Are Creation and Evolution Compatible?

Lesson 33 –
Are Creation and Evolution Compatible?

For most of human history, we have not had the evidence or information to seriously grapple with the idea that the natural world has undergone historical development, since it seems so completely stable from within the lens of human experience.

It is really only in the last two centuries that we have been able to make the sorts of subtle observations necessary in physics, astronomy, geology, and biology to take the idea that there might be historical development in nature seriously.

Course Reading

Summa Theologiae I q. 103, a. 6 | St. Thomas Aquinas

The Fittingness of Evolutionary Creation | Fr. Nicanor Austriaco, O.P.

Excerpt from the Summa Theologiae I q. 103, a. 6:

[S]ince things which are governed should be brought to perfection by government, this government will be so much the better in the degree the things governed are brought to perfection. Now it is a greater perfection for a thing to be good in itself and also the cause of goodness in others, than only to be good in itself. Therefore God so governs things that He makes some of them to be causes of others in government; as a master, who not only imparts knowledge to his pupils, but gives also the faculty of teaching others.