The first couple were expelled from the Garden where things were perfect and into … where? The Catechism tells us the Scripture uses “figurative language.” They were made in the image of God, not the image of animals. One way to interpret this is that Adam and Eve were beings of spirit and the “garden” a place of sanctuary for them in a spiritual state, but that they willfully challenged God somehow, and were sent to earth to live in human form.
When we read that “sin entered the world” through Adam, earthquakes aren’t sins. Animals killing one another aren’t sins. Only humans can sin by choosing that which is not God. God can have waited (no Time in Eternity) for a species to have such a complex nervous system that it could connect with the Divine thought (prayer and consolation) and placed Adam and Eve in the bodies of that species (H. sapiens). Note a passage in the story in Scripture where God “makes clothes” for them. Our loving Father would never abandon us.
Figurative language is the operative phrase. Evolution is no way diminishes Scripture or the Faith. God created everything and called it good. Including processes of change, so that creation could show by it’s very existence that yearning for God present in all that is not God. I’ve always thought Saint Francis understood this instinctively.
This idea that a complex nervous nervous system developed that “could connect with the Divine thought” has no scientific support.
“figurative language” is only part of the story.
From the Catholic Answers Library:
"Adam and Eve: Real People
"It is equally impermissible to dismiss the story of Adam and Eve and the fall (Gen. 2–3) as a fiction. A question often raised in this context is whether the human race descended from an original pair of two human beings (a teaching known as monogenism) or a pool of early human couples (a teaching known as polygenism).
"In this regard, Pope Pius XII stated: “When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains either that after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parents of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now, it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the teaching authority of the Church proposed with regard to original sin which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam in which through generation is passed onto all and is in everyone as his own” (Humani Generis 37).
“The story of the creation and fall of man is a true one, even if not written entirely according to modern literary techniques. The Catechism states, “The account of the fall in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man. Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents” (CCC 390).”
Peace,
Ed
