Creation and Evolution           The Catholic Church understands the creation accounts in the Bible, the recent scientific theories about the origin of the universe and the development of life on earth in a particular way. This enables it to take a position that neither rejects God's creative action nor evolution.     What do scientists tell us about evolution? Here is one overview: The universe, beginning with a Big Bang, is between 12-15 billion years old. Our solar system and earth was formed about 4 ½ billion years ago. Richard Leaky, a renowned anthropologist, acknowledges there is little agreement among scientists about the detail of human prehistory but there is a good deal of agreement about the broad outline. He identifies four main stages: About 7 million years ago ape like species began to walk upright. Between 2 and 5 million years ago there were multiple species of hominoid creatures. Between 2 and 3 million years ago one group of hominoid creatures developed a significantly larger brain. Between 34,000 and 500,000 years ago modern humans (Homo Sapiens) appeared. In 1996, Pope John Paul II said, "evolution is more than a hypothesis". How then does the Church understand the issue of evolution? In dealing with the question of creation and evolution, the Church teaches that God is the Creator, that is to say the author of the Big Bang. The six days of creation do not have to be interpreted as 24 hour days, but can be seen as evolutionary periods of varying length. The human soul is not something inserted into the human body like an external object. Rather the human soul signifies and enables a person to be self-reflectively intelligent and to choose how they relate to the world around them, to other people and to God, the ultimate source of the Universe. Adam and Eve are the names we give to the first humans who experienced this kind of awareness and of ability to choose. From an evolutionary perspective God is not seen as a God of "Zaps" or an interventionist such as the early Greeks thought but as the One who works within and through the unfolding world, blessing it with graciousness and goodness and guiding it to the fullness of life. Thus the Church would not accept an evolutionary theory that explains our world and human life as the result of random chance. The Church can accept the notion of a developing universe - even if this involves catastrophic events such as the extinction of the dinosaurs - as an acceptable way of reconciling the teachings of evolutionary scientists with the religious teachings of the Bible.