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Page 10

Chapter 13; Part 1 Continued...

  • The Catholic bishops teaching the doctrine must be in communion among themselves and with Peter's successor.
  • The bishops must be teaching authentically in matters of faith and morals.
  • The teaching in question must be one that the popes and bishops agree upon. (General unity, not necessarily absolute unanimity.)
  • The teaching of the popes and bishops must be presented as one to be held definitively.


  • Nevertheless, many Catholics (both clergy and laity) still cling to evolutionary scenarios, hoping - against the voluminous evidence - that the mechanism of Evolution will emerge. But there is no justification in resorting to highly fanciful, implausible, theistic evolutionary explanations for the origin of Eve. The Genesis account is specific; she was directly created when God fashioned her body from a portion of Adam's body, and this fact was affirmed by the Ordinary Magisterium by Pope Leo XIII in 1880.

    Regarding the origin of Eve's body, the attempted synthesis of Evolution Theory with Catholic theology was bound to founder on Catholic Tradition. In fact, it was clearly doomed back in 1880 by Leo XIII, long before modern science could shed clear light on the behavior of DNA. Ironically, the "father" of the science of genetics - Fr. Gregor Mendel (d. 1884) - was still alive in 1880 and his published but unheralded scientific findings would not be rediscovered until the early 1900s.

    With respect to the possibility of "special transformism," as distinct from "natural transformism," can serious credence be given to divine intervention scenarios in any so-called "evolutionary" origin of Adam and Eve? Divine intervention scenarios for the "evolutionary" origin of Adam and Eve are really highly speculative and unwarranted and ought to be rejected. Such scenarios have an aspect in common with the highly fanciful notion of "punctuated equilibrium" - that of being open to the charge of trying to prove something by the complete absence of proof.

    Copyright © 1999 by Gerard J. Keane, Tan Books and Publishers

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