Thanks to all those in this thread doing God's work.
The world is a slightly better place because of contributions to the Catholic cause like this thread. I mean that sincerely.
All I have to contribute is --
I have watched a ton of videos lately on "Answers in Genesis" about Creation, evolution, young earth, DNA, man's history, etc. and although it's a protestant group, they made points that a Catholic can take as-is and use! For example, the fact that there was no death before Original Sin. If the fossil record is truly the millions of years before Man's monkey ancestor was "upgraded" (given an immortal, rational soul) by the direct intervention of God, then there was PLENTY of cancer, sickness, and death BEFORE Original Sin. Which is heresy.
Long story short, Fr. Robinson (et al) are much more unforgivable than priests teaching *the same exact material* in 1940 or 1950. Because we simply didn't have the truth staring us in the face back then. We didn't know what went on in a cell. We didn't know anything about DNA or genetics compared with today. AND Catholics in the 1950's were truly taken off guard, they thought that the scientists TRULY had proven evolution. So they just salvaged their religion, saying "Well, I know God exists, so He must have used evolution..."
But such a position would be ridiculous today. We know better.
* We know what Darwin and all his peers thought a cell was in his day (basically a homogeneous, gelatinous blob)
* Darwin expected transitional fossils (stages between species, proving evolution) to be found -- they never were
* We had the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980, which caused "millions of years" of activity to happen in just weeks or months. We basically had God demonstrate to us just how quickly certain geological features can be created.
* We know the statistical probability of how long it would take for a single protein to be created by random chance. Basically: impossible.
* Natural selection (original wolf-like dog --> Poodle) is NOT the same as creating new information and a new species. You can get a poodle from the original Dog kind, but you breed OUT tons of information to get the degenerate result: a poodle. You can't go from poodle --> original Dog. A new species involves new features, new programming, new INFORMATION. One of the atheists weakpoints: show me any observable mechanism whereby nature ADDS new information to the DNA of an animal. I'll wait. All they have is "mutation" but mutations are *always* harmful. You don't get wings on a lizard all the sudden.
* And speaking of wings, there's the Irreducable Complexity argument. Certain "features" or parts of an animal all have to be created AT ONCE, ON DAY ONE or they don't work AND the animal doesn't survive to reproduce. Check and mate, evolution. Like the false "Jello cell" model, we might think, at first glance, that "wings" are something simple. But they're anything but simple. They involves whole SYSTEMS. You're talking hundreds of moving parts, including the entire creature's bone structure and density.
For example, that one beetle that mixes chemicals to create an explosion to defend itself. Go watch a video or read an article about that little wonder. If the whole system didn't work on DAY ONE, the beetles would explode, destroy themselves, etc. and NO MORE BEETLES. They wouldn't survive to the next generation to proceed with iterative (step-by-step) development by blind chance. They wouldn't get that chance. Exploded, dead beetles don't reproduce. Irreducable Complexity.