Nor do I. Irrefutable facts are refuted in time. It is shifting sand.

Most so-called science these days is paid for by grants. Not only is the course of research determined by these grants.. there is pressure to produce the right answers or the grants don’t get renewed.

I question the assumptions that undergird the science that Greg loves. He comes back with “irrefutable facts”.

Facts are only facts within a set of accepted assumptions. Outside those assumptions they are simply data.

Where he refuses to engage is at the level of assumptions. We quickly start talking past each other and it can descend into argument. On the other forum, the trend was more supportive of him so I stooped commenting. Here it is the opposite.

Both thoroughly Orthodox forums BTW.

These are not easy questions.

Well then, my apologies to Greg. I only frequent a few favorite sites.

If you are still in attendance, I must say respectfully that you often pop in, make assertions that are subsequently challenged (or at least questioned), and then virtually disappear without answering the challenges/questions. Some of these are, perhaps, merely combative and not worthy of response; but others are deserving of an intelligent reply. It is frustrating for those of us who might like to broaden our perspective. If you have something of genuine value to contribute to the conversation, please stay with it. For if it is true, it will hold up under scrutiny.

Greg, it is never actually clear what anyone means by “Darwinian Hypothesis”. The meaning seems to be ephemeral and change within the course of most discussions.

Whatever it is materialism has always been at the root of it; a denial of the Incarnation has always been at the root of it; a denial of the creation of man in the image and likeness of God has always been at the root of it. Randomness was certainly part of Darwin’s approach and understanding.

That may be changing in the scientific community and for that I can only that God. However, the loud, continuous and malicious attacks on Christians by those who say they represent the evolutionary community seems to indicate otherwise. The public face of the modern scientific community is one of intolerance toward faith, especially Christian faith.

This is not an intolerance of fact or method or desire to know. It is an intolerance born of a lust of power and despite your denials, Darwin and his closest followers were actively looking for a paradigm to replace the Christian moral/cosmological perspective.

When I hear important voices in the Orthodox Church say things like “St. Maximos must be reevaluated in the light of modern science” I am shocked and saddened. For we Orthodox the revealed theology of the Church must be used to evaluated the philosophical claims of all other disciplines.

As Mr. Leite points out and I have attempted to point out, the “Darwinian Hypothesis” seems quite clearly to be a metanarrative laid over highly selected facts to produce a doctrine that is antithetical to revealed truth. To me that is not science. You seem to reject that entire line of thought. You seem to want to argue from “just the facts”. Facts are simply data until they are subjected to analysis from the over riding metanarrative that is unproven and un-provable empirically.

Three things about the common “Darwinian Hypothesis” that are continually at work in the modern mind that I reject (so that we are clear):

1. The transmutation of lower order creatures into man
2. Materialism or its cousin mechanistic dualism.
3. Any origin myth that denies God as creator.

All three of those assumptions are at work in the evolution that is presented to non-scientists. I will oppose any attempt to change the cosmological and moral teaching of the Church based upon the false materialist/academic philosophy.

Here is a reading list for you:

“The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma” by Henry Adams
“Mont St. Michel and Chartes” by Henry Adams
“Exit the King” by Eugene Ionesco

I assume you have read St. Athanasius, “On the Incarnation”

Greg,

I’m no anti-evolutionist. In fact I just accept the contradictions between scientific evidence and theological evidence because that is actually quite common even within a specific field of knowledge and much more between two different ones. It’s no exclusivity of biology and theology.

But, how do you reconcile “the Fall as metaphorical” and “the Resurrection as factual” if you do that?

What I mean is: if evolution is really a fact – and not a metanarrative over facts, which the mere dispute it has with religions evidences it to be – then there was no factual fall. The fall is a metaphor for some other kind of spiritual problem with humanity, a spiritual problem that has no root in the physical universe, even if it manifests here. Therefore, there would be no need of an actual Incarnation, death and Resurrection of the source of existence to solve that. The problem could be solved just as spiritually and apart from the world and we could use the Resurrection as just a metaphor for that, just like we say that a person who fell to an addiction and recovered somehow was “born again” but not in a literal way.

If there was never an Adam and Even whose bodies were made of another kind of matter, because death did not enter the material world through their actions but has always existed and in fact it was a much benefitial component of the emergence of the material manifestation of Humanity – for evolution requires death – how is it that God was saving us not from a “glitch” in the universe, but from something that He put in it as a creative tool itself? In other words,if God uses death as a *mandatory* tool for good *despite* any action of lesser beings, being the de facto immediate cause and morally responsible for our sufferings and death, how is this a good God at all?

Unfortunately, it is never actually clear what you mean by “the Darwinian hypothesis”, but evolutionary theory posits specifically non random development. I repeat: evolution depends explicitly on the non-randomness of the universe and specifically of the biological process of evolution. You *really* need to familiarize yourself with the claims of evolutionary theory, because your comments are critiquing a non existent straw man. Any college level text should explain this clearly.

Second, as has been noted here before, you are also conflating categories: the fact of evolutionary development does not somehow depend of philosophical materialism. Please – at this point I am begging you – please read David Bentley Hart’s Existence of God. I am happy to pay for it. There is no question that his work destroys the category error you are promoting. If “information” – which is certainly not the same as Maximus (or Bulgakov for that matter) – exists “below, behind and within” matter, it would explain quite a bit. But it would not contradict the fact of evolutionary development.