We are creatures made up of spirit and matter, body and soul. Our spirit is the immaterial soul, which our senses cannot feel. But our faith tells us it is there. So by way of our soul, we have some share in the nature of the angels.

We can see that we have a spiritual soul in this way. Each of us has a concept or idea of dog in general. Our mental dog is not high or low, long or short, sharp-nosed or pug-nosed. If we hired the very best artist, offered him any sum and his choice of mediums: oil paints, carving, casting etc., to make an image of our dog, we would get nothing. For no material can hold this concept. So that in us which holds it is not material, but spiritual. This is all the more obvious in our concepts of goodness, truth, justice etc.

Our soul can exist apart from the body. It will never die, because being spiritual, it has no parts, and so cannot come apart. It will live forever in happiness beyond what we can imagine, or in the reverse, eternal damnation. The Book of Wisdom 3:1-4 says: "The souls of the just are in the hand of God, and no torment will touch them. They seemed to die, to the eyes of foolish people, and their departure was considered evil . . . but they are in peace. Their hope is full of immortality."

Each human soul is directly created by God Himself, it is not produced by or derived from the parents. The parents produce only the human body, and do even that, only with the help of God's power. The uniting of the soul with the body is called infusion. Modern biology knows that at the moment of conception, when the 23 chromosomes from each parent join, the complete genetic pattern of a unique being is already present. So abortion is gravely sinful.

Many today think that the human body evolved from lower beings. If they say that this happened without any help from God, it is atheistic evolution. Not only theology rejects that foolish idea, even mere reason rejects it: it supposes that matter could lift itself up and up higher by its shoelaces, as it were, with no outside source for the higher levels of complexity.

Pope Pius XII in Humani generis in 1950 told us we may consider as a possible--not as something proved--that God established some natural laws that would bring about this evolution from lower to higher. Even so, the whole process would depend on God's creative power. This is true especially of the human soul, which, being spiritual, cannot have evolved. We would call this theistic evolution, that is evolution involving the power of God at so many points.

To be continued…