Darwin And Evolution

[MC Just]

What's the deal with this, lat time I looked darwin believed man came from apes. I also remember, the church somewhat believes his teachings..

[point5]

last I checked the church never took a formal side...they allow either belief to be accepted as long as it complies with being created from God. For the longest time I have been against evolution, but I am finding some christian sites that promote it through science...I really don't know what to believe anymore, I just kinow that the end result is not gonna contradict my faiths foundational principals.

-Kiel

[dUSt]

Read this:

[url="http://www.catholic.com/library/Adam_Eve_and_Evolution.asp"]http://www.catholic.com/library/Adam_Eve_and_Evolution.asp[/url]

Also:

The Church and Evolution
The Catholic Church has never had a problem with "evolution" (as opposed to philosophical Darwinism, which sees man solely as the product of materialist forces). Unlike Luther and Calvin and modem fundamentalists, the Church has never taught that the first chapter of Genesis is meant to teach science. F.J. Sheed writes in his classic Theology and Sanity that the creation account in Genesis,

[i]... tells us of the fact but not of the process: there was an assembling of elements of the material universe, but was it instantaneous, or spread over a considerable space of time? Was it complete in one act, or by stages? Were those elements, for instance, formed into an animal body which as one generation followed another gradually evolved-not, of course, by the ordinary laws of matter but under the special guidance of God-to a point where it was capable of union with a spiritual soul, which God then created and infused into it? The statement in Genesis does not seem actually to exclude this, but it certainly does not say it. Nor has the Church formally said that it is not so.... [/i]

Pius XII correctly pointed out in the encyclical Humani Generis (1950) that the theory of evolution had not been completely proved, but he did not forbid that the theory of evolution concerning the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter-for Catholic faith obliges us to hold that human souls are immediately created by God-be investigated and discussed by experts as far as the present state of human science and sacred theology allows (no. 36).
In his catechesis on creation given during a series of general audiences in 1986, John Paul 11 provided the following discussion on the first chapter of Genesis:

[i]This text has above all a religious and theological importance. There are not to be sought in it significant elements from the point of view of the natural sciences. Research on the origin and development of individual species in nature does not find in this description any definitive norm.... Indeed, the theory of natural evolution, understood in a sense that does not exclude divine causality, is not in principle opposed to the truth about the creation of the visible world as presented in the Book of Genesis.... It must, however, be added that this hypothesis proposes only a probability, not a scientific certainty. The doctrine of faith, however, invariably affirms that man's spiritual soul is created directly by God. According to the hypothesis mentioned, it is possible that the human body, following the order impressed by the Creator on the energies of life, could have been gradually prepared in the forms of antecedent living beings (General Audiences, January 24 and April 16, 1986). [/i]

The Church's quarrel with many scientists who call themselves evolutionists is not about evolution itself, which may (or may not) have occurred in a non-Darwinian, teleological manner, but rather about the philosophical materialism that is at the root of so much evolutionary thinking. John Paul 11 puts the matter succinctly:

[i]The Church is not afraid of scientific criticism. She distrusts only preconceived opinions that claim to be based on science, but which in reality surreptitiously cause science to depart from its domain. [/i]

This remark was aimed at biblical exegetes, but it certainly applies to Darwinian science, which contains hidden philosophical additives.

In the area of theology, the Magisterium has warned against the teachings of the French paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who concocted from evolutionary theory a kind of process theology that, among other things, implicitly denies original sin and the existence of first parents of the human race who differed in kind from whatever may have preceded them. In Humani Generis, Pius XII also condemned polygenism, championed by Teilhard, Rahner and other theologians, which holds that we are descended from multiple ancestors rather than from one historical person named Adam (no. 37).

The Church insists that man is not an accident; that no matter how He went about creating Homo sapiens, God from all eternity intended that man and all creation exist in their present form. Catholics are not obliged to square scientific data with the early verses of Genesis, whose truths-and they are truths, not myths-are expressed in an archaic, pre-scientific Hebrew idiom; and they can look forward with enjoyment and confidence to modem scientific discoveries which, more often than not, raise fundamental questions which science itself cannot answer.

Taken from here:
[url="http://www.catholic.net/Catholic Church/Periodicals/Issues/Darwin.html"]http://www.catholic.net/Catholic Church/Periodicals/Issues/Darwin.html[/url]