EVOLUTION AND THE BIBLE 



which would adapt the living being for the reception of a 

 spiritual soul. The necessity of such intervention is maintained 

 either for philosophical reasons^ ^ or to preserve conformity 

 with a decree of the Biblical Commission of 1909, which 

 mentions the special creation of man, not only of his soul.^^ 

 Such a modification could have been effected at the very 

 instant the soul was infused into the body. Certainly the 

 spiritual soul would radically transform the pre-existing animal 

 organism it began to animate, for the operations of sense are 

 specifically different and nobler in man than in animals.20 

 Other Catholic authors make no reference to such an inter- 

 vention as distinct from the ordinary laws of divine providence, 

 or think that it was not needed, since the primitive organism 

 was endowed by God with a definite capacity and perfect- 

 ibility, and from the very beginning, through an evolutionary 

 process willed and supervised by God, tended in the direction 

 of the human body. 



Whatever may be the merits of the philosophical arguments 

 postulating such direct activity on God's part, Scripture and 

 theology seem to have no voice in the debate. Furthermore, 

 the Biblical Commission refers to man, not to man's body, 

 and states that the creation of man was special, not immediate. 

 An evolutionary explanation of human origins that preserves 

 awareness of the essential difference between the highest 

 animal and man, who possesses the intelligence that makes 

 him God's image, runs afoul of no Christian dogma, so long 

 as it recognizes the creation of man's spiritual soul by God. 



B. Continuity and Discontinuity 



At this point a discordant note faintly sounds to disturb the 

 harmony existing between the religious and scientific attitudes. 

 Science thinks of a continuity that took place, in insensible 

 gradations of transition, from a purely animal state to a human 

 state. Such biological continuity of man with the higher 



1® Cf. M. M. Labourdette, O.P., Le peche originel ef l&s origines de 

 I'homme (Paris, 1953) 126 f.; H. Lusseau, Precis d'histoire biblique 

 (Paris, 1949) 50. 55. 66. 



19 Cf. F. Ceuppens, O.P., Genese IMl (Bruges, n.d.) 121; J. de Aldama, 

 S.J., "El evolucionismo antropologico ante el magisterio de la Iglesia," 

 in El evolucionismo en filosofia y en teologia (Barcelona, 1956) 241 f. 



2° St. Thomas Aquinas, De potentia, q. 3. a. 11 ad 1. 



106 



