If we assume the wiki link to be accurate, we have the RCC saying "We're okay with you believing in evolution if you concede that 'God-did-it' but we're also saying that Adam-n-Eve were for real".
This is an acceptable stance for y'all? Am I the only one here seeing some slightly conflicting statements.
The RCC's position isn't that "Adam and Eve were real as according to Genesis" (if that's what you meant), but that there was an 'original sin' event by someone who was the first human, even if that was millions of years ago. This also allows that the first human evolved from an earlier form.
From the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p1s2c1p7.htm
The account of the fall in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man.
It was known from the early 19th C that the earth was much older than 6000 years. A common figure of that time was that the earth was around 20 million years old. Young earth Fundamentalism is
a modern phenomenon. The Fundamentalists broke away from the mainstream churches, rather than the other way around.
Christians helped to develop the Theory of Evolution. From the link you yourself gave earlier:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_and_the_Catholic_Church
Catholics' contributions to the development of evolutionary theory included those of the Jesuit-educated French scientist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) and of the Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel (1822-1884). Lamarck developed Lamarckism, the first coherent theory of evolution, proposing in Philosophie Zoologique (1809) and other works his theory of the transmutation of species. He constructed a genealogical tree to show the genetic connection of organisms...
On the Protestant side, there was Asa Gray:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asa_Gray
Gray and Joseph Dalton Hooker went to visit Richard Owen at London's Hunterian Museum in January 1839.[113] Gray met Charles Darwin during lunch that day at Kew Gardens, apparently introduced by Hooker. Darwin found a kindred spirit in Gray, as they both had an empirical approach to science, and first wrote to him in April 1855.[114] During 1855–1881 they exchanged about 300 letters...
Darwin published On the Origin of Species on November 24, 1859.[125] The first printing was 1,250 copies, with some having been sent to America via ship; one of those was for Gray. Gray's copy arrived just before Christmas, and he read it between Christmas and New Year's.[126] Since there was no international copyright law at the time, Gray worked to protect the book from publishing piracy. According to American law at the time, a copyright could only be secured by an American edition being published by an American citizen, and royalties were not required to be paid to the author.[127] Gray arranged the first American edition of On the Origin of Species and was able to negotiate royalties on Darwin's behalf...
Darwin had Gray in mind when he wrote, "It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent theist & an evolutionist."
It's a betrayal of the hard work done by our ancestors to misrepresent, either deliberately or not, the history of that work, regardless of whether they are atheists or theists.
