This is a thoughtful text, given by Dr. Stacy Trasancos and inspired by the thoughts of Stanley L. Jaki:
“Fear not evolution. In fact, go further. Catholics should not frown when people say humans evolved from atoms and primates. We should add that we evolved from the beginning. Atoms constitute the matter that makes us up, and every atom in our bodies came from the Earth, whose particles seem to have come from supernovas, whose matter and energy probably came from the earliest moments after the Big Bang. Did you ever wonder what path the ever-fluctuating particles of your body traversed in the last 4.5 billion years on Earth and the 13.8 billion years in the universe? Did you ever wonder how many other bodies all the uncountable particles in your body have occupied? (Never mind. That can be gross.)
Stacy Trasancos, A 10-point primer on Faith and Science, 2016
……
But evolutionary science cannot identify a first man, first woman, or original sin committed in a moment, because evolution deals with populations over thousands and millions of years. Expecting evolution to find our first parents is like expecting a bulldozer to find the first two grains of sand on a beach. Not only is it the wrong tool, it is the wrong scientific concept. We do not think of beaches forming one grain of sand at a time. So if Adam and Eve began to live, literally, as a fully grown man and woman through a miraculous act of God, or if they came to exist some other way, science can only shrug and keep on digging. A Catholic can both explore what evolutionary science has to reveal and, simultaneously, believe in the reality of Adam and Eve. What a Catholic, or anyone else, cannot do is expect evolutionary science to find them any more than chemistry or physics can find the exact location of two electrons on your nose.”
