Evolution

Evolution

(1) The bible is not a scientific document, but rather, a theological one. 

(2) Evolution is compatible with both the bible and Church teaching.

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 others 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.

The biblical author’s use of “seven days” is to be taken as a theological context for the story and not as an attempt by God to suggest scientific fact. The same holds true for the age of the universe  which physics has very well established to be at least 13.7 billion years old (since the big bang). One cannot assert as scientific fact that the universe is a little over 5,000 years old (by summing the generations in the bible as if the creation of human beings is coincident with the creation of the universe itself), because the creation of human beings on the seventh day is part of the theological context of the story. This was never meant to be a scientific fact, and it should not be treated as one. The human soul is not a product of mere material evolution. Certain features of the human body may have evolved from other less developed species, but the human soul is not matter, and it therefore could not have arisen from a merely material process.

Conclusion: Is the biblical account of creation diametrically opposed to the scientific account of creation? It is not. We would not want to force the biblical author (writing 2800 years ago) to be giving a scientific account.