Do people like Ken Ham help or hurt Christian evangelization?

If my descendants are taller than me, more inteligent, and no longer develop wisdom teeth, does this mean they can no longer carry the image of God?

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just to jump in here. that is not what rus is talking about. microevolution is testable and obeservable. if your decendents are taller, more intellegent, and no longer have wisdom teeth, they are still human.

What, essentially, makes us "man"?

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we are made in Christ's image. whatever He is is what a true human being is and always has been and always will be.

truthseeker32 said:

Two good articles on this topic:

MYSTAGOGY: Orthodox Bishop Answers 4 Questions on Science and the Theory of Evolution

Evolution, Creation and the Hidden Cause[bless and do not curse]|[bless and do not curse]Glory to God for All Things

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truefiction1 said:

Sayre, EO do not have to believe that human evolution denies the fall.

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Thank you both!

truthseeker32 said:

I would like to see that logical formula.

Depends on what "the Fall" means. If one insists that it must mean and event in which man fell into physical entropy, then your conclusion follows, but this isn't the only interpretation.

Two things: 1. Just because one believes evolution has happened it doesn't necessarily follow that men will continue to evolve. 2. If my descendants are taller than me, more inteligent, and no longer develop wisdom teeth, does this mean they can no longer carry the image of God? What, essentially, makes us "man"?

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I laid out the logic above. The Fall means not ONLY "physical" entropy, for Creation is a seamless whole and the physical (material) and the spiritual do not exist in separate vacuums; the Fall IS entropy, the entropy of everything. Decay is both physical AND spiritual. Trying to posit that the one existed without the other is the gymnastic that is unreasonable. The very principle of entropy is the undoing of God's Creation, all aspects of it. You can't take one aspect, exclude another and present it as the whole tamale.

The same evolutionary science that you accept regarding the eolution of all things, that you hold such reverence for, you suddenly deny when pointed out that, if true, holds true or man is well? Here you become unscientific by your own standard. If one sincerely believes evolution "has happened" it must include man, or on those grounds of natural science show how it didn't. Only the whole of that science is constantly trumpeting how man was once NOT man, how he was once an ape, and before that an amphibian, and so on. The atheists and X-Men enthusiasts are far more logical in, having accepted this idea, to see it as an inevitable process.

And if that change shows no sign of ending, then it would not stop at a loss of wisdom teeth, but of legs, reproductive or speech organs, and/or God knows what. And yes, if as a species we ceased to be able to walk and talk, we would indeed have ceased to be human, to be anything any of our ancestors would recognize as human. You can offer no scientific basis on which that would end.

The upshot is that you accept the claims of modern science until they really do contradict your (right) beliefs. Then you suddenly and arbitrarily decide that they do not really apply to man as we are now, that we have or soon will "complete" our evolution. You insist on trusting science, and then turn around and deny it yourself.

I agree on denying the scientific claim. I just prefer to be more logical in doing so.

Over 500 'proofs' that in no way could evolution occur, let alone that it did not (it is a recent deception, not an old belief),
have been systematically censored, blacklisted, and covered up or erased by a greedy, egotistical, pernicious society of so-called educated professionals and media.
There is no proof of this here, and none will be presented.
No, you don't have to accept this by faith. If you seek the truth from Yhwh in order to live His Life, this will be simply revealed to you as Yhwh sees fit. It is Yhwh's choice.... ...

rusmeister said:

I laid out the logic above.

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The Fall means not ONLY "physical" entropy, for Creation is a seamless whole and the physical (material) and the spiritual do not exist in separate vacuums; the Fall IS entropy, the entropy of everything. Decay is both physical AND spiritual. Trying to posit that the one existed without the other is the gymnastic that is unreasonable. The very principle of entropy is the undoing of God's Creation, all aspects of it. You can't take one aspect, exclude another and present it as the whole tamale.

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You keep stating things like this, but you have yet to explain how this is necessarily the case. Things in this world break down and new life springs from this entropy. It is easy for me to see how God would create such a self-sustaining system, without "logical" contradiction. The only way I think your conclusion follows is if you believe that a human being, created in the image of God, possesses no immaterial attributes (like some mormons believe), and if you think God has no power to grant certain attributes to creatures that don't have such an attribute. I have held and still hold that physical entropy in itself is not evil. It only becomes evil when it affects those carrying the image of God, which I believe could have been carried by whatever material creature God wished, because the image of God doesn't necessarily mean "what God looks like, physically."

Rus, I'm starting to wonder if you fully grasp logic and evolutionary science. When is the last time you took a logic course? I have several colleagues who are devout Christians (one is Orthodox) that are all trained in philosophy, possessing competency in logic. They are all more than capable of reconciling science, logic, and creation. The difference between you and them, it seems, lies in the premises. I am most interested in knowing this specific point: Why must the Fall include physical entropy?

Why must the Fall include physical entropy?

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because there was no physical breaking down before the Fall

truth, it has been demonstrated in various threads in this forum that the Church has always taught that physical death is a result of the Fall. what Father says otherwise?

Yes. And if God authored death, sending His only beloved Son to redeem us from his creation that harmed us to begin with seems a bit bipolar, does it not? Death NOT being God's desired outcomes is one consistent theme through Scripture and the Church's history!

jckstraw72 said:

truth, it has been demonstrated in various threads in this forum that the Church has always taught that physical death is a result of the Fall. what Father says otherwise?

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jckstraw72 said:

truth, it has been demonstrated in various threads in this forum that the Church has always taught that physical death is a result of the Fall. what Father says otherwise?

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Im not sure that... 5 minutes before the fall... that the earth was perfect. There was already Satan on earth. How is that good? This tells me that the earth was already disordered and not operating as He intended.

Note that Eve's pain was multiplied... it was already in existence.

Doesn't ireneaus address these concerns?

Sorry for using such brief words - I'm posting via phone.

You know, today's reading, by coincidence, is 2 Peter 1:20-2:9, and this stuck out:

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knowing this first, that no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation,

21
for prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.

1
But there were also false prophets among the people, even as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Lord who bought them, and bring on themselves swift destruction.

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All of those interpretations that do not start by asking what the consensus of the Church fathers is are private.

So yes, God DID make everything good, and I should probably say to those who would insist that God made a flawed creation that He made it good enough.

rusmeister said:

You know, today's reading, by coincidence, is 2 Peter 1:20-2:9, and this stuck out:



All of those interpretations that do not start by asking what the consensus of the Church fathers is are private.

So yes, God DID make everything good, and I should probably say to those who would insist that God made a flawed creation that He made it good enough.

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Hi Rusmeister,

I'm new here, so please be patient with me.

That is an interesting verse you posted. I'm not quite sure what prophesy of Scripture means, because is there anything to predict about Scripture?

Leaving that to one side, I thought I'd elaborate a little more on my current understanding of "good". I thought Irenaeus agreed with me, if not, it seems I've misread or misremembered what I've read.

We know that God created, and then called it good. But sometime later, that thing which was good, was tarnished. And it was tarnished before Eve ate the fruit. I struggle to see how God could call a garden, in which there is a talking snake, tempting His Creation, is a "good" thing. There is already disarray in this image. Something - is not quite right.

The accusor is introduced before the fall. Was it "good" that there was an accusor?

Blessings.

Sayre said:

Hi Rusmeister,

I'm new here, so please be patient with me.

That is an interesting verse you posted. I'm not quite sure what prophesy of Scripture means, because is there anything to predict about Scripture?

Leaving that to one side, I thought I'd elaborate a little more on my current understanding of "good". I thought Irenaeus agreed with me, if not, it seems I've misread or misremembered what I've read.

We know that God created, and then called it good. But sometime later, that thing which was good, was tarnished. And it was tarnished before Eve ate the fruit. I struggle to see how God could call a garden, in which there is a talking snake, tempting His Creation, is a "good" thing. There is already disarray in this image. Something - is not quite right.

The accusor is introduced before the fall. Was it "good" that there was an accusor?

Blessings.

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I'm fairly good on patience...

Orthodox teaching actually stresses that prophecy is NOT mere prediction. But more than that, we don't even think that the ban on private interpretation is limited to prophecy in any event.

One thing I can see we DON'T know is that the Earth was "tarnished" BEFORE Eve ate the fruit.

In the book of Job, God allowed the devil to tempt the most righteous man God had at the time. Does that "tarnish" the righteous man? Obviously Lucifer Fell in temporal terms *before* Adam and Eve did. But sin and death entered the world by the Fall of man, not the Fall of Lucifer. Enter does not merely mean "obtain opportunity to tempt" but "to dominate, reign" in the world. Those things had no power over the world before the Fall of man.

Note that Eve's pain was multiplied... it was already in existence.

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no there was none before the Fall, the Christ's birth was more akin to unfallen births, with no pain, no mess, etc.

The accusor is introduced before the fall. Was it "good" that there was an accusor?

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the accuser also tempted Christ. Christ's goodness is in no way tarnished by the devil, the Pharisees, Judas, etc.

and Satan is the not the king, priest, mediator, and microcosm of creation. Man is. Thus his fall did not effect all of creation as did man's.

If the teaching is that there was no death before the fall, that is going to be a serious evangelical huddle :/

jckstraw72 said:

but Ken Ham didn't do this. He quite emphatically demonstrated that he loves science.

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For a different world view perspective, I recommend a read of Dr Albert Mohler's review of the debate. He had a front row seat at the debate. Mohler is the President of the flagship seminary of the Southern Baptists, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

By the way, before he migrated to the USA about 25 years ago, Ken Ham was an Australian science high school teacher. So he is not against science.

The assessment of the Nye-Ham debate on creationism and science by Dr Mohler is at, 'Bill Nye’s Reasonable Man—The Central Worldview Clash of the Ham-Nye Debate'.

Oz

OzSpen said:

For a different world view perspective, I recommend a read of Dr Albert Mohler's review of the debate. He had a front row seat at the debate. Mohler is the President of the flagship seminary of the Southern Baptists, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

By the way, before he migrated to the USA about 25 years ago, Ken Ham was an Australian science high school teacher. So he is not against science.

The assessment of the Nye-Ham debate on creationism and science by Dr Mohler is at, 'Bill Nye’s Reasonable Man—The Central Worldview Clash of the Ham-Nye Debate'.

Oz

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I think most of us here are not interested in "different world view perspectives". We want to know what the Orthodox teaching us; some want complete reconciliation with modern scientific ideas, some don't. But we want the truth, not mere perspectives.

rusmeister said:

I think most of us here are not interested in "different world view perspectives". We want to know what the Orthodox teaching us; some want complete reconciliation with modern scientific ideas, some don't. But we want the truth, not mere perspectives.

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So where does one go for the truth about the origin of the universe?

What you are really asking is what truths can we know?
The truth about man is in the Church, of course. Anything that contradicts that, that ultimately denies Church teaching, MUST be false.

Can ultimate faith be placed in human science for absolute knowledge of truth? No. Good natural science admits that its knowledge is always changing, always being modified. We are now so far from the truths of natural science of two and three thousand years ago that most of what was certain has been junked. - from the Four Elements to the terracentric understandings are now admitted to be useless. Bleeding patients for their health, certain medical knowledge of two hundred years ago is admitted bunk in our time. Our own view from our own perspective is far too truncated. If we were left, or limited, to the natural sciences we would truly have to admit, like Socrates, that we can know nothing.

Only in humility of submitting to an Authority wiser than us can we know anything at all. The Church does not pretend to speak with final authority on details of the natural world - the temporal knowledge (when it is right and true) that IS the realm of science; but we can certainly say what we are certain is not true.

And lest you think I and others are "against" science; I say that we only admit that the natural sciences must assume their proper place in the hierarchies of human knowledge; that they must be subject to true philosophy and theology, and are conducted in the light of some philosophy and theology, which in our time are nearly all gone wrong.