Evolution for Catholics

Pope John Paul II's Address on Evolution “Truth Cannot Contradict Truth” is the best summary of the question so far. I discuss some of these issues in my book Making Senses Out of Scripture as well, which you can find at Amazon.

The Church's position, in a nutshell, is that there is room in the Catholic worldview for some sort of biological evolution in the origin of life on earth. The Church has always taught that “grace perfects nature” and that God the First Cause uses “secondary causes” (i.e. creatures) in the accomplishment of his will.

With respect to human origins, the Church insists on a few things (sometimes very mysterious things I should add). John Paul insists that the soul is not a function of matter (i.e. we did not “evolve” souls by growing bigger brains) but that it is a direct creation of God. His concern is to avoid a purely naturalistic account of human origins which, in the final analysis, rejects our divine origin and the fact that we are made in the image of God and not merely unusually clever pieces of meat. In addition, Pope Pius XII, in his Address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (November 30, 1941), bound the faithful to only three “elements [that] must be retained as certainly attested by the sacred author [of Genesis], without any possibility of an allegorical interpretation.” These are:

1. The essential superiority of man in relation to other animals, by reason of his spiritual soul.

2. The derivation in some way of the first woman from the first man.

3. The impossibility that the immediate father or progenitor of man could have been other than a human being, that is, the impossibility that the first man could have been the son of an animal, generated by the latter in the proper sense of the term.

In context, the statement reads, “Only from a man can another man descend, whom he can call father and progenitor.

Finally, the Catechism tells us:

Bottom line: the Church avoids the error of the religious fundamentalist by remembering that Genesis is using figurative language, not newspaper language, to describe human origins and the fall. So Catholics are not committed to the idea that the universe was made in six 24 hour days. However, it also avoids the error of the naturalist fundamentalist by reminding us that the figurative language is describing a real “primeval event” that actually happened in time and on earth and not something in a cloud in cuckoo land. So Catholics cannot subscribe to the hardcore naturalist notion that there is no Creator and it's all just a big accident that somehow produced the mind-boggling fine tuning of the cell (and everything else) by the most astonishing and dumbest of dumb luck.

The fact is, we shall never really know just how God brought humans into existence. What Scripture is interested in is the far more important question of “Who and why?” not “How?” Science will never be able to disprove the answers which God has given to these questions in Genesis and elsewhere.

I hope that helps!