Supreme Creationist

“Class of 2015, you should not leave Stone Ridge High School thinking that you face challenges that are at all, in any important sense, unprecedented,” Scalia said, adding that “Humanity has been around for at least some 5,000 years or so, and I doubt that the basic challenges as confronted are any worse now, or alas even much different, from what they ever were.”

Humanity began to develop much more than 5,000 years ago. Early human ancestors began to diverge from the chimpanzee lineage about six million years ago. The first members of the species Homo sapiens are believed to have lived in Africa about 100,000 years ago, and cave paintings and other evidence of human culture exist that are believed to have been created 50,000 years ago.

Young earth creationists generally believe that God created the earth within the last 10,000 years. This is a fringe view, however, within Scalia’s Catholic faith. In 1950, Pope Pius XII wrote in a letter to bishops that the Catholic church “does not forbid” research or discussions regarding “the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter.” More recently, in 1996, Pope John Paul II wrote a similar letter to bishops saying that evolution is “more than a hypothesis.”