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Evolution & Creationism
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
Science is the study of the method of how things come to be. Theology is the study of the nature of the universe in relation to God. In conclusion the Church teaches why and what, science teaches the How.
God Bless
Let me ask you about your theology. Do you believe animals died before Adam was created? Do you believe that the earth is 4.5 billion years old? Do you believe that Adam and Eve literally had trees that gave them life or knowledge?
As for God creating man, who disagreed with that? Were you not created by God? Does God have to snap his fingers or do it this or that way to create you? Did He have to do that with Adam? Is a long lasting act any less done by God than one that is short, as if time were of the essence? Think about your assertions and questions.
God Bless
Here's my issue. If you are going to disagree with Evolution on Scriptural basis because you've become unable to read past the letters of Genesis to read its message, than you must also accept that the earth is flat, that the sun revolves around the earth and that the moon burns you at night (all with verses that appear to make those claims).
If on the other hand, you can't accept a scientific theory because you see it as unbefitting of God, who are you to make that claim? "But indeed, O man, who are you to reply against God? Will the thing formed say to him who formed it , “Why have you made me like this?” (Romans 9:20)
You are now subjecting God's method of creation to suit your own ideas. Is it any less amazing if God makes the universe as it is within the blink of an eye or over the process of billions of years? Is man any less God's creation by whatever method God employed to make him? The problem here is that the Fathers teach us that God is a mystery and we are imposing our own limitations on Him and putting Him in a box.
If you still have doubts about the Trees, St. Gregory the Theologian did not believe they were literal trees, or at least he saw the story allegorically. Kind of like how we read the Book of Revelation. It is an abstract incomprehensible mystical reality expressed in cruder and raw human language in the form of a concrete story.
As for man being an animal, this is something almost all the Church Fathers disagree with you on. Read through the likes of St. Athanasius or St. Cyril of Alexandria and you will see they all refer to man as physically being an animal. Its not surprise we have appendages, follow the same primary biological functions as most mammals with their instincts and drives and have a genetic makeup that is 98% similar to that of chimpanzees. This is only fact. But it is not surprising since we are all made from the dust, we are physical beings with a physical animal nature. However above and beyond that we are made in the Image and Likeness of God, who is His Logos (who said if you see Me you have seen the Father). We are thus rational (like the Logos), have freedom of will (like the Omnipotent), make moral choices and perceive objective morality (like the Good God) in our conscience and bear the imprints of creativity (like the Creator) and our center of self a consciousness (like the great 'I AM'). This is our spiritual component which cannot be accounted for by science since it studies material things. This is why the philosophy which excludes the supernatural aka Materialism, cannot account for free will but believes in biological determinism (that all our thoughts and actions are merely the response to neural impulses). We cannot reason or choose anymore than an ape desires to have sex and acts on that drive. This is the materialist view, it is not science (ironically), but a philosophy (which excludes the supernatural). We also cannot make moral choices anymore than a lion forcibly copulates with a lioness. The lion doesn't really rape the lioness and so on the materialist view the same can be said about the human. All this shows that the divine imprint that we bear is in our spirit and that the human is not *ONLY* explained by science (study of the physical universe), since he is not only physical.
As for evolution and your arguments against it, scientifically they are untenable. I don't think you completely understand the theory by the things you are saying. You cannot sit and watch a species evolve, but fossil records and mechanisms for it have been discovered and the theory is almost as well established as Newton's gravitational theory. But I digress, I don't care to prove or disprove evolution, but to show that science (the study of nature) is but one way to read and express God's glory: "The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament shows His handiwork. Day unto day utters speech, And night unto night reveals knowledge." (Psalms 19:1-2)
As for you having differing opinions on what happened. Theology is not something subject to individual opinion but is a matter of the consensus of the Fathers and the teaching of the Church in her Liturgy, ScripturesScriptures, Councils and Saints. The Fall happened due to sin and turning away from He who is Life. The return happened through the Incarnation which includes the entire life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ including everything in between.
Our trust in God is not compromised by studying science and following it to its natural conclusions. Neither is it compromised by properly understanding the message of the Bible and how it was inspired and meant to be read.
I hope you actually answer to the points of the post.
God Bless
My beloved in the Lord
Thank you for waiting for me. After
two weeks holiday we came back to no hot water and a broken PC, but thank God
everything is back to normal now. I have had a chance to read through this
thread from the beginning and have much to say to you. As I said, by God’s
grace, I will answer the points raised since I joined the discussion, so at the
end of this post I have listed them, so that if you would like to amend
anything, please just let me know.
Before that I would like to clarify what
has been said about Saint Athanasius the Apostolic’s ‘On the Incarnation of the
Word’ earlier on in this thread. I had a copy which I took with me on holiday.
When you read from the beginning you will learn three things that Saint
Athanasius was very clear about. He
1. Expressly refuted the man-made versions of creation stories of his day, starting with the Eipicurean theory which is in essence the theory of evolution, followed by the Platonic and Gnostic notions. He refutes all three theories.
2. Upholds the Scripture version of the creation as the only divine truth
3. Confirms that death entered the world as a consequence of the Fall
The passage that has been quoted earlier on in this thread is from chapter one "Creation and the Fall" section 3. But what does Saint Athanasius say in section 2? He says:
1. St Athanasius Refutes the Evolutionary Theory of His Time
“In regard to the making of the universe and the creation of all
things there have been various opinions, and each person has propounded the
theory that suited his own taste. For instance, some say that all things are
self originated and, so to speak, haphazard. The Epicureans are among these;
they deny that there is any Mind behind the universe at all. This view is
contrary to all the facts of experience, their own existence included. For if
all things had come into being in this automatic fashion, instead of being the
outcome of Mind, though they existed, they would all be uniform and without
distinction. In the universe everything would be sun or moon or whatever it was,
and in the human body the whole would be hand or eye or foot. But in point of
fact the sun and the moon and the earth are all different things, and even
within the human body there are different members, such as foot and hand and
head. This distinctness of things argues not a spontaneous generation but a
prevenient Cause; and from that Cause we can apprehend God, the Designer and
Maker of all.
Others take the view expressed by Plato...
Then, again, there is the theory of the Gnostics..."
Immediately after refuting each one of these three philosophies of the origin
of life, he goes on to say at the beginning of part 3:
“Such are the notions which men put
forward. But the impiety of their foolish talk is plainly declared by the
divine teaching of the Christian faith. From it we know that, because there is
Mind behind the universe, it did not originate itself…”
2. St Athanasius Upholds the Scriptural Account
He calls it the “divine teaching of the Christian faith”; it is not man’s teaching, but
God’s, it is divine and therefore above every foolish notion of man. In the
paragraph below and elsewhere he refers to the literal account.
3. St Athanasius Confirms that Death was a Consequence of the Fall
The continuation of part three has already been quoted earlier on May 22:
“For God is good—or rather, of all goodness He is Fountainhead,
and it is impossible for one who is good to be mean or grudging about anything.
Grudging existence to none therefore, He made all things out of nothing through
His own Word, our Lord Jesus Christ and of all these His earthly creatures He
reserved especial mercy for the race of men. Upon them,
therefore, upon men who, as animals, were essentially impermanent, He bestowed a grace which other creatures lacked—namely the
impress of His own Image, a share in the reasonable being of the very Word
Himself, so that, reflecting Him and themselves becoming reasonable and
expressing the Mind of God even as He does, though in limited degree they might
continue for ever in the blessed and only true life of the saints in paradise.
But since the will of man could turn either way, God secured this grace that He
had given by making it conditional from the first upon two things—namely, a law
and a place. He set them in His own paradise, and laid upon them a single prohibition.
If they guarded the grace and retained the loveliness of their original
innocence, then the life of paradise should be theirs, without sorrow, pain or
care, and after it the assurance of immortality in heaven. But if they went astray and became
vile, throwing away their birthright of beauty, then they would come under the natural law of death and live
no longer in paradise, but, dying outside of it, continue in death and in
corruption. This is what Holy Scripture tells us, proclaiming the command
of God, "Of every tree that is in the garden thou shalt surely eat, but of
the tree of the knowledge of good and evil ye shall not eat, but in
the day that ye do eat, ye shall surely die." (Gen. 2.16) ‘Ye
shall surely die’-not just die only, but remain in the state of death and of
corruption"
The claim has been made that this account says that man would "revert back to the natural law of death". However, Saint Athanasius did
not say that man would "revert back" but he said that man would "come under the natural law of death", which means that they had
not been under it before.
Saint
Athanasius also maintains that death came after the Fall in the same chapter 1:
(section 4):
“For God had made man thus (that is, as an embodied spirit), and
had willed that he should remain in incorruption. But men, having
turned from the contemplation of God to evil of their own devising, had come
inevitably under the law of death. Instead of remaining in the state in which
God had created them, they were in process of becoming corrupted entirely, and
death had them completely under its dominion”.
(section 5):
“as also Wisdom says "God created man for incorruption and as
an image of His own eternity; but by envy of the devil death entered into the
world." (Wisdom 2. 23) When this happened, men began to die,
and corruption ran riot among them and held sway over them to an even more than
natural degree, because it was the penalty of which God had forewarned them for
transgressing the commandment”.
We note that Saint Athanasius quotes Wisdom, "by envy of the devil death entered into the world", as does Saint Basil in his Divine Liturgy. Therefore, both these saints uphold the teaching that death entered the world as a consequence of sin.
Allegorical or Metaphorical?
Regarding the
Church Fathers interpretation of Scripture, we must discern whether their
contemplations were allegorical or metaphorical. In the metaphorical way of
contemplation the literality of the account is not being denied at all. On the
contrary, it is upheld, but in order to extract spiritual lessons from it,
literal things may be taken to symbolize other things. For example when we say
that the censer is the Virgin, we are not denying that the censor is a real
censor. I remember listening to a sermon of His Holiness Pope Shenouda in
Arabic, I think it was about anger, in which he mentioned that the Fathers
often used the ‘metaphorical way’ of interpreting the Bible (saying
‘metaphorical’ in English).
Saint Basil the Great Rejects Allegorisation
In Saint Basil’s Hexaemeron (homily on the six days of
creation), Part 9, he says the following:
“I know the laws of allegory,
though less by myself than from the works of others. There are those truly, who do not admit
the common sense of the Scriptures,
for whom water is not water, but some other nature, who see in a plant, in
a fish, what their fancy wishes, who change the nature of reptiles
and of wild beasts to suit their allegories, like the interpreters
of dreams who explain visions in sleep to make them serve
their own ends. For me grass is grass; plant, fish, wild beast, domestic
animal, I take all in the literal sense. ‘For I am
not ashamed of the gospel’. Romans 1:16”
What we can determine from this is even if one Church
Father allegorized the creation account, other Fathers have the opposite stand.
As we can see, both Saint Athanasius and Saint Basil uphold the straightforward
reading of the creation account.
Please let me know which Church Father you think saw
the creation account as allegory and where exactly in their writing, and I will
research it diligently, by the grace of God.