Ok - but that puts my comment argument from acceptance of the Sabbath commandment details - that we find no agreement between those details and the stories of evolution.
So when I point out that Darwin, Dawkins, Provine Meyers and others admit to that same gap - that same contradiction between evolution and the Bible statement on origins - am I not arguing in favor of the OE position?
What am I missing?
What you are missing is the orientation given in my post above. The true reason for the Sabbath is not the Law, but Christ's rest in the tomb (which took place on a literal Saturday). The "day" spoken of in Genesis one, and typologically remembered in the Law, is prophetically pointing forward towards Christ and is not, as you seem to take it, necessarily pointing
backwards to some literal Saturday in the past on which God "rested" after laboring over His creation.
Put another way, seen from the perspective of the Cross, the FIRST 7th-day of Creation is Holy Saturday. Genesis One is, then, not a description of the cosmic past (of things God did prior to the Fall / Garden of Eden) but a summary of what happens in the remaining books of the Scripture. Having brought about the created order, God says "Let us make man in our image" and the REST of the OT and NT is the story of God doing this, culminating in the Cross (the 6th day of Genesis one, Friday) after which God (the Incarnate Christ) rests in the tomb (the 7th day of Genesis one, Saturday), and inaugurating the NEW creation (the 1st day) in fulfillment of the old (the 8th day).
Here again we are in agreement.
My point is from the position of accepting the Sabbath as we find it in scripture and noticing from those details - that it is speaking to events in Genesis 1 and that the details it gives are not of the form "4 billion years and then such and such evolved".
I wrote a post earlier in this thread on OT historical-literalism; granted it was aimed very much at an EO audience (so I call on analogies and arguments that are more likely to persuade an already-committed Orthodox Christian rather than members of another group). My essential response here would be the same: whatever idiom the OT texts are using, they are using to point us towards Christ - not to make literal-historical statements about the past (as we understand it in our modern idiom). They do indeed witness to God's ongoing activity with Israel prior to Christ's manifestation, but they are not fruitful texts for historical reconstruction (or, rather, not the sort of historical reconstruction that most of us would want to use them for).
That's the short of it anyway; my earlier post gives more nuance / detail.
Ultimately, my aim is to allow for both views (or even more, provided they point Christ-wards).
Given that the details of Exodus 16 set a 7 day week with fresh food only available on 6 days of the week and on Friday a double portion that would preserve through the 7th day - and given that as you say this is perfectly satisfactory with OE teaching - I think we are still talking about accepted OE doctrine.
am I missing something as I point out that the details in such accepted OE doctrine on the Sabbath - are not compatible with the details of evolution just as Darwin stated?
To say something is acceptable within Orthodoxy is not to say it is normative / dogmatic. That may be the missing piece; either that, or I'm just not understanding your point.
So a few scientists / humanists said that in their view Scripture and their theories didn't conform to one another... As I posted earlier in this thread, they were judging history (or Scripture) through a modernist lens with a modernist sense of historical plausibility / scientific inquiry, and this posits a Truth other than Christ by which Christ can be judged. I reject that notion. I'm not troubled by a few thinkers (who aren't even students of Scripture on a deep level) saying such a thing.
In my own reading, I see no necessary contradiction between Genesis 1 and the theory of evolution. The point of Genesis 1 is not, necessarily, to give a literal account of creation with a timed chronology; more likely (to my reading anyway), it is trying to affirm that God created, created good, and created in a way leading towards Christ. Evolution does not contradict this (or need not necessarily contradict this). Arguments about the last point (created in a way leading towards Christ) are the most likely to bear fruit in establishing Genesis 1 as against evolution (e.g. making an argument that evolution fails to point forwards towards Christ); but even there, we are talking not about the events themselves but how we interpret or understand them.
So some, in this thread, rightly point out that evolution would seem to make God the author of death. In answer, a theistic evolutionist could point out that in TE, we see God use death to create new life, and this is precisely what God reveals on the Cross.
In Christ,
Macarius
