Help with believing?

[shaky]

You may find this a helpful starting point. In the words of Pope Pius XII:

In other words, Catholicism allows that it’s possible that the human body came to be through evolutionary processes. Human souls are directly created by God.

I think this is not really so startling as it may appear to some people at first. Even if a religious person reads Genesis literalistically and does not believe in evolution, he would still believe that the human body was made of pre-existent matter and God directly created the soul. Meanwhile, even an atheist who believes in evolution believes that there was some point at which a human came into being where previously there were no humans. In other words, regardless how they believe it happened, everyone believes:

1. there was once a time when no humans existed, only non-human stuff
2. later, some of that non-human stuff became a component of human beings.

As far as the Church is concerned, you’re welcome to believe the “stuff” from which humans were composed was either dirt (as in a literalistic reading of Genesis) or some kind of apes (as in an evolutionary theory). The soul of the human, the primary component which distinguishes humans from other stuff, is directly created by God.

More details at the link above, though.

No one believes humans are descended from pigs or horses. In fact, no one believes humans are descended from any modern animals. Our non-human ancestors, if we had any, were some kind of hominids that are now all dead and gone.

The idea that humans are a kind of animal is not a new idea and long predates modern theories of common descent. The Christian belief that humans are capable of sin and other animals are not is based on our belief that we are a different kind of animal than others, we are animals capable of reason, persons.

The idea that other animals are mortal by nature is not a new one. St. Athanasius, for example, clearly believed that only humans were created immortal:

Cool! Mine is blue.

Will not Animals be Immortal and live fore-ever like us in the New earth and Heaven in the Kingdom of God ?

 

[aspirant]

The liberal Protestants had you guys beat by 70 years in allowing theistic evolution.

Or perhaps we had them “beat” by hundreds of years. After all, St. Augustine promoted a non-literalistic reading of Genesis in which all matter was created in an instant, simultaneously, and that further creation is ongoing even to this day. Or again, Charles De Koninck and Jacques Maritain, apparently working independently with the works of St. Thomas Aquinas, came to the conclusion that Thomas provides a philosophical basis for evolution in Summa Contra Gentiles vol. 3, and perhaps a better philosophical basis than anyone since. It’s true that neither Augustine nor Thomas was proposing evolution as we now understand it, lacking most of the data on which modern theories are based, but both of them nevertheless make space for it and even provide-- however unwittingly-- some support for evolution philosophically and theologically.

Will not Animals be Immortal and live fore-ever like us in the New earth and Heaven in the Kingdom of God ?

While I tend to believe there may be some reason to think there will be animals in the new heavens and earth, I do not think it necessarily follows that animals were originally intended to be immortal by nature.