At the moment for example, even the Church dithers. On the one hand there will be a statement from the Vatican stating evolution is more than a theory, and then on the other the catechism will make reference to “original sin” and “Adam and Eve” as literal people.
In the meantime it makes no effort to define exactly where “sin” did come from if the evolutionary context is correct.
Many of Church Fathers held that the garden of Eden was in some celestial realm, utterly distinct from the world we now inhabit. After man sinned, God then created for man the bodies we now inhabit as He "made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins, and clothed them (Gen 3:21). These skins were our bodies, as Job says: “You clothed me with skin and flesh, and knit me together with bones and sinews” (Job 10:11). In other words, due to original sin in a celestial world, our rational souls were banished to bodies made through evolution in this corporeal world. Thus there is no contradiction between between evolution and original sin. And we are failing to make these teachings known to scientists.
Here’s how Augustine explained the fall of man:
“But [Adam and Eve] continued to remain in Paradise, even though now under the sentence of God’s condemnation, until it came to the
tunics of skin, that is, to the mortal condition of this life…And so when the man went against the commandment and sought to be God, not by lawful imitation but by unlawful pride, he wascast down into the mortal condition of monstrous beasts” (On Genesis: A Refutation of the Manichees, Section 2.32)
Furthermore, Saint Thomas Aquinas posited that God could bring forth one species from another if He so willed it. From the Summa Theologica:
“Some laid it down that God acts from natural necessity in such way that as from the action of nature nothing else can happen beyond what actually takes place–
as, for instance, from the seed of man, a man must come, and from that of an olive, an olive; so from the divine operation there could not result other things, nor another order of things, than that which now is. But we showed above (Question 19, Article 3) that God does not act from natural necessity, but that His will is the cause of all things; nor is that will naturally and from any necessity determined to those things. Whence
in no way at all is the present course of events produced by God from any necessity, so that other things could not happen, [and] the divine wisdom is not so restricted to any particular order that no other course of events could happen. Wherefore we must simply say that
God can do other things than those He has done.” (STh, I, q.25 a.5)
So if God chose to cast us down into the conditions of beasts by giving us bodies descended from them, this is entirely compatible with the tradition of the Church. Make sense?
-Ryan Vilbig
ryan.vilbig@gmail.com
