Hi @Christy! Not intending to attack the author’s motives. It’s the content and style which I find shallow. The “fail to completely embrace” quote is from the article, a disrespectful dismissal of all views but the author’s own. To me, if @marusso wanted gracious dialog, that’s where you need to start.
BTW - thank you for letting the post through. I prefer dialog, as you know. But the ease with which the article could be satirized, I felt, was the most illuminating approach.
This is an excellent article that summarizes why science and Christian faith are definitely not mutually exclusive. I shared this to my Facebook page and if one person will take the time to read it, it will be worth the share.
I found his article to be brilliant and illuminating.
Thanks for sharing, I hope it stimulates some interesting discussions in your community.
I am Eastern Orthodox and came to this through a youtube video. I don’t want to be full of debate, and honestly and truly my prayers are for all that we find the Way the Truth the Life, the Eternal Logos who loved us into being because Jesus Christ has revealed that God is Love.
Consider the meaning of words scientifically and rigorously so that our communication is honest and true. Origin - “the point or place where something begins, arises, or is derived.”
When Darwin wrote “On the Origin of Species”, and I have read most of that book (perused the later chapters, I found it boring), he was asserting that speciation was a process driven by survival - and in theological terms one could argue overcoming death by death, but in scientific terms his argument is both insufficient and unnecessary!
The problem is, mere survival is insufficient to go to “Origin.” Fruit flies survive. E Coli survives. Grass survives. In 170 years since the writing of his book, we have not seen fruit flies change into anything substantially different than fruit flies, or grass change into something substantially different than grass, or E Coli change into anything other than E Coli. Certainly there were adaptations and genetic changes. However, those changes can be traced genetically and they allow a species to survive various conditions better, but they do not fundamentally change the “kind.” That is a real problem in science.
And from an Eastern Orthodox perspective, if something is not true, or if something is posed as truth but is exalted beyond its reasonable limits, it is in error. The EO all agree on the utility of Holy Scripture, the authority of Holy Scripture, the beauty and truth of Holy Scripture BUT we don’t believe in Soli Scriptura, for we have the witness of the Holy Spirit and the truth and the beauty of Saints who have lived lives which manifest the works of God, and they have explained and lived many passages of Holy Scripture and have warned against many errors in reducing the meaning of Holy Scripture. So Holy Scripture is part of a greater whole that is the Church.
The utility of something is important. Its application and proper use is important. Be it food, or communication, or prayer, or worldly money, or worldly power, or time… And perhaps I am wasting the latter.
Darwin’s theory does not go to “Origin.” Its utility has been dubious. It has been used as an excuse for apostasy, in its social form for mass murder in the third Reich, in its educational form for mass delusion for it is not true going to “origin”, and in its extrapolation as a catch word for anything other than “Creation”, God and The “Logos”, the Logos being the Origin of species, of biology, of the Cosmos, and all things visible and invisible that we encounter as human beings.
And from a scientific mathematical and physical perspective, it is easily shown that the total number of interactions in the Cosmos is far smaller than 10^128 (a 1 followed by 128 zeroes), but the number of combinations in 64 bytes, 512 bits, is over 10^154! And the simplest virus is over 2.3 Kilobytes - so “evolution” clearly does not go to “Origin” of anything. This mathematical and rigorous understanding is important, because without logic to guide adaptation in vast combinatorial space, entropy (death in physics) assures that mutations or random errors in DNA/RNA will lead to degradation - and that is what we in fact see in science, in species, and in Holy Scripture - for our lives used to be much longer.
Logos is translated as “Word”, but it is more a dynamic “Word.” I understand it has been translated as a verb in the French, but it is beyond verb and noun - it is more like DNA in the generic sense of that word. Logos is the pattern of the Cosmos and of all things in the Cosmos that have meaning and it is the Logos that overcomes and drives speciation in reality - just as a computer program can be designed in AI space to overcome obstacles and “adapt.” But more so, a dynamic program can be adapted using dynamic intervention, and life can be adapted by Divine intervention, and the latter happens.
All people and all things are made in a beautiful way. That includes our enemies. When we reduce things and people around us, we encounter the danger of judging them, of reducing them, of using them or even destroying them when we think that Darwinian process or “evolution” is something real and utilitarian. But when we think in terms of Logos, our neighbor, our enemy, our environment, our Cosmos becomes Holy for it is made in the image of God, and we as people in it are called to His Likeness through a Cross in life.
That Cross encompasses truth.
I know there are those within the Eastern Orthodox Church that believe in Evolution. However, I do not find them particularly experienced in the Holy Traditions of the monastery, or the ancient Fathers, or particularly credentialed and rigorous in science. That is my observation at least. As a hard scientist, evolution is pretty much meaningless and useless.
The problem with insisting that evolution should be something we can observe in a lab in real time is that it requires so many generations and generations take time to be born and reach reproductive maturity. Lenski’s experiment on bacteria has demonstrated that the proposed mechanisms of evolution can be observed in a lab. Of course the bacteria didn’t turn into something other than bacteria, but that was not predicted by any hypothesis.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01620-3
The theory of evolution reflects the idea that things reproduce according to their kind. Dogs have dog babies. Octopi have octopi babies. The lines between species can never be drawn between two generations of individuals because evolution happens at the population level over large amounts of time. It’s the same dynamic as language change. Back in the day speakers of some dialects of Latin became dispersed and over hundreds of years populations of speakers who had been isolated from one another gradually changed the way they spoke that their dialects became both very different from the original Latin speaking population and very different from each other. But all the children spoke the language of their parents and their community. No Latin speaker gave birth to a French speaker. No family decided to speak Spanish in the middle of an Italian community.
This is not true. The reason it has been such a successful theory (and what is used in science today has moved well beyond Darwin’s original ideas to incorporate genetics and other mechanisms of genetic change in populations besides simply natural selection) in so many fields of science. Anything can be used as a tool of oppression and anything can be given as a reason for apostasy. Christianity itself has been used as a justification for all kinds of evil including slavery, genocide, and the subjugation of women. I personally know so many people who cite the behavior of the church in light of sexual abuse scandals as the reason they lost their faith. So this whole idea that “bad people quote Darwin” or “people leave Christianity because of science” doesn’t prove anything about whether the theory of evolution is sound or not.
The evolutionary model only claims to explain how existing life changes over time. It does not claim to explain the Big Bang, the fine tuning of the universe, or the origin of life. Deciding it is the theory of everything and then faulting it because it isn’t really the theory of everything is a misunderstanding.
This is not a correct understanding of entropy.
Christians who accept evolution believe that God is the Creator of all things visible and invisible and that the Son/Word has been present from all eternity and all creation exists through him. You do not have to deny God’s ongoing work in creation in order to agree the evolutionary model is a sound scientific one. We don’t expect science to have the tools to identify or explain God’s presence and contribution.
I personally don’t think there is any intelligent design to evolution. As far why did something move beyond just bacteria and so on, is because natural selection favored it. Same as why blue eyes developed and seems to do well in certain places. Same reason why dots developed in this or that animal and others get stripes. I have no reason to believe evolution was manipulated to being about our species or any species. That would mean a loss of free will as god guided specific animals to specific places to mate and caused the environment to be a specific way and so on. I just don’t buy it. I think it happened randomly.
As for did god come into play. I don’t know. I presume on a argument centered on the gap of us having no idea really how anything came into exist. If we go back further and further to seconds before the universe was created, and seconds before whatever created that, and seconds before the first universe of the multiverse and so on. Into ink at some point our god did something. Maybe one day we will know. But I don’t see it within modern science.
Since it can be easily illustrated that your understanding and explanation of evolution is not true, then I assume this statement applies as well. Christy has pointed out several points of error you are making. No doubt they are done with the best of intentions and reflect what you were taught, but they are still erroneous. I respect that you do not want to argue, and agree that it is better to discuss the ideas we have in common, but would encourage you to study a bit about what evolution really is before expounding on what it is not. Darwins book was written a century and a half ago, and while has some conceptual ideas that remain valid, is quite dated from a scientific standpoint. It is sort of like trying to land a spacecraft on Mars using Newton’s writings alone.
" Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution " is an essay written by Theodosius Grigorovich Dobzhansky, a prominent and influential Eastern Orthodox biologist.
It usually increases the rate of genetic change, and can thus be quite useful in high-stress environments. This is especially evident in things like Daphne that can do both asexual and sexual reproduction.
So, EC is not for fundamentalists and not for non-post-fundamentalist, non-American evangelical ones.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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