Yet, despite a brief sortie into that exact kind of cross-referencing that settles the (completely unnecessary and invented) dispute, you insist on saying that Moses -- the prophet of God -- was ignorant according to modern standards of categorisation and must therefore have just mistakenly recorded what he saw despite not knowing any better... even though this is the Mosaic Law we are talking about, which was revealed to Moses.
So, maybe the reasons Moses gave for various animals being unclean is false, maybe he fibbed a little bit, maybe he was supplying the reasons for the establishment of the law retroactively, according to what made sense to him ? Is that what you mean to imply ? Or do you also not believe that Moses wrote it, and that it's all just a giant paraphrase created by some Hebrew priest in Babylon centuries later ? Strange to create such a detailed corpus of laws -- including how to slaughter certain animals and how many days a woman is unclean after delivering a boy and what to do with a bread offering on the third day after it was offered -- and then make the casual mistake here and there...
I'm saying that the differentiation of what was chewed, for what biological purpose, in whatever manner other than the observable behavior, was immaterial. Moses was recording the way by which the unclear animal could be identified.
I invite you to keep in mind that science -- even taxonomy -- has been overturned and amended many times in our own days. Two hundred years from now, different theories will be dominant. If it were possible for this exchange to be recorded for posterity, your protests will seem incredibly silly.
Taxonomy, as I stated previously, is based on the evaluation of like morphology. If a taxonomical system is overturned, then it is almost certainly because of
refinement of our understanding of that morphology. But one cannot equivocate and say that because we rearrange taxonomies that we can expect facts, verifiable facts of nature, to suddenly be no longer accurate or self-consistent.
And I welcome its recording in posterity for I've said nothing which I do not believe to be the truth and nothing for which I feel ashamed.
Yet, taxonomical classification changes all the time as categories are amended and evolve. Are you a "scientist" of the naturalistic kind by profession or training or something like that ? It seems to me that there is no reason to have such absolutist opinions in favour of the utility and self-understanding of modern scientists and their peer-reviewed navel-gazing unless one is personally invested in it. So, are you?
I am a scientist only in the sense that I believe the universe which God has made to be self-consistent, governed by knowable law, and able to be penetrated by that reason which He has given us the purpose of understanding His creation insofar as the limits of our cognition will allow. I believe that when the fruit of human reason, in dozens of different disciplines and divorced from ideology on either side, presents a near-seamless tapestry of consistent, mutually supportive data, then one repudiates one's God-given intelligence.
Formally speaking, however, science is not my vocation. You are correct in that I have a personal investment in science, only because I have a personal investment in the notion of a Creator that is just, merciful, and supremely rational, which He must be as He does acts neither without cause nor without foreknowledge of the outcome. This will be my last response to this, as we both know where the other stands on the subject. Before, I go I do feel enjoined to quote the same
Providentissimus Deus which you would wield like a cudgel:
"To understand how just is the rule here formulated we must remember, first, that the sacred writers, or to speak more accurately, the Holy Ghost "Who spoke by them, did not intend to teach men these things (that is to say, the essential nature of the things of the visible universe), things in no way profitable unto salvation." Hence they did not seek to penetrate the secrets of nature, but rather described and dealt with things in more or less figurative language, or in terms which were commonly used at the time and which in many instances are in daily use at this day, even by the most eminent men of science. Ordinary speech primarily and properly describes what comes under the senses; and somewhat in the same way the sacred writers -- as the Angelic Doctor also reminds us -- "went by what sensibly appeared," or put down what God, speaking to men, signified, in the way men could understand and were accustomed to."
This, to my mind, is the very essence of linguistic phenomenology by which any seeming errors of language or natural process described in Sacred Scripture can be reconciled to observable fact.