Not Science

1.The Church has taught, since the time of Pius XII, in two encyclical letters that (1) the bible is not a scientific document, but rather, a theological one (Divino Afflante Spiritu – 1943) and

(2) that evolution is compatible with both the bible and Church teaching (Humani Generis -- 1950)

Let me briefly explain each of these. With respect to the first point, the Church has long recognized that divine inspiration is not divine dictation. When God inspires a biblical author, he does so through the biblical author’s human powers, capacities, and categories. This means that when God inspired the author of Genesis 1:1 ff, He would have used categories familiar to a person about 2,800 years ago. These categories were decidedly not scientific. Empirical, mathematical Science was initiated by around the late 16th century by Francis Bacon and others and has developed since that time. The formal mathematics that we use in contemporary physics (the calculus in particular) was developed by Newton and Leibnitz after that time. This means that God could not have meaningfully given a scientific account of the creation or the development of the natural world to the biblical author, and therefore, we cannot try to make the biblical account be scientific in the strict sense.

So what was the biblical author doing? He was doing theology. He is inspired to respond to the accounts of creation implicit in the myths of his day (e.g. the Gilgamesh epic). These creation accounts speak about many gods, and associates natural objects (such as the sun and the moon) with gods. They also imply that the gods are capricious and frequently unjust and that creation can be intrinsically evil. The biblical author is inspired to redress these theological problems by creating a story which has one God. This one God creates the sun, the moon, and the stars, and all other natural objects (hence, they are merely creations). Furthermore, God is just and good (not capricious) and creates things which are good.