This came up in a recent Pit Thread…? http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=178173
It was my understanding that Catholics, believing in Creationism, also believe that the world is roughly only 4000 years old.
How does that make them “not imcompatible”? Evolutionary theory dictates that humans evolved over millions of years… not 4000.
What am I missing?
Catholics don’t believe the creation story in the OT needs to be taken literally. Catholics don’t read a lot of the Bible literally and this creates a lot of friction with fundamentalist groups.
Basically, as long as you acknowledge God as the “prime mover”, the mechanism involved doesn’t matter.
Wait a second. I’m confused. Are you saying that all Catholics are Creationists? Evolution is compatible with Catholocism. Most Catholics are not concerned with the “how” of church history, but more with the “why” of church history. I’m a Catholic(well kinda, went to catholic school and all), and where I am from, most Catholics believe in Evolution and see no problem. The only people that I know that talk about Creationism are hardcore Protestants. But anyway, I believe the Pope has said that it doesn’t matter how God created man, it is only important that we acknowledge that God did create man.(sorry no cite, i’m a loser)
The only argument that I have heard from a Christian against evolution is that human suffering cannot exist before original sin and that if the world is millions of years old, suffering would have existed before OS and everything would be a crock. Or something like that, sorry, I wasn’t really listening to the people arguing 
Pope John Paul II declared in 1996 (IIRC) that evolution is acceptable.
A quick search on the Web reveals Truth cannot contradict Truth
According to that cite, it happened much earlier than I thought:
I also believe that the RCC is okay with modern Cosmology, which requires a several-billion-year-old universe. However, the Church does not consider itself an authority in the field of science, so it doesn’t come out and say that evolution is right or wrong, leaving that up to someone else.
Well, John Paul II noted in 1996 that the RCC was not opposed to the Theory of Evolution as a description of how life develops on earth, but he was not setting any new trends–
Pius XII expressed a similar concept in 1950, but he was not changing Church teachings–
The Catholic Encyclopedia (written between 1909 and 1919), had two separate articles on Evolution, noting that the scientific work should be accepted as science, as long as one did not draw the conclusion that, somehow, the science had precluded God as the Author:
Catholics and Evolution
Evolution (History and Scientific Foundation)
(Note that the second article was written before Dobzhansky and others had set the Theory of Evolution on the solid footing now called “neo-Darwinism” in the late 1920s.)
It should be noted that the 4004BC date was calculated by an Anglican (hence, Protestant) Bishop, not a Roman Catholic Hierarch or theologian.
Traditional “Anno Mundi” calculations actually do not agree with each other.
I would have to disagree with this statement. Most Catholics take most of the Bible literally, except that the creation stories are generally thought of as symbolic (ie, parables).
As long as you believe that God created humanity, the method is unimportant.
The Catholic Church has long taught that God is capable of using metaphor and allegory to make His point. They also believe that a simple literal reading of Scripture is likely to lead an uneducated person into error.
That is, as I understand it, one of the major sticking points between the Church and some Protestant denominations. The Protestants seem to feel that God will not allow a person to misinterpret His Word, whereas Catholics recognize that any individual’s capacity for self-delusion is unlimited.
Please note: some Protestant denominations. The majority of Protestants are not Fundamentalists or Biblical literalists. The worldwide Anglican communion certainly isn’t; the same is true of several other mainstream Protestant denominations.
DrFidelius has it down.
Not just Catholicism, but as Steve says, mainstream Christian denominations around the world have accepted the conclusions of science and found no objection, as long as nobody tried to say God was disproven. It’s little commented that within a century of the whole Galileo flap, the RCC had turned an almost full 180 on its attitude towards experimental science (though still concerned about laypeople getting the information unfiltered by authority).
Now, Catholic doctrine does include “Original Sin” as a real phenomenon involving the common human ancestors (referred to in the Bible as Adam and Eve), but again it’s not literally the eating of a fruit in an orchard located somewhere in Northern Iraq. It is nonspecifically described in the 1994 Catechism as a willful rupture of an existing state of harmony between the CHA’s and God, by deciding to place their own judgement of good vs. bad above God’s.
BTW, the belief that literal reading of scripture by an unprepared or unassisted layman is likely to lead to error is also held by various branches of Judaism IIRC.
I’m a Presbyterian, attended Catholic schools, grades K-12. Both churches teach that true science and true religion never conflict. I was taught evolution in school and my church accepts it.
Frankly, I don’t understand how anyone who believes in an omnipotent god can also believe god couldn’t do things any way god wanted to, whether we understand it or not.