Since somebody did bring this up, I wonder whether he can comment, since this is the demographics thread, on his knowledge of what the seminarians and faculty he is acquainted with from his time there, roughly, believe. Is it mostly YEC among both, or are there a fair contingent of students and/or faculty that deny this "consensus" of "all the saints and elders"?
the majority definitely do not believe in evolution ... i can think of 3 students who are vocally in favor of evolution, and probably a handful who don't really care and don't have much of an opinion, but the majority are definitely in favor of maintaining the literal level of Genesis in harmony with its other layers of meaning. I walked into the library one time and found some students talking about it. One, who is now a priest, was asked what he thinks about it all - and he said that it's hard to argue with so many Fathers, and one of those vocal evolutionists declared "no it's not, you just say THEY'RE WRONG!" and that pretty much killed that conversation.
As for the faculty, I doubt if there is a single evolutionist among them. Bp. Michael taught us in his Israel's Origins class that there was no death in the world before the Fall and that the Fathers interpret the days to be 24 hours long, and his handouts even have a little blurb specifically on the problems of evolution. Dr. Harry Boosalis, our Dogmatics professor, teaches a course on Cosmology, and he follows the literal readings given by the Fathers. He had us read the correspondence between Dr. Alexander Kalomiros and Fr. Seraphim Rose and he told me that Kalomiros' argument is very weak and that he doesn't even try to give Patristic backing. The abbot, Archimandrite Sergius, has specifically taught against evolution. My thesis advisor was Dr. Christopher Veniamain who is our Patristics professor. He grew up going to Essex and was a spiritual child of Elder Sophrony for decades, and he also studied in Greece, including with Fr. John Romanides, and in Oxford with Met. Kallistos. My second reader was our history professor, Dr. David Ford, and they both gave my thesis an A+.
Interestingly, when we began, Dr. Christopher told me that he was not convinced that evolution is incompatible with Orthodoxy, but that he was interested in learning more about it and about Fr. Seraphim. When we got to the main point - about evolution necessitating death even before the Fall, he said this was a very strong point and is certainly a huge problem (he had spoken on the environment at a conference here a few years earlier, and afterwards i remarked to him that his whole talk seemed to be dependent on the belief that nothing in creation was meant to die, and he said "that's right
nothing was meant to die). At some point he remarked that he has been studying the Fathers for years, and yet Fr. Seraphim made him want to go back and take another look. Just about a month or so ago a pro-evolutionist came and spoke here (unfortunately I was in Russia at the time, speaking about my thesis to students at the St. Tikhon's University in Moscow - an interesting coincidence
), and when I spoke to Dr. Christopher about it later he said to me "I wonder what he could have said, because what you showed that Fr. Seraphim teaches is very strong."
