Regarding this article, here: http://evangelist.org/main.asp?SectionID=4&SubSectionID=36&ArticleID=24669&TM=35557.04
This article is full of very dangerous errors.
The gravest is when Fr. David Mickiewicz says that we “take the Bible seriously, but not literally.” Of course we take the bible literally; we take it literally whenever it is speaking literally. For example, Our Lord literally tells us to eat His flesh and drink His blood, but He does not literally mean that he is a vine and we are branches. What a lie it is to even say you take something seriously if you are not willing to take it literally when it intends to be literal.
Inquisitiveness about creation has led us to astrophysics, string theory, microbiology, space and sea exploration, astronomy, genetics, cellular biology and physics. If God gave us the inquisitiveness which marks humans as different among all living creatures, isn’t that part of what it means to be created in the “image and likeness of God?”
Yes, Fr. Mickiewicz, God gave us inquisitiveness and curiosity. This can be used for good or for evil. Adam chose to use it for evil. We, too, choose to use it for evil whenever we accept an alleged claim of science that contradicts something contained in the Deposit of Faith (e.g. the fact that Adam and Eve were real people and the whole human race really descended from those two, the fact that Jesus really physically literally rose from the dead, the fact that he performed real miracles, the fact that he was conceived by the Holy Spirit, the fact of Mary’s perpetual virginity, and on and on.)
Is it appropriate to expect answers for these questions from science? Conversely, can religion be expected to answer why there’s a universe; how it came into being; and the questions posed by the natural world, matter, space and time, or energy and force?
Yes, religion can answer questions pertaining to the natural world. What nonsense to wager there are “two truths,” one scientific, and one religious. There is one and only one truth; and both faith and reason are means of attaining to it — but they can never contradict. If we ever think that reason (or its application in science) contradicts a claim of faith, we have simply reasoned incorrectly. Consider the Snopes trial that Fr. Mickiewicz here triumphantly cites; the 180 so called “vestigial” organs referenced in it — organs that were supposed to be useless and therefore prove that the human body was not designed by a supreme intelligence but rather just came to be by chance — have since all, *by science,* had their use discovered.
Furthermore, the way Fr. Mickiewicz quotes Pope Benedict is very misleading. Benedict did not call the debate on evolution an absurdity as Fr. claims he did (in an effort to argue that anyone who dares question evolution must also be absurd?) What Benedict called an absurdity was someone insisting that the two are inherently contradictory; in other words, one claiming that evolution disproves Faith. That is what he was calling an absurdity. It is incredibly deceptive to say, as Fr. David does in this article, “The Church supports the teaching of evolution as the best available account of how nature works.”
The Church permits Catholics to believe in evolution so long as they believe that God designed the human body, and that all humans descended from their first two parents; Adam and Eve, whose original sin caused the fall of the human race. The Church most definitely does not teach that evolution occurred.
Fr. David’s article is heavy on claiming to speak for the Church, but I see no Magisterium quoted. So permit me to close with a quote from the Magisterium, binding on all Catholics (from Humani Generis) “When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.“
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