I'm not interested in endless back-and-forths where one side simply doesn't listen to the other. And the only kind of debate I am interested in is if either a non-Orthodox HONESTLY wants to understand why we believe what we believe; is open to apologetic answers, or an Orthodox Christian HONESTLY wants to understand why the traditional teachings are what they are. If that desire to understand the opposing view is there, I'm in. If it's not, I'm out.
(Especially to Anastasia) The modern idea of Darwinian macro-evolution (as opposed to observed micro-evolution, the observed local adaptations of species (which does not represent actual change of species) IS a real threat to Orthodox thought and theology. It rejects the majority consensus of the fathers on Creation, that God created man separately through special action, and winds up having massive effects on Church teaching. People who accept it gradually come to doubt or deny many other teachings previously accepted as established doctrine; the idea that Adam was a literal historic personage and the first human in human history, and the father of the human race. That denial casts into doubt Adam's status as a holy forefather, and contradicts his iconic representation, and leaves anyone who has him as a patron saint as praying to an abstraction rather than to a real, living person. That's one tiny effect of many. The doubt expands until many events, always understood as having literally happened, fall under the aegis of skepticism, believers who have swallowed evolution begin to think that the Tower of Babel, Joshua and the walls of Jericho, Jonah in the belly of the great fish/whale, "didn't really" happen; they become reduced to their allegorical significance only. The idea that such things could happen comes to be seen through an atheistic, materialist lens superimposed over the believing eye, and one by one, the believer begins to doubt God's power to do such things.
I have solid reasons for rejecting evolution, and that's just the very beginning: how it slowly destroys our faith and aligns our thinking with that of the world. But there is more than just that behind my thinking. You know I am a teacher that understands the schools and the history of public education. I know the system that produces the modern scientists with their utter lack of philosophy, where that system came from, why it was created and for what purposes. I have excellent reason to doubt the modern scientist, to see how they could all make the same mistakes and make them in unison, and come to the same erroneous conclusions. And the discussion of that education, that history that hardly anyone knows, together with the long collapse of genuine philosophy, observably falling into theological error at the time of Aquinas and the Schoolmen, and slowly, gradually, leading to the beginning of a steeper fall with Descartes, whose idea that thinking proves existence gradually solidified into the error that thinking a thing makes it so, to the defenses of reason (Kant, et al) that excluded numinous knowledge, or any form of knowledge not achieved by rational thought to the despair of Schopenhauer and the rational path to insanity plowed by Nietzsche, all produced a line of humanist thinking (humanism being that the human is the ultimate measure of things; man is to be his own god) that became the formational basis of the philosophy now taught to nearly all by compulsory government education and centrally-controlled mass media: pluralism, relativism and de facto materialism. The scientists view all of the evidence and draw all of their conclusions through those lenses.
