Can Catholics Believe in Evolution?
This is a hot topic question. It needs to be discussed not only in R.C.I.A. and Catholic education, but also in secular academia, which seems to be ignoring any other position than strict atheistic evolution. As Catholics we may believe in evolution properly understood.
In evolution circles there’s three basic positions:
1) Atheistic evolution, that concludes that life is the result of just natural selection or some mutation or just some random forces alone, which modern secular academia teaches.
2) Special creation, or instantaneous evolution, which in reality is not truly evolution, because the proponents to this position hold that there’s no development of the world or life because all of life is a direct creation of God. This position is held by most Fundamentalist Protestants, and Catholics are free to believe it also.
3) And finally the position most Catholics hold is developmental creation or theistic evolution, which believes there is a development by design of a previous state or form, under God’s guidance. Pertaining to man’s origin, mitigated Evolutionism (theistic evolution) asserts that God may have permitted the development of the human body through evolution, but God infused the soul at a certain stage during the developmental process of the body.
For Catholics we are not bound to believe or reject evolution, but there are definitive parameters that are acceptable. For instance the Church has infallibly defined (in Vatican I) that God is the creator of all things–Canon 5: “one must confess that the world and all things which are contained in it, both spiritual and material, were produced, according to their whole substance, out of nothing by God.” Now, whether the stars or the planets then developed over time, like after the supposed “big bang,” the Church doesn’t have an official position. However, if they were developed over time, this was by God’s design. Sacred Scripture backs the Churches teaching also in Psalm 33:6–“By the word of the Lord, the heavens were made and all their host [Stars, Nebulae, Planets], by the breath of his mouth.”
It’s important to keep in mind that the Catholic Church has always taught what Pope Leo XII did in Providentissimus Deus #18. To paraphrase, he said that there can be no real disagreement between the theologian and the scientist provided each stays in his own field. If there seems to be disagreement, it has to be remembered that the sacred author or really the Holy Spirit, did not wish to teach men anything in contradiction to science. Why? Perhaps because the notion that the world was developed after a big bang does not, if it is true, jeopardize our salvation.
God bless,
Pat Bline