Did God Create Animals to Be Eaten as Food? Part 03

It's 9:33 AM on Saturday and I have just returned from a 55-minute ruck with a #15-pound pack, during the course of which I listened to a riveting 45 minutes of Daryl P. Domning, PhD | "Teilhard, Original Sin, Evolution, and the Curia: What Went Wrong?" Domning has inspired me to read Humani Generis (August 12, 1950). Ah, that was helpful. It's 10:03 AM, I've just finished reading Humani Generis, and I have to say that without Domning's introductory lecture, I wouldn't have understood what I was reading in nearly the same way. In defense of Pope Pius XII, I see considerable merit in Humani Generis, including its identification of the problem of false "irenism" at the interface of scientific and Catholic dogma. That may be a weakness I need to watch out for in myself in some areas, while in other areas I may be too aggressive. Science also advances through "ecumenical" councils like the IPCC; is convoluted by scientific politics; and crystalizes into its own dogmas, some of which will stand the tests of time and God, and others of which may not - at least not in the way we understand them at present. This is not to say there is something inherently wrong with ecumenical or scientific councils, with ecclesiastical or scientific politics, or with the crystalizing of religious and scientific revelation into dogma, beyond what we might expect from original sin. The question, as I see it, is rather how each new generation of innovative yet consensus-minded theologians, priests, and bishops avoids becoming irresponsibly dogmatic about inherited truth, at the expense of living revelation, on the one hand; and irresponsibly innovative about living revelation, at the expense of inherited truth, on the other. And here Saint Aquinas does seem to set an important bar for the Church's circumspection.

Now frankly, I may not ever be gifted with enough time or capacity to critically examine, from a faithful Christian viewpoint, the relative strength of the scientific and theological cases for monogenesis or polygenesis as these apply to our descent from Adam and Eve. Should I take it on faith in the overlapping magisterium of science that polygenesis has been proven, and is dogma, or should I take it on faith in the overlapping magisterium of the Catholic Church that monogenesis, and with it the transmission of some kind of heritable original sin, has been set in stone and is dogma? Cf. https://share.google/aimode/3APuUzVKGGZtYRND7. 

I conclude with two short videos from William Lane Craig to further stir up the pot:

• What Is Original Sin?    
• William Lane Craig Q&A: Was There Animal Death Before Adam's Sin?

Now I need to decide whether to proceed to my normal Saturday morning office organization block or take some time for a UN Charter Navigation briefing on the NATO-Ukraine-Russia situation.