How do we explain Neanderthals?

JackRT · Oct 6, 2016

Petros --- I like your signature line. It reminds me very much of Friedrich Nietzsche who wrote "Whoever fights monsters, should see to it that in the process he does not himself become a monster."

Your quantum mechanical argument above suggests that the same "quantum state" argument can be applied to scripture as well. Many Bible passages and stories are capable of multiple interpretations (quantum states) but someone centuries ago "opened the box" and that interpretation has been with us ever since. When we are confronted with new information that simply was unavailable all those centuries ago we then need to go back to the box and open it again. I have long thought that when science comes into conflict with scripture it is our interpretation of scripture that is usually at fault. We also do well to remember that scripture itself is also an interpretation.

Petros2015 · Oct 6, 2016

I don't know - scripture and tradition imply that there was an incredible universal change with the story of the Garden. I feel like the Garden certainly qualifies as a special case. Science looks back and says 'No everything seems consistent here. Pretty sure T-Rex had those teeth for a reason'.

...But, if you read the fine print, science also says some other things about the fundamental structure of reality. And those are pretty fascinating. Check out The Science of God sometime by Gerald Schroeder, I think you'll like it. It's a good book by a physicist for people who are trying to reconcile the observable world and science with some of the tradition (Jewish perspective, not distinctly Orthodox, but I think close in many cases) of scripture. It was the only intelligent scientific defense of 6 day creationism that I had ever seen, and it was beautiful and strengthened my faith in both scripture and science.

JackRT said:
I have long thought that when science comes into conflict with scripture it is our interpretation of scripture that is usually at fault.

What if it was both?

ArmyMatt · Oct 6, 2016

jckstraw72 said:
i don't get your point about the flood

just trying to think about why they are not around anymore. I thought maybe they were some of the sinful ones that the Flood took care of.

Cnk12 · Oct 6, 2016

Maybe I'm oversimplifying this, but if God transcends time, couldn't that bridge the differences between Genesis and old earth? Of course not in a clear way where we understand complete details, but at least a jumping off point.

jckstraw72 · Oct 6, 2016

God transcends times, sure, but the issue here is disputed timelines about creation itself, which does not transcend time.

ArmyMatt · Oct 6, 2016

rusmeister said:
Let me ask instead how you understand "Wherefore as by one man sin entered the world, and death by sin, and so death passed upon all men". Do you understand that literally, or do you explain it away somehow as a symbol? How did the Church fathers understand that passage? If you do accept it as literally true, then how is it that death entered the world by sin, AND entered the world before there was any man to sin?

Wisdom of Solomon is even more blunt:
"God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living. For He created all things that they might exist, and the generative forces of the world are wholesome, and there is no destructive poison in them; and the dominion of Hades is not on earth." -Wisdom of Solomon 1:13-14

rusmeister · Oct 6, 2016

Wrote an extensive reply, which a "browser refresh" erased.

In super-extreme short, not only am I familiar with the idea of Schroedinger's Cat, I actually know who Stanley Jaki is. The idea is nonsense as applied to the issue at hand. It is not true, in regard to the Creation of man, that two mutually exclusive ideas are both true. The cat is NOT both dead and alive, it is only our knowledge of the fact of the matter that is at fault. The cat does not become retroactively dead or alive; it was always one or the other. Common sense should immediately grasp this.

I had a much more considered response that I will have no time to reproduce for a few days, and apologize for the unintended curtness. The main reason I don't wish to argue with non-Orthodox is not that I cannot respond, but rather that it is hard enough establishing common ground with people who profess the same faith as I do. When they don't, the number of shared assumptions rapidly becomes much smaller.

One difference I note between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism in general is that the former is definitely more OK with not understanding, and places less demand on any synthesis with secular knowledge. The latter, especially Thomists, place much greater weight on the importance of human reason. I myself enjoy non-Orthodox authors and apologists, but know where to draw the line.

YCGP · Oct 6, 2016

What does the cat experiment mean for creation? Is it that with archeology we have 'observed' one reality and now it is real (or perhaps just seems that way to us?). And without observing there is no God and were no neanderthals?

Please explain this to me

buzuxi02 · Oct 6, 2016

YCGP said:
I am reading a book called "Sapiens" and it tells the story of humankind. So far most of it has been about neanderthals and the other species of humans who existed at the same time. Eventually, all but one species went extinct and homo sapiens (us) made it to the top of the food chain.

These species, such as neanderthals and homo erectus, existed two million years ago.

What is the Orthodox explanation of this?

First is I would take the Chinese theory as more accurate than the standardized "out of Africa" theory that is taught in our neck of the woods. Yes Chinese scientists have a differing out of Africa theory which differs from we are accustomed to hearing

The very fact that scientists believe we interbred with neanderthals can only mean that neanderthals are also of the same species as us (or if you prefer a subspecies that was hardly any different). The Chinese insist that Homo Erectus is literally the first homosapien.
The word for human in the Greek OT is anthropos. Etymologically the word anth-oro-pos means 'looking upwards', standing erect etc.
The OT does make mention of variations. In one place, it spoke of the men of old the men of fame the men of renown, offspring of Seth''s and Cain intermarrying.

Petros2015 · Oct 6, 2016

YCGP said:
What does the cat experiment mean for creation?

Heh. That's a good question. To me, personally, it means we are living in someplace fantastic. Under the covers 'common sense' doesn't necessarily hold - to some degree it seems like the Universe is built for miracles. And that strengthens my faith and is not incompatible with it. You can email me pgordon2015@gmail.com if you like and I'll talk about it off-thread.

truefiction1 · Oct 6, 2016

rusmeister said:
Wrote an extensive reply, which a "browser refresh" erased.

In super-extreme short, not only am I familiar with the idea of Schroedinger's Cat, I actually know who Stanley Jaki is. The idea is nonsense as applied to the issue at hand. It is not true, in regard to the Creation of man, that two mutually exclusive ideas are both true. The cat is NOT both dead and alive, it is only our knowledge of the fact of the matter that is at fault. The cat does not become retroactively dead or alive; it was always one or the other. Common sense should immediately grasp this.

I had a much more considered response that I will have no time to reproduce for a few days, and apologize for the unintended curtness. The main reason I don't wish to argue with non-Orthodox is not that I cannot respond, but rather that it is hard enough establishing common ground with people who profess the same faith as I do. When they don't, the number of shared assumptions rapidly becomes much smaller.

One difference I note between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism in general is that the former is definitely more OK with not understanding, and places less demand on any synthesis with secular knowledge. The latter, especially Thomists, place much greater weight on the importance of human reason. I myself enjoy non-Orthodox authors and apologists, but know where to draw the line.

I prefer to use the word "rationalization" rather than "reason" when I think of western civilization. But most people I see don't see much difference.

gurneyhalleck1 · Oct 6, 2016

The Fathers tell me--

a) God created Man. He was "good." He was without sin and wholly without death.

b) we had First Parents

c) Our First Parents sinned, brought death into the world

d). The Incarnation was utterly perfect and gloriously transfigured and fully God, fully Man, like us physically in every way save sin.

e). Man is sinful, cannot improve without God's grace and mercy.

Evolution/seculars tell me--

a) God created some kind of spark amidst a primeval soup that ascended to land. It wasn't "good," just trying to survive and cope, adapt, live.

b) We didn't have First Parents, just a large group of hominid primates who bludgeoned each other and primitively killed and survived and were killed by animals stronger than them. They grew, adapted.

c) Death wasn't invented by sin, it was just part of a primeval equation of coping, living, adapting, DYING. Death was pre-loaded into the matrix making God the author of death.

d). Jesus can't perfectly be fully Man because man at that time was a snapshot in time, a "stage" toward something higher on an upward climb of evolutionary greatness. Someday, in millions of years, this Jesus kind of "man" will be a throw-back stage.

e) Man doesn't need a God. He's his own hope, always advancing ever onward. He learns, adapts, copes, improves. He's an animal, just a more sophisticated one.

So we are told how unreliable the Bible is, allegorical, interesting morally, and a quaint book from a bygone time of backwards desert dwellers buying into an anachronistic shaman group.

We hear the phrases "most likely" and "probably," and "we think" as well as "seemed to have" associated with evolution. Scientists find evidence of ancient camp fires or dimple tools and jewelry, ape-like remains, and twenty evolutionary scientists can't agree on the significance. And yet we have an Orthodox Christian in here calling evolution FACT not theory.

I see no way conceivable where this secular gospel that is so theologically bereft of Patristic footprints can be considered viable. It is not compatible with Our Faith and it offends the very heart of the teachings of our venerable Fathers. Father Seraphim Rose had the right idea about evolution, and we must really proceed cautiously with anything atheist scientist moderns tell us about the ancients. My fear of not believing the latest humanist fad and suffering the mockery of the chic contemporaries is nothing compared to my fear of accepting, encouraging, and witnessing to something that violates basic tenets of our faith and falling into the view that Stephen Hawking, Darwin, and the boys trump the Cappadocian Fathers, illumined saints, and other Fathers that were inspired and guided by the same Spirit that said "this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased." Lord have mercy.

Orthodox have let the toxicity of Protestant and Catholic compatibalism inform their mindset way too far. Again...Lord have mercy.

rusmeister · Oct 6, 2016

gurneyhalleck1 said:
The Fathers tell me--

a) God created Man. He was "good." He was without sin and wholly without death.

b) we had First Parents

c) Our First Parents sinned, brought death into the world

d). The Incarnation was utterly perfect and gloriously transfigured and fully God, fully Man, like us physically in every way save sin.

e). Man is sinful, cannot improve without God's grace and mercy.

Evolution/seculars tell me--

a) God created some kind of spark amidst a primeval soup that ascended to land. It wasn't "good," just trying to survive and cope, adapt, live.

b) We didn't have First Parents, just a large group of hominid primates who bludgeoned each other and primitively killed and survived and were killed by animals stronger than them. They grew, adapted.

c) Death wasn't invented by sin, it was just part of a primeval equation of coping, living, adapting, DYING. Death was pre-loaded into the matrix making God the author of death.

d). Jesus can't perfectly be fully Man because man at that time was a snapshot in time, a "stage" toward something higher on an upward climb of evolutionary greatness. Someday, in millions of years, this Jesus kind of "man" will be a throw-back stage.

e) Man doesn't need a God. He's his own hope, always advancing ever onward. He learns, adapts, copes, improves. He's an animal, just a more sophisticated one.

So we are told how unreliable the Bible is, allegorical, interesting morally, and a quaint book from a bygone time of backwards desert dwellers buying into an anachronistic shaman group.

We hear the phrases "most likely" and "probably," and "we think" as well as "seemed to have" associated with evolution. Scientists find evidence of ancient camp fires or dimple tools and jewelry, ape-like remains, and twenty evolutionary scientists can't agree on the significance. And yet we have an Orthodox Christian in here calling evolution FACT not theory.

I see no way conceivable where this secular gospel that is so theologically bereft of Patristic footprints can be considered viable. It is not compatible with Our Faith and it offends the very heart of the teachings of our venerable Fathers. Father Seraphim Rose had the right idea about evolution, and we must really proceed cautiously with anything atheist scientist moderns tell us about the ancients. My fear of not believing the latest humanist fad and suffering the mockery of the chic contemporaries is nothing compared to my fear of accepting, encouraging, and witnessing to something that violates basic tenets of our faith and falling into the view that Stephen Hawking, Darwin, and the boys trump the Cappadocian Fathers, illumined saints, and other Fathers that were inspired and guided by the same Spirit that said "this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased." Lord have mercy.

Orthodox have let the toxicity of Protestant and Catholic compatibalism inform their mindset way too far. Again...Lord have mercy.

QFT.
I agree completely. If we fall to the point that we talk of "different interpretations" of Romans 5:12 then we must equally treat all understandings traditionally seen as doctrinally understood (John 3:16, for example, or the meaning of the Paschal Troparion) as "a matter of interpretation", which is to say that all doctrine is up to the individual to decide what it means.

You might as well use Schroedinger's Cat to say that Christ is both risen and not risen from the dead, and there is no reason why someone who hasn't already applied "the Cat" to cast doubt on our understanding of Romans 5:12 and all of the associated Patristic teaching and other Scripture which are summed up there couldn't apply the idea to any doctrine whatsoever.

It is the reaching out to a new science that may well prove, in the end, to be as passing as Newtonian, or even the four elements as explanations of the universe, to deny that things ARE, that there is definite reality that we can know, definite truth that we can believe in. It takes intellectual mind games and uses them to unsettle settled and eternal truth, in an ultimately self-contradictory effort to synthesize the much less important curiosity about how things work in the temporal world with the far more important business of eternity.

I love intellectual reasoning, folks, but I am far more sure that the wisdom of the world is foolishness with God and that there is certainly going to be tension between the teachings of the world and thise of the Church.

But Gurney said it better, imo.

Petros2015 · Oct 6, 2016

rusmeister said:
You might as well use Schroedinger's Cat to say that Christ is both risen and not risen from the dead

Heh. Maybe you could have, until someone opened the Box. But after the stone was rolled back, we found a live Christ. And 'it was always so'.

gzt · Oct 6, 2016

Well, if that's the way one sees it, I wouldn't blame one for going that way. That's not the way all Orthodox theologians see it, and I hope one wouldn't impute those views to them, as bearing false witness is an evil sin.

gurneyhalleck1 · Oct 6, 2016

You're too kind, Rus. Coming from you, the compliment means a lot, trust me.

What bothers me about the modernism seeping into the Church is the slippery slope nature of it. It just seems like once you make Genesis a cute little allegory, Noah's tale just a local yokel weird take on the Mesopotamian myth with Noah being a rip-off of Ziusudra, then pretty soon it's not unrealistic to say there was no parting of the Red Sea, Moses somehow made the Commandments, not some God. Then Abraham was possibly not a real guy, just a great idea of a timeless archetype of a loving patriarchal figure. Not long after maybe the conquest of Canaan was bogus, David was really just some desert thug who got lucky and took over a kingdom because of some tribal connections, Saul was a great guy who wasn't really haunted by a demon because of his own narcissism and unwillingness to obey God and give him credit but rather because maybe he had health issues? Maybe the Babylonian Captivity was made up, the Ark was never there to begin with, and the whole Old Testament is just a neat book of fables? Then maybe John the Baptist was just another archetype, Jesus just a great moral guide but really a fictional hero that encapsulates the same virtues of all religions a la Joseph Campbell's mindset, there was no real Crucifixion because that was just done to make the Jews look bad, and there was no Resurrection because we all know that idea was stolen from Mithras, Magna Mater, Isis, and other Mystery Religion cults of the early Roman Empire!

In short, if one is going to embrace the modernist gay fascism, evolution, obsession with race-baiting and Black Lives Matters, and bow down to any and everything that modernity preaches without close scrutiny through ecclesiastical eyes, why even be Orthodox?

My wife has this friend who is a super duper far left secular humanist. Her house is replete with Martin Luther King, Dalai Lama, Kennedy, Bela Abzug, all the secular religious characters. Why not just go that route? Why bother to be Orthodox at all?

rusmeister said:
QFT.
I agree completely. If we fall to the point that we talk of "different interpretations" of Romans 5:12 then we must equally treat all understandings traditionally seen as doctrinally understood (John 3:16, for example, or the meaning of the Paschal Troparion) as "a matter of interpretation", which is to say that all doctrine is up to the individual to decide what it means.

You might as well use Schroedinger's Cat to say that Christ is both risen and not risen from the dead, and there is no reason why someone who hasn't already applied "the Cat" to cast doubt on our understanding of Romans 5:12 and all of the associated Patristic teaching and other Scripture which are summed up there couldn't apply the idea to any doctrine whatsoever.

It is the reaching out to a new science that may well prove, in the end, to be as passing as Newtonian, or even the four elements as explanations of the universe, to deny that things ARE, that there is definite reality that we can know, definite truth that we can believe in. It takes intellectual mind games and uses them to unsettle settled and eternal truth, in an ultimately self-contradictory effort to synthesize the much less important curiosity about how things work in the temporal world with the far more important business of eternity.

I love intellectual reasoning, folks, but I am far more sure that the wisdom of the world is foolishness with God and that there is certainly going to be tension between the teachings of the world and thise of the Church.

But Gurney said it better, imo.

rusmeister · Oct 6, 2016

Petros2015 said:
Heh. Maybe you could have, until someone opened the Box. But after the stone was rolled back, we found a live Christ. And 'it was always so'.

Agreed. But that's the whole point, that it really was so, not in scare quotes (doubt quotes?) but that the other state was always an imagined, fantasy state, not real or consistent with reality.

rusmeister · Oct 7, 2016

gzt said:
Well, if that's the way one sees it, I wouldn't blame one for going that way. That's not the way all Orthodox theologians see it, and I hope one wouldn't impute those views to them, as bearing false witness is an evil sin.

Yes, bearing false witness is a sin. But no one is saying that all Orthododox theologians see it that way.

My question to you remains - did sin enter the world by the action of an already existing man, and death by sin, as a result of that sin, or did death exist in the world before there was a man to commit a sin, as the evolutionary scientists aver? Or are you trying to have it both ways and say that the Fall "retroactively" caused everything to die and live by death from the beginning? That last seems to be what you have been saying, though the propositions are mutually exclusive. It is preposterous to pretend (even in the sense of "claim") to say that the natural sciences offer us coherent answers that are more sensible and compatible with reason than what the fathers believed about the world, having accepted as authority on the basis of faith, and then turn around and tell us it is so complex that it can violate all knowledge hitherto known and that nobody can really understand it.

If I'm going to err, I would rather it be with the fathers than with the scientists. And again, I am not anti-intellectual or anti-science; I just reject this package deal that requires me to accept things that have not and cannot be observed that factually deny tenets of the Faith, whether one intends it or no, along with things I don't argue about that can be observed such as medical or technological achievements.

Petros2015 · Oct 7, 2016

rusmeister said:
Agreed. But that's the whole point, that it really was so, not in scare quotes (doubt quotes?) but that the other state was always an imagined, fantasy state, not real or consistent with reality.

No, not scare or double quotes for me, comfort quotes. I don't really think you can apply Schrodinger's Box to Christ's Tomb, that was God in there, the Creator. There was never a question of outcome, thank goodness. On the other hand, the one place (maybe the only place) I think it *possibly could* have applied on a universal scale was the Garden. That was the Creation in there. And that was The Very First Moral Choice. And I believe that there was a question of outcome. I believe in free will, and I don't think from what I've read that is inconsistent with teaching.

rusmeister said:
are you trying to have it both ways and say that the Fall "retroactively" caused everything to die and live by death from the beginning?

To me, that appears to be what happened.

rusmeister · Oct 7, 2016

Thanks! But that's not even mysticism. It's just the self-contradiction of embracing mutually exclusive alternatives. Folk wisdom of previous ages called it trying to have your cake and eat it, too. It's not wise or deep. Anyone can do it. It's how people deny truth in general. It's how, for instance, Protestants affirm the validity of the Bible while denying the Church that produced it. The Church was both valid enough to produce the Biblical canon and invalid enough for them to dismiss as a corrupt man-made institution. They have it both ways, and that's why they can remain Protestant when confronted. It's how so many Christians try to hang on to both God and mammon. And on and on.
You're trying to hold on to the contradiction produced between a science that insists death was a part of Creation (assuming believing scientists) from the very beginning and a faith that insists it was Created without death.

The difference between a paradox and an actual contradiction is that a paradox only appears, superficially, to contradict, while in fact it does not, while a contradiction actually contradicts. There's no paradox in this idea. Only contradiction. Like God and mammon, we have to decide which one we really want, which one we choose in the face of the contradiction.

How do we explain Neanderthals?

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