Some Christians argue that God created matter with inherent natural properties that would change imperceptibly over time and thus “evolution” takes place as continual creation. George Sim Johnston promotes this view in his book Did Darwin Get It Right?. If this belief were true, there should be innumerable findings of intermediate stages in the fossil record (as Darwin hoped for, in vain) and we should by now have great trouble in identifying distinct species. Instead, no fossils of transitional forms have been found in the strata; they do not exist.
In view of horrendously complex conceptual problems involved in the idea of intermediate stages, shown by Michael Denton in Evolution: A Theory In Crisis, other theistic evolutionists are forced to resort to the possibility that God intervened many times over many years to tinker with life forms and thus implement evolution with a helping hand. But this belief contradicts the popular notion that evolution is a purely natural process. Since naturalistic evolution has to be abandoned, this concept would be better defined as Theistic Intervention rather than Theistic Evolution.
If one argues that Adam arrived as a baby boy after God tinkered with the genes of his animal parents so that they gave rise to a new kind, there would be no one to adequately nurture him to maturity. Hardly a convincing scenario. He must have been created as an adult, for the destiny of all mankind depended on his awesome choice of obedience.
If one argues that Adam and Eve were not real human beings-the first parents-but instead were many “first parents” then one encounters the problem of polygenism. This position is effectively impermissible for loyal Catholics to hold. Fr. J. Franklin Ewing SJ (Prof. of Anthropology and a theistic evolutionist) wrote in 1956 that he was personally convinced that Pope Pius XII, in the encyclical Humani Generis (1950), held polygenism to be irreconcilable with the doctrine of Original Sin.
The choice of obedience seems likely to have been given to one man only. On Adam’s shoulders rested the future destiny of mankind. If God gave the choice to a group of first parents, He would have to consider the possibility of disagreement and that the minority choice would miss out. That party could feel betrayed and charge that God had let them down because their choice was never going to count, even though they may have voted for obedience.