AP Biology is making me question my faith...

If God chose to feed the flowers with light, why did he not do this for us?

Because God delights in variety.

It makes me question creationism.

Ok. Creationism is not a teaching of the Catholic faith.

I forgot which passage it was, but somewhere in Genesis, God says that we can see all living things with the naked eye.

Find the passage and then we can talk about it.

First: Don’t you like food? It’s a gift we get to enjoy all the different kinds of food.

Second: The Church is okay with evolution. There’s nothing wrong with it.

Finally: I don’t know what passage you’re talking about or the context

If you are unfamiliar with the concept, Darwin claimed we are descended from ancient monkeys from the Galapagos.

Hey man you might wanna re-read that chapter in your textbook before any tests.

Great questions. As someone trained in the scientific method (after AP Bio/Phys/Chem, I studied Computer Science at MIT and worked as a graphics programmer), I then went on become a Catholic priest, I hope to provide some clarity from both the science and faith perspectives.

1. Created material things necessarily have limitations (e.g. material things can break and decompose into parts, whereas purely spiritual beings cannot). There are tradeoffs between advantages and disadvantages for every ability of a creature.

Photosynthesis has a very limited rate of energy production, and large mobile creatures like mammals have a high rate of energy consumption. Adam Wu explains:

"For most animals, however, photosynthesis cannot work as the primary method of energy capture. The problem is rate. Photosynthesis can only work at a particular speed, so the amount of energy you can harvest is limited by that speed. Most animals have mobile lifestyles that use energy at a very high rate, a rate too high for photosynthesis alone to satisfy. And the structural adaptions (remember, eukaryotes are good at evolving structure but terrible at evolving chemistry) required to increase that rate directly interfere with the structural adaptions needed to be efficiently mobile. Think of a tree with its many outspread branches trying to move around in a forest without getting itself all tangled up. Ludicrously cumbersome.

- Quora, Why did the animal kingdom not evolve to be capable of photosynthesis?

God chose to create various orders of being, each with its own degree of perfection proper to its nature (from atoms to angels), along with laws governing such beings, to display His perfections through the whole. Thus, creation is symphonic - containing creatures with varying degrees of perfection - revealing God through the whole.

2. The teachings of the Catholic Church are harmonious with accepting evolutionary biology. Most Catholic theologians, including all recent Popes reject "Young Earth Creationism" and hold to a theistic evolutionist position in which God used a process involving random mutation and natural selection to create the diversity of life on earth.

I made a radio program on the issue called Reasons to Believe in Creation and Evolution. You can listen to the mp3 and download the detailed show notes PDF

3. I am unaware of any passage of Scripture that states "we can see all living things with the naked eye." There is one which says, "*God saw all that he had made, and it was very good"* (Gen 1:31). Perhaps if you find the specific passage, we can discuss its meaning, according to the way Catholic Church interprets Scripture.

It is important to interpret any text according to its literary genre, the particular style or mode of writing used by the author in its composition. For example, "Once upon a time..." means you're likely reading a fairy tale. “Four score and seven years ago…” indicates a historical narrative or a presidential address. “Your eyes are radiant pools…” indicates poetry. “There was a father with two sons…” is a parable.

The Church exhorts us to use literary genres to interpret the Scriptures: “In determining the intention of the sacred writers, attention must be paid... to ‘literary forms, for the fact is that truth is differently presented and expressed in the various types of historical writing, in prophetical and poetical texts’ and in other forms of literary expression.” - Vatican II, Dei Verbum, On Divine Revelation, 3, 12

For example, the literary genre of Genesis 1-11 makes use of symbolic language:

"The human person, created in the image of God, is a being at once corporeal and spiritual. The biblical account expresses this reality in symbolic language when it affirms that 'then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being' (Gen 2:7)." - Catechism of the Catholic Church, par. 362

The author is asserting truths about God, humanity and their relationship. The author is not making scientific claims, because the literary genre is not "science textbook".

OP’s post history from newest to oldest:

• Gmin7 chord gives my wife heartburn.

• What's a book I can give to my boyfriend that will hint to him that he needs to be a better communicator?

• This got me through my divorce thought I’d share. :(

Only a high schooler, and he’s already been twice married and celebrated an anniversary with his boyfriend. Astonishing.

Darwin claimed we are descended from ancient monkeys from the Galapagos

Not to be rude but that is so laughably not what Darwin or evolution says I have to assume you weren’t exactly paying attention.

All evolution says is that given time, mutations can build up in genetic material such that species can and will adapt to their environment. It does NOT say that we descended from monkeys, merely that we share a recent common ancestor. Same concept as you being related to your cousins but you aren’t descended from them.

Catholics have been leaders in science throughout the history of the world. Even Neil Degrasse Tyson has admitted that.

• ⁠Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543, the originator of the heliocentric universe and its mathematical justification — 1540) was a Catholic cleric. • ⁠Nicolas Steno (1638 – 1686, a Catholic Danish Bishop) is acknowledged to be one of the founders of modern stratigraphy and geology. • ⁠The Augustinian monk and abbot, Gregor Mendel (1822-1884), is acknowledged to be the founder of modern genetics. • ⁠Monsignor Georges Lemaître (a Belgian priest and colleague of Albert Einstein) is acknowledged to be the founder of contemporary cosmology through his discovery of the Big Bang Theory in 1927 • ⁠Currently, Nicanor Ausriaco, a biologist who got his Ph.D. from MIT and a Dominican friar, is doing a ton of great work on evolutionary biology. You might want to look into some of his works.

These are just a few.

Here are a couple books you might want to check out.

• ⁠Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism. By Alvin Plantinga

• ⁠The Genealogical Adam and Eve: The Surprising Science of Universal Ancestry. By S. Joshua Swamidass