Question on Catholic hermeneutics

Here's a question from an evangelical MoJ reader:

I'm sure you're familiar with all the problems and divisions Evangelicals have concerning science and scripture.  It seems that Catholics don't sweat trying to figure out things like exactly who Adam or Noah were or whether God may have created life through evolution (or maybe that's a misperception).   Why is that?  What kind of hermeneutic do Catholics employ here -- do Catholics take some of the early parts of scripture as only figurative?  Are there some official documents on hermeneutics that discuss this?

UPDATE:  Villanova law prof Mike Moreland responds:

It seems to me that Catholic biblical exegesis, since the time of Origen, Augustine, and Jerome, has distinguished between the literal and spiritual senses of scripture, with the spiritual sense commonly divided further among the allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical senses. Aquinas simply took the possibility of several senses of scripture for granted in Ia, q.1, a.10. Obviously, there's an enormous range of material to consider on such a complicated question, but a classic study is Henri de Lubac's multi-volume Exégèse médiévale, which Eerdmans brought out in a new edition and translation a few years ago (Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture, 2 vols.). The most important recent magisterial pronouncement, of course, is Dei Verbum, the Dogmatic Constitution on Revelation from Vatican II, though its discussion of the interpretation problem is brief.

Boston College law prof Greg Kalscheur, S.J. also recommends Dei Verbum, "especially Chapter III (Sacred Scripture: Its Divine Inspiration and its Interpretation) and a 1993 document from the Pontifical Biblical Commission, The Intepretation of the Bible in the Church, which can be found in vol. 23 of Origins, issue 29 (Jan. 6, 1994).  The latter document is a very helpful comprehensive discussion of the usefulness of a variety of hermeneutical methods."  Jonathan Watson recommends online resources here, here, and here.

UPDATE #2: Thanks to David Buysse for passing along this (somewhat puzzling, in my view) quote from Origen's De principiis, IV, II, ix:

Divine wisdom has arranged for certain stumbling-blocks and interruptions of the historical sense to be found therein, by inserting in the midst a number of impossibilities and incongruities, in order that the very interruption of the narrative might as it were present a barrier to the reader and lead him to refuse to proceed along the pathway of the ordinary meaning: and so, by shutting us out and debarring us from that, might recall us to the beginning of another way, and might thereby bring us, through the entrance of a narrow footpath, to a higher and loftier road and lay open the immense breadth of the divine wisdom.