I don’t have much problem believing in evolution and seeing the Incarnation as a unique and appropriately singular event.
This world was designed with humanity at the head of it—as its gardeners and tenders and keepers and lords. All the other species were placed under us as our charges. If we had to go through millions of years to get to man...what is that to me? Didn’t we go through thousands of years before God revealed Himself to Moses? And another thousand at least before the Christ? And another two thousands before the Church encompassed all the earth? God works in His time, not ours.
However we got here, we fell in a way that no other species could fall. So we needed to be fixed in a special way: the Incarnation.
Because we are the head species, and presumably the species through which God was going to bring the earth to perfection, God became man. Not monkey. Not slug. Once man is set aright, the whole earth will then fall into place, because that’s what our job was from the beginning. To tend, to keep, and to subdue.
As for some hypothetical “next stage” evolved human—that will never happen. We’ll need geologic time to get there, and we can’t even make it one century without cataclysmic wars and bigger and better superweapons making those wars ever more destructive. Simply put, given our titanic hubris, we’ll never make it that far. We’ll see the book of Revelations play out instead.
Some major assumptions there, big enough to drive a truck through.
For starters, the assumption “We will never get to the next stage”. We can’t define what that stage is, or for that matter what the last ‘stage’ was.
When I was a kid, Neanderthals were pictured as upright apes. Today, with modern forensic science, they are pictured like a guy I work with. There have even been hybrids found in various places. Were the Neanderthals saved? Or just the Shemites? Or where they just modern humans with brows like my friend? Heck, I had one professor at college maintain that they were descendants of modern humans, not the ancestors.
Catholics "cannot accept evolution as we scientists accept it - as an unguided, materialistic process with no goal or direction," said University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne, who writes about science and religion in his blog, "Why Evolution Is True."No kidding.