The Evolutionary Mindset
While the Church does not reject the theory of natural selection or various other theories of evolution, I find that there is a problem with the “evolutionary mindset” of people today. What is the problem? It is precisely that people find it hard to recognize differences of kind rather than merely of degree.
For example, how many people consider human beings to be on a continuum with plants and animals? No one can deny that humans are more advanced than other animals, but plenty of people today deny that there is a qualitative difference. The difference is huge: man has a spiritual soul. Our spiritual faculties such as intellect and will cannot be the result of matter and thus could not have evolved.
So, technically speaking, man could not have evolved from lower creatures. However, the Church does not rule out the possibility that man’s body could have evolved to the point where it was capable of being animated by a spiritual soul.
It’s interesting to note that it used to be commonly held that the ability to reason required a non-material element in man while today people commonly take it for granted that reason is the product of evolution, a material quality. This leads people to suppose on one hand that in the future artificial intelligence will be possible and on the other hand that things like abortion are okay because we’re simply animals anyway.
Hierarchical cosmology where there are clearly different orders of things recognized (plants, animals, men, angels) has been replaced by a democratic cosmology where everything is thought to be on a continuum. In other words, modern man simply believes that one kind of thing is not really distinct from another but that given the right circumstances any kind of thing could become any other kind of thing.