Creation Rediscovered by Gerard J. Keane
To this consideration a second of the Fathers of the Church must be added. The miraculous formation of the body of the first Adam from the "virgin earth" is a type of the even more miraculous formation of the body of the second Adam, Christ, from the Virgin Mother, viz., through a virginal conception and virginal birth. In a word: type and anti-type, figure and reality, prophecy and fulfillment are of the same order - historical and miraculous.
Denial by many scholars of the historicity of Genesis has ushered in a widespread form of "closed" Origins mindset, which is now largely self-perpetuating among Christians: question the truth of the Genesis account as the accurate description of a miracle, and one will be disposed (despite himself) to question the historicity of the miracle of the Virgin-birth, and with that the truth of the Incarnation as an historical rather than merely symbolic statement. Similarly, deny the historicity of the Virgin-birth and one will be predisposed (despite himself) to relegate the narrative of Genesis to the status of "myth" about Origins in justification.
The tendency of all scientific formulations of evolutionary theory for human origins to affirm some form of polygenism for the sake of "scientific" plausibility confirms this. So, too, in regard to the end of human life, evolutionary theory tends to affirm the mere "naturalness" of human death, thus fudging and indeed erasing the essential, unbridgeable difference between vestige and image of God, between mere animal and human person, between a duration that is mere succession of moments and a duration entailing eternity, between nature and grace and between human nature before and after the Fall.
These confusions and errors, in particular the denial of the numerical individuality of Adam and Eve, entails the denial of the universal need of redemption by a single Redeemer in a single Church, the new Eve, taken from the side of the New Adam in the sleep of death on the Cross. According to Pope Paul VI, a theory of Evolution is only plausible for a believer to the degree it does not contradict what his faith tells him is simply true, without qualification. Since the uniqueness and individuality of the first Adam are among such truths, and since the inner logic of evolutionary theorizing tends to contradict these, it is difficult to see how such speculation can be reconciled with faith.
With this we see that the question of Evolution is not merely, or primarily, of apologetic interest to believers. Evolution, as it is ordinarily taken to indicate a certain kind of scientific hypothesizing about Origins, is a doctrinal error parading in scientific guise. That is why, as Mr. Keane so ably shows, genuine science either tends to falsify theories of macroevolution, or simply declare that such theorizing is not properly the object of science.
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