Do you have to believe in Adam and Eve?
It is not often that I find myself in agreement with Professor Jerry Coyne, but this is one of those occasions. Over at his Website,
Why Evolution is True, Professor Coyne has written a lengthy post entitled,
Catholics proclaim complete harmony between science and their faith, trot out Aquinas again, in which he cites (without naming me) a post of mine from 2010 on
Why Aquinas’ views on Scripture would have prevented him from becoming a Darwinist.
I stand by the conclusions I reached in that post, regarding Aquinas’ views on God, creation and Scripture, and I share Coyne’s sense of indignation with the following
statement, made by a prominent Catholic theologian from the University of Oxford and a scientist from the American Museum of Natural History:
Evolutionary biology and faith in God are not incompatible, two professors asserted at the international Rimini Meeting, an event that brings hundreds of thousands of people to Italy.
“A proper understanding of creation, especially an understanding set forth by a thinker such as Thomas Aquinas, helps us to see that there is no conflict between evolutionary biology or any of the natural sciences and a fundamental understanding that all that ‘is’, is caused by God,” Professor William E. Carroll of Oxford University’s theology faculty told CNA Aug. 22…
Professor Carroll was a keynote speaker at the Rimini Meeting, an international gathering organized by the Catholic lay movement Communion and Liberation…
Sharing a platform with him was Professor Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Unlike Aquinas, I happen to be a Catholic who believes in common descent. However, I know enough about the history of the Church’s teachings on human origins over the last 2,000 years, to realize that some things are
not up for grabs for Catholics, as Professor Carroll seems to think they are. The contemporary scientific consensus on evolutionary biology clearly contradicts Catholic teaching on several points – notably, Adam and Eve. I thought I’d assemble the evidence here, and let readers judge for themselves.
As I’ll show below, the Catholic Church is still committed to the view that the human race is descended from a single original pair, Adam and Eve, and from nobody else. I’d also like to mention that Fr. Brian Harrison, a conservative Catholic priest who is Associate Professor of Theology, at the Pontifical Catholic University of Puerto Rico, has written a two part article entitled,
Did Woman Evolve From the Beasts? – A Defence of Traditional Catholic Doctrine – Part I and
Part II, has gone further, and argued that argued that Catholics are, to this day, bound to believe as infallible Catholic teaching the proposition that Eve was formed from Adam’s side, and that IF Adam was descended from the animals, the final step in his physical evolution must have been accomplished not naturally, but by
supernatural intervention: “Hence, … a last-minute supernatural intervention at the moment of Adam’s conception would have been necessary in order to give his embryonic body the genetic constitution and physical features of a true human being.” Fr. Harrison defends the same view in another article entitled,
Did the Human Body evolve naturally? A Forgotten Papal Declaration. As I am not a theologian, I will content myself with presenting the evidence, so that people can judge the matter for themselves. I will say, though, that Fr. Harrison makes a very good case for his view that while Adam may have evolved, Eve was created.
more…
