Can you believe evolution exists while also being an Orthodox Christian?

rusmeister said:

Thus, the experience itself is unhelpful and overvalued.

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You seem to be highlighting a distinction between empirical knowledge and understanding: Making one's knowledge fit together in the right way and be sufficiently full and rich with background information yields understanding.

But this is, once again, knowledge vs. understanding, and not experience vs. understanding or experience vs. knowledge. Because I certainly experience both empirical knowledge and understanding. So it seems we still don't know what experience itself is, or how I have access to it. We know that I experience a tree in some sense or other; but what we mean by "experience" is still left unstated.

I do think your idea of systemic misunderstanding or failure to understand is important; we might get back to that later.

Cappadocious said:

You seem to be highlighting a distinction between empirical knowledge and understanding: Making one's knowledge fit together in the right way and be sufficiently full and rich with background information yields understanding.

But this is, once again, knowledge vs. understanding, and not experience vs. understanding or experience vs. knowledge. Because I certainly experience both empirical knowledge and understanding. So it seems we still don't know what experience itself is, or how I have access to it. We know that I experience a tree in some sense or other; but what we mean by "experience" is still left unstated.

I do think your idea of systemic misunderstanding or failure to understand is important; we might get back to that later.

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This looks to me like an unimportant effort to make a mental distinction that completely misses the important point, aka not seeing the forest for the trees. I'm saying why, in a larger scheme of understandings, experience is not enough, and you're worried about what is empirical or not, and what kinds of different experience there are. Understanding, and wisdom, are comprised of more than mere experience or mere knowledge. You're barking up the wrong tree in a forest that is all around you.

"So I respectfully disagree with any notion that we cannot add to and improve the knowledge of truth possessed by the Church."

Right, because if we did that (not add to what the Church knows), we would have to reject modern medicine, which, does use principles from the theory of evolution in researching cures and treatments for diseases.

medicine is developed in the here-and-now, in the observable present with observable outcomes. medicine doesn't hit the shelves without observable experimentation. this has nothing to do with fantastic theories about common descent. remember that no one is rejecting scientific advancements, but rather extrapolations into the deep past, which have no effect on whether or not medicine will work in the present and into the future. our theories about the past are derived from our observations of the present - they form our scientific paradigms. we can extrapolate the present into the past, and we can use it to inform the future, but using the present to formulate stories about the past is in no way necessary for medicine in the present and future.

jckstraw72 said:

medicine is developed in the here-and-now, in the observable present with observable outcomes. medicine doesn't hit the shelves without observable experimentation. this has nothing to do with fantastic theories about common descent. remember that no one is rejecting scientific advancements, but rather extrapolations into the deep past, which have no effect on whether or not medicine will work in the present and into the future. our theories about the past are derived from our observations of the present - they form our scientific paradigms. we can extrapolate the present into the past, and we can use it to inform the future, but using the present to formulate stories about the past is in no way necessary for medicine in the present and future.

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This is what I was trying to say earlier about positions not being so simple. That this is still not understood indicates that it might not be understood at all.

rusmeister said:

you're worried about what is empirical or not, and what kinds of different experience there are.

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Because a certain understanding of experience is the foundation of much of the modern way of understanding things. So of course, to understand modernism, we ought to understand this foundation.

Let me ask in a very nitty gritty way: When you experience a tree, what is it that you're immediately experiencing?

Cappadocious said:

Because a certain understanding of experience is the foundation of much of the modern way of understanding things. So of course, to understand modernism, we ought to understand this foundation.

Let me ask in a very nitty gritty way: When you experience a tree, what is it that you're immediately experiencing?

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The politest way I can say this is that since you're ignoring what I'm saying, I'm going to have to ignore what you're saying. The disrespect of your subtitle doubly encourages me to take you at your word as a sower of division and disdain that division, which here appears to be mere sophistry trying to be sophisticated. I do not talk about "experiencing trees" - or chairs - I am not such a sophist. I can speak of experiencing car accidents, or the Divine Liturgy. You should speak to what I do say, not what I don't say, if you want me to take you seriously. You can "experience" a tree as a thing that gives you shade or as an obstacle that breaks your body on a ski slope. I understand these things, and do not appreciate being treated as if I do not. But I will speak about the shade or the accident or the Liturgy.

So trying to fudge the idea of experience is mere distraction from the fact that all of your experience of public education as a pupil, teacher, or staff member (whatever that may be) does not, in itself, give you the necessary tools to understand what public education is.

rusmeister said:

I do not talk about "experiencing trees" - or chairs - I am not such a sophist... I can speak of experiencing car accidents, or the Divine Liturgy.

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Why is there a difference? Why is one sophistry and one not?

rusmeister said:

all of your experience of public education as a pupil, teacher, or staff member (whatever that may be) does not, in itself, give you the necessary tools to understand what public education is.

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Where did I say that?

Cappadocious said:

Why is there a difference? Why is one sophistry and one not?


Where did I say that?

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I said that.

And if nothing else, the car accident (or any event) tries to speak directly to what the other person is saying and the tree (experiencing things as things) does not. Children, who we should want to become like, understand that a college degree is not necessary to understand that pillows are soft, glasses help you see, a tree can give shade on a hot day or hurt if you run into it.

rusmeister said:

And if nothing else, the car accident (or any event) tries to speak directly to what the other person is saying and the tree (experiencing things as things) does not.

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Can you re-phrase or otherwise explain this distinction? I'm not sure what you mean.

Any child would understand it. If we were to ask the rank and file of TAW whose thoughts they understood better, mine about experiencing public school and yours about experiencing a tree, and ask them whose meaning they understand more clearly, despite my seemingly rambling style, I don't think they would say yours. I do happen to understand it, and it is being used here to say that experience is a complex thing we cannot clearly understand.

I was speaking about experience of a large and complex system, a human construction designed for the control and manipulation of populaces, that most believe to be constructed to enlighten and educate them. You tried to turn the discussion to the "experience" of an object, a simple thing that can be defined and seen in front of you.

It requires no deep intelligence to grasp the reality of the tree, though we may not understand all of the purposes God created it for. It does, though, require a deeper order of intelligence to grasp how our own thinking may have been formed in a process mistakenly called "education". And so yes, my charge is that modern intellectuals are among the most poorly educated (in a true sense) people on the planet. The schools and colleges literally produce the most ignorant people. A PhD (where they still even exist) today is not going to impress me. An ability to show that one can actually think will.

rusmeister said:

It requires no deep intelligence to grasp the reality of the tree, though we may not understand all of the purposes God created it for. It does, though, require a deeper order of intelligence to grasp how our own thinking may have been formed in a process mistakenly called "education".

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Interesting.

You probably think there is something called "the objective"---I think you mentioned something to this effect a few posts ago.

Modern people talk about objective truth in contrast to something else, often called the subjective. What is the subjective to you, and why is it of lesser value?

Right. You are a subjectivist, I see. Therein lies the whole problem.

We cannot communicate anything meaningfully if all truth is only subjective. That would mean that things mean things to us alone; it makes shared common understanding impossible.

CS Lewis spoke most effectively against subjectivism, though to an Orthodox Christian I would say that it ought to be enough to say that we must become like children of we wish to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

You have achieved over-sophistication, it is essential to return to the nursery and to rediscover the simplicity of things, that while they have complicated aspects, they are also quite simple, and can be put simply. Only the person trapped in a web of his own mental confusion can fail to see the simplicity along with the complexity.

Patronizing is essential, a good thing here. The salvific thing is to become like the child and accept patrons, paters, even the Church fathers. The damnable thing is to admire one's own intellect and reject the humility and simplicity of the child.

There is good solid objective reality, along with subjective perceptions of it. The child is wiser in accepting the objective reality than we intellectuals.

https://www.calvin.edu/~pribeiro/DCM-Lewis-2009/Lewis/The-Poison-of-Subjectivism.doc

rusmeister said:

Right. You are a subjectivist, I see. Therein lies the whole problem.

We cannot communicate anything meaningfully if all truth is only subjective. That would mean that things mean things to us alone; it makes shared common understanding impossible.

CS Lewis spoke most effectively against subjectivism, though to an Orthodox Christian I would say that it ought to be enough to say that we must become like children of we wish to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

You have achieved over-sophistication, it is essential to return to the nursery and to rediscover the simplicity of things, that while they have complicated aspects, they are also quite simple, and can be put simply. Only the person trapped in a web of his own mental confusion can fail to see the simplicity along with the complexity.

Patronizing is essential, a good thing here. The salvific thing is to become like the child and accept patrons, paters, even the Church fathers. The damnable thing is to admire one's own intellect and reject the humility and simplicity of the child.

There is good solid objective reality, along with subjective perceptions of it. The child is wiser in accepting the objective reality than we intellectuals.

https://www.calvin.edu/~pribeiro/DCM-Lewis-2009/Lewis/The-Poison-of-Subjectivism.doc

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The child relates to a thing he encounters outside of himself in a thoroughly authentic way, experiencing what really is. This is not what we are doing here via philosophy. What happens in philosophy is that the Truth, once real and alive, becomes "represented" by the rational mind in its attempt to linguistically define (so as to grasp it, so to speak, similar to the way Adam desired to grasp the knowledge of good and evil, by reaching to grasp) everything. Very small children cannot philosophize, nor can they articulate in language until their brain's language centers begin to come online at about age two (unless they have Aspergers, and begin speaking in full sentences too early, which is usually evidence of right hemispheric dysfunction or left hemispheric over-arousal).

The power of Tradition is due to its nature and function as metaphor. It serves to take us beyond mere "representation", across the gap between rational, linguistically defined thoughts and into a direct, authentic, face to face experience of God in God's energies (as described by Palamas). It has been rightly stated, I believe, that the only thing philosophy is really any good for is to lead one to awareness that one can never come to authentic knowledge of God by means of it. It is the product of a part of the mind that can only re-present things that are authentically experienced by the part of the mind that can, but can never itself experience it in the present, the way that a child whose only mode of experiencing is in the present moment.

This is not subjectivism. It is resistance to another damning philosophy called Orthodox fundamentalism, which seems to reject present experience of good objective truths discovered in creation in favor of a rigidly defined (and therefore having lost its power as metaphor) philosophical "system". It takes Tradition and re-presents as a system of beliefs and moral teachings created by grown ups, and if we grasp the system and know the rules then we are big bad grown-ups too. But this is not what Tradition really is. Tradition is the mode of being of small children. It initiates us into the Life of God, making us partakers of that Life, and all of Scripture and Tradition point to it, in strongly metaphoric language and images. It is often stated by Orthodox theologians that the mode of being that I describe here is what is meant by Tradition. If the Church can accept the theory of evolution as an authentic expression of God in creation, it will be because She recognizes the importance and function of metaphor in initiating believers into Divine Life, and that often the Word of God comes through parables, and at other times through objective experience of creation: "For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse" (Romans 1:20)

That is not what YOU are doing here via philosophy. But it is what I am doing. I am talking about what really IS, what the child actually experiences, and not at all about representations, even of the rational mind. As I said, you have achieved over-sophistication. I repeat the words of our Lord, which are NOT "representation" of anything, but necessity for us adults steeped in what would then have been called "Greek wisdom". That we must become like children if we wish to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

You must rediscover the view of the child, even on philosophy, and discover that the child is right, and the adult is messed up. A good example of that is your saying "The power of Tradition is due to its nature and function as metaphor". That is not what the power of Tradition is. The power of Tradition is that it is TRUE, and teaches us realities, both ones we are capable of understanding and ones we are not. How can you be sure what is metaphor and what is not, unless valid Authority tells you it is? Many Protestants think on that basis that the Eucharist is not the Body and Blood of Christ, imposing their own "wisdom" to decide that Christ can't have been serious and literal in saying that it is.

And your idea of what philosophy is seems cockamamie to me. I understand it as "the love of wisdom". We are SUPPOSED to love wisdom! And it is NOT a claim of "authentic knowledge of God". You are accusing authentic philosophy of trying to do something it doesn't try to do.

It IS subjectivism, though you twist this way and that trying to deny it. You refuse to affirm any truth, any knowledge, as true. I have asked up-front questions you do not respond to at all. I have encountered nothing but evasion from you. In everything you say, the ultimate authority determining whether anything is a metaphor is the individual, and Tradition is to you whatever you care to make of it. I insist that it must be something that can correct me, that has the power to say "Rusmeister is wrong.", and it can't do that if it cannot be defined. I can always worm out of any correction by the loopholes of indefinability, and propagate whatever heresy seems good and true to me as an individual, even "Orthodox fundamentalism". The one thing that can protect against both that and subjectivism, an anything-goes theology and praxis, is a Tradition that can clearly show you, me, or anyone to be in the wrong, where we can say that "the apostles and Church fathers agree that...", "Our Liturgy affirms that...", "Scripture says that.." in unison, general agreement, where yes, sometimes some fathers disagreed, and some things never agreed upon, but where there are many things that tey did, and these things have the authority to correct us, because they are TRUE, and we are silly and very temporary humans with our goofy ideas of what philosophy, theology and so on are.

Return to the reality of the child, of one who can be taught, and corrected. If Tradition can, in consensus, show me to be in the wrong about that, or about worldly knowledge and understandings, please show me and I will read, listen and learn.

This is really getting tiresome. This seems to say it well enough:

Will the sun rise tomorrow? How do you know?

Just because you personally saw it rise today? Because you saw it rise everyday for your entire life?

jckstraw72 said:

medicine is developed in the here-and-now, in the observable present with observable outcomes. medicine doesn't hit the shelves without observable experimentation. this has nothing to do with fantastic theories about common descent. remember that no one is rejecting scientific advancements, but rather extrapolations into the deep past, which have no effect on whether or not medicine will work in the present and into the future. our theories about the past are derived from our observations of the present - they form our scientific paradigms. we can extrapolate the present into the past, and we can use it to inform the future, but using the present to formulate stories about the past is in no way necessary for medicine in the present and future.

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You could say that same thing about fantastic theories that the entire universe was created in six days a mere 6000 years ago - except there is absolutely no data of any kind that supports that theory - in fact, every piece of data contradicts it.

Yes, the theory of evolution attempts to explain the how. To connect the dots so to speak. Maybe they could be connected in a different way, but the dots are real and cannot just be ignored.

of course there is supporting data for a young earth (although, of course, the age of the earth is not really the important issue here). the Divine vision of the saints is "data." it's just not data you choose to heed in this particular context.

but i think my point about medicine still stands. this idea that creationism will somehow hurt or prevent such scientific advancements is silly.

I wouldn't call it Orthodox fundamentalism, but rather, Protestant fundamentalism superimposed upon Orthodoxy.