goes:
Evolutionary theory per se is not incompatible with the Genesis account. Many early Christian writers, such as St. Justin Martyr, believed that the days spoken of in the creation account were 1000 years, according to the Psalmist who wrote that a day for God was a thousand years. Therefore, Adam died at 930 which was before 1000 years had passed, fulfilling the word of God that he would die the day he ate of the Tree. There are good reasons why the apparent age as we observe it might be disparate from the age as God reckons time and which was revealed in Genesis, and these need not contradict each other in actual fact. If God said it took him six days and on the seventh day he rested according to his reckoning, and to us it looks like it took hundreds of thousands of years or even millions of years, then we only have to trust that God was not mistaken when He told us how long it took Him. Perhaps He will enlighten us in Heaven so we can understand how it can both be true that the Earth is so old and took the majority of its existence form into a habitable environment and yet to God it was only six days from the void.
Now people might respond with the classic, “it specifically says the sun went down and came up,” and while this is true, that kind of repetition is very common in semitic poetry and the literal sense of the text is only that the author was communicating a passage of time that he understood to be one day. It must also be understood that the author was prevented from error when he wrote down the account of creation. Therefore to understand them as literal 24-hour days must not be an error, at least not to God. But neither is it an error to understand them as longer periods of time, because the passage seems to employ literary devices.
However, if evolutionary theory begins to say that Man was accidentally created, or that other creatures like Man can exist in other places without the intervention of God, then that form of evolution cannot be accepted. In the Theology of the Body by Saint Pope JPII he talks about how being created in the image of God is a special gift that is given to humans and to no other creature, which is why Adam did not have a helper fit for him until the creation of woman, who coming from his side was also made in God’s image. The problem that many Christians find with evolution is that it seems to say that there is nothing exceptional about Man at all, but only that he is further along the evolutionary path than other creatures, and therefore Man can be treated just like another animal, or other animals elevated to be treated like Man. These things cannot be true and undermine the truth of Revelation, which emphatically states that Man was created by God in God’s own image.
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