This thing has almost been in hibernation during this the winter of our discontent. It slowly wakes up now, as another winter approaches. I am just back from Rome where I got the inspiration to get going with this again, partly by hanging out with people who live on -and sometimes it seems, for- their blogs. At least one of them put me up on his, here though I am a bit blurry.. Another reason to get going again are the distraught people contacting me about all the goings on, especially within he Church, these days.
One of the lastest things on that front was the pope speaking about how Big bang, evolution, etc., really are something to get on board with. A talk which promptly inspired a protestant acquintance to write, asking; "if he[papa Francesco] really is the vicar of Christ, why does he not teach that which Christ thought?"
The big explosion is not really a problem, Pius XII used it to say that we now have proof of God creating the world. Monsignor Georges Lemaître, a belgian priest and astronomer, who presented the theory might not have been so eager to jump to conclusions but the theory shows that the universe has a beginning, unlike the theory proposed by some astronomers before then and by some militant atheists today.
Evolution, well... we can certainly speak of micro-evolution i.e., small scale changes. Those have been known for millenia. We use them to e.g., breed horses or cattle that have different characteristics. Work horses, horses for the race track, cows that produce more milk and so on.
Switching from species to species which macro or large scale evolution needs to create new species is a whole different ball game. Actually, it is like baseball suddenly turning into soccer, turning into golf. We just don't see this happening, despite the elaborate theories cooked up on different campuses.
While it is true as the pope says that ”Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation,
because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve” this is not really what the people sponsoring evolution as an explanation for the origin of species and life itself say. He said as well that “[God] created human beings and let them develop according to the internal
laws that he gave to each one so they would reach their fulfillment.” Which sounds uncomfortably Deist. as if God got things going and then whitdrew, work done. One more of his unprecise, sweeping statements...
Now, we can be open to different theories as long as we keep to some basic principles, of which at least:
-God created the world
-God created man
-There were really a first couple that fell into original sin and that are the origin of us all
But what this allows for is really micro-evolution, not the species hopping, wild everything-evolving- from-the-same-clump-of-cells-that-spontaneously-came-to-life-in-a-pond idea. If this micro-evolution is what the man means then, va bene, good, no problem. If not, then we have one more problem. In either case, being a bit more precise in what he says would be a good characteristic for the man to evolve.