Creation, Evolution and the Sanctity of Human Life
In the Beginning: The Catholic Understanding of Creation
The Catholic Church teaches that God is the ultimate source of all that exists. This is not simply the view that God ‘designed’ the universe like an architect working with existing materials — rather, Catholic theology holds that God created everything ex nihilo, meaning ‘out of nothing.’ This teaching goes back to the early Church, and the theologian Augustine of Hippo gave it precise formulation in his Confessions XII, 7, where he reasoned that if God made everything, he could not have needed any pre-existing material to work with. The very fact that something exists rather than nothing is entirely a gift of God.
Creation ex nihilo has two important consequences. First, it means the universe is entirely dependent on God: without God’s ongoing creative will, nothing would exist at all. Second, it means creation is fundamentally good — not a mistake or a prison for the soul, as some ancient philosophies taught, but a loving gift from a God whose goodness overflows into existence.
Two Genesis Accounts
The Bible opens with two distinct accounts of creation. The first, Genesis 1:1–2:3, is a structured, poetic account in which God creates over six days and rests on the seventh, declaring each stage ‘good’. The climax is the creation of humans in God’s imago Dei — in the image of God — as male and female. The second account, Genesis 2:4–24, is more personal and narrative in style: God forms the human being from the dust of the ground, breathes life into him, plants a garden, and forms a companion from his side.
The Catholic Church does not require a literal, seven-day reading of Genesis. Instead, the Church distinguishes between the religious truth these accounts communicate — that God is creator, humans are special, creation is good — and the question of how God brought creation about. This allows Catholic teaching to be open to scientific accounts of the universe’s origins while insisting that science and faith address different questions: science asks ‘how?’, theology asks ‘why?’ and ‘who?’
Genesis 1:1–2:3 gives a structured, six-day account emphasising God’s power and the goodness of creation. Genesis 2:4–24 gives a more personal account focusing on the human relationship with God and the earth. The Catholic Church reads both as conveying religious truth rather than scientific description.
Evolution: Science, Faith and Pope John Paul II
Charles Darwin’s work on natural selection proposed that species, including human beings, developed through gradual evolutionary processes over vast periods of time. Richard Dawkins, a contemporary evolutionary biologist, has argued from this that evolution is a ‘blind’ process with no direction or purpose — making the idea of a creator God unnecessary. This is sometimes called the ‘blind evolution’ view.
The Catholic Church’s position is more nuanced. In his 1996 Message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on the subject of evolution, Pope John Paul II stated (in paragraphs 3 and 4) that the theory of evolution is ‘more than a hypothesis’ given the convergence of evidence across multiple scientific fields, and that the Church can accept biological evolution as the means by which God brought about human life. However, he insisted that the spiritual dimension of the human person — the soul — is not the product of evolutionary processes but is directly created by God. This is sometimes called ‘theistic evolution’ or ‘planned evolution’: evolution is real, but it is God’s method, not a godless accident.
Catholic teaching holds that God is transcendent — utterly beyond and above the created order. God is not a being within the universe who can be observed by science; God is the ground of being on which everything else depends. This is why science and faith do not simply contradict each other: they operate at different levels of enquiry. Augustine’s insight in Confessions XII, 7, was that God must be the cause of all being, not a being among others. God’s omnipotence is not simply brute force but the power to bring existence itself into being from nothing.
The mystic Catherine of Siena, writing in her Dialogue (also known as the Dialogue of Divine Providence), expressed through a series of contemplative conversations with God that the soul’s deepest longing is for its creator, and that human dignity comes from the fact that God has made each soul in his own image. Catherine describes God as the source of all goodness and the soul as incomplete without its return to God — an insight that connects creation theology to ethics: if humans are made in God’s image, the way they are treated matters profoundly.
The Sanctity of Human Life
Catholic teaching holds that because human beings are made in the image of God, every human life has an intrinsic worth that cannot be measured in terms of usefulness, productivity or capacity. This is called the sanctity of human life. The principle is absolute: it applies from fertilisation to natural death, which is why the Catholic Church opposes both abortion and euthanasia.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church, at paragraph 2270, states that human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception. On euthanasia, Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Evangelium Vitae (1995), at paragraph 65, describes the intentional killing of a suffering person as gravely wrong — a violation of God’s sovereignty over life and death. The Church supports palliative care (relieving pain without hastening death) as an alternative to assisted dying.
Abortion is currently legal in Great Britain (up to 24 weeks under the Abortion Act 1967, as amended) and pro-life organisations such as the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) campaign against it. SPUC is not an official Church body, but many of its supporters are Catholics. The Catholic Church regards the embryo as a human person from fertilisation, so abortion at any stage is considered a gravely serious act. The Catechism (paragraph 2270) is clear that the life of the unborn person must be protected absolutely.
The Catholic Church also takes a strong position on stewardship and protecting the planet, recognising that care for creation flows from the same theology that grounds human dignity. Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’ (2015), at paragraph 49, calls on Catholics to hear ‘both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor’, linking environmental responsibility to Catholic social teaching.
Non-Religious Views: Humanist and Secular Challenges
Non-religious thinkers approach the questions of creation and human life very differently. Stephen Hawking argued that the laws of physics can explain the universe’s origin without invoking a creator, pointing to the Big Bang as a natural event not requiring divine action. Richard Dawkins argues that ‘blind’ evolution — driven by natural selection with no purpose or direction — makes the idea of a creator God unnecessary.
On the value of human life, the philosopher Peter Singer has challenged what he calls speciesism — the idea that human beings automatically deserve more protection than other sentient creatures simply because they are human. Singer argues that what matters morally is an organism’s capacity to feel pain and have interests, not whether it belongs to the human species. This leads him to conclude that in some circumstances, the life of a non-human animal with a rich conscious life may be more morally valuable than the life of a severely brain-damaged human infant.
The ‘quality of life’ argument, used by organisations such as Dignity in Dying (which advocates for assisted dying) and by those who support a right to choose regarding abortion, holds that what matters is not simply being alive but whether life is experienced as meaningful or involves excessive suffering. This contrasts sharply with the Catholic ‘sanctity of life’ position, which holds that life’s value is intrinsic rather than dependent on the person’s condition.
Peter Singer’s concept of ‘speciesism’ challenges the idea that human life is automatically more valuable than animal life. Catholics respond that the imago Dei gives human beings a unique dignity that goes beyond mere sentience or capacity for suffering.