Catholics and Evolution Theory: Scientific and Theological Considerations

By Thomas McFadden

Genesis attributes the origin of the heavens, earth and humans to God who willed them into mature existence and interacted with them. Genesis is the basis for the fundamental doctrines of Catholicism. The Church holds that the Bible was written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and is inerrant. Fathers, Doctors, Popes and Councils treated Genesis as historical fact. In the 18th and 19th centuries there developed materialistic explanations that attributed the origin and subsequent development of life to natural causes. By the end of the 19th century the scientific explanation embraced the development of all species, including humans, from a simple common organism over millions of years by a random chance process known as evolution (Darwinism). Without empirical evidence, by the end of the 19th century the naturalist explanation had gained sufficient influence in scientific and intellectual circles that it became the preferred explanation in most universities. In the 20th century the "big bang model" became the materialist explanation for the origin and development of the universe. As the secular education and culture continued to assert the truth of the scientific explanations, influential Catholic scholars, especially clergy, became caught up in the conviction that the scientific explanation of origins and development was more plausible and more likely to be true than the historical narrative of Genesis. Perhaps because of a wish to "save'' the credibility of the Church, there developed within Catholic scholarship a demand that the Church reconcile the claims of science with the Genesis account by interpreting Genesis to incorporate the claims of science. To maintain the integrity of Catholicism, many believed it was necessary to teach that Catholics are free to accept the scientific consensus of evolutionary origins provided that as it is understood that God was ultimately responsible for it, i.e., "God did it." That combination of naturalism and supernaturalism is known as Theistic Evolution (or Evolutionary Creationism) and became the mainstream teaching of Catholic educators. Missing from the teaching is anything definite about what exactly "God did" and when He "did it" because neither science nor the bible nor Catholic Tradition can be consulted for that information. The modern understanding of Genesis chapters 1-3 within mainstream Catholic apologetics was best described by Bishop Robert Barron, former Chairman of the Bishops'' Commission for Evangelization and Catechesis. He said that one has to understand the "genre" of Genesis. The genre, he said, is "theology, mysticism, spirituality; a theological reflection on the origin of all things." In other words, it is not the historical narrative the Magisterium said it was. Many people of faith assume they must adopt an evolutionary framework in reading Scripture because "science" says so. Many think they must adopt an evolutionary understanding of origins despite its cost to the coherence of core Christian doctrines. Does science dictate that we must reformulate basic biblical doctrines? Is evolutionary theory so well established that it makes it compulsory to read Scripture in an entirely different way? The weight of the evidence from across the natural sciences does not oblige it. On the contrary, from cosmology to biology, it is becoming increasingly clear that science''s failure to explain matters at the most fundamental level is due, at least in part, to an institutional commitment to "methodological naturalism." If one''s education has convinced him that it really doesn''t matter how and when we got here and believes that one is free to believe any version of origins if one also believes that "God did it," the truth may not matter. This book''s purpose is to explain scientific and theological factors that may persuade the reader that truth does matter and cause him to pursue it.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0DS6885MF
• ISBN13: 9798305672541
• Release Date: January 2025
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.93 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.6" x 6.0"