The Church teaches that while evolution may not turn out to be the best scientific encapsulation of how God created humans, it would not be a violation of the the Church’s understanding of Scriptures if evolution turned out to be the method by which God chose to make humans.
Read Genesis. In Chapter 1, people are created, not man and then woman, but together, after the creation of the animals. In Chapter 2, man is made before the animals, which he names, and then the woman is made. It makes sense to conclude that these accounts may not be meant as a literal chronology of creation. It would be in keeping with the oral traditions from which these Holy Scriptures came if the accounts were poetic expressions of the truth that God is the ultimate creator of all, that all of creation is good, and that man is not simply one among the animals, but that humans, uniquely among all creatures, bear the likeness of God, and so on.
It is important that we realize our relationship to our Creator and the rest of his creatures and that we live that realization. Finding that God chose to effect our creation in one manner rather than another is relatively unimportant. It was fairly recently that anyone would think it was.
We must realize that the Scriptural accounts of our creation were written before the concept of sterile and strictly literal scientific descriptions artificially divorced from poetry and theology were ever thought of. We are so used to our literal rational way of looking at the world, we often forget how narrow and limited it is. It suits the enterprise of science to be so limited, but that is a poor mindset to have take over one’s whole worldview. It is not the job of Scripture to bend to suit our current way of understanding the truth. Instead, it is our job to bend our Western brains and our narrow modern idea of what a fact is to the Scriptural way of expressing truth.
If you ask why God wouldn’t give us a strictly literal description of creation, one that takes no poetic license with the “facts”, consider that most people didn’t talk or even think that way until relatively recently. We don’t even talk or think that way all of the time. It would be like asking why John referred to Jesus as the Lamb of God, when Jesus was not in fact a sheep and never was. Isn’t Scripture true, after all? It was because it would not dawn on anyone in earshot to dream that John meant that! I mean truly: do we ever use the Scriptural truth that God breathed life into man as evidence that God must literally have physical lungs? I would think not.
Contrast this with Jesus talking about Himself in the Eucharist in John 6. People got mad when they heard him talking that way. Former disciples quit following him. He obviously was being literal, he was being taken that way, and he did not correct his meaning when he found he was being taken that way. The hard meaning was the one he meant. If Jesus’ miracles, for example, all had a natural explanation, had you but been there, then why would Herod have hoped to see Jesus work some miracle? He wouldn’t. Likewise, the story of “doubting Thomas.” When Scripture is saying something that could literally strain credulity, Scripture says so, and reiterates that the difficult meaning is indeed the one that is meant.
It is not a good idea to try to teach the Church how to interpret Holy Scriptures. The Scriptures are from the Church, and God elected to use the Magesterium to guide us through the Scriptures and their meaning. It is the office of the Magesterium to teach us what the Scriptures say, not our job to teach the Magesterium what they say. Using Scriptures to teach our teachers is the road that lead to the thousands of Protestant sects in this country alone. We ought not go there.
