Lecture Four in The Origin of Life and Nature Before Sin, with Fr Mariusz Tabaczek, OP, STL, PhD, Professor of Theology, The Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas.
The encounter of philosophical, theological, and biological views on anthropogenesis inspired the most emotional reactions to evolutionary theory and posed a considerable challenge to systematic and philosophical theology. The history of the conversation between scientific and religious worldviews on the topic of hominization is thus long and complicated. In my presentation I will discuss two issues. Firstly, I will delineate the contemporary Thomistic approach to the question of the origin of our species and defend it as theologically more accurate and precise than the most prevalent version of the semi-naturalistic position that is favored and repeated by many theologians and accepted in the official statements of the Magisterium of the Catholic Church. Secondly, I will address the complex debate on mono- versus polygenism. I shall argue that the contemporary model favoring monogenetic origin of the human species (Muller 1951, Alexander 1964, and Kemp 2011) does not stand without including a direct (special) divine intervention.
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