What was the dogma of special creation?

Answer 1

In the Western world, Special Creation was the dominant theory of the origin of the world and life in it from the sixteenth century until the nineteenth century when it was supplanted by scientific theories, particularly the Theory of Evolution.
Special Creation was given special impetus in the 1880s in an attempted response to the Theory of Evolution. Some Creationists asserted that the the universe and all life in it were created by God in a very short space of time, a few thousand years ago, just as they believed that Genesis describes creation. They say that Genesis is an accurate historical account of creation of the universe over the course of six twenty-four hour days.
The Roman Catholic Church sees "special creation" somewhat differently. The Pontifical Biblical Commission issued a decree ratified by Pope Pius X on June 30, 1909 that "special creation" only applied to man, not to the other species. In 2004, the International Theological Commission, under the presidency of Cardinal Ratzinger, published a paper in which it accepted the scientific explanation of the history of the universe, commencing in the Big Bang about 15 billion years ago, and the evolution of all life on earth, including humans, from the micro organisms commencing about 4 billion years ago. In modern Catholic teaching, the doctrine of "special creation" refers only to the origin of the human soul.