“For God nothing is impossible” (see Luke 1:37).
He is almighty. Anyone who calls on God in need believes that he is all-powerful. God created the world out of nothing. He is the Lord of history. He guides all things and can do everything. How he uses his omnipotence is of course a mystery. Not infrequently people ask, Where was God then? Through the prophet Isaiah he tells us, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways” (Is 55:8). Often God’s omnipotence is displayed in a situation where men no longer expect anything from it. The powerlessness of Good Friday was the prerequisite for the Resurrection.
Does science make the Creator superfluous?
No. The sentence “God created the world” is not an outmoded scientific statement. We are dealing here with a theological statement, therefore a statement about the divine meaning (theos = God, logos = meaning) and origin of things.
The creation account is not a scientific model for explaining the beginning of the world. “God created the world” is a theological statement that is concerned with the relation of the world to God. God willed the world; he sustains it and will perfect it. Being created is a lasting quality in things and a fundamental truth about them.
Can someone accept the theory of evolution and still believe in the Creator?
Yes. Although it is a different kind of knowledge, faith is open to the findings and hypotheses of the sciences.
Theology has no scientific competence, and natural science has no theological competence. Natural science cannot dogmatically rule out the possibility that there are purposeful processes in creation; conversely, faith cannot define specifically how these processes take place in the course of nature’s development. A Christian can accept the theory of evolution as a helpful explanatory model, provided he does not fall into the heresy of evolutionism, which views man as the random product of biological processes. Evolution presupposes the existence of something that can develop. The theory says nothing about where this “something” came from. Furthermore, questions about the being, essence, dignity, mission, meaning, and wherefore of the world and man cannot be answered in biological terms. Just as “evolutionism” oversteps a boundary on the one side, so does creationism on the other. Creationists naively take biblical data literally (for example, to calculate the earth’s age, they cite the six days of work in Genesis 1).
Contributed by Fr. Jesus Galindo OFM
From: Catechism in a Year
Cathechism of the Catholic Church
Santuario de San Antonio Parish 