The results of the evil predations of materialistic evolution are a delusion shared by far too many - especially Catholics.
ABS will post some copy and paste sections about Adam from Father Walter Farrell's wonderful "A Companion to the Summa" as an antidote to that poison which has infected the intellects of modern man.
EVE'S FAMILY AT HOME
(Q. 94-103)
World memory of an age of gold
THE statement of man's evolution has been hurled at our minds so constantly and from so many different directions that we are apt to overlook the fact that this idea is fairly recent. Men did not always maintain that man began from a woefully inferior status and gradually worked up to his present perfection like the hero of a success story. For centuries men cherished a precious memory. They told, with poignant regret, the story of an initial happiness and perfection that was only gradually lost as men descended step by step to the present miserable state; whatever the century this "present" represented, it was always a miserable state for the old days were always best.
Tradition and mythology of Greeks and Romans
There are written records of such a memory dating back as far as nine hundred years before Christ, Hesiod's Works and Days. According to that first of the Greek poems, the days of men were fittingly divided into ages of gold, of silver, of brass and of iron That first golden age, an age quite distinct from the age of the heroes of Greek mythology, was a moral paradise; there way no sin in it, no injustice, no moral evil whatsoever, but all men lived in a delightful peace and harmony.
Much later, the Roman poet Ovid gave evidence of the vitality of this ancient tradition by recording the fume division of the days of men, insisting again on the golden age as an age of faith and justice. Of course physically it measured up to an Italian ideal an eternal spring with gentle breezes, rich harvests springing up spontaneously, with none of the unpleasantness of cold, ice or snow. The degeneration of man goes on steadily until the iron age (the "present" of Ovid) is reached. He describes it thus: "The last age was of hard and stubborn iron. Instantly all kinds of wickedness broke out in this age, of a more degenerate turn: modesty, truth, and honor fled, in place of which succeeded fraud, deceit, treachery, violence, and an insatiable itch to amass wealth."
Place of moral factors in this tradition
Throughout all these ages of the pagan tradition of an original state of perfection of men, the emphasis was steadily centered on moral factors. There was no question of man being driven down or up by blind, irresistible forces that left him stripped of praise or blame, even though the loss of the golden age was due to an overthrow of the reigning god, Saturn, and his replacement by Jupiter. The perfection of the golden age was seen as essentially a moral perfection; it depended on the absence of evil and was characterized by a profound peace and a harmony that echoed the deepest wishes of the human heart. In that age, men were happy because they were good; as that perfection became a memory, sin made its entrance on the stage of the world.
Philosophical versions of this original age
A world of hate and strife (Hobbes)
The precious memory was definitely abandoned when the renaissance philosophers attempted to picture the natural state of man in such a way as to support a political theory. The exceedingly fearful and timorous Hobbes, championing the English monarchy's power and protection, insisted that all men are essentially bitter enemies because their happiness consists in exceeding their neighbors. By nature, all were equal, all self-seeking; so that the natural state of man was one of terror, war and a supremacy held by might -- a condition of things that was particularly terrifying to a man like Hobbes. Men finally realized the futility of all this and the necessity of a common power to keep all in awe; they ceded their rights to the sovereign, not by a contract with the sovereign but by a contract between the subjects. They are now completely subject to the king.
A world of unrestricted individualism (Rousseau)
Rousseau went to the other extreme, insisting that men did not need a government to give them peace and happiness; all they needed was to be let alone. The theory of Rousseau might well have been expected. It was one of the periodic swings of the pendulum that had been throwing its shadow back and forth from the beginning. By one swing the position was reached that man was badly damaged somewhere along the line, some integral part of his nature had corrupted so that, as he now exists, he is essentially evil. At the opposite extreme, it was insisted that man had absolutely nothing the matter with him, needed no help from anyone in any line; he was in as good condition now as he ever was, as perfect as the day he was made. Rousseau, clumsy, ill at ease in society, plagued by complexes of inferiority and persecution, not only championed an absolute individual liberty and an emotional participation of life untrammeled, he attacked all authority. It is precisely because of authority, discipline and convention that man has been ruined; these things must be done away with. In his original state, man-was good, as was nature and God. Man's original peace, goodness and innocence have been destroyed by human institutions. Both Rousseau and Hobbes denied the social nature of man in his original state; the one picturing society as a corrupter of human nature, the other as an artificial savior of man from himself.
The modern world of mud
With the advent of a thoroughly materialistic modern philosophy, the happy memory of an original state of perfection of man was doomed. What perfection man can claim must find its source in a purely material universe that certainly did not produce effects above the material. Man was an integral part of a completely material world, to be explained, examined and evaluated as any other part of that universe. Thus man is pictured as a product of an evolving process within that material universe, a purely material product whose original state was at worst a primeval slime, at best a brute animality; his present position is not due to a degeneration or a fall, but to centuries of a steady climb that has left him qualitatively the same as his animal ancestors.
Sin, faith, justice, morality had no part to play in the origins of man, as they have no serious part to play in his present life. The change (for the better) that has taken place in man explains itself; for it was the very process of change that brought about the improvement. Man is the result of a blind necessity, of the interaction of natural forces that need no explanation. No credit can be given him for his present or past condition; no hope can be held out for his personal future. He is caught in a relentless tide of progress without a goal and without a beginning; in that progress he is an unimportant phase.
Principles for the investigation of the original state of man
St. Thomas was familiar with the ancestors of the renaissance philosophers; he knew materialism in its earliest forms; the dreams and memories of the pagans were packed away on the shelves of his memory. But when he came to treat of the original state of man, he resorted to none of these; rather he was content to go to the factual account in the Book of Genesis, examine it, analyst draw out its implications, fill in its blank spots with reasonable hypotheses to give us a full picture of man in his first home.
The integrity of nature
Before plunging into the story itself, St. Thomas lays down some fundamental principles that give his whole treatment a unity which makes its rational character stand out strikingly. The first principle he insists on is that nothing that was natural to man was lost by man's sin. When we speak of fallen nature or of the wounds suffered by nature through the sin of Adam, we do not mean that human nature suffered a bad smash-up and was condemned to hobble through the ages a hopeless cripple. True enough, human nature was injured, but in the same sense that a man is injured when he is left naked by the roadside. Objectively, he is in the same condition as a man who has never had any clothes, though he certainly feels a great deal worse. So human nature now is in the same condition it would have been had Adam never received any extraordinary gifts; but it has been stripped of those gifts which Adam did receive. This is not a gratuitous assumption. There are sins enough in the world to give us material for a thorough check on the fact that sin, in itself, does nothing to destroy the integrity of human nature.
Cause and essential notion of superiority of the original state
By way of a second principle, St. Thomas points out that the cause of the original perfection of man was his original justice. That is, man was created in sanctifying grace with his soul completely subject to God; this subjection extended right on down so that man's sensible appetite was subject to his reason, and the physical world was subject to man. These two, original justice and original perfection, went hand in hand in Adam. They were, however, quite capable of separation, for one was within the order of nature, though not of human nature, while the other was above all nature. So, in the Blessed Virgin Mary, there was the same supernatural perfection and perfect justice as in Adam, with the same complete subjection of her soul to God; but without the accompanying extraordinary gifts of Adam's original perfection.