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It was a monkey named “Dusty”, Moses messed up the dictation. :)

I don’t see how the term “Catholic” in this article means anything more than a coat one puts on.

I think what is missing from the discussion is a level of precision commensurate with the subject. The darwinians tend to rely upon data that is hundreds of years old, and is based upon an argument by association, one of the weakest forms of argument. If one looks at the wonderful heirarchy of life forms, the “tree of life” as it were, one could either say that the species were created similar for the sake of a beautiful harmony, the eternal music of the cosmos as Plato would say, or one could say the similarities are the result of random mutations which led to new life forms from common sources. We now have the ability to test this theory by looking at the DNA sequences, to see if the billions of lines of code from one species are off from the billions of lines of code from the “next” species by a few random mutations. Then we can do the math, the probability and statistics to verify that even one species gap could have occurred in the time alloted by the age of the universe. It is quite simple, I don’t think there is any need to rely upon crude out-dated evolutionary storyboards found in most natural history museums.

Yeah, it basically sets up a Straw Man. But Bishop Usher helped them out there a bit with that. Interesting controversy.

The Catholic position has not relied on Old Testament chronology tables and there has always been a framework for metaphysical cosmology in a broader sense with which most activist atheists avoid debating for some reason. It boils down to an ontological distinction between creatio ex nihilo and the possible mechanisms for the generation of life or living things AFTER the cosmic creation is theorized to have occurred ("in an instant of time").

At any rate, in their cosmic struggles against Young Earth Creationism some secular Darwinists overlook this and fall back on the Straw Man fallacy. Like Sisyphus, little progress or headway is made. It doesn't really matter what intermediary geological, physiological, biochemical, or genomic processes God may have set in motion after the cosmic creation (from a Catholic point of view). The findings of paleontology or primatology would not eliminate the theological anymore than they would affect Anselm's ontological argument or the Five Ways of Aquinas. Evolutionary models would still have a "design" component from a theological point of view. Whether part of Whitehead's idea of "process" or any of the other models, classical Deism, etc.

But no serious Catholic would ever lose his faith or doubt the existence of God based on the debates about fossils or possible scientific explanations for the generation and differentiation of life, living things, bodies, or genetics. That would not change the Gospels. Whatever the fossil record reveals has no bearing on the articles of faith (the Nicene Creed, etc.). It's a category mistake whenever someone makes such a claim.

A real debate between evolutionary theories and theistic metaphysical cosmology would be more helpful than the usual circus which goes on with this. But no one can prove the non-existence of God with fossils and graphs about primates. It's a strange obsession.