What is the Church's position on Creation/Evolution

[gurneyhalleck1]

Brontosaurus!!? Everyone knows the Leviathan was a Brachiosaurus!!

The problem is that there have been very few or little Orthodox Creationist Scientists who would be willing to demonstrate something that is more explainable than a 6000 year old Earth - the majority of the Creation institutes that exist are Evangelical Protestant Christians who assume from the get-go a 6000 year old Earth, and have varying degrees of success and failure (a lot of times being not able to answer a lot of basic objections made by secular scientists) in trying to prove such an assertion. It's basically impossible to find a Creationist institution, which does research, that will bring forth arguments that contend the Earth is older than Bishop Usher's date, and as such, it's hard to disconnect the theory of YEC from the age of 6000 years.

One one hand of the spectrum, you'll have Jason Lisle, who has a PhD in Astrophysics, but who operates within the 6000 year old paradigm which can come across a bit of difficulties. Sometimes, I think he does an okay job - he does a good job of explaining away via pure logic the fallacies that Secular Scientists use in terms of scare tactics. Other times he'll argue that the speed of light is not necessarily constant and come across some other major problems which are difficult to logically answer within the 6000 year old framework.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have Dr. Dino - Kent Hovind - a man who received a theology degree from a degree mill, and was arrested for tax fraud - who continually uses discredited arguments so much so that he is mocked by other Creationists in the field, and he contends the idea that it's ridiculous that "a frog can turn into a monkey and then a monkey into a human." He also believes the Leviathan in Job was a Brontosaurus. He also operates within the 6000 year old paradigm and believes very deeply in Chiliasm - and I mean deeply. He seems to imply the end times are coming soon and that Christ is gonna establish a Kingdom on Earth when the end times happen.

 

[TheLostCoin]

Tomato tomoto.

An interesting video:

 

[TheLostCoin]

EDIT:

Well, I meant Behemoth. Are you sure I'm not an idiot? I've messed up three times already.

This video is PG 13 due to sexual organ euphemisms.

 

[rusmeister]

I have another question about the consensus of Saints - is it impossible for the consensus on Scientific (theological) fact to change? One could argue there was a consensus of Geocentrism until Copernicus and Galileo kind of changed everything. I doubt even Saint Paisios was Geocentrist.

Yes, it is impossible. But I would not accept a claim of consensus on geocentrism. The thing that is specifically impossible is that any claim made by worldly science, the temporary and passing knowledge of this world, which always has some degree of error, could be true insofar as it contradicts known and established dogma: Adam as a real and actual person, and not merely/only an allegory or imaginary type, the absence of death in the world until it was introduced by the sin of a fully-formed man - such claims that do in fact contradict this certain knowledge are false, misinterpretations amd misunderstandings of what people do see, and think they “know” (in the worldly sense). The narrative of evolution denies both of these teachings, and openly asserts that death existed from the very beginnings of life before any men ever existed. Further, the idea of evolution denies that there is any such permanent thing as a man, that we are in a perpetual state of change - there are only living beings, evolving from we-hardly-know-what to we-know-not-what. Thus creatures ultimately do not produce after their own kind, but rather produce new and different kinds, very slowly and subtly. That is the whole meaning of the narrative of evolution. Unbelievers hope that, through it, humans can evolve into their own gods. Believers hold the view in a state of cognitive dissonance, failing to see the mutual contradictions, and believing in worldly knowledge and education not only AS, but MORE firmly than in Holy Tradition which denies that narrative.

 

[TheLostCoin]

Yes, it is impossible. But I would not accept a claim of consensus on geocentrism.

Can you find a Church Father before Galileo who disagreed with Geocentrism? If not, there was a consensus. If you argue that Saints after Galileo disagreed with Geocentrism, thereby there isn't a consensus, then consensus did change.

I hate to remind you, but "worldly knowledge" has led to a proven truth of Heliocentrism which the "wise knowledge of Tradition" didn't provide (ignoring the development from the old Jewish model, as it's clear that the Church Fathers based their model of Geocentrism on the contemporary, worldly science of the day. Which Orthodox Christian believes in a flat earth, surrounded by a dome which is submerged in the Heavenly Waters?).

For me, consensus cannot change on matters pertaining to dogma and morality. How is it that animals before the fall were vegetarians is a matter pertaining to dogma?

Maybe perhaps Scientists have really read their own pre-supposed conclusion in analyzing deformed fossils and calculating the geological strata of the Earth. But mind you, Science as a whole can't be too far off due to how much instrumental value we as a society have received from it.

 

[rusmeister]

The problem I have with non-evolutionary OEC that I haven't found satisfactory is the record of death in the Earth which exists, which makes no sense as to why God, outside time and space, would design skeletons in the Earth to give impressions that creatures died, and that over time, skulls which were once more ape-like look slowly more and more human, and how these skulls can appear in multiple layers of strata that are all distinct from each other, which give the immediate impression of millions of years of erosion and burial of skeletons by said erosion, if He is omnibenevolent.

How did those skeletons get there?

If you say the Flood, the question is how exactly did they get to the layers - which have been dated to millions of years - by flood water, and how have they lined up so consistently that one hasn't found, for example, a Homo Habilis looking fossil around the date of a Homo Erectus looking fossil, (e.g., est. 600,000 years ago.)

I understand how you can think that.

You speak of getting impressions that... It is evident to me that what you see is a number of differently-shaped skulls that have been arranged in a certain order, and you have an unswervable faith that the information you were taught in school, in college, or the NY Times, is infallible, that dating methods are unquestionable, even though they produce dates that no one could ever have possibly observed (they were supposed to teach that the scientific method requires observability of results, but that gets left out of the whole issue of trying to look back to times before there were any human eyes to onserve anything. And the fact that even a method that might really produce demonstrable results over one thousand years (with faith in the records of fallible humans in the past) could still go completely off the wall over an attempt to project calculations back a hundred thousand, let alone a million or a billion years. As an analogy (which needs be valid on only one point to be valid), if one were using the Julian calendar thinking it to be completely accurate in solar terms, one goes off cosmic accuracy VERY quickly. In a mere 25,000 years, one would find blazing summer in the Northern Hemisphere in December, and freezing conditions in July. And that’s for something that describes a circle of time, not a straight line. On a linear model, the error would go on into infinity in a wildly wrong direction, ever increasingly divorced from the truth. Especially if the truth were much more finite than the calculators had calculated.

What I’m trying to say is that your faith in your own education is incredibly robust, so much so that it cannot even consider challenge to its foundations. It is dogmatic and sees the claims of time and calculation as unerring and certain, as if you yourself had lived across all that time and seen that claimed history for yourself.

A person who accepts that his own education might have been disastrous, that it might have taught him to see things completely wrong, is capable of recovering the faith of a little child and to see as true what is “foolishness to the Greeks”. A person who cannot accept that regarding his schooling would choose the wisdom of this world OVER any contradiction to it, though a man should rise from the dead to tell him otherwise.

 

[rusmeister]

Can you find a Church Father before Galileo who disagreed with Geocentrism? If not, there was a consensus. If you argue that Saints after Galileo disagreed with Geocentrism, thereby there isn't a consensus, then consensus did change.

I hate to remind you, but "worldly knowledge" has led to a proven truth of Heliocentrism which the "wise knowledge of Tradition" didn't provide (ignoring the development from the old Jewish model, as it's clear that the Church Fathers based their model of Geocentrism on the contemporary, worldly science of the day. Which Orthodox Christian believes in a flat earth, surrounded by a dome which is submerged in the Heavenly Waters?).

For me, consensus cannot change on matters pertaining to dogma and morality. How is it that animals before the fall were vegetarians is a matter pertaining to dogma?

Maybe perhaps Scientists have really read their own pre-supposed conclusion in analyzing deformed fossils and calculating the geological strata of the Earth. But mind you, Science as a whole can't be too far off due to how much instrumental value we as a society have received from it.

False. Geocentrism requires that one declare that the Earth is the center of all things, and to hold THAT as a dogmatic teaching. The ancient fathers never declared that. It makes your whole digression irrelevant. The ancient Christians were far more agnostic on the matter than you seem to suppose.

And “heliocentrism” is only an idea of science in our time, as geocentrism was an idea of science of the past. Neither was ever Church doctrine, and some future ‘discovery’ of worldly science could “prove” heliocentrism inaccurate, just as the heliocentrism “proved” geocentrism inaccurate. You seem to hold a greater faith in heliocentrism than in Jesus Christ as the risen Son of God.

Now I DO think you are right that science as a whole is not too far off when we speak about things we CAN observe. But the whole point is that you apply that reliability based on observability wrongly to things that cannot be observed. It is a classic mix-and-match, a substitution of concepts.

 

[TheLostCoin]

False. Geocentrism requires that one declare that the Earth is the center of all things, and to hold THAT as a dogmatic teaching. The ancient fathers never declared that.

Proof? Can you find Church Fathers who would dispute that the Earth is the center of the universe? Before Galileo?

And “heliocentrism” is only an idea of science in our time, as geocentrism was an idea of science of the past. Neither was ever Church doctrine, and some future ‘discovery’ of worldly science could “prove” heliocentrism inaccurate, just as the heliocentrism “proved” geocentrism inaccurate. You seem to hold a greater faith in heliocentrism than in Jesus Christ as the risen Son of God.

If you are suggesting that geocentrism has any possibility of being true, due to your snobby quotation marks, it really can't, according to your own paradigm of "observable science," because heliocentrism came about due to the fact that astronomers noticed weird patterns in terms of the sun's movement - rather than moving across the heavens and settling down, it would, before settling down, move upward and then circle around back downwards - something which doesn't make sense if geocentrism were to be true. Moreover, Galileo noticed that the phases of Venus made no sense from the physics of a the Geocentric model, as did the various moons of Jupiter. Unless the angels were pulling a funny prank on us, according to the Thomist astronomical model. But at that point, you would have to dismiss Newton's Theory of Gravity, as well as what visual astronomy has shown us, nearly falling into the realms of the Flat-Earther conspiracy.

 

[TheLostCoin]

And of course, when I say "heliocentrism", I mean simply the Earth revolving around the Sun - not that the sun is the center of the universe.

 

[rusmeister]

You are saying that if the fathers did not dispute geocentrism, then by definition they professed it. That’s like saying that because I do not speak out against vegetarianism, therefore I support it. No, the only way you can allege that the fathers held a consensus believing in geocentrism is to show that they actively taught it.

On heliocentrism, fine. But then it still becomes irrelevant. The fathers never taught “flat earth”, it never entered their teachings, and the fact that people refined such (worldly) knowledge does not make people of the past ignorant fools. The ancients knew a good deal more than you seem to suppose, and even the idea that the earth was round was known in the ancient world.

As to the charge of snobbery, I put the terms in quotation marks because I do question their validity as ultimate truth. It is obvious to me that, even if we were to have CONTINUAL development and refinement of knowledge of this fallen world and universe, which is not a fact, as a collapse of civilization could cause all such progress to be lost, then the knowledge that you are so sure of today would, in such speculative future refinement, equally prove to be backwards, primitive and simplistic by that imaginary future standard. Ergo, such knowledge must ALWAYS be held conditionally. And when we come to dogmas of the faith, we must not set conditional knowledge as higher than revealed knowledge. If we accept revelation in the Church at all as teaching ultimate - and not conditional - truth, then we must accept that it is ultimate, and therefore in the event of clear contradiction trumps any conditional knowledge of the temporal. We must accept that Adam appeared in the world fully-formed, as God made him, a world without death, in which there was no “evolution”, and that his fall produced the processes that we now attribute to sin and death, the processes that our temporal science observes and tries to describe and understand under terms like “evolution”.

And that has not yet begun to explore the validity of the education at the hands of this world that pretty much all of us received to one degree or another. If it is not valid - if it has taught us to see the world wrongly - and I do assert that, then the claims of its alumni are of little value.

I accept the science of this world - until it says that death has always been part of existence, long before any man appeared. “Wherefore as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin...” That is something that we have accepted by divine revelation, and it denies that narrative of evolution, produced by the abysmal education and schools of our time.

 

[TheLostCoin]

On heliocentrism, fine. But then it still becomes irrelevant. The fathers never taught “flat earth”, it never entered their teachings, and the fact that people refined such (worldly) knowledge does not make people of the past ignorant fools. The ancients knew a good deal more than you seem to suppose, and even the idea that the earth was round was known in the ancient world.

Oh, I know. Ovid, in his "Metamorphosis," even goes so far as to say the Earth is a sphere with two cold poles on opposite ends of the earth.

However, my original point was that such a model wasn't taken from the Bible - rather, the Church Fathers took the pagan philosophies of Ptomely, Aristotle, and all the subsequent Greek and Roman philosophies which held to a Geocentric Model and projected such a model onto the Bible itself.

The Jews understood Genesis in a different way before the advent of Ptomely, Aristotle, Ovid, etc.

You are saying that if the fathers did not dispute geocentrism, then by definition they professed it. That’s like saying that because I do not speak out against vegetarianism, therefore I support it. No, the only way you can allege that the fathers held a consensus believing in geocentrism is to show that they actively taught it.

They did actively teach it, which was my point.

Geocentrism - Scripture Catholic

I just assumed you knew this. My argument was that they actively taught it, and there isn't one Church Father whom I know of that taught differently, until Copernicus changed the game.

You can argue that Geocentrism and Heliocentrism don't pertain to Faith, but how do we determine what pertains to Faith and what doesn't if the Consensus of the Fathers on a particular cosmology is wrong?

 

[prodromos]

My advice, if you find this to be a contentious issue, is to simply put it aside for a time and concentrate on living the sacramental life of the Orthodox faith, just as converts who have struggled with things like prayer to the Saints or veneration of their relics etc. In time you can revisit the subject but I believe you will be able to take a much more objective view, having been informed by our faith, than you are able to at present.
It's not worth getting yourself worked up over when our Church is under constant attack from the evil one.

 

[prodromos]

They did actively teach it, which was my point.

Geocentrism - Scripture Catholic

No they didn't. They are simply describing things in terms of how they are observed, not teaching any particular model of why they are observed to move as they do. And the earth is at the centre of the universe in a way because all of the story of creation, the fall and our redemption takes place on the earth and nowhere else.
I suggest you find and read the article, "Most of the time the earth is flat"

 

[prodromos]

Found it for you.
Orthodox Arts Journal

 

[TheLostCoin]

That's possible.
But from the same website (my website), you have these same quotes where such an interpretation seems more difficult.

Saint John Chrysostom: "For He not only made it, but provided also that when it was made, it should carry on its operations; not permitting it to be all immoveable, nor commanding it to be all in a state of motion. The heaven, for instance, hath remained immoveable, according as the prophet says, “He placed the heaven as a vault, and stretched it out as a tent over the earth.” But, on the other hand, the sun with the rest of the stars, runs on his course through every day. And again, the earth is fixed, but the waters are continually in motion; and not the waters only, but the clouds, and the frequent and successive showers, which return at their proper season. "

Saint Clement of Rome: "the Creator, long-suffering, merciful, the sustainer, the benefactor, ordaining love of men, counselling purity, immortal and making immortal, incomparable, dwelling in the souls of the good, that cannot be contained and yet is contained, who has fixed the great world as a centre in space, who has spread out the heavens and solidified the earth."

Saint Gregory of Nyssa: "…the vault of heaven prolongs itself so uninterruptedly that it encircles all things with itself, and that the earth and its surroundings are poised in the middle, and that the motion of all the revolving bodies is round this fixed and solid center…"

Saint Hippolytus: [Refuting the view of the Greek Ecphantus]: “And that the earth in the middle of the cosmical system is moved round its own center towards the east...”

Saint Irenaeus: "The sun also, who runs through his orbit in twelve months, and then returns to the same point in the circle..."

Saint Jerome: "The moon may dispute over her eclipses and ceaseless toil, and ask why she must traverse every month the yearly orbit of the sun. The sun may complain and want to know what he has done that he travels more slowly than the moon."



I will say though that there is a massive contrast between Darwinism and Geocentrism. The Ancients simply were explaining how they viewed the universe; you'll be harder pressed to find Church Fathers or Councils discussing Heliocentrism and arguing why it's heretical (with the exception of referring to the Gregorian Calendar as being calculated by the "Atheist Astronomers" of the Pope according to Patriarch Meletius of Alexandria's Tomos), whereas every Saint that has talked about Evolution has specifically condemned it as heretical up until this point. And there's greater consistency with how the Jews viewed Adam and Eve and how someone like Saint Paisios viewed Adam and Eve, compared to Saint John Chrysostom and the Jewish Cosmological System.

Still, though...

 

[gurneyhalleck1]

Prodromos is 100% dead on. If this is going to get you so worked up that it becomes a thorn in your side and you can’t see the forest for the trees, if move away from the topic. Rush has given you some real theological meat that should stick to your ribs. He’s right about secular education and the faith we put into it. Seven years ago, I’d be like you and I’d no doubt be agreeing with and liking each post you make in here. I had huge faith in the evolutionary teachings and I just took them for granted.

No more.

I highly recommend you build up a massive wall of skepticism toward the secular. The Lord admonishes is about “the world.” The same institutions that you’ve received this education from now teach gender is not based on science but rather feelings and perceptions. These “scientists” are telling you genitalia don’t equate to gender. How.....scientific....

These same educators by and large are atheist, pro-abortion, pansexualists, and living the humanist utopia pipe dream.

If you can back off tonight and say, “ I might be wrong on this issue,” then I’d say you’re making spiritual progress. If not, the secularists have their talons in too deep. Who’s to say Adam isn’t just allegory, Moses is just a legend, Abraham a tall tale, and Jesus a historical nice guy with a good message who never healed a soul and who died like the rest of us? I’d really pray about this. Creation and the Fall are not trifles theologically speaking. They’re huge. A proper understanding of evil, death, sin, and nature all stem from how we understand Creation. I submit that the whole domino castle falls if we misunderstand what started it all—-the how’s and why’s. How can I understand the Incarnation and the Paschal glory if I don’t understand what the Divine Physician came to cure?

 

[Platina]

Great fathers like St. Basil and St. Anastsius of Sinai specifically say the Church doesn't care about things like the weights and motions and arrangement of heavenly bodies--it has nothing to do with the content of the Church's teaching, so if they did talk about these things at time, they could be wrong precisely because they were giving the teaching of science, which is fleeting, and NOT the teaching of the Church, which is unchanging.

 

[gzt]

Found it for you.
Orthodox Arts Journal

Yes, that's a good article and though I have minor criticisms of it, I'm puzzled you think it's more friendly to the YEC position than to those who acknowledge the scientific consensus. Ditto the notion that St Basil doesn't particularly care about the motions and arrangements of heavenly bodies.

 

[prodromos]

Yes, that's a good article and though I have minor criticisms of it, I'm puzzled you think it's more friendly to the YEC position than to those who acknowledge the scientific consensus. Ditto the notion that St Basil doesn't particularly care about the motions and arrangements of heavenly bodies.

I'm puzzled as to why you think that I think it is friendly to the YEC position since my post was in response to claims the Church father's taught geocentrism.

 

[Platina]

Yes, that's a good article and though I have minor criticisms of it, I'm puzzled you think it's more friendly to the YEC position than to those who acknowledge the scientific consensus. Ditto the notion that St Basil doesn't particularly care about the motions and arrangements of heavenly bodies.

I was also responding about geocentrism. If the Fathers taught incorrectly about it, the question is, so what? It's irrelevant to theology as far as I can see, and they openly admit that in those cases they were leaning on the science of their time.

That's rather different than when St. Basil explicitly tells us he is giving the teaching of the Church in his Hexameron, or when he introduces teachings by saying things like "Nothing is truer than this..."