Six 24-Hour Days?

Many scientists are justifiably scandalized by Christian Fundamentalists' assertion that the world had to have begun ~10,000 years ago and that it only took six 24-hour periods to come into existence. This assertion is wrong in two respects: (a) The Hebrew word םוי ("yom") in Genesis can either mean a 24-hour period or an indefinite length of time, and (b) if God did stop creating the universe after six days, it would no longer exist today; this is because God creates with creatio ex nihilo ("creation out of nothing"), creation in its true sense and proper only to God, Who sustains everything in existence. So these Fundamentalists have an incorrect understanding both of the literal sense of Genesis and of creation.

Dr. Ludwig Ott summarizes the Catholic perspective, which opposes that of Fundamentalist Christians, in his Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma (pp. 93-94):

The Divine Work of Creation

chapter 1

Revealed Doctrine concerning Material Things, i.e., Christian Cosmology

§ 11. The Biblical Hexahemeron (The Six Days of Creation)

1. General Principles

In order to solve the difficulties deriving from the apparent contradiction between the results of natural science and the Biblical narrative of the Creation the following general principles are to be observed:

a) Even though all Holy Writ is inspired and is the Word of God, still, following St. Thomas (Sent. II d. 12 q. 1 a. 2), a distinction must be made between that which is inspired per se, and that which is inspired per accidens. As the truths of Revelation laid down in Holy Writ are designed to serve the end of religious and moral teaching, inspiration per se extends only to the religious and moral truths. The profane facts of natural science and history contained in Holy Writ are not inspired per se, but only per accidens, that is, by virtue of their relation to the religious-moral truths. The data inspired per accidens is also the Word of God, and consequently without error. However, as the hagiographers in profane things make use of a popular, that is, a non-scientific form of exposition suitable to the mental perception of their times, a more liberal interpretation, is possible here. The Church gives no positive decisions in regard to purely scientific questions, but limits itself to rejecting errors which endanger faith. Further, in these scientific matters there is no value in a consensus of the Fathers since they are not here acting as witnesses of the Faith, but merely as private scientists.

b) Since the findings of reason and the supernatural knowledge of Faith go back to the same source, namely to God, there can never be a real contradiction between the certain discoveries of the profane sciences and the Word of God properly understood. The Vatican Council declared: Nulla unquam inter fidem et rationem vera dissensio esse potest. D 1797.

2. Decisions of the Bible Commission (30/6/1909)

a) The first three Chapters of Genesis contain narratives of real events (rerum vere gestarum narrationes quae scilicet obiectivae realitati et historicae veritati respondeant), no myths, no mere allegories or symbols of religious truths, no legends. D 2122.

b) In regard to those facts, which touch the foundations of the Christian religion (quae christianae religionis fundamenta attingunt), the literal historical sense is to be adhered to. Such facts are, inter alia, the creation of all things by God in the beginning of time, and the special creation of humanity. D 2123.

c) It is not necessary to understand all individual words and sentences in the literal sense (sensu proprio). Passages which are variously interpreted by the Fathers and by theologians, may be interpreted according to one’s own judgment with the reservation, however, that one submits one’s judgment to the decision of the Church, and to the dictates of the Faith. D 2124 et seq.

d) As the Sacred Writer had not the intention of representing with scientific accuracy the intrinsic constitution of things, and the sequence of the works of creation but of communicating knowledge in a popular way suitable to the idiom and to the pre-scientific development of his time, the account is not to be regarded or measured as if it were couched in language which is strictly scientific (proprietas scientifici sermonis). D 2127.

e) The word “day” need not be taken in the literal sense of a natural day of 24 hours, but can also be understood in the improper sense of a longer space of time. D 2128. Cf. the whole letter of the Secretary of the Bible Commission to Cardinal Suhard, dated 16th January, 1948 (D 3002).

3. Explanation of the Work of the Six Days

The Biblical account of the duration and order of Creation is merely a literary clothing of the religious truth that the whole world was called into existence by the creative word of God. The Sacred Writer utilised for this purpose the pre-scientific picture of the world existing at the time. The numeral six of the days of the Creation is to be understood as an anthropomorphism. God’s work of creation represented in schematic form (opus distinctionis—opus ornatus) by the picture of a human working week, the termination of the work by the picture of the Sabbath rest. The purpose of this literary device is to manifest Divine approval of the working week and the Sabbath rest. Cf. Ex. 20:8 et seq.

The many theories which have been evolved to explain the Biblical Hexahemeron (the six days of Creation), fall into two groups. The former regard Gn. 1, as giving a historical account of the duration and sequence of the works of creation (realistic theories). The second group sacrifices the historicity of the narrative concerning the duration and sequence of the works of the Creation, and in order to avoid conflict with natural science, assumes that the division of the six working days derives from the imagination of the Sacred Writers (idealistic theories). To the former group belong those who hold the “Verbal Theory,” which is expounded by most of the Fathers and Schoolmen, the “Restitution Theory,” the “Sin Flood Theory,” and the various “Concordance Theories,” which explain the six days of Creation as six periods of creation. To the second group belong the “Allegorism of St. Augustine,” “The Vision Theory,” “Poetism,” “The Anthropomorphistic Explanation,” mentioned above, and “Mythism,” which has been rejected by the Church (D 2122).

§ 12. The Doctrine of Evolution in the Light of the Revelation

1. The materialist doctrine of evolution (E. Haeckel) which assumes the eternal existence of uncreated material, and which explains the emergence of all living creatures, of plants and animals and also of men, both body and soul, through purely mechanical evolution out of this material, is contrary to Revelation, which teaches the creation of the material and its formation by God in time.

2. The doctrine of evolution based on the theistic conception of the world, which traces matter and life to God’s causality and assumes that organic being, developed from originally created seed-powers (St. Augustine) or from stemforms (doctrine of descent), according to God’s plan, is compatible with the doctrine of Revelation. However, as regards man, a special creation by God is demanded, which must extend at least to the spiritual soul (creatio hominis peculiaris D 2123). Individual Fathers, especially St. Augustine, accepted a certain development of living creatures. Proceeding from the assumption that God created everything at the one time (cf. Ecclus. 18:1), they taught that God brought a certain part of His creatures into existence in a finished state, while He created others in the form of primitive seeds (rationes, seminales or causales) from which they were gradually to develop. Those Fathers and Schoolmen who accepted a development, conceived a development of the individual species of living things each from a particular primitive form created by God; but modern theories of evolution (descendence theory) conceives the development as from one species to another. According as these give priority to evolution from a plurality of original forms or from one single stem-form (primitive form) one speaks of a many-stemmed (polyphyletic) or single-stemmed (monophyletic) development. From the standpoint of the doctrine of evolution, either form is possible. From the standpoint of natural science, F. Birkner says: “A single-stemmed monophyletic development of living beings is to be rejected, as the transitions from one group to the other are missing. Everything seems to favour a many-stemmed, polyphyletic development. Unfortunately, up to the present it has not been possible to determine how many primitive forms or basic organisations of living beings existed.”

Fr. Coyne & Dawkins

Nota bene: The Church does not necessarily endorse all Fr. Coyne's opinions, and he is not necessarily speaking infallibly.

A related speech's transcript.

Vatican Astronomer on "Intelligent Design Theory"

Fr. Coyne's presentation and question-and-answer session at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)'s "Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion" lecture. Can modern science truly do without God, as he says? Are true philosophy and theology necessary for modern science to be true science, i.e., to search for absolute truth?

Part 1 and Part 2

Nota bene: The Church does not necessarily endorse all Fr. Coyne's opinions, and he is not necessarily speaking infallibly.

Creation Mingled with Works of Nature? No.

My responses are red and Dr. Tkacz's are green.

Hello Prof. Tkacz,

Thank you for the excellent article "Thomas Aquinas vs. The Intelligent Designers." [...] I understand the flaws of ID [Intelligent Design] as it is presently conceived by people like Behe, but I am confused when you wrote about the hippo:

Consider another example: a large quadrapedic mammal, such as a hippopotamus, gives live birth to its young. Why? Well, we could answer this by saying that “God does it.” Yet, this could only mean that God created hippopotamuses—indeed the mammalian order, the whole animal kingdom, and all of nature—such that these animals have the morphology, genetic make-up, etc. that are the causes of their giving live birth. [So God is a deist's God who only sets up the natural conditions and leaves them alone?] It cannot be that God “reaches into” the normal operations of hippopotamuses to cause them to give live birth. [Why not? Is He not involved at all past some level?] Were one to think that “God does it” must mean that God intervenes in nature in this way, one would be guilty of the Cosmogonical Fallacy. [Or I just wouldn't be a deist?]

Isn't this an issue of proximate versus remote causes? A proximate cause (what biology would study) of a hippo giving birth is the female hippo, and a remote cause (what theology would study) is God, so both the Thomists and ID folk are right; to me it just seems to be an issue of epistemology. What exactly are you trying to know: how the hippo's existence is due ultimately to God or how it's due to its hippo nature—its "hipponess"?

From St. Thomas's Summa Contra Gentiles:

Accordingly if we be asked the wherefore of a particular natural effect, we can assign the reason to some proximate cause: provided, however, that we refer all things to the divine will as their first cause. Thus if it be asked: Why was the wood heated at the presence of fire? we reply: Because to heat is fire's natural action: and this, because heat is its proper accident: and this results from its proper form: and so on until we come to the divine will. Hence if we reply to the question Why was the wood made hot? by saying: Because God so willed: we shall answer rightly, if we intend to trace the question back to its first cause, but incorrectly if we intend to exclude all other causes.

—Summa Contra Gentiles, lib. 3 cap. 97 n. 17

His response:

Thank you for your message. I understand your question about my “hippo” example. I certainly do not intend to claim that St. Thomas is a deist. He most certainly is not—indeed, he would consider deism heretical because it denies God’s omnipresence and immanence to creation. The point of my example is that God’s creation is not a substitute for natural causes. Any natural thing or process has natural causes of the kinds that we discover in our scientific research. At the same time, any natural thing or process requires God’s immediate act of creation to keep it in existence. Both are true at once. This is St. Thomas’ view. So, the hippopotamus is created by God in the sense that it is immediately caused to exist and is kept in existence by God. What God causes here, however, is the animal as caused by its natural causes. So, divine creation is not a substitute for natural causes, nor is it like a natural cause. It is a unique kind of cause in a class of its own.

As you know, deism is the view that creation is some primordial cause. Thomas rejects this view. He holds that creation is not an event that took place at some primordial time. [But some creation could; it's not necessary, though, right? No. This is the point St. Thomas is making: it is impossible that God creates the way human beings and other natural things create. God’s act of creation does not take place in time and it must be immediately present to the thing being created. Thus, it cannot be that God created way back when. God creates here and now at every here and now of the universe, whether that here and now is, from our temporal point of view, a present here and now or a future here and now or a past here and now. Remember: According to St. Thomas, creation is not an event, but a relationship of absolute dependence of creature on creator. I think you misunderstood me; I was implying that creatio ex nihilo is possible at a certain moment in time for some creatures, such as the soul of a newly conceived human, or is that false? I think you would say it just appears that way form our temporally-bound viewpoint? I see. You are right and St. Thomas would agree, but he would point out that the creation of the individual human soul must be true in a way that does not commit the Cosmological Fallacy (the confusion of natural cause with God’s divine agency). Because God is absolutely immanent to all of nature, then he is omnipresent with his power to the conception of the individual human being making it be. Basically, this is no different from God’s being present to any other new natural event. But there is a sense in which the creation of the individual human soul is different from God’s general immanence: the human soul is the image of God in a more perfect way than is any other natural thing or process. God’s creation of the individual rational human soul, then, is God sharing his own divine essence in a particular manner that is different from his creation of other natural things. We often tend to think of this in an event manner, but this is, as you say, just part of our “temporally-bound viewpoint.”] Rather, creation is the radical dependence of everything on God for its existence. So, creation is not an event at all, but a relationship of absolute dependence. As in the text you cite from SCG, St. Thomas often uses the term “first cause” to refer to God’s act of creation. He does not here mean “first” in the sense of first in time, but in the sense of absolutely fundamental. God’s actions do not occur in time, they are eternal or to put it another way from our point of view, God is always making us be, he is always creating us. Were God to crease being our creator, we would pass out of existence. So, there is no deism here.

The problem with ID theorists such as Dr. Behe is that he confuses divine causation with natural causation. [As I understand it, he thinks that biology, e.g., can understand the supernatural's effect on the natural order? I get the feeling that he considers life to be a miracle of the first degree:

The highest degree in miracles comprises those works wherein something is done by God, that nature can never do: for instance, that two bodies occupy the same place, that the sun recede or stand still, that the sea be divided and make way to passers by. Among these there is a certain order: for the greater the work done by God, and the further it is removed from the capability of nature, the greater the miracle: thus it is a greater miracle that the sun recede, than that the waters be divided.

—Summa Contra Gentiles, lib. 3 cap. 101

How does science know when it's dealing with the natural or supernatural if miracles do indeed happen? Miracles is something I have never seen discussed in the ID debate. Maybe they have been, and I'm just unaware. According to St. Thomas, a miracle is not just a wonderful event, but a revelation of God—it is one of the ways in which God tells us about himself. Miracles must meet three criteria: [1] they must be unusual events out of the regular order of nature (this rules out Behe’s notion that “irreducible complexity” is a miracle), [2] they must draw attention of human beings and evoke wonder in them, and [3] they must have theological significance (that is, they must reveal to us something that is part of the deposit of faith). So, the raising of Lazarus is a miracle because [1] it is out of the regular order of nature (this is not the usual way in which nature creates life), [2] it evokes wonder in human witnesses, and [3] it is a type of the resurrection of Christ.] He treats God’s agency as a sort of super-powerful natural cause. [Yes, definitely] From the Thomistic perspective this is incorrect, for it implies that God requires a material potentiality in order to create, as do natural causes. God’s agency is not just a more powerful sort of cause, but it is totally unlike natural causes. God does not actualize a potentiality when he creates, but he simple is the reason why things are. How can this be? Well, we would have to be God to understand how something can be caused to be without the actualization of a potentiality, but then we are not God. God is the transcendent creator and his very transcendence means that we cannot comprehend how he does what he does. But we can distinguish God’s action from the actions of created things and, therefore, know that God is the transcendent creator. This is important, because if we are not careful, we can be slip into error in our thinking about who God is. The natural universe is intelligible and scientific research is the means by which we know it. God made it that way. But the fact that we can explain natural things in terms of natural causes does not rule out their being created by God. In fact, the only way to explain why there are natural things and their natural causes at all is to understand that they radically depend on God for their existence.

M. Tkacz

Dr. Michael W. Tkacz
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Gonzaga University

I think every ID advocate correctly understands that God and only God creates ex nihilo ("out of nothing"), but they do not understand that God does not override nature. Thus, every ID advocate should read this article in St. Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica: "Whether creation [i.e., creatio ex nihilo] is mingled with works of nature and art?" While ID advocates would say "Yes," St. Thomas says "No." He says that "in the works of nature creation does not enter, but is presupposed to the work of nature." This is fully consistent with God simply letting things be. He does not say, e.g., "I create light!" but "Let there be light." (Genesis 1:3). Nor does He say "I bring forth the living creature!" but "Let the earth bring forth the living creature." (Genesis 1:24).

On Evolution & Intelligent Design

The fifth of St. Thomas Aquinas's "five ways" (quinque viæ) of proving God's existence is as follows:

The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly [ex intentione], do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.

—Summa Theologica Iª q. 2 a. 3 co.

This is a teleological (Greek telos = "end") argument for God's existence because it argues that the whole world, its creatures—all created things—are directed toward an end; viz., they have a "final cause," to use the philosophical term. It, like Cardinal Schönborn's controversial essay "Finding Design in Nature," is "based neither on theology nor modern science nor ‘intelligent design theory.’"

In “Finding Design in Nature,” I said:

• The Church “proclaims that by the light of reason the human intellect can readily and clearly discern purpose and design in the natural world, including the world of living things.”
• “Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.”
• Quoting our late Holy Father John Paul II: “The evolution of living beings, of which science seeks to determine the stages and to discern the mechanism, presents an internal finality which arouses admiration. This finality, which directs beings in a direction for which they are not responsible or in charge, obliges one to suppose a Mind which is its inventor, its creator.”
• Again quoting John Paul II: “To all these indications of the existence of God the Creator, some oppose the power of chance or of the proper mechanisms of matter. To speak of chance for a universe which presents such a complex organization in its elements and such marvelous finality in its life would be equivalent to giving up the search for an explanation of the world as it appears to us. In fact, this would be equivalent to admitting effects without a cause. It would be to abdicate human intelligence, which would thus refuse to think and to seek a solution for its problems.”
• Quoting the Catechism: “Human intelligence is surely already capable of finding a response to the question of origins. The existence of God the Creator can be known with certainty through his works, by the light of human reason. . . . We believe that God created the world according to his wisdom. It is not the product of any necessity whatever, nor of blind fate or chance.”
• Referring to the Church's teaching on the importance and reach of metaphysics: “But in the modern era, the Catholic Church is in the odd position of standing in firm defense of reason as well. In the nineteenth century, the First Vatican Council taught a world newly enthralled by the ‘death of God' that by the use of reason alone mankind could come to know the reality of the Uncaused Cause, the First Mover, the God of the philosophers.”

My argument was based neither on theology nor modern science nor “intelligent design theory.” In theology, although the mind's ability to grasp the order and design in nature is adopted by, taken up into, and elevated to new heights by the faith of Christianity, that ability precedes faith, as Romans 1:19-20 makes clear. In science, the discipline and methods are such that design—more precisely, formal and final causes in natural beings—is purposefully excluded from its reductionist conception of nature. [...] [T]rue science is impossible unless we first grasp the reality of natures and essences, the intelligible principles of the natural world. We can with much profit study nature using the tools and techniques of modern science. But let us never forget, as some modern scientists have forgotten, that the study of reality via reductive methods leads to incomplete knowledge. To grasp reality as it is, we must return to our pre-scientific and post-scientific knowledge, the tacit knowledge that pervades science, the knowledge that, when critically examined and refined, we call philosophy. [...] First of all, we must observe that the role of randomness in Darwinian biology is quite different from its role in thermodynamics, quantum theory, and other natural sciences. In those sciences randomness captures our inability to predict or know the precise behavior of the parts of a system (or perhaps, in the case of the quantum world, some intrinsic properties of the system). But in all such cases the “random” behavior of parts is embedded in and constrained by a deeply mathematical and precise conceptual structure of the whole that makes the overall behavior of the system orderly and intelligible. [...] [T]he overwhelming trend of Catholic commentators on the question of neo-Darwinian evolution [...] gladly discuss[es] its compatibility with the truths of faith but seldom bother to discuss whether and how it is compatible with the truths of reason. [...] Let us return to the heart of the problem: positivism. Modern science first excludes a priori final and formal causes, then investigates nature under the reductive mode of mechanism (efficient and material causes), and then turns around to claim both final and formal causes are obviously unreal, and also that its mode of knowing the corporeal world takes priority over all other forms of human knowledge. Being mechanistic, modern science is also historicist: It argues that a complete description of the efficient and material causal history of an entity is a complete explanation of the entity itself—in other words, that an understanding of how something came to be is the same as understanding what it is. But Catholic thinking rejects the genetic fallacy applied to the natural world and contains instead a holistic understanding of reality based on all the faculties of reason and all the causes evident in nature—including the “vertical” causation of formality and finality.

—Cardinal Schönborn's "The Designs of Science"

There are two important ideas that the cardinal mentions: randomness and teleology. In the case of randomness, what appears to us as random is not necessarily so when understood more deeply, so randomness in nature is really an epistemological issue possibly due to Original Sin, our finite nature, and our imperfect intellects. E.g., the motions of atoms in a gas are not random in the sense that they obey no underlying rules; one can in principle derive the statistical properties of a gas by analyzing its trillions of atoms individually. Taken as a collection they have very predictable characteristics—e.g., temperature and entropy—indicative of an underlying logic. The same goes for quantum mechanics. The neo-Darwinists' biology, on the contrary, makes no predictions from random genetic mutations toward an increase in the information in DNA, which one would expect if more complex beings were to evolve from lesser complex ones, contrary to what the second law of thermodynamics says—that disorder tends to increase in closed systems. They call what they do not understand "random." Therefore, randomness in the former sense in no way precludes teleology as does randomness in the neo-Darwinists' sense. As for teleology:

Again, we should notice that, although every agent, both natural and voluntary, intends an end, still it does not follow that every agent knows the end or deliberates about the end. To know the end is necessary in those whose actions are not determined, but which may act for opposed ends as, for example, voluntary agents. Therefore it is necessary that these know the end by which they determine their actions. But in natural agents the actions are determined, hence it is not necessary to choose those things which are for the end. Avicenna gives the following example. A harpist does not have to deliberate about the strings that he will pluck, since these are already determined for him; otherwise there would be a delay between the notes which would cause uneveness. However, it seems more reasonable to attribute deliberation to a voluntary agent than to a natural agent. Thus it is plain, by reasoning a maiori, that, if a voluntary agent, for whom deliberation is more proper, sometimes does not deliberate, therefore neither does the natural agent. Therefore it is possible for the natural agent to intend the end without deliberation; and to intend this is nothing else than to have a natural inclination to something.

—St. Thomas Aquinas's Introduction to the Philosophy of Nature

The exclusion of final causes from science is a limitation because chance cannot be a cause:

It is necessary, no doubt, that the causes of what comes to pass by chance be indefinite; and that is why chance is supposed to belong to the class of the indefinite and to be inscrutable to man, and why it might be thought that, in a way, nothing occurs by chance. For all these statements are correct, as might be expected. Things do, in a way, occur by chance, for they occur accidentally and chance is an accidental cause. But it is not the cause without qualification of anything; for instance, a housebuilder is the cause of a house; accidentally, a fluteplayer may be so. [...] The question 'why', then, is answered by reference to the matter, to the form, and to the primary moving cause. For in respect of coming to be it is mostly in this last way that causes are investigated—'what comes to be after what? what was the primary agent or patient?' and so at each step of the series. [...] A difficulty presents itself: why should not nature work, not for the sake of something, nor because it is better so, but just as the sky rains, not in order to make the corn grow, but of necessity? (What is drawn up must cool, and what has been cooled must become water and descend, the result of this being that the corn grows.) Similarly if a man's crop is spoiled on the threshing-floor, the rain did not fall for the sake of this—in order that the crop might be spoiled—but that result just followed. Why then should it not be the same with the parts in nature, e.g. that our teeth should come up of necessity—the front teeth sharp, fitted for tearing, the molars broad and useful for grinding down the food—since they did not arise for this end, but it was merely a coincident result; and so with all other parts in which we suppose that there is purpose? Wherever then all the parts came about just what they would have been if they had come to be for an end, such things survived, being organized spontaneously in a fitting way; whereas those which grew otherwise perished and continue to perish, as Empedocles says his 'man-faced oxprogeny' did. Such are the arguments (and others of the kind) which may cause difficulty on this point [of teleology]. Yet it is impossible that this should be the true view. For teeth and all other natural things either invariably or for the most part come about in a given way; but of not one of the results of chance or spontaneity is this true. We do not ascribe to chance or mere coincidence the frequency of rain in winter, but frequent rain in summer we do; nor heat in summer but only if we have it in winter. If then, it is agreed that things are either the result of coincidence or for the sake of something, and these cannot be the result of coincidence or spontaneity, it follows that they must be for the sake of something; and that such things are all due to nature even the champions of the theory which is before us would agree. Therefore action for an end is present in things which come to be and are by nature.

—Aristotle's Physics 197a8-197a15; 198a33-198a35; 198b17-199a8

Addressing "I turned me to another thing, and I saw that under the sun, the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the learned, nor favour to the skilful: but time and chance in all." (Eccles. 9:11), St. Thomas touches on what I called above randomness due to our imperfect intellects and lack of knowledge of all causes of things; i.e., that we are not able to perceive things perfectly holistically, atemporally, and omnisciently as can God:

These things are said to be under the sun which are generated and corrupted according to the sun's movement. In all such things we find chance: not that everything is casual which occurs in such things; but that in each one there is an element of chance. And the very fact that an element of chance is found in those things proves that they are subject to government of some kind. For unless corruptible things were governed by a higher being, they would tend to nothing definite, especially those which possess no kind of knowledge. So nothing would happen unintentionally; which constitutes the nature of chance. Wherefore to show how things happen by chance and yet according to the ordering of a higher cause, he does not say absolutely that he observes chance in all things, but "time and chance," that is to say, that defects may be found in these things according to some order of time.

—St. Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica Iª q. 103 a. 5 ad 1

Pope Pius XII's encyclical Humani Generis, the first papal document addressing evolution, sums up the Catholic position on evolution:

5. If anyone examines the state of affairs outside the Christian fold, he will easily discover the principle trends that not a few learned men are following. Some imprudently and indiscreetly hold that evolution, which has not been fully proved even in the domain of natural sciences, explains the origin of all things, and audaciously support the monistic and pantheistic opinion that the world is in continual evolution. Communists gladly subscribe to this opinion so that, when the souls of men have been deprived of every idea of a personal God, they may the more efficaciously defend and propagate their dialectical materialism. 6. Such fictitious tenets of evolution which repudiate all that is absolute, firm and immutable, have paved the way for the new erroneous philosophy which, rivaling idealism, immanentism and pragmatism, has assumed the name of existentialism, since it concerns itself only with existence of individual things and neglects all consideration of their immutable essences.

Hopefully science will free itself from some of its self-limiting practices, and, as Cardinal Schönborn says in his essay, "awaken Catholics from their dogmatic slumber about positivism in general and evolutionism in particular."