Modern science uncovers ever more evidence that evolution is behind the origin of man and every other biological species. For some, science thereby confirms that there is no need to postulate a divine creator. For others, we cannot accept evolution as it appears to be incompatible with the Bible's teaching on the creation of man. The Catholic Church, on the other hand, insists that Revelation and science do not contradict one another and that we should inquire more deeply into each. Even so, many struggle to square the theory of evolution with the Church's teaching that God creates each human person directly.

In this interview, Matthew Ramage discusses these problems and recommends some recent studies on the compatibility between evolution and the Christian faith.

Matthew Ramage is a professor of theology at Benedictine College and an adjunct professor of Sacred Scripture for the graduate programs at Holy Apostles College and Seminary and St. Bernard’s School of Theology and Ministry. His research and writing concentrates on the theology of Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI; wedding ancient and modern methods of biblical interpretation; the dialogue between faith and science; and the development of a robustly Catholic approach to care for creation. He is a science and nature enthusiast and a Scholar Associate of the Society of Catholic Scientists. He is the author of The Experiment of Faith: Pope Benedict XVI on Living the Theological Virtues in a Secular Age, Jesus, Interpreted: Benedict XVI, Bart Ehrman, and the Historical Truth of the Gospels, Dark Passages of the Bible: Engaging Scripture with Benedict XVI and St. Thomas Aquinas, and From the Dust of the Earth: Benedict XVI, the Bible, and the Theory of Evolution.

1. Faith, Science, and Reason: Theology on the Cutting Edge
   by Christopher T. Baglow
2. Thomistic Evolution: A Catholic Approach to Understanding Evolution in the Light of Faith
   by Nicanor Pier Giorgio OP et al.
3. Creation through Evolution: New Perspectives from Thomistic Philosophy and Theology
   edited by Nicanor Pier Giorgio OP
4. Theistic Evolution: A Contemporary Aristotelian-Thomistic Perspective
   by Mariusz Tabaczek OP
5. From the Dust of the Earth: Benedict XVI, the Bible, and the Theory of Evolution
   by Matthew Ramage

Is evolution a scientific hypothesis, a fact, or a theory?
A theory. I subscribe to the view that science needs to be inherently falsifiable, otherwise it is not science. Hence, theory is the better word.

As John Paul II famously said, evolution is definitely more than a hypothesis. A hypothesis is put out as a possibility for which there is not yet proof. It is reasonable to pose a hypothesis. However, a theory arises whenever a hypothesis has been tested and proven to not be falsified. It must be open to at least some revision, and yet it offers a very strong explanatory framework.

Like many words, such as ‘myth’, ‘theory’ has gone through a devalued process. Nowadays people say things such as, “That is just your theory.” Here, ‘theory’ is a synonym for ‘that is just your conjecture or opinion.’ However, in science, a theory is a well-established framework for understanding something.

What is the current consensus within the scientific community over the mechanism of evolution?
The consensus is constantly developing. It is neat to be a theologian who is interested in science rather than a PhD in science. Of course, your question is best answered by a professional biologist. However, natural selection and the recombination of DNA remain part of the consensus about the mechanism.

As a Thomist, I would say that there is also some element of contingency or chance in the process of speciation and genetic change, just as there may be some chance to how the rain falls or to how a river arises. However, this process is governed by a teleology. In the scientific literature, there is some recognition of an underlying teleology.

Once you have that current cut, there are only so many pathways it can take. The classically trained Catholic philosopher or theologian understands that some degree of chance is involved in the evolutionary process. Chance is part of God's providence. It serves a greater goal, just like human freedom.

Natural selection, within an underlying teleology, is certainly part of evolution. So is survival of the fittest. The birds were the only dinosaurs that were fit to survive after the great events that occurred 66 million years ago. They were the fittest to survive in the new climate because they could fly.

I am an example of a human who would have been selected against if not for man's unique rationality. I have lupus. I have had kidney failure and heart issues that would have killed me already. Man is part of this evolutionary process but is more than it. He is a rational animal, as Aristotle says. He can transcend the evolutionary process.

The modern popes are not only comfortable with the scientific theory of evolution but have even put it forward in a way.

"We need to educate people about evolution because there is no reasonable alternative scientific proposal."

You are a theologian. What prompted your interest and research on theistic evolution?
During my undergraduate years at the University of Illinois, I was trying to defend the Catholic faith at a secular university. One of the things that kept coming up was that science disproves God. John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio was relatively new. In it, he decried scientism: the reduction of all knowledge to the empirical sciences.

Ironically, back in high-school, I had a wonderful zoology teacher. He was a six-day-creationist who thought the world was 6000 years old. I was just an average Catholic, and not a very staunch one. However, I was struck by his views and became interested in defending both my faith and science.

My love for the natural world and creation also underlies my interest in this issue.

When I started at Benedictine College, I noticed that students were increasingly distraught by the seeming incompatibility between creation and evolution. Even today, people who do not even take my classes come and ask me about this problem. They have heard the two are incompatible from an atheist podcaster. More often than not, Catholic personalities have told them than they cannot believe in evolution.

Hence, I have become increasingly interested in defending the classical teaching of the Church on the unity of faith and reason, particularly as regards evolution.

As you mentioned, many find it difficult to reconcile Christian belief with evolution. Many even conclude that science thereby disproves the doctrine of creation. To what extent are such difficulties and conclusions based on a deficient understanding of science and, perhaps even more fundamentally, philosophy?
It is certainly based on a deficient understanding of science.

Honour students can invent a class and have asked me a couple of times to teach one on faith and evolution. Some had followed a Protestant homeschool curriculum that presented the two as incompatible. So, there is a problem of scientific illiteracy.

We need to educate people about evolution because there is no reasonable alternative scientific proposal.

My homeschooled children are taking high-school biology classes from one of my own colleagues and are learning the basics of evolution. It is framed within the content of faith.

A group of Dominican friars and nuns have launched a Thomistic Evolution project. There are even writing materials for incorporating it into high-school instruction.

However, as you said, there is a deeper philosophical problem. Pope Benedict claimed that it stems from an understandable fear that once you open the door to modernity and give an inch, it will take a mile. The fear is that the faith will end up like a jellyfish, with nothing to hold onto. His response, like that of his friend Henri de Lubac, is that we must not fear that the faith is too weak to stand up to scrutiny. Such a fear often signals a loss of faith. That is my quasi-pastoral experience of evangelizing my students or people who send me emails. The faith is strong enough to stand up to these questions. Not only that, the faith needs to have a voice. We cannot cede this territory to secularists.

What are the main magisterial teachings on evolution? What does the Church teach about evolution?
We need to begin in 1950, with Pius XII's Humani generis. This is the only encyclical to address evolution. Remarkably, it came out when the evidence was much less strong than it is now. There are now multiple strands of science— from biogeography to genetics—that point in the same direction. The homologous structures, different species, and the fossil record all point in the same direction.

However, Pius XII was the first pope to officially address evolution in a systematic manner. He taught that Catholics can accept evolution of the body, but must hold that the soul is created directly by God. That remains the teaching of his successors. Neither Paul VI nor John XXIII said much about the matter. John Paul II and Benedict XVI have said the most. Francis has only touched upon it tangentially.

Pius XII then stated that it is in no way apparent how you square polygenism with original sin.

Kenneth Kemp has pointed out that, back in the 1940s and 50s, polygenism was the belief that humans arose on multiple continents. That ‘theory’ really is a hypothesis. Some even held that the white race is better because it arose in Europe or that blacks were inferior because they evolved separately. Pius was right to decry that thesis theologically. Moreover, that hypothesis is scientifically false. The human race is one.

In his letter to the head of the Vatican Observatory, John Paul II stated that evolution is more than a hypothesis and that we need to investigate whether an evolutionary perspective might shed more light on anthropology: on man created in view of Christ.

Benedict XVI states that there are so many proofs in favour of evolution and that we see it right before our eyes. The theories regard the mechanism, but it is a fact that life evolved gradually.

He spent decades probing this problem and wrote about it off and on.

The other day, some students came to my office to ask me a few questions. They had heard from a biologist that, given evolution, humans are not unique. They wondered why the Church does not come out and just declare evolution true. My first inclination was to wish that it did. However, the Church should not do so. Science does not belong to the realm of faith and morals. There should be no magisterial declaration about the science because we will come to an ever deeper understanding of the mechanisms of evolution.

The International Theological Commission’s document Communion and Stewardship was the last time the Church wrote something fairly authoritative on evolution. It is worth checking out. However, it is not magisterial per se. It is the document of a Vatican curial body that the magisterium stamps as orthodox.

That document describes how mankind arose, either as an individual or in populations, around a couple hundred thousand years ago in Africa. That is still largely accurate. However, it would be best not put such claims into a magisterial declaration.

Staying on Humani generis, does Pius XII really teach that evolution entails that God does not create the body directly?
If I understood him correctly, he says that the body can evolve.

Does he actually opt for one hypothesis or the other?
He leaves it open. In my opinion, he seems to root against evolution even though he is open to it.

Pius XII is a very interesting pope. He declared the Assumption of Mary, but was also very nuanced on biblical scholarship. His encyclical on interpreting Scripture, Divino afflante Spiritu, is quite advanced. He was the first pope to open the door to the now well-established findings of modern biblical scholarship.

Humani generis teaches that there is an apparent incompatibility between polygenism, the descent of humans from more than one pair of parents, and the universality of original sin. Original sin is transmitted through natural generation from Adam to all humanity. Has this teaching been revised by a magisterial teaching of equal or greater authority?
No, it has not.

Professor Ratzinger inquired into this. With a priest, who is a friend of mine, I am working on an article on Ratzinger's lecture notes on creation. Importantly, he distinguishes polygenism from polyphyly, the view that there are multiple lineages. He accepts polygenism, though in a sense different from Pius. So do an increasing number of orthodox Catholics.

Last summer I was on a panel on this subject with Kenneth Kemp and Fr Mariusz Tabaczek OP. As Thomists, we agreed that the first humans, Adam and Eve, had genetics from a very large population of prior breeding hominins. Science has established that the breeding population was at least several thousand hominins that were biologically almost identical to us. We can call this polygenism. However, polygenism is this sense is different from that of which Pius XII spoke. In modern terminology, it is polyphyly that is difficult to accept theologically: that humans arose once, say, in sub-Saharan Africa and sometime else in super-Saharan Africa. Scientifically, this does not seem to have been the case. Even so, it would be difficult though maybe not impossible to square such a situation with the dogmas of the faith.

Were the first parents created at one single moment? The magisterium leans in that direction. However, it is not 100% clear. This is a topic Fr. Tabaczek and I are currently probing.

Scripture teaches that man is made in the image and likeness of God but palaeontology has identified various species within the genus homo. Is homo sapiens the species of homo that is created in the image and likeness of God, or does the current state of palaeontology suggest otherwise?
As Ratzinger says, we will never be able to excavate the first human with a shovel. His preferred way of speaking about what makes us uniquely human is to say that we are the only species capable of a relationship with God. Thomists would say that only humans have an intellect capable of concepts and free will. Science does not disprove any of that.

The science becomes interesting when it can start to delineate the latest or the earliest that humans originated.

Neanderthals were making jewellery 200,000 years ago. They were our cousins and share a common ancestor that was already rational.

Some argue that homo erectus, from 2,000,000 years ago, was already rational because he stood upright and walked like us. This is a hypothesis rather than a theory. However, some argue that homo erectus lit fires and brought them deep into caves, thereby demonstrating a level of forethought that far outstrips anything else that had ever existed on the planet.

Kenneth Kemp and William Lane Craig have written very interesting studies on this. They posit that, given the current evidence, homo heidelbergensis from 750,000 years ago was already rational. Though I have a hypothesis on out of my own, I do not have any horse in the race. The point is that science can help us figure out when we humans must have first existed. As Aquinas says, we know the soul by its actions. A mere chimp or non-rational animal cannot have produced sophisticated eagle-talon jewellery.

You noted that Kenneth Kemp has written a history of the debate between Christian theology and the theory of evolution. He sums up the thesis in the title of his book: The War That Never Was. Is that an accurate description or an oversimplification of the debate?
I love Kemp's book and he is writing another, which will be the definitive history of Catholicism's engagement with the theory of evolution. Maybe there was a war over evolution but it did not have to be that way.

Ratzinger admitted that the Church engaged in some warfare with Galileo and did not need to have been so severe with him. Not that Galileo was treated poorly. My astrophysicist friends who specialize in the Galileo case tell me that he was treated quite well in his house arrest. And no, he had not proven everything that he claimed to have proved.

Still, Galileo and Copernicus were right: heliocentrism is correct and geocentrism is wrong. Incidentally, heliocentrism is a theory. You could call it a fact, but it is still an explanatory framework. The Church and everybody in Western civilization had held that incorrect scientific worldview for millennia.

Nevertheless, while there have been moments of battle, if not warfare, the Church has always been pro-science, just as she his pro-man even though her record on slavery, the treatment of Jews, or any number of issues, is not perfect.

Some might argue that there are theological and metaphysical reasons for maintaining that God creates both the body and soul of a first parent directly, rather than by transforming some member of a pre-existing species of hominin into a new kind of creature. What are the main philosophical and theological arguments against special transformationism?
A literal reading of Scripture supports the view that God created both our first parents’s body and soul directly. However, along with Ratzinger and John Paul II, I would say that this is a somewhat illiterate reading. Vatican II calls us to read Genesis in light of its literary genres. As the Catechism teaches (n. 390), the creation narrative of Genesis relates real events, but in figurative language.

In the first account of creation in Genesis 1, it looks as if God creates each species through a fiat. That would be a stronger argument against transformationism. Nor did the Church Fathers know about evolution. Naturally, they believed each species came about individually.

I was thinking more along the lines of the argument that relies on the Thomistic concept of soul as the form of the body, which is also dogmatized in the Council of Vienne. Infusing a new type of soul into a pre-existing body does not seem compatible with the soul's nature as the form of a body.
The Council of Vienna comes up in Kenneth Kemp and Mariusz Tabaczek. They are better than I am on this concept and have dug deeply into the wells of Thomism. However, I am of the same view as them.

According to hylomorphism, the soul and body have to conform: they have fit one another. Any living thing has a soul; only man has a spiritual soul.

Kemp takes up the discussion of the first human. It cannot be an all-or-nothing one-time affair. The fossil record that bespeaks the continuity between homo sapiens and earlier hominins. However, let us say that the creation of the first human was a unique event. The first human’s parents would be human biologically, but not spiritually or theologically. They would have had an animal sensitive soul, but not a rational one. Whatever biological changes need to take place, the spiritual changes went along with them, and vice versa.

Fr. Nicanor Austriaco of the Thomistic Evolution Project explains that some biological change needed to have occurred. There are certain genes associated with language. Some Catholic scientists are researching this. At the same, there is definitely a biological continuity between us and earlier species of homo. Hence, their soul, though not a spiritual soul, would have to fit with a body that had a share in rationality. St. Thomas allows for even ordinary mammals to have a share in rationality. That helps a lot because the proto-humans would have had many traits that were already more advanced than those of chimps, a species from which we split around six million years earlier.

“Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.”
John Paul II

Each of the books you have recommended argues that evolution is compatible with what God has revealed about the creation and fall of our first parents. Who makes the strongest case for the opposing position? 
I have read many of them and I believe that they are all weak. Most are fundamentalist and accept six-day creationism, but the one I would recommend is Thomistic: Fr. Michael Chaberek’s Aquinas and Evolution. Those interested should read it in concert Fr. Mariusz Tabaczek’s book. Fr. Chaberek is not a fan of evolution on the principle that more cannot come from less.

To my mind, Fr. Tabaczek’s more recent tome, Theistic Evolution, definitively answers all of Fr. Czabarek's qualms. 

1.

Why is your first recommended book one that is written for school and college students: Christopher T. Baglow’s Faith, Science, and Reason: Theology on the Cutting Edge?