How do we explain Neanderthals?

truefiction1 · Oct 9, 2016

ArmyMatt said:
It could be a strong human element because that's what really happened. even the heretics get stuff right.

True. Or it could be because such beliefs were foundational within Judeo/Christian society and were the most universally accepted explanation for how things came to be, until challenged by other ideas, of which the proponents began to be able to provide considerable physical evidence in support of, beginning in about the 19th century AD. Does this not sound reasonable?

Now what I am saying is not that the Holy Spirit is not responsible for the belief that "God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1). Only that the Book of Genesis is not concerned with divulging detailed knowledge about cosmological things -- only Theological things (i.e. the relationships between things and between beings and between persons).

truefiction1 · Oct 9, 2016

rusmeister said:
I am fully aware that you do not intend to say this. I believe you have the best of intentions.
But you do seem to deny a very clear contradiction I have already pointed out, in which Scripture states clearly that death entered the world due to sin, an action of conscious, thinking man. Insofar as you defend the idea of human evolution (and you hitherto seem to have done exactly that), and the evolutionary narrative in general, you contradict this clear teaching which is unambiguously interpreted in our Tradition as meaning that there was a Created world without death, that a sinless man enjoyed, until he sinned. If you do NOT defend the idea of evolution and a world which never existed without death among living things, then please say so clearly. A refusal to do so can only be interpreted as willful contradiction of the clear teaching of the fathers, which DOES mean that the effect of what you say is that 'today we know better', which is not clarification of existing doctrine, but actual change of doctrine.

Still no contradiction. You see the relationship between the sin of man and the present nature of existence as one dependent on a linear timeline. We know, however, that what is revealed by the chronological order in the story is not about timelines but about relationships.

rusmeister said:
There is a sense in which this is true.But it is equally true that any communication, including Scripture, has the aim of communicating something, and not speaking an alien language that no one can understand. The contradiction remains. It has been clearly communicated and affirmed many times that death entered the world by sin, into a world that had existed without death and sin, something that you seem to be expressly denying now.

If Scripture had included communication about the theory of evolution, it would have, during the times it was produced, been "speaking an alien language that no one" could understand. Hence, it would not have been seen to qualify as authoritative sacred writings.

Neither the scripture nor any consensus unambiguously states that the present condition of existence (wherein death takes center stage) came after sin in time. The only relationship between sin and death that is unambiguously taught by Scripture and the consensus of Church writings is that sin is the first, or primary cause for things being as they are. What I mean by this is that although the Biblical text and many Church fathers portray this relationship in terms of strict chronological order, first sin, then the wages of sin, the Scripture and some saints clearly state that man was created from dust and would return to dust if he freely chose not to be high priest of the earth. Mortality was already programmed into his nature, as he was a product of the previously existing natural order. Thus, the relationship between sin and death can be seen as ontological rather than chronicle. In other words, Adam's failure in the garden caused death to reign throughout the entirety of created time and space, from beginning to end, without respect to the precise time and place the failure occurred.

YCGP · Oct 9, 2016

truefiction1 said:
If Scripture had included communication about the theory of evolution, it would have, during the times it was produced, been "speaking an alien language that no one" could understand. Hence, it would not have been seen to qualify as authoritative sacred writings.

Why do you think that nobody would be able to understand?

truefiction1 · Oct 9, 2016

YCGP said:
Why do you think that nobody would be able to understand?

I suspect that at that time there was a lack of sufficient recorded observations of phenomena that would have served as evidence to help any of them see, or realize, that a theory such as evolution could be a valid explanation for how the many varieties of living things came to be. With no knowledge of genetic traits, no experience with fossil records, and no means by which to tell how old things were, there would have been no baseline of understanding for them to be able to take the big step into comprehending evolutionary theory. The Scriptures began to be produced during a period of human history in which people answered questions using mythological stories. That is the sort of writing they knew at that time. There were not any scientific writings.

Rodan6 · Oct 9, 2016

rusmeister said:
Hi, Rodan, and welcome to TAW!
Please bear in mind that this is a congregational forum, and we have our own rules here.

You've walked in on a conversation that has been going on for some time, and haven't seen the extent to which the disagreeing sides have shown that they most certainly are not "checking their brains at the door". It is (no doubt unintentionally) insulting to us who disagree with you. You would have to show that you understand what we have been saying, and your comment here shows that you haven't yet.

Please forgive my blunt assessment. My intent was to illustrate the problem that arises when (I believe), people's noses are too close to the pages they study. Sometimes, when we step back a little, we may realize that we are taking our research so seriously, that we loose the reality of the big picture--in this case, that God has chosen an evolutionary path for our world. Our research and study should not neglect facts as they are proven with overwhelming evidence. Study and analysis are of great value and benefit to us all and do not deserve ridicule (which, regretfully I am guilty of here). The pursuit of truth is perhaps God's greatest desire for His children on earth. It is my hope and prayer that those seeking truth do not fear the truths that are revealed--especially when such truths are discovered by those who hold different religious leanings. Truth is truth regardless of where it is found.

truefiction1 · Oct 9, 2016

gzt · Oct 9, 2016

Rodan6 said:
Please forgive my blunt assessment. My intent was to illustrate the problem that arises when (I believe), people's noses are too close to the pages they study. Sometimes, when we step back a little, we may realize that we are taking our research so seriously, that we loose the reality of the big picture--in this case, that God has chosen an evolutionary path for our world. Our research and study should not neglect facts as they are proven with overwhelming evidence. Study and analysis are of great value and benefit to us all and do not deserve ridicule (which, regretfully I am guilty of here). The pursuit of truth is perhaps God's greatest desire for His children on earth. It is my hope and prayer that those seeking truth do not fear the truths that are revealed--especially when such truths are discovered by those who hold different religious leanings. Truth is truth regardless of where it is found.

I think your commentary is quite welcome.

~Anastasia~ · Oct 9, 2016

truefiction1 said:
I suspect that at that time there was a lack of sufficient recorded observations of phenomena that would have served as evidence to help any of them see, or realize, that a theory such as evolution could be a valid explanation for how the many varieties of living things came to be. With no knowledge of genetic traits, no experience with fossil records, and no means by which to tell how old things were, there would have been no baseline of understanding for them to be able to take the big step into comprehending evolutionary theory. The Scriptures began to be produced during a period of human history in which people answered questions using mythological stories. That is the sort of writing they knew at that time. There were not any scientific writings.

I would respectfully disagree with the assessment that humankind couldn't understand such things as genetic traits being passed on - ESPECIALLY in the mind of someone who holds to the popular anthropological theories.

Mankind had domesticated animals by that time. Breeding could be controlled, especially in the kinds of flocks and herds that require only a single male to many females, leaving the rest to be culled. Mankind would have figured out very quickly that traits are passed to the offspring and could be selected for. They would have been able to purposely produce changes in animal lines over a few generations. To explain such happening over a great period of time, larger changes, shouldn't have been beyond the ability of mankind with a written language and established culture to fathom.

rusmeister · Oct 10, 2016

truefiction1 said:
Still no contradiction. You see the relationship between the sin of man and the present nature of existence as one dependent on a linear timeline. We know, however, that what is revealed by the chronological order in the story is not about timelines but about relationships.

If Scripture had included communication about the theory of evolution, it would have, during the times it was produced, been "speaking an alien language that no one" could understand. Hence, it would not have been seen to qualify as authoritative sacred writings.

Neither the scripture nor any consensus unambiguously states that the present condition of existence (wherein death takes center stage) came after sin in time. The only relationship between sin and death that is unambiguously taught by Scripture and the consensus of Church writings is that sin is the first, or primary cause for things being as they are. What I mean by this is that although the Biblical text and many Church fathers portray this relationship in terms of strict chronological order, first sin, then the wages of sin, the Scripture and some saints clearly state that man was created from dust and would return to dust if he freely chose not to be high priest of the earth. Mortality was already programmed into his nature, as he was a product of the previously existing natural order. Thus, the relationship between sin and death can be seen as ontological rather than chronicle. In other words, Adam's failure in the garden caused death to reign throughout the entirety of created time and space, from beginning to end, without respect to the precise time and place the failure occurred.

TF, you say words like "first" (cause) and "primary" (as if shifting to Latin really hedged your bets), yourself forgetting that they do in fact have chronological meaning. Your rejection of the relation of cause and effect to chronology sounds oh-so-intellectual, but it is still just nonsense. The assumption of chronology IS unambiguous, and you are trying to cast doubt on it now because you are holding modern science, a fully human affair, as fully revelant of divine truth as Tradition, and in fact, drag the consensus of Tradition down to make it at least as fallible and subject to doubt and change as science. This is scientism.

Scientism places ones personal opinion above a consensus of Tradition that has the power to correct one when one is wrong. It is a heresy, because it means that Tradition cannot correct my personal opinion. If so, then anyone can differ on any point, merely by speaking of ambiguity, the casting of doubt, the denial of previously held assumptions, like the serpent did to Eve in the garden.

Whereas I say that I personally could be wrong about anything, and if I am, and I have been, let it correct me. Anything. Including what I think to be of my knowledge of science, history, or whatever. Even evolution. The trouble there is that absolutely everything I find affirms you are wrong. You cant even produce a chronological narrative that would describe how sin entered the world in an evolutionary framework, and so you resort to saying that chronology is nonsense. I would be very interested if you could prove me wrong on that one. Produce your narrative, in chronological order. You cant. Chronology does not deny or contradict ontology, and your ability to use those two words doesnt make it so. Your theory is fancy, but it is nonsense. Yes, it lets you, in your own mind, hold science in one hand and Tradition in the other and see no conflict. But plenty of other people do see it. If everything is just your opinion vs my opinion, then there is no Church. If the consensus of Christians of the past can be found to be really wrong in something really important, that does impact theological understandings, and declared ambiguous, even though everybody agreed and understood the same things, then all of Truth is up for grabs. The Resurrection can be doubted as much as an actually sinless and deathless garden.

I apologize for the lack of punctuation, by the way. I have a bug greying out my keyboard shift.

rusmeister · Oct 10, 2016

The upshot is that these defenders of evolution think they do know better, that modern scientific knowledge shows that the fathers were ignorant about things that affected their theological understandings. That undermines Tradition completely.

I see it as the fantasy of every teenager that knows better than his parents because he or she has learned a few things about life.

rusmeister · Oct 10, 2016

Furthermore, as this affects Orthodox theology, I'm going to ask that non-Orthodox stay out of offering opinions.

gzt said:
I think your commentary is quite welcome.

GZ, do you want the thread closed? That seems like something we could do. Shut down all discussion of this, kill any thread as soon as it is posted. And not because I am afraid of truth, but because I believe the truth will win out in the end. It is just that the falsehoods do so much damage before that end. Either we keep this issue limited to Orthodox, or I think this will have to become a taboo topic.

Cappadocious · Oct 10, 2016

rusmeister said:
Either we keep this issue limited to Orthodox, or I think this will have to become a taboo topic.

Funny how Orthodox used to treat being banned from Catholic Answers Forums as a badge of honor because they couldn't handle objections. And the Catholics here have a similar policy.

I like to think we can do better.

rusmeister · Oct 10, 2016

Cappadocious said:
Funny how Orthodox used to treat being banned from Catholic Answers Forums as a badge of honor because they couldn't handle objections. And the Catholics here have a similar policy.

I like to think we can do better.

Well, Capp,
We all think this issue is important. You think it matters that we affirm modern science and deny that it could ever contradict Holy Tradition, and some of us think it important that we admit that modern science could really err, and actually contradict our Tradition.

It's really hard to maintain a charitable spirit if we are trivializing those Orthodox we really disagree with. We wind up offending them, they wind up offending us, nobody wins. And real winning is figuring out which view is more completely true, and more correctly encompasses how we think about Tradition vis-a-vis other knowledge, and getting EVERYBODY to support THAT, not getting any joy out of having "beat somebody else" (not that you think that).

It's a really bad idea, in such situations, to look to any non-Orthodox for support. In that sense, the CAF attitude is ultimately right, even if their position is wrong. People really don't share our theology or ecclesiology; on what basis are they even agreeing with us? I can't even really appeal to Lewis or Chesterton, though I think they came to what I have also come to, a recognition that the earthly sciences have poisons that have the power to falsify our understandings. We might have a free-for-all in St Justin's, but the threads are here in the main forum, where we shouldn't be arguing. This is something that really is an internal issue for us, and it is not right to invite outsiders, who aren't in communion with us, to back us up.

truefiction1 · Oct 10, 2016

rusmeister said:
TF, you say words like "first" (cause) and "primary" (as if shifting to Latin really hedged your bets), yourself forgetting that they do in fact have chronological meaning. Your rejection of the relation of cause and effect to chronology sounds oh-so-intellectual, but it is still just nonsense. The assumption of chronology IS unambiguous, and you are trying to cast doubt on it now because you are holding modern science, a fully human affair, as fully revelant of divine truth as Tradition, and in fact, drag the consensus of Tradition down to make it at least as fallible and subject to doubt and change as science. This is scientism.

Scientism places ones personal opinion above a consensus of Tradition that has the power to correct one when one is wrong. It is a heresy, because it means that Tradition cannot correct my personal opinion. If so, then anyone can differ on any point, merely by speaking of ambiguity, the casting of doubt, the denial of previously held assumptions, like the serpent did to Eve in the garden.

Whereas I say that I personally could be wrong about anything, and if I am, and I have been, let it correct me. Anything. Including what I think to be of my knowledge of science, history, or whatever. Even evolution. The trouble there is that absolutely everything I find affirms you are wrong. You cant even produce a chronological narrative that would describe how sin entered the world in an evolutionary framework, and so you resort to saying that chronology is nonsense. I would be very interested if you could prove me wrong on that one. Produce your narrative, in chronological order. You cant. Chronology does not deny or contradict ontology, and your ability to use those two words doesnt make it so. Your theory is fancy, but it is nonsense. Yes, it lets you, in your own mind, hold science in one hand and Tradition in the other and see no conflict. But plenty of other people do see it. If everything is just your opinion vs my opinion, then there is no Church. If the consensus of Christians of the past can be found to be really wrong in something really important, that does impact theological understandings, and declared ambiguous, even though everybody agreed and understood the same things, then all of Truth is up for grabs. The Resurrection can be doubted as much as an actually sinless and deathless garden.

I apologize for the lack of punctuation, by the way. I have a bug greying out my keyboard shift.

Again, the proof that the biblical chronology is not about ordered time is in the text itself. That's all I have time to point out for now.

jckstraw72 · Oct 10, 2016

St. Basil says that the first day is an image of eternity precisely because it lays down the boundary of a day - twenty-four hours - and then revolves upon itself endlessly, making the linear timeline, which of course is opposed to the cyclical time of the pagans. the text is unmistakably about ordered time --- yet another contradiction.

ArmyMatt · Oct 10, 2016

truefiction1 said:
True. Or it could be because such beliefs were foundational within Judeo/Christian society and were the most universally accepted explanation for how things came to be, until challenged by other ideas, of which the proponents began to be able to provide considerable physical evidence in support of, beginning in about the 19th century AD. Does this not sound reasonable?

and again, if that were the case, the post-19th century saints would be more open to the idea of evolution. and they are not.

truefiction1 said:
Now what I am saying is not that the Holy Spirit is not responsible for the belief that "God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1). Only that the Book of Genesis is not concerned with divulging detailed knowledge about cosmological things -- only Theological things (i.e. the relationships between things and between beings and between persons).

while true, our theological origins point out that God did not create death and that (according to St John Chrysostom) vegetation was created after the sun to show that life comes from God and not from the sun.

stavros388 · Oct 10, 2016

Cognitive Dissonance, anyone? I must point out that what I feel I am seeing on display here is the unfortunate weakness of holding to Tradition at all costs. Of course there are great strengths to holding fast to Tradition, but when it places one in a strict either/or position, things get silly really fast.

Evolution is not scientism. It is fact, confirmed by mountains of evidence and verified across several scientific domains. Death of the physical kind most certainly existed long before there were any homo sapiens around to sin. There is evidence that our ancestors were at one time primarily a prey species, that they fought off other hominid species, and some of them appeared to have resorted to cannibalism. All of this is clearly evinced through the study of homonid sites and bones. Read 'Sapiens' as mentioned in the OP, or 'Masters of the Planet' by Ian Tattersall for a more in depth examination of human evolution. This acquired knowledge paints a picture much different from that which the Church paints, but to deny it is voluntary self-deception.

So what does one do?

I don't have the answer. My faith has been greatly challenged by such information, yet I have studied (and continue to study) these matters and cannot deny what is plainly true. Can one not accept reality as demonstrated by evidence and scientific consensus, on the one hand, and practice the faith diligently on the other while accepting that aspects of Tradition are largely mythical, particularly in regards to what it deems as 'sacred history'? Cannot one still accept that Christ and the Church offer a practical and efficacious means of approaching theosis, of knowing God, and this in spite of what science shows us to be true? Is the essence of true Christianity destroyed by the fact of human evolution and the past existence of neanderthals? I'd like to believe it is not.

It poses a challenge, to be sure! But perhaps we need to separate what is spiritually beneficial in the writings of the father's from what is clearly erroneous, or attempt to reinterpret what is there as myth, metaphor, or metaphysical insight instead of placing some of the fathers in a head to head battle against all (or nearly all) of the world's anthropologists, archeologists, paleontologists, zoologists, geneticists, and so on, when it comes to that which contradicts what we now know about the world.

jckstraw72 · Oct 10, 2016

stavros388 said:
Evolution is not scientism.

interestingly, do you know what St. Paisios has to say about it?

stavros388 · Oct 10, 2016

As much as I adore St. Paisios, he didn't spend much time at dig sites or in science classes, so I prefer to acknowledge him as a sure guide to rooting the passions out of the human heart but not for piecing ancient bones or human history together.

jckstraw72 · Oct 10, 2016

stavros388 said:
As much as I adore St. Paisios, he didn't spend much time at dig sites or in science classes, so I prefer to acknowledge him as a sure guide to rooting the passions out of the human heart but not for piecing ancient bones or human history together.

but did he comment on it scientifically or religiously?

How do we explain Neanderthals?

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