Science and Orthodoxy: 4 Questions and 4 Your Answers

[nutroll]

Okay, well, my understanding is that it is NOT contrary to those chapters, rather that it affirms them...and affirms, in agreement with various Fathers, the understanding that sin so wrecked the cosmos that nothing we can observe is as it was before sin (and therefore the pre-sin creation is simply not accessible to science, because it cannot be observed).

In a young earth creationist model, however, sin comes about very soon after the creation of the universe. So it seems to me that this would be of limited benefit in explaining things. If we assume that things are roughly uniform since the fall (even excluding a cataclysmic flood from assumptions of uniformity), science would be able to study most of created time in an effective way. This logic reminds me of arguing with a kid who just wants to change the rules of a game when he's losing. I could be mistaken, but it always seemed like a half baked idea from so-called "creation scientists" who are more concerned with having an argument than finding evidence.

 

[rusmeister]

Fr Matt is right.
But I would say that it is possible to be in the Church and believe a whole bunch of wrong things and still hope to be saved by God's grace. The Church can cure and correct us over time, if we let it. We don't walk into the Church with right thinking about everything; in the modern age with its faith in modern education and modern science, which is produced by modern education, which is governed by modern secular philosophy that seeks to exclude God from thought, even when the person being educated strives to include Him, one of the great tragedies is of people coming into the Church and thinking that their ideas ARE the mind of the Church, and they teach their ideas and do not accept correction from Holy Tradition. Thus we have a plurality of thought that ought not to exist, but like so many things in the Fallen world darkened by sin, does exist.
Modern science is a passing thing by definition - especially when you have worked out what the word "modern" means. It does not teach eternal truth, but can only say what SEEMS to be true at a given moment given certain assumptions. Its teachings are not equal in weight of truth to the revelation of Christ, and the consensus of the teaching of the fathers and saints in Holy Tradition. That the earth is round we should accept with a grain of salt - some more advanced form of physics outstripping even quantum may show a far more complex picture some day. That Jesus Christ is the Son of God we should accept on absolute and unquestioning terms. Sadly, many have that paradigm reversed.