After running into somebody who was essentially implying that the unanimous consensus of the Fathers was a literal 7-day creation some 7000-ish years ago - and this includes all modern saints and elders - I wondered about what other people say about this. Their principal objection to an older earth and specifically evolution was what becomes of death. Namely, nothing at all, not plants or animals or humans, could die before the Fall. According to this unanimous consensus. Anyway, I whipped together very quickly and unscientifically a survey meant for Orthodox Christians - entertainment purposes only - here: survey on evolution and Orthodoxy.
There are some definite flaws.
Personally, I think, beyond the obvious flaws, that the age of man deserves some thought. I put in 200,000 years as the appearance of biologically modern homo sapiens. But, you know, if God grabbed existing homo sapiens and then endowed him with a "rational soul" as some 'kind of' think, maybe the point should be "behaviorally modern man", which is on the order of 50,000 years ago (the "thousands of years" response). In that case, perhaps different questions should be written that distinguish the two. The "thousands of years" response was there more for "old earth creationists" of the stripe that believe the account of events as historical and literal, but that Adam and Eve were further in the past than Genesis seems to indicate, given archaeological finds that can be believed. And that's just one issue that nobody else has mentioned to me yet. There are several that have been mentioned on other questions.
Like I said, not a very well-written survey.
If you want to browse the results, you can look at the preliminary graphs.
No comments:
Post a Comment