For example, the Catholic Church relies on “original sin” — the stain on humanity caused by Adam and Eve — as an explanation for the existence of death and suffering, and for the necessity of universal redemption.

“God did not make death,” asserts the catechism of the Catholic Church. Instead, death resulted from human disobedience in Eden. This point also is stressed in the New Testament, Romans 5:12, “Sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned.”

The catechism describes original sin as “an essential truth of the faith,” and warns “we cannot tamper with the revelation of original sin without undermining the mystery of Christ.”

According to evolution, of course, death did not originate with human “sin,” but has existed since the beginning of life. Furthermore, there wasn’t a literal Eden Adam and Eve or magical hereditary taint requiring redemption from Jesus. Humans merely evolved from ape-like ancestors.

Evolution does far more than “tamper” with an “essential truth of the faith” — it exposes it as a baseless fairy tale.

In response, believers often retreat to nonliteral interpretations of Genesis and original sin. This has other ramifications.

For example, the Gospel of Luke’s genealogy of Jesus — tracing his ancestry back through Adam in a mere 77 generations — is a transparent fabrication if Adam is mythical.

Similarly, the Catholic “Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception” becomes nonsense if original sin is merely metaphorical. This belief, declared as an “infallible” truth by Pope Pius IX, asserts Mary, mother of Jesus, was uniquely “preserved immaculate from all stain of original sin.”

It gets worse when considering evolution and God. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, God is “unlimited in every kind of perfection … infinitely good, intelligent, wise, just.”

It’s inconceivable that such a being would choose evolution by natural selection as a creative mechanism for life. Natural selection is compassionless, inefficient and permeated with suffering. It’s a method a sadistic monster would gleefully employ, not an all-loving deity who is presumed capable of creating perfect worlds (e.g. heaven).

Charles Darwin was disturbed by this fact from the beginning: “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.” Similarly, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins noted, “During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease.”

If God created life through evolution, he is implicated as the direct architect of suffering. Physical afflictions and death cannot be blamed on human transgressions, rationalized away with specious claims of “free will,” or labeled the work of Satan. Suffering becomes intrinsic to God’s merciless and callous design.

Finally, evolution is an inherently directionless process — humans were never the inevitable end result. Our species arrived after eons of savage competition, bloody evolutionary dead ends and chaotic extinctions. We aren’t the pre-intended children of God, created in divine image, we’re merely lucky and ignoble primates whose ancestors survived long enough to reproduce.

Ultimately, the acceptance of science should never be predicated on how well it reconciles with popular mythology. Evolution is an established scientific fact. Pandering to religious opinion, as though it were relevant, is an outdated and distasteful way to promote the acceptance of science.

John Bice is a State News columnist. Reach him at bice@msu.edu.