Last week, Pope Frank backed up the accomodationist Catholic Church hypothesis that evolution is not inconsistent with creationism, which garnered him a ton of fair rebuttals by people who actually understand evolution, such as Jerry Coyne.
The thing is the Catholic Church doesn’t care about the truth, they just need this whole metaphysical jumble to keep their charade going.
If the Church were to accept scientific evolution, they would need big enough mental gymnastics as to have the Lost scriptwriters confused.
First of all, evolution dismisses the myth of Adam and Eve.
If there were no Adam and Eve, then there was never such a thing as the original sin. And without the original sin, then Jesus, the central mythological figure of Christianity, would have come to Earth to die for nothing, which would be really stupid (I mean, stupider than a pigeon having sex with a Palestinian girl and stupider than getting pissed at Judas —the guy who got Jesus to fulfill his destiny—, but I digress…).
And if there’s no original sin and Jesus came for nothing, then Earth is not a valley of tears, this material and natural world is not a place for us to come to suffer and be punished and tested, sex wouldn’t be taboo, and gay people would be left off the hook.
And if we’re not supposed to come here to suffer, then there’s no point in opposing euthanasia, stem cell research or drugs. If there was never a first human being, then the soul never enters the newly formed fetus, therefore, there would be no theological basis to ban abortion.
All the nefarious Catholic political stances would fall… but they wouldn’t and they won’t. Haters will hate, and bigots won’t care whether their ridiculous dogma is more or less incoherent than it is now.
How can I say this? Because we’re there already — the Catholic Church has said that the Adam and Eve story is an allegory. So, to be clear: they’ve been recruiting and indoctrinating newborns based on a metaphor of something that didn’t actually happen, and they’ve admitted so!
And, yet, they keep on opposing the most basic Human Rights and civil liberties on these grounds. So they don’t need theistic evolution. As long as there are emotionally broken and mentally unstable people who can hide behind the Catholic message, business is gonna be fine.
