Dear Ryan:

Sorry for the delay in responding.

Essentially I think you are correct in your response in the first three paragraphs. Man may have been created with the snap of the fingers of God, or God could allow the evolution of a creature that would someday fit God's plans for the human soul. If God intended the human person to have physical immortal that immortality was not available to the creature until God imbued that creature with a human soul.

If physical evolution took place, which of course cannot happen without generations of births and deaths, that prehuman creature is prehuman. What makes a human being human is not a scientific designation. The creature is not human until God creates the human soul and implants it in that creature at the moment of conception.

The reason human beings must experience death is because Adam and Eve sinned and thereby the human race was no longer innocent. The acts of Adam and Eve were the acts of rebellion. The penalty for sinning against God is death. This is the reason why the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity had to humiliate himself and become man. By doing so he voluntarily offered himself up as a sacrificial lamb to pay the penalty of death that should be ours.

It is not necessary to believe that these things literally transpired in this way. The creation myth (myth does not equal fiction) is primarily tasked with teaching us about who is the creator not how creation was accomplished.

However it happened, the point is that human nature was corrupted from the perfection that God created. Human nature became imbued with concupiscence, which is the tendency to sin. The consequences of that sin is that the human race must experience physical death and perhaps spiritual death, depending on the state of soul of the person.

God did create human beings through a process of life. The consequences of sin, which ios death, has nothing to do with God. He is not the one to bring death into the world. It is Man's own doing, the consequences of his own actions that brings on that death.

As for animals we know that animals do not have an immortal soul because God choose not to give them that type of soul. The human soul is what really separates us as human beings from animals.

St. Thomas Aquinas taught that there are three kinds of souls. The first kind is the vegetative soul. This is the essential life-force that all living creatures have, both animal and plant.

The second soul is the sensitive soul. The sensitive soul gives the creature the ability to sense and observe his surroundings, to experience those surroundings, and to respond to that stimuli. Plants do not have a sensitive soul, but animals do.

The third soul is the rational soul. The rational soul is immortal and is given only to human beings. Thus, human beings have all three types of soul: the vegetative or life force that all living things have, the ability to sense and experience our surroundings and respond to stimuli, and the ability to be aware of our own existence, past and future. the capacity to love, to create, and to choose. These attribute are the attribute of God. The rational soul is the image of God within us.

Much of this is mystery, and I agree with you that what comes to mind are the passages in the book of Job where God says, "Where were you..." Arrogance, of course, is one of those attributes of concupiscence.

God Bless,
Bro. Ignatius Mary