If evolution is true, then there is no actual distinction between humans and other animals. The line drawn between humans and our more primitive ape ancestors is completely arbitrary.
My
point no. 3 - the black-and-white distinction you draw between humans and other animals, in terms of physiology and material processes, is unnecessary. What differentiates humans from animals, in the Christian mindset, is our rational and spiritual soul created in the image of God.
Since he recognized that we are formed out of the same basic materials (i.e. carbon) of which all creatures are made out of, St. Thomas Aquinas, in the 13th century, had no qualms about categorizing human beings as animals in the biological sense:
"But it was fitting that the human body should be made of the four elements, that man might have something in common with the inferior bodies, as being something between spiritual and corporeal substances." (ST P1 Q91 A1)
"Socrates and Plato ... have the same human species; others differ specifically but are generically the same, as man and donkey have the same genus animal." (De Principiis Naturae 45)
The Bible likewise emphasizes that humans are not fundamentally different from other animals in terms of biological function:
Ecclesiastes 3:18-22
18 I said in my heart with regard to human beings that God is testing them to show that they are but animals. 19 For the fate of humans and the fate of animals is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and humans have no advantage over the animals; for all is vanity. 20 All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again.
Our primary and intrinsic difference, in the theological sense, resides in the fact that God infused within us a rational soul (consciousness) that will return to Him at death, as the selfsame scriptural text affirms later in the narrative:
Ecclesiastes 12:7
the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.
Point no.4 - the autonomy of the natural order and of processes like natural selection are not incompatible with belief in an omnipresent Divine Being as the ultimate Creator of the universe, unless one is wedded to a belief in God as some kind of tyrannical micro-manager.
Your perspective here disregards the crucial contribution that Christian doctrine made to primitive science, in enabling natural philosophy to move away from the pagan belief in
'gods' being causally involved in the everyday operation of the natural world. The father of Hellenic philosophy, Thales, had believed that:
- The magnet has a soul [which moves it]. (De Anima 405a19)
- All things are full of gods. (De Anima 411a7)
Plato therefore imagined that stars and planets were divine beings, while Aristotle regarded them as rational souls made out of luminous
aether, since his cosmology required an individual unmoved mover for each sphere.
Early Christians rejected this worldview, as can be seen from the sixth century Christian philosopher
John Philoponus (born around 490, dead sometime in the 570s):
John Philoponus facts, information, pictures | Encyclopedia.com articles about John Philoponus
Philoponus’ main significance for the history of science lies in his being, at the close of antiquity, the first thinker to undertake a comprehensive and massive attack on the principal tenets of Aristotle’s physics and cosmology, an attack unequaled in thoroughness until Galileo.
Philoponus’ philosophy of nature was the first to combine scientific cosmology and monotheism. The monotheistic belief in the universe as a creation of God and the subsequent assumption that there is no essential difference between things in heaven and on earth, as well as the rejection of the belief in the divine nature of the stars, had already been expressed in the Old Testament and was taken over by Christianity and later by Islam.
The monotheistic dogma of the creation of the universe ex nihilo by the single act of a God who transcends nature implied, for Philoponus, the creation of matter imbued with all the physical faculties for its independent development according to the laws of nature, a development that he conceived of as extending from the primary chaotic state to the present organized structure of the universe.
This deistic conception of a world that, once created, continues to exist automatically by natural law, was completely foreign to the classical Greek view, which never considered the gods to be “above nature” but associated them with nature, reigning not above it but within it. The shock created by this conception of Philoponus’ is reflected in the words of Simplicius, who is bewildered by the idea of a god who acts only at the single moment of creation and then hands over his creation to nature.
Likewise, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas both believed in a concept known as the
actualization of potential.
In
De Trinitate and his
Literal Commentary on Genesis, St. Augustine interprets Genesis as God having endowed creation with the capacity to develop - that is, a view compatible with, albeit different from, our contemporary understanding of evolution. Augustine employs the image of a dormant 'seed' to aid his readers in understanding this point, what Alistair Grath refers to as Augustine's belief in "
divinely embedded causalities which emerge or evolve at a later stage." See:
Augustine, Genesis, & the Goodness of Creation | Henry Center
Augustine also argues for a notion of “seminal seeds.” His argument is that, when God created the world, he both created actual “stuff”—animals, vegetation, etc., but also created seminal seeds by which (over time) “new” things would come forth.
Thus, at some point after the original creation, we really do see “new” creatures, “new” vegetable life, and so on. But when animals reproduce, or when the seeds of a plant lead to the existence of a new plant, there is no autonomous creating going on.
Rather, God is still the ultimate creator, because within humans, or within other living things, exist these seminal seeds created by God, and only through these seminal seeds does new life come into being.
In the
Summa Theologica, Aquinas likewise argues in favour of the view that God created all things to have potential:
On the day on which God created the heaven and the earth, He created also every plant of the field, not, indeed, actually, but “before it sprung up in the earth,” that is, potentially.…All things were not distinguished and adorned together, not from a want of power on God’s part, as requiring time in which to work, but that due order might be observed in the instituting of the world.
It is for this reason that the Catholic Church is utterly comfortable with the idea of the human
body evolving from antecedent biological forms, so long as one continues to uphold the
special creation of the rational
soul by God and its infusion into the corporeal form. Pope Pius XII thus declared in 1950 that "
the teaching authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions . . . take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter—[but] the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God" (Pius XII,
Humani Generis 36).