[Claud]

And I might ask how you can lump all Catholics with Loisy just because they find nothing in evolution as a secondary cause that is incompatible with Scripture. The original meaning of evolution after all is “unfolding,” as in the unfolding of a flower, or, the process that leads from seed to fruit.

To wit

St. Augustine, on the Literal Interpretation of Genesis, Book II "Question of the phase in which the moon was made" 15, 30

"God, after all is the author and founder of things in their actual natures. Now whatever any single thing may in some way or other produce and unfold by its natural development through periods of time that are suited to it, it contained it beforehand as something hidden, if not in specific forms and bodily mass, at least by the force and reckoning of nature, unless of course a tree, void of fruit and stripped of its leaves throughout the winter, is then to be called imperfect, or unless again at its origins, when it had still not yet borne any fruit, its nature was also imperfect. It is not only about the tree, but about its seed also that this could not rightly be said; there everything that with the passage of time is somehow or other going to appear is already latent in invisible ways. Although, if God were to make anything imperfect, which he then would himself bring to perfection, what would be reprehensible about such an idea? But you would be quite within your rights to disapprove if what had been begun by him were said to be completed and perfected by another."

The philosophical underpinnings are there I think. Besides, Augustine postulated just such a process at work with flies and other creatures which he thought were created potentially and not actually during the hexamaeron.

[RobbyS]

The last sentence is apt if one is opposing the “Darwinian notion that since human nature is mere accident that we can by taking thought perfect it in accord with our present conceits. I refer of course to eugenics, and the idea that
scientists have the right to play the role Darwinists deny to God.

[Zionist Conspirator]

I have remarked about Augustine before.

The philosophical underpinnings are there I think. Besides, Augustine postulated just such a process at work with flies and other creatures which he thought were created potentially and not actually during the hexamaeron.

So now you're going to fall back on an actual erroneous belief, biogenesis, in order to defend evolution? Smart move.

As I understand it, Augustine did not teach that things "evolve" but that everything was created at once in the first instant. This constituted the problem with the six days in his eyes.