The Catholic Church does not hold as an infallible truth the theory of evolution nor, I believe, is it possible. Evolution is not mentioned at all in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. In spite of, what I believe is Pope John Paul II’s personal opinion, can you provide an official document of the Church which tells me or any catholic that we must hold that the origins of humankind are explained by evolution? We already know that the human soul is immediately created by God and evolution has no part in it. And since a human being is called a human being because of the union of his/her soul with his/her body; the consequence is that God immediately created the first human being. Adam, as Genesis states.
Well, Genesis begins with “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth.” The Church understands this literally, i.e., that God created the entire universe and everything in it and that this universe has a beginning, it is not eternal.
The Church recognizes that the inspired writer of Genesis in some sense uses symbolic language to impart religious truths to a people of the time who could understand it. But the Church falls short of saying in most cases that the literal meaning of the words does not have any truth to it or may not have any truth to it. The Church is mainly concerned with the truths the inspired writer is conveying. We should keep in mind that Holy Scripture is the word of God and not some Harry Potter or Nancy Drew fictitious novel.
If you read the CCC and official documents of the Church throughout its entire history, you will find many references to the Old Testament. One and the same God is the principle author of both the Old and New Testaments. The science of sacred theology is based on divine revelation which is contained in Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition. Try reading some of the works of St Thomas Aquinas and you will find many references from both the Old and New Testaments.
Good Evening Richca: The Church does not make a formal statement on evolution being an infallible truth, but it wisely stays away from the subject. The worlds of John Paul II simply reflect the thinking of many in the Church on evolution. People such as myself agree with this, and we are a faction that takes modern science and the observable world into account. I firmly believe that humans are primates that developed from a line of hominid permutations. I do not believe that there is a man in the sky who created the cosmos in 7 earth days, as earth days are largely irrelevant to a being that supposedly is creating something infinitely larger than the solar system in which the earth resides, and came about billions of years before the earth. Our sun came about much later than the universe did, long after the Big Bang, which was in fact first posited by a Catholic priest. Our sun was not around, the earth was not around, and therefore, nothing was created in 7earth days, except maybe the Jewish tale about how it was created. At the time the universe came into being, there was only simple matter such as hydrogen and then other simple elements like helium. It took vast spans of time for them to form stars, and the matter from which we are made comes exclusively from dead stars, where elements such as carbon is formed. And this is how planets were then formed, on which beings like ourselves came to be, who in turn looked back at stars and wondered. We seem to be the manner in which the universe comes to know itself, or at least one of the ways in which it does so.
And the issue of things like creation and evil are simply problems caused by linguistics and the frameworks that attend them. Our structure of nouns, verbs and predicates makes us think in terms of nouns causing things, rather than what we take as being “things” as being what they really are, which are simply events. There are no fixed things in the universe. only a series of ever changing permutations of energy, and these things are events, not things. And as for God’s separation from the temporal world, this is simply an idea. In truth, I would offer that we are to God what a branch is to a vine. This is how Jesus put it. “I am the vine and you are the branches.” And a vine is not something different than its branches. Like a wave is not something different than the ocean. A wave is simply what the ocean is doing at the nexus of space and time where the wave is. You in turn are simply what the universe (or God) is doing at the nexus of space and time where you are sitting. It is all one thing expressed as endless things. World without end, amen.
And before you tell me how some the primitive men who wrote the books of the Torah disagree with me, tell me in your own words how what I am telling you is not so. Because I think you can think for yourself. And once you are able to do that, you can start being free from these ideas about who or what created evil. Because the subject is so very small in relation to what we are actually all about, and once you start thinking about it, you’ll know that you knew it all along. The way we came about is clearly defined by fractal geometry. We, and all things are fractal in nature. Our relationship to God and the world around us is seen most clearly in the Mandelbrot Set.It is all one thing expressed as many. The Alpha is observable in the Omega and the Omega is foretold by the Alpha, as are all points in between. Watch:
youtube.com/watch?v=0jGaio87u3A
Than you,
Gary
An anthropic view of the Creator is bound to be myopic!