You and I, being both Catholics, have no real need to debate this however since ultimately, in our Church, both "sides" are allowed to co-exist. One can be a strict "evolutionist" or a strict "creationist" or anything inbetween so long as no one maintains that the soul itself "evolved".
This is another reason I rarely post on these threads, because ultimately this is an issue that has no real bearing on true Christianity, IMO. It doesn't matter *how* we got here, even the strict "creationist" so much as admits this by the utter lack of regard they have for science in general. That is, for the creationist it IS irrelevant *how* we we got here. The only thing that matters for the creationist is that God created us to be with Him fully and not "through a glass, darkly".
Well, that's pretty much what anyone like myself believes too. Ultimately, the theory of evolution can only answer HOW we got here, but the more important question of WHY is left to theology. Why we all can't just focus on that commonality instead of insisting that "our view is the only view" is beyond me. Speaking for myself, I couldn't care less if someone believes in a 6-day literal creation. I don't think that will send anyone to Hell.
I don't know why it's implied that people like me are hellbound, simply because we are more curious about the mechanism of God's creation than others. (not that you say that, but some around here SURE DO imply that)
Neither point 10 or 15 in that long post speaks to the lack of fossil evidence of an evolutionary path from sufficiently complex species to another sufficiently complex species through single (or otherwise probable) mutations. What I need to see is a chain of species S1, S2, Sn, where S1 is not the same species as Sn, yet for every q Sq+1 is a mutated direct descendant of Sq.
It is true that should the evolutionary hypothesis be ever proven, it will in no way take God as the Primary Designer out of the equation, and therefore will be fully compatible with Catholicism. Mine is not a theological argument. My point is simply that it has not be proven, and it cannot be proven by discovery of new species, no matter what other species the new species resembles.
I agree that there are observations that indirectly corroborate the hypothesis. The creatures do look alike, and simple organisms do mutate to a distinct but separate variety, and if you wish you might call it species. On the other hand, in complex species we see stable distinct species and no productive mutations. Further, the scant observations that do corroborate the evolutionary hypothesis can also be explained without it.