EVOLUTION AND THE BIBLE 



disconcert the religious teaching that the human being is 

 animated by a spiritual soul. The observable continuity joining 

 an animal line to the human stock may be illustrated by an 

 analogous continuity, likewise observable, which joins the 

 human infant to the parental line. Catholic theology insists 

 that the human soul does not proceed by way of generation 

 from the human parents, but is directly created by God and 

 infused into the living organism for which the parents are 

 responsible. Nevertheless, even though the soul is not derived 

 from the parental line, observable continuity is not disrupted. 

 Therefore the direct creation of the soul by God accords 

 perfectly with the natural processes in which nothing prevents 

 us from maintaining continuity, in the one case between man 

 and man, in the other between animal and man. The gap 

 which theology introduces affects a level of being quite other 

 than that of the biological organism. Consequently the ontologi- 

 cal discontinuity which faith requires, and the morphological 

 continuity to which science rallies, are simultaneously realiz- 

 able.2i 



The solution may be brought out in a somewhat different 

 way. Scientists apply the term "mutations" to brusque varia- 

 tions that modify the genotype and become hereditary. Is not 

 the natural course of events violated by the sudden appearance 

 of a being endowed with a spiritual soul created by God? In 

 reply we may consider that elevation from the animal to the 

 human level can be represented in two ways. God may have 

 chosen an adult pair of anthropoids and infused spiritual souls 

 into them; in this case the law regulating biological mutations 

 is not applicable, but is simply surpassed. Or else we may 

 imagine that the first two human souls were infused into germ 

 cells; then the law regulating mutations is not transgressed 

 in a manner that is biologically ascertainable; apparent biologi- 

 cal continuity is safeguarded, in spite of the enormous meta- 

 physical discontinuity between a brute animal and a rational 

 animal; it is only later, after a dormant period of some years, 

 that awakening to the life of reason would occur.22 In either 



2^ Cf. D. EHibarle, O.P., "Evolution et evolutionnisme," Lumiere et Vie 



34 (1957) 86. 

 ^2 Cf. C. Joumet, "La question des origines: la Bible et les sciences," 



Nova et Vetera 33 (1958) 175. 



108 



