The discussion of Gen 1-3 continues…

over at What’s Wrong with the World.

I was poking around yesterday and found out that Jimmy Akin had a similar discussion of polygenism , monogenism and related stuff a few years ago. He appears to be way ahead of me in speculating on what may and may not be reformable with respect to all this.

What always strikes me (about both sides of the debate) is how little we actually *know* compared to how ready both sides are to make huge and sweeping assertions. I have written about this before several times.

The odd thing is, both the fundamentalist readers of Gen 1-3 (including some Catholics) *and* the Pharyngula types are certain that a refinement of theology here *has* to spell the end of the Church. So, for instance. one of my combox contributor recklessly reacts like this to the very carefully thought-out discussion of how doctrine might develop with respect to human origins:

Catholic Doctrine teaches that there was an Adam and Eve and the idea that science is trustworthy is laughable ever since it divorced Sacred Theology and began whoring around with atheists.

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I trust science a far as I can throw Jerrold Nadler.

If Adan and Even can be explained away, Original Sin will be gone – and so will The Church.

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If the impossible were to happen – The Catholic Church teaching that Adam and Eve did not exist or that Adam really means an anonymous coterie of cavemen – you would hear a high-pitched whirring issuing from the grave of St. Vincent of Lerins. The noise would be generated by him spinning faster than an anemometer atop Mt. Washington because a change in Doctrine was being reframed as a development of Doctrine.

Well then. That settles it. Science can just stop what it’s doing. Because if it find out something that threatens these hasty and ill-conceived dogmatic pronouncement about what the tradition *must* be saying, that means the Faith is false.

Me: I think the Tradition is sturdier than that and that we really do have nothing to fear from what the sciences may discover since God is the author truth both natural and revealed. I have no confidence that polygenism will be shown to be the fact behind human origins. But I also have no fear that, if it is, it will mean “a change in Doctrine was being reframed as a development of Doctrine” nor that “Original Sin will be gone – and so will The Church.” The curious shared conviction of the Fundmentalist and the Pharyngula type that it will suggests to me that it’s not merely a case of “Scratch an atheist, find a fundamentalist.” It’s also “Scratch a fundamentalist, find an atheist.” In what, I wonder, is their real trust?