Orthodox Christianity and Evolution
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- Опубліковано 26 вер 2024
- Video credits to Osckar Espinosa, Victor Salazar, Fernando González, Gábor Adonyi, Jari Lobo, stooz, Caelan Kelley, mostafa meraji, Ronin Studio, Олександр Копєйкін, Mabel Amber, who will one day, oleg_golovin, Niroshan Basnayake, Juncala, Caelan Kelley, motionstock, Tomislav Jakupec, Giustiliano Calgaro, Andreas, Renato Peixoto, Christian Bodhi, Engin Akyurt with thanks! Thanks also to the images by bodymybodyImage and by Dimitris Vetsikas.
That quote by St. Hippolytus is misleading and downright deceptive. St. Hippolytus is describing what Anaximander believes in order to REFUTE HIM. The book is literally called, "Refutation of all Heresies." He says the Greek philosophers are nothing but atheists. This would appear to disprove your entire point.
Most certainly, St Hippolytus does not refute Anaximander. He refutes heresies of his time such as the gnostic heresies of Valentinus and Secundus among many others, he refutes the three schools of Judaism, crossover beliefs, belief in magic, in astrology and the like. He mentions the classical philosophers in his Introduction, but does not refute anything concerning Anaximander and ends in his conclusion with a statement: The followers, however, of Hippasus, and Anaximander, and Thales the Milesian, are disposed to think that all things have been generated from one (an entity), endued with quality. St Hippolytus does not say that this disagrees with Christian belief. At the end he rather comments that "the Greeks [the classical philosophers], not being aware, glorified, in pompous phraseology, the parts of creation, while they remained ignorant of the Creator. And from these [from the classical philosophers] the heresiarchs [leaders of heretics] have taken occasion, and have transformed the statements previously made by those Greeks into similar religious doctrines, and thus have framed ridiculous heresies."
WOW. I have the same opinion on the matter but i didn't know the Holy Fathers and especially St. Basil was so open about it too (meaning the evolution)
Nice keep it up!
It is good to hear. Those Orthodox Christians from the parts of the world where Orthodoxy is the tradition understand most of that through cultural osmosis because our parents and our grandparents and so on understood things in that way. The idea that sound is transmitted via pressure waves or that clouds contain evaporated water or that living organisms inherit their traits from both their parents were in the culture since antiquity and are described by Aristotle. It was common knowledge, at least to those from regions where Orthodox Christianity was common. In western Europe, culture differed, there was no Greek education, no exposure to these ideas. Western Europeans rediscovered some of these ideas following the Renaissance, attributing the theory of evolution for example to Charles Darwin, a common misconception. They began using these ideas for political means, to justify class wars, fascism, etc, while accusing Christians of being ignorant of them, especially as devout Protestants with their sola scriptura stance (that only the scriptures contain any truth) were resisting scientific knowledge. Protestants converting into Orthodoxy think that because the Orthodox Church is old, it must share their literalist views on how to read the Old Testament.
YES exactly. I agree 100% as a Greek Orthodox . The only thing i still haven't found a logical argument against is the problem of death entering to the world through Adam. I would like to elaborate more on some details. I would like to know if you can and want to ask some more stuff if we can communicate through email or other platform thank you very much. @@nikolaosaggelopoulos8113
“The nature of existing objects, set in motion by one command, passes through creation without change, by generation and destruction, preserving the succession of the species through resemblance until it reaches the very end. It begets a horse as a successor of a horse, a lion of a lion, and an eagle of an eagle; and it continues to preserve each of the animals by uninterrupted successions until the consummation of the universe. No length of time causes the specific characteristics of the animals to be corrupted or extinct, but, as if established just recently, moves along with time”
- Saint Basil The Great, _Hexaemeron IX_
Thank you for this excellent lesson.
Very nice!
Why is it that you believe the Old Testament is mythological but the New Testament is a literal historical account? Is it not more reasonable that all of the extraordinary and impossible claims made in the gospels are just as mythological as the ones in the OT?
What about the modern Saints which clearly reject the common ancestor theory in evolution?
The modern Saints are mostly opposed to Social Darwinism a form of political philosophy underpinning Communism, Fascism and Nazi ideology which had nothing to do with science or Darwin. Name a specific quote and I can show you how the Saints is saying the opposite of what religious fundamentalists think the Saint is saying.
@@NicholasAggelopoulos "Proponents oof the theory that man evolved from apers are ignorant of man and his sublime destiny because they deny that man has a soul and refuse that he is capable of Divine Revelation. St Nectarios and more as i saw they specifically reject the common ancestor part of the Darwinian evolution
@@ThePerfectchris - Please cite a source, not just spurious claims. Are you quoting St Nektarios? St Nektarios has written in defense of reason. But if you have a specific quote in mind, please let me know where St Nektarios said it, which one of his writings and I can show you most certainly that he was arguing something very different from what religious fundamentalists wish he had been saying.
@NicholasAggelopoulos I saw the quote and I cut pasted some of it that points something like that . There is a UA-cam video that is showing all the quotes I will try to post in another comment. Maybe if you could refute this or explain your position. Thanks in advance
@@NicholasAggelopoulos ua-cam.com/video/gYRUcWYJMog/v-deo.htmlsi=4vhMWeyrq-vZeg9c
"Taken literally, the statements made in the story of creation will not simply be at variance with the process of evolution but also with our knowledge of geography, geology, physics, astronomy, meteorology and every other branch of empirical sciences."
So what? If the Scriptures don't fit in the little box of the current trending mythology of society, that doesn't mean we abandon the Scriptures. The fathers taught that creation is a mystery and it's arrogant to subject them to our own understanding of what we think happened. Science is great and useful for real time analysis and reproduction of hypotheses. But to use it to invent an evolutionary creation myth is taking it beyond what it has the ability to do.
"They preceded the New Testament and are subsequent to a more developed understanding."
That sounds more like Marcionism and Protestantism than Orthodox Christianity. The New Testament writers believed in the Old Testament "stories" as history and held the Old Testament scriptures with the highest esteem. We have no authority to cherry-pick which Scriptures are not literal when we don't want to believe them.
First of all, our current scientific knowledge is not a myth, it has caused among else the invention of computers and the internet. What is likely myths are the stories of the Old Testament. The saints in their wisdom called them myths and they are now known to repeat similar myths found in other older mythological traditions among the Assyrians and the other Messopotamian civilisations.
Secondly, I am quoting the three most important saints in Orthodoxy, the Nicene Creed and the Gospels and St Paul. The western understanding of both Protestantism and Catholicism is that God miraculously and supernaturally created the world as some kind of matter which became independent of God and was no longer God in any way and everything has been going on since then independently of God. Then what is natural and not miraculous cannot be a revelation of God. The Orthodox understanding is that the world is created through Logos (reason, the first principle of causality) and it remains always in a state of creation and that the world around us is not dirt but the very energies of God. It is God (in His energies) not dirt or dead matter. As the saints I quoted argued, the story of creation was a stepping stone towards Christianity and monotheism, useful in the context of economia, but the stories are myths and stories, these are the terms the saints have used. By contrast again, since for Western Christians the world around us is dirt, the Western Christians, exemplified by the Inquisition, have seen the Old Testament as a revelation and a source of true scientific knowledge (despite not using reason in any way or empirical knowledge or logic to arrive to any testable conclusions). In the west and especially in America, it is common to argue that only through the Old Testament we understand God. So rejecting the Old Testament as a source of scientifc knowledge to a Western Christian to whom reality is not a revelation of God, means that the only source of revelation (to them the Old Testament) is denied. If you do not understand this difference between east and west, you will only misunderstand and misrepresent Orthodoxy. You can read about the debate between St Gregory Palamas and Barlaam of Calabria to better understand that the Orthodox and Catholic views of what is the source of revelation of God are diametrically opposed.
Concerning Marcionism, the saints including St Paul as quoted, have argued that the New Testament complements the Old and Logos (and therefore as its consequence logic and causality) is the creative force in the universe. If Logos is not the creative force but the world is created by utterances of magic formulae as in the Old Testament, then we have two Gods, one of the Old Testament creating by voodoo then going to sleep on the 7th day of creation and later Logos appearing with Christ at a later stage continuing the creation -- or how do we reconcile the monistic monotheism of the Old Testament with Christ in the New Testament? That belief in two gods, one in the Old Testament and a different one in the New Testament creating in different ways would, indeed, be Marcionism.
I do not think you have thought it through enough.
It is rather the case that the Saints in referring to the Old Testament stories, often regarded them as myths and fables. Many have been known for centuries to come from other mythologies, from the Assyrian, Sumerian and other mythological circles. Noah's flood was a myth that existed in many cultures, as was the Garden of Eden. If you have gone as far as the 2nd page of the Gideon Bible you should have realised that there plants and animals are made after the creation of humans, which contradicts the first page. As St John Chrysostom says, these stories were appropriate for humanity at its infancy (as childrens' stories are appropriate to children). That is the view of the Orthodox Church as taught in our schools in Greece. In America you have lived too long separated from the Orthodox Church and your understanding comes from the Catholic and Protestant Churches. If you consider yourself an Orthodox, judging from your youtube name, you should try to remove yourself from those ideas and think with a fresh mind.
What the word "histories" meant in ancient times, was stories, not facts. Using the word history to mean historically confirmed facts is the modern use of the word, not the ancient use. The Saints, including the three hierarchs, choose to interpret the story of creation using the encyclopaedic knowledge of their time. Why should one accept myths dating from a time of illiteracy to be useful except as myths?
Concerning Marcionism, we have a God in the Old Testament who creates by speaking in time, in 6 days. The New Testament rather says that God exists outside time and creates through Logos (John, 1, St Paul's 1st Corinthians and Nicene Creed). To accept both methods of creation is to accept two Gods or a dual God: in the Old Testament God created through magic spells within time, in 6 days, but went to sleep, then the Apostles and Evangelists tell us he was creating through the Son, Logos,. That would seem like Marcionism. The New Testament supercedes the Old as St John Chrysostom argues. Everything has been created through Logos and without Logos nothing has ever been created. You have not thought about it clearly enough.
So Jesus's ancestors were monkeys? I'm sorry, but that doesn't sound right.
Perhaps you do not understand biology then. "Jesus's ancestors" has a certain meaning, it normally refers to humans, his Jewish ancestors, not to taxonomic between-species relations. In the same way you would not say that the US dollar was invented in ancient Mesopotamia, just because the Sumerians also had a monetary system. You can say that sentient organisms were preceded by non sentient organisms, as St Gregory of Nyssa puts it. So much would be correct and is indisputable. The use of the word "ancestors" is inappropriate.
If you have a problem with Orthodox Christianity, you can join some religious sect where reason is perhaps rejected and some stuff is made up to please people who think that other animals are not living organisms or whatever bizarre idea they have gotten into their heads because of their ignorance. The Fathers of the Church were learned men with sufficient knowledge on these topics as to appear completely modern in their perspective even in our own time.
@@NicholasAggelopoulos None of this proves evolution and the Church Fathers certainly don’t teach this.
@@SunshineCarpetCleaningAZ - St Gregory of Nyssa speaks not only of evolution of life but of the evolution of life from inanimate matter. It is at the end of the video. As I explain, it was common knowledge since antiquity, every educated person had knowledge of it, there was no point in the Saints' concentrating on that topic. It is only in the west that the idea was relatively unknown. The Patriarch of Constantinople at the time of Darwin wrote to congratulate Darwin for his compelling theory, not evolution on the whole that was known since antiquity which Darwin also acknowledged in his writings, but for his idea of natural selection through the survival of the fittest which was Darwin's proposal. The Patriarch only took an issue with the evolution of man, as man has language and other animals do not. St Gregory of Nyssa, however, does not see any difficulty even in that.
@@NicholasAggelopoulos What truly pains me is the realization that some individuals within our Church are disseminating falsehoods. They poorly reflect the true essence of our beliefs and distort our image, thereby providing an inaccurate portrayal to those on the outside seeking to understand our faith. please take down this content because it does not represent what our Orthodox faith truly believes.
@@SunshineCarpetCleaningAZ - This content is Christian Orthodox content that is taught in schools and seminaries in Orthodox countries around the world. It is exactly a problem that in America, people coming into Orthodoxy have the wrong idea about what Orthodoxy is. The belief in Creationism and so called Bible lietralism is the thing that most harmed the Western Churches. It was exactly the cause of the Roman Inquisition, that was non-existent in the Eastern Churches. There is no way Orthodox Christians around the world can tolerate the Creationist incursions into the Orthodox Church. Nothing can pollute and harm the Orthodox Church more than its derision by western atheists and ordinary rational Christians in America because of these ridiculous beliefs.
But were Adam & Eve real humans that physically ate the forbidden fruit, bringin sin and death to this world?
If not, how did anything die before humans? Or was there «death» before sin? Animals haven’t sinned so would that mean that animals were created to die, as they are not concius and do not posess a soul? Im not Orthodox but looking into it for answers. Please explain.
The Old Testament is the tradition in Judea at the time of Christ. It was not the tradition in most of the classical world. St Basil, St Gregory the Theologian and other early saints who embarked on explanining the Old Testament to a Christian audience, used the science of their times and reasoned analysis to come up with an appealing interpretation. For example, God did not have a mouth nor produced a sound when it is said that at the beginning He said: let there be light. Moreover, St Basil and the other Fathers said "he commanded" not that he wished or desired or decided, i.e. there must be no anthropomorphism, just an act of creation.
In the same sense, the creation of Adam must be seen as allegorical, as a metaphor, an act of God, the living Logos who endows humans with reason. Reason was understood at the time to be a unique attribute of humans alone among living organisms. The sin of eating an apple and the resulting mortality of Adam and Eve must also be seen allegorically. St Gregory the Theologian, who supervised the wording of the Nicene Creed, argued that God made humans in an image that we as humans do not perceive. For example, in afterlife the resurrected soul will not need a stomach to eat e.g. apples. He also argued that by the resurrection of the soul we must understand the resurrection in a shape or form that is conceived by God.
Aristotle had argued that other animals survive by the strength of their limbs, claws, fangs but humans alone excel in the ability to transmit knowledge. Those acculturated with classical philosophy at the time would have understood knowledge and logos to be closer to the "image" that God had made man in - St Basil argues exactly that. God did no make humans in His image in the sense of God having a body with a head, limbs and the other appendages and bodily functions - that would be ridiculous.
@@NicholasAggelopoulos So the Seven day creation is metaphorical, and humans are evolved distinct from monkeys through milions of years, and then someday given consciusness aka «God’s image»?
Maybe im just stupid and misunderstood your comment but how could there be death, if there was no «real» fall? And what need there would be for Jesus’s genealogy back to Adam if he was not a real man?
@@ravnus8599 - The final passage from St Gregory the Theologian at the end of my video summarises the act of creation and also answers your question about the evolution of mankind, hopefully better than I can.
@@NicholasAggelopoulos Appreciate that your responding, but I don’t seem to find the concrete answer in this video.
One can not say that Adam is metaphorical, without also saying the same about Kain & Abel and so on till Noah?
And did gaining consciousness/cognition result in the fall (whatever it was)?
And when did this all happen? There are 60 000 year old cave paintings, were the painters sinners by nature or ”animals” in the gradual progress of becoming ”human”
Sry about rambling, but i dont understand :(
@@ravnus8599 - The Old Testament (OT) is not a book of science. It is useful in providing cultural background and for its moral teachings, the idea of a Creator and the prophesies of a Messiah. It is also not an oracle. Importantly, it cannot contradict the New Testament, or else we have two Gods in two books contradicting each other and no longer monotheism. The Fathers describe the OT as useful for the edification of humanity at its infancy at e.g. 11:58, but the creation must be understood in terms of the Nicene Creed 11:12 and Gospels e.g. 12:25. The creation of life is presented by St Gregory the Theologian at 23:25.
God made Adam in His image. That should mean not with a head and mouth, limbs and bodily functions but perhaps as pure logos, as pure reason. The biological Adam is the mortal Adam "after the Fall". The "Fall" is pre-Christian mythology, if read without reference to the Christian Church. The Orthodox understanding is a world with reference to God (before the "Fall") vs with reference to our human understanding (after the "Fall"). From our human viewpoint, as we live in time and not beyond time, humanity turned up in the fullness of time and, like all other life, humans need to consume food to survive although, exceptionally, humans are endowed with logos or at least the ability to express reason through speech. If you are interested in questions of science regarding human biology, the Old Testament has absolutely nothing to say on the topic. The Fathers occasionally express some views (e.g. 23:25) but they are also not the best placed to provide answers. Following death, the soul after its resurrection will be in the image of God, again not needing to eat apples or carry out any other bodily functions (St Gregory the Theologian: On the Soul and its Resurrection).
I should add perhaps that there are two versions of the story of creation in Genesis. In chapter 2, page 2 of the Gideon Bible, it is instead said that God first created humans and then all other living organisms. These versions should be contradictory, as read by an American Evangelist believing God Himself to be subjected to time. How do they choose which one is the correct one? Perhaps it would help if I said that the Orthodox view is that God is unbounded by space and time and, therefore, it has no meaning to ask what came first and what came next or whether all appeared at once or sequentially. The evolution of life even from a human viewpoint might be arbitrary, as humans can also be seen as the product ultimately of the first ever organism or of the first ever organic chemistry reaction or of the first ever chemical reaction or the first ever atoms, etc. It is only out of some idle historical interest that these questions arise of what came first and what came next and when do humans come into the picture.