"Is Evolution an Open Question for Catholics?"
Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation
The “one ancestor” mentioned in the CCC could only be the first male human being, namely Adam). Therefore, polygenism is not an open question for Catholics.
Leo XIII effectively pulled the rug out from under human evolution with his 1880 teaching on the special creation of Eve. With polygenism ruled out, the only possibility left is that of evolution-of-the-male-only (i.e., rapid special transformism within monogenism) but what evidence is there for such a concept? Yet another possibility - that God inserted a rational soul into an adult male member of a race of “almost human beings” - is much too convenient and devoid of supportive evidence. And the implausible idea that God intervened directly to change an apelike creature into that of a human being (i.e., Adam) makes no pretence at qualifying as “evolution” as most evolutionists understand the term.
The idea that Adam’s body arose by the intervention of God acting upon two apelike parents so that they gave rise to a new “kind” is untenable. Consider the result: A baby boy born of an animal who must fend for himself among animals until he reaches maturity maybe 25 years later when God would create Eve from a portion of his body! This contradicts the Genesis revelation that both Adam and Eve were created on the same day, not 25 years apart. Why even call this concept “evolution” when the natural process of evolution has had to be abandoned in favour of divine intervention. This scenario requires that Adam’s body and rational soul would also have been carried within the female animal for a period of months. Given their rejection of ancient evolutionary, anti-Creation concepts, it is hard to see how the Church Fathers would have accepted such a scenario.
Other interventionist speculation involves the possibility of “almost human beings” whom God acted upon when he brought Adam into being. If such creatures ever existed, where did they come from anyway-by natural evolution or by some form of interventionist creation, which only begs the question further? And what became of them all after Adam arrived? Are we to believe they all died out long before the global Flood could show evidence of their fossils and thus they left no trace that they ever existed? One can only wonder why God would not simply insert a rational soul into an adult female “almost human being” instead of ignoring these females and creating Eve’s body directly from matter taken from Adam. Multitudes of these “almost human beings” and other supposed ancestral creatures would have died in the slow journey leading up to the arrival of Adam, but Romans 5:12 declares that death only began to occur after Adam’s sin of disobedience. So when is a human being a human being? The 1994 Catechism declares that we are human beings precisely because we are animated by a spiritual soul! (364) The idea of “almost human beings” does not qualify as credible speculation. The first male human being, on whom the awesome choice of obedience would be placed on behalf of all future mankind, is much more likely to have been specially created as an adult human being. (If one holds that this reference to death applies only to human beings, then why do fossils of supposed apelike transitional forms show evidence of the disease of rickets? Are we to believe that Adam and Eve were created upon a vast museum of death and that it was not a good, tranquil Creation after all? The buried fossils in reality resulted from the global Flood of Noah, many years after Adam and Eve.)