"Is Evolution an Open Question for Catholics?"
Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation
Consider some things known about the trustworthy Creator. The Second Person of the Divine Trinity was not only present at Creation but actually carried out the work of Creation-“through whom all things were made.” He later took on human form and carried out the work of Redemption in perfect obedience to the Father. He must have been intimately involved in the truth revealed to Moses. God can neither deceive nor be deceived, so how can we ignore Christ’s various comments regarding the genuine historicity of Genesis, including the global Flood and the concrete reality of Adam and Eve.
Let us not forget that the Second Person did some extraordinary things by human standards, such as calmly walking across the rough sea to Peter and the other frightened disciples in the boat (Matt. 14:25). We know that he created space, time and matter rapidly at the beginning of Creation, changed water into wine rapidly, brought the dead Lazarus back to life rapidly, created a coin inside the mouth of a fish rapidly (Matt. 17:26) or at least directed Peter to a fish that had a coin in its mouth, multiplied five loaves and two fishes rapidly to feed 5,000 men plus women and children (Matt. 14:19), and he cured blindness and diseases rapidly, so why balk at the idea of his rapid creation of Adam and Eve in keeping with the Genesis text? Why not also believe that he rapidly “stretched out of the heavens” (i.e., the Universe), a term used various times in the Old Testament, during the Creation days? The implausibility of divine interventionist concepts comes into sharp focus when one considers that, in contrast to acceptance of the rapid adult creation of Adam, theistic evolutionists are driven to invoke innumerable rapid divine interventions over eons of years. So whom do we believe about the truth of Creation-the trustworthy divine Second Person who was present at Creation, or fallible modern human beings who were not there?
Papal Permission To Investigate Evolution
Many Catholics argue that Adam and Eve were not real, concrete, human beings and that the Genesis account is poetry and nothing more than early man’s attempt to comprehend the cosmos around him, but Pius XII taught quite the opposite. He declared in the 1950 encyclical Humani Generis that Genesis does contain real history, though not recorded in the way of modern historians, and that Adam and Eve were the first parents of all human beings and not symbolic representations of mankind. Their rational souls were divinely implanted in acts of Special Creation, and Catholics are bound to believe this. He reaffirmed that Original Sin is
“sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which through generation is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.”