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Catholic concern about evolution has always been very largely concerned with the implications of evolutionary theory for the origin of the human species; even by 1859, a literal reading of the Book of Genesis had long been undermined by developments in geology and other fields. [12]
The position of the Roman Catholic Church on the theory of evolution has changed over the last two centuries from a large period of no official mention, to a statement of neutrality in the early-1950s, to limited guarded acceptance in recent years, rejecting the materialistic and reductionist philosophies behind it, and insisting that the human ...
In October 1996, Pope John Paul II outlined the Catholic view of evolution to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, saying that the Church holds that evolution is "more than a hypothesis," it is a well-accepted theory of science and that the human body evolved according to natural processes, while the human soul is the creation of God. [127]
The level of support for evolution among scientists, the public, and other groups is a topic that frequently arises in the creation–evolution controversy, and touches on educational, religious, philosophical, scientific, and political issues.
Evolution is the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. [1] [2] It occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection and genetic drift act on genetic variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more or less common within a population over successive generations. [3]
The very idea of an ordering of organisms, even if supposedly fixed, laid the basis for the idea of transmutation of species, whether progressive goal-directed orthogenesis or Charles Darwin's undirected theory of evolution. [20] [21] The chain of being continued to be part of metaphysics in 19th-century education, and the concept was well known.
Rejection of evolution by religious groups, sometimes called creation–evolution controversy, has a long history. [1] In response to theories developed by scientists, some religious individuals and organizations question the legitimacy of scientific ideas that contradicted the young earth pseudoscientific interpretation of the creation account in Genesis.
This was the first official action of the Catholic Church against Mivart but it "had nothing to do either with evolution or science". [2] Later articles in January 1900 ("The Continuity of Catholicism" and "Scripture and Roman Catholicism" in The Nineteenth Century, and "Some Recent Catholic Apologists" in The Fortnightly Review ) led to his ...