Did We Evolve A Soul?

by Michael Shackleton · October 3, 2016

Further to your article of August 17 about evolution: at which point did humans acquire a soul? Since evolution is a gradual process over time and not a sudden event, did we gradually evolve a soul too?

Darwin’s theory of evolution proposes that certain species of living organisms have developed from earlier forms, especially by natural selection.

The immediate implication is that such an organism is made up of physical or material parts that are able, over time, to vary along certain lines determined by both their nature and their ability to adapt to their environment in order to survive and reproduce. The human species in this context, has evolved from pre-existing organisms to the state in which it is constituted now. The theory makes no reference to the human soul.

The Church teaches and believes that the soul does not evolve from the living human organism. It cannot do so for the simple reason that it has no parts that will gradually vary and change it into a new species.

The soul is of a spiritual nature, having no physical or material existence. So we believe the soul is the human person’s vital principle enabling us to transcend the totality of things. Unlike the body, it is incorruptible. Yet it has an existence that is in an essential relation with the body so that the human person, created in the image of God, is a being at once spiritual and corporeal.

The soul, since it has no way of developing from what already exists physically, is created directly by God. This is illustrated in Genesis 2 where God breathes into man’s nostrils a breath of life. The newly conceived human foetus receives this breath of life in the same way.

The Catechism states that every spiritual soul is created immediately by God and is not produced by the parents; it is immortal and does not perish when it separates from the body at death, and it will be reunited with the body at the final Resurrection (365).

Pope John Paul II in April, 1986, speaking about the origin of man in regard to the body by means of the theory of evolution, said that the soul, on which our humanity definitively depends, cannot emerge from matter because of its spiritual nature.

When the physical body dies, its constituent parts disintegrate. The soul, however, having no parts, survives bodily corruption. Updated from 2011