As Pope Benedict pointed out in his book Christianity and the crisis of cultures, the proper attitude to take toward Scripture is the Catholic view which isn't always advertised well even by Catholics. Galileo wrote a letter in 1615 illustrating the perspective quite well:
And if the same Holy Spirit has intentionally refrained from teaching us
propositions of this kind, that is, of astronomy, since these have nothing to do
with his own true intention-which is our salvation-how can one then assert that
it is absolutely necessary to hold this position rather than that, so that one
is de fide, the other erroneous?... Here, I would repeat something I once
heard from an ecclesiastical personage of the most eminent rank, namely, that it
is the intention of the Holy Spirit to teach us how to go to heaven, not how
heaven goes.
So while I was living my career as a paleoanthropologist, I really had no trouble with the science of the origins of life and the universe in history, and believing in Scripture. But when someone would ask about when those hominids received a soul, I would just give a short stock answer that was only partly satisfying: "at some point God injected a soul into the hominid."I have just finished reading a book by CS Lewis called The Problem of Pain. And in the fleshes out a little bit the whole concept of God injecting a soul:
For long centuries God perfected the animal form which was to become the vehicle
of humanity in the image of himself. He gave it hands whose thumb could be
applied to each of the fingers, and joggers and teeth and throat capable of
articulation, and a brain sufficiently complex to execute all the material
motions whereby rational thought is incarnated. The creature may have
existed for ages in this state before it became man: it may even have been
clever enough to make things which a modern archaeologist would accept as proof
of its humanity. But it was only an animal because all its physical and
psychical processes were directed to purely material and natural ends.
Then, in the fullness of time, God caused it to descend upon this organism, both
on its psychology and physiology, a new kind of consciousness which could say I
and me, which could look upon itself as an object, which new God, which could
make judgments of truth, beauty, and goodness, and which was so far above time
that it could perceive time flowing past... Judged by his artifacts, or
perhaps even by his language, this blessed creature was, no doubt, a
savage. All that experience and practice can teach he had still to learn:
if he chipped flints, he doubtless chipped them clumsily enough. He may
have been utterly incapable of expressing in conceptual form his Paradisal
experience. All that is quite irrelevant. From our own childhood we
remember that before our elders fought us capable of understanding anything, we
already had spiritual experience as fewer and as momentous as any we have
undergone since, though not, of course, as rich in factual context. From
Christianity itself we learn that there is a level-in the long run the only
level of importance-on which the learned and the adult have no advantage at all
over the simple and the child. I do not doubt that if the Paradisal man
could now appear among us, we should regard him as an utter savage, a creature
to be exploited or, at best, patronized. Only one or two, and those the
holiest among us, would glance the second time at the naked, shaggy-bearded,
slow-spoken creature; but day, after a few minutes, would fall at his feet.
Provides some pretty stimulating ideas doesn't it?
