So glad to see this come up. I used to ‘intern’ at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences when I was training to be a priest in Rome and was a fly-on-the-wall for that very workshop.
In hindsight, my time there was a big part of me ending up doing this sort of thing, getting used to talking about the big questions. It’s a great place!
Thank you for sharing your response. You make some great points for me to think about.
The only thing I’d add is that, writing to a Catholic theological audience, you have to really work quite hard to justify saying anything new, especially if you want to gain traction in more conservative circles. I guess ultimately it’s a rhetorical thing: Newman’s idea of the development of dogma is a generally accepted framework for legitimising novel ideas, and I believe is applicable in this case in a softer use, as an example of how, in light of new knowledge outside of theology, maintaining dogmatic principles can lead to some surprising implications.