The Vatican has announced a conference on evolution to be held next year. The international conference will be titled, “Biological Evolution: Facts and Theories. A Critical Appraisal 150 years after ‘The Origin of the Species’“. It will be held on March 3-7, 2009 in Rome and will be co-sponsored by the Pontifical Gregorian University, the University of Notre Dame, and the Pontifical Council for Culture.
Personally, I have never understood why some people of faith see evolution as a problem. Of course God has the right to create us in any manner that God chooses. It can be instantaneous or it can be through a long evolutionary process.
A reading of the Book Genesis reveals two creation stories in the first two chapters. I love the second one, where God first created man out of the clay of the ground and then later “blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and so man became a living being.” Many years ago, my scientific mind wondered what this human person was like during the inbetween time. In other words, what was this person like after being created out of clay, but not yet having received God’s breath of life. My young adult mind decided that this must be the phase of evolution, when we rose from the “earth”, from the molecules, from the waters and from our animal ancestors. And then we became fully human when God breathed life into us.
Granted, this was a very literal reading of the Bible. But it reinforced that we don’t need to be afraid of evolution or any type of science. After all, God created the laws of this universe. Why should we feel threatened to recognize that God decided to follow those very same laws in creating us?
Posted by APWeb 
