Unfortunately the Vatican is behind the power curve on this one. The reality of the situation is that if evolution occurred as humanists today contend that the entire story of Genesis is a complete and utter fraud.
A theory in which millions of years of death and change led to the ascent of man is mutually exclusive with a document which states unequivocally that death did not exist prior to Cain murdering his brother.
The weakest of all philosophical and theological viewpoints is born out of attempting a merger of the two.
Brilliant! Someone gets it!
There are basically four attempts at reconcilliation:
The Ideal View. Genesis 1 is merely a poetic description of the creative acts of God. This has its forerunner in the allegorical interpretations of Genesis 1 or Philo, Origen, and Augustine. The "days" are seen perspectively and not chronologically. A corollary is Kurtz's visionary theory, which sees Genesis 1 as a backward-looking prophecy.The Restitution View. This draws a radical divide between Genesis 1:2 and 1:3, placing all events and phenomena taught by geology in between. The six-day "restitution" begins in verse 3, wherein God makes the earth inhabitable for man.
The Concordistic View. The days are lengthened, but their chronological order is maintained. Many well-respected natural scientists of their day, including Cuvier, embraced this view.
The Literal-Historical View. The results of geology are to be found partly in the six days, and partly in cataclysmic events thereafter. The flood and the Ice Age are intimately intertwined.
Yes, and Jesus conquered death by being a sinless sacrifice. The wolf and the lamb will feed together, lions eating straw, no more eating each other, when we get back to the original creation.
Isa 65:25 The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock: and dust [shall be] the serpent's meat. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, saith the LORD.
I agree with you, except for the fact that God dealt out the first sacrificial death on an animal to provide the skins that covered Adam and Eve. Then of course, probably following Adams example, Abel sacrificed one of his flock as an offering to the Lord. The first murder recorded was Cain's murder of Abel.
P.S. Scripturally, plants wither, but don't die. Blood is required for life and death.
Lev 17:11 For the life of the flesh [is] in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it [is] the blood [that] maketh an atonement for the soul.
The Vatican is wisely hedging their bets. Since they've lost every other battle with science (Copernicus, Galeleo, etc.), it's a wise move. It's too bad today's Evangelicals have tied their faith to creationism, because they will lose too.
God created the world, and He gave us the Bible. The world contains massive evidence for Evolution, even despite the creationist naysayers.
So either 1) God "lied" to us when He created the world by salting it with an incredible amount of evidence for Evolution. Or 2) some minority of Evangelical Christians are mis-interpreting a few hundred words in Genesis.
Since it's very hard to get a perfect picture from mere words, I prefer to interpret the world created by God, when the question is about that world itself (how the species were created).
God does not lie, either in His creation, or His word. It takes a human to interpret one or the other of them wrong. There is no conflict between science and Genesis, only humans who refuse to admit they are wrong.
Nonsense. It would mean Genesis uses metaphorical and allegorical language, common to ancient peoples, to express basic divine truths. There is no evidence the book was meant to be taken literally.
Besides, evolution is not the only science that makes a literal reading of Genesis untenable. To believe the earth is only 6,000 years old, you'd have to chuck out geology. To believe that night and day preceeded the creation of the sun, you'd have to chuck out astronomy. And where exactly is the canopy of water in the heavens? How come we haven't found it yet?
A theory in which millions of years of death and change led to the ascent of man is mutually exclusive with a document which states unequivocally that death did not exist prior to Cain murdering his brother.
Nowhere does the Bible say there was no animal death before Cain's murder. Romans 5 speaks only of HUMAN death. Accepting evolution only requires accepting pre-human ANIMAL death.
The weakest of all philosophical and theological viewpoints is born out of attempting a merger of the two.
The weakest of all philosophical and theological viewpoints is born out of taking literally an obviously poetic and allegorical text whose literal reading is not only contradicted by mountains of readily observable, empirical data, but in fact contradicts itself.