Above: Photograph of microbial mats covering red algae and coral at depth of 190m, taken by NOAA expedition.
STEPHEN M. BARR
President of the Society of Catholic Scientists and a retired professor of Theoretical Particle Physics.
Why Evolution is Not a Problem for the Catholic Church
Some Catholics are not sure what to think of biological evolution. They hear from their evangelical Protestant friends and neighbors that it is contrary to Christian belief, but they do not hear much on the subject one way or the other from authorities in the Catholic Church. For example, the topic is never explicitly mentioned in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. My purpose in this article is to sketch in broad outline what the Church’s position has been and to answer some common objections to evolution made by Christians who are skeptical of it.
When people speak about “evolution,” they can mean different things. So one must distinguish several layers to the theory of evolution.
First, there is the basic idea of evolution, which is that the present species of living things arose from earlier species by a gradual process of development, and that ultimately all of them came from a single original form of life. This is sometimes called “common descent” since it says that all known forms of life on earth descended from a common ancestor. Second, there is the evolution of mankind in particular, i.e. the idea that human beings evolved in the same way and are thus part of the same branching tree of life. However, here we must make a distinction: do we mean the evolution of only the human body or of both the body and the spiritual soul? As we shall see, that is an all-important question. And third, there is the mechanism of evolution, which according to Darwinian theory is primarily natural selection acting on random genetic mutations.
Public discussions of evolution and religion are often dominated by fundamentalist Christians on the one hand, who reject evolution on the basis of narrowly literalistic readings of the Bible, and militant atheists on the other hand, who draw sweeping conclusions of a philosophical character from evolutionary science. But what has the Catholic Church had to say on the subject?
As far as official teaching goes, i.e. pronouncements of the magisterium, the Church said virtually nothing for almost a hundred years after Darwin published his theory in 1859. However, some sense of the general attitude of Catholic scholars and theologians toward evolution in the early days of the theory can be gotten from looking at the old Catholic Encyclopedia, which was written in the first decade of the 20th century. Of course, this had no magisterial authority, but it was one of the outstanding products of Catholic scholarship at that time in the English-speaking world and carried an imprimatur certifying that it contained nothing contrary to Catholic doctrine.
The article in the encyclopedia entitled “Catholics and Evolution,” first summarized the theory of evolution as it stood at that time, and then said,
“This is the gist of the theory of evolution as a scientific hypothesis. It is in perfect agreement with the Christian conception of the universe.”
Click below to read the FULL Article
