I've had people say that Orthodoxy has no opinion on science but has anyone addressed what the fall and ancestral sin mean if we are to accept Darwinism?
Is that a real question, or merely rhetorical?
Has anyone answered as to why we should compromise our theology for a modern secular idea?
The thing is, there is any amount of disagreement on how much compromise there actually is, and tere are more than just two positions in the argument. Since this has been moved over to free-for-all, I'm not the least bit hesitant about turning the teacher tone up very high about this.
The bad position is, of course, the "man is the measure of all things" Enlightenment humanism turned up too high version of Darwinian evolution in which utterly random small scale genetic variation is deemed sufficient to power the pattern of development to which the fossil record (among other things) testifies, therefore eliminating the deity from the picture. This position surely overreaches, in the sense that it is making claims about genetic variation which are scientifically at least a bit dubious. It's quite clear that genetic variety equals speciation; it's also clear that survival is a sorting factor. What isn't clear is exactly what is generating that variation. (Discussion of the origin of life is utterly speculative and may be disbelieved at will.)
The problem with the young earth creationist theory, though, is that if one assumes that the physical world testifies accurately to the processes of time, then one must believe that the world is old and that there is a definite progression of form in living creatures as time progresses-- on a scale of millions of years. This evidence is scientifically unassailable, and the creationist attempts to refute it as science are utter failures. The only way to escape is to make an unscientific assertion: that the world was created to look old. This has
huge theological implications, none of which I think would prove acceptable to any of us.
YEC is a theological opinion, not a scientific theory. And furthermore, it's an opinion whose authority arises from the interpretive process, not from any text itself. To believe it one must believe that scripture intends to teach about the physical processes of creation, and while we're at it (as far as the fathers are concerned) that it intends to refute any kind of evolutionary theory, not just the atheistic Darwinists.
As far as the church fathers are concerned, they cannot have consciously intended to refute evolution; the idea hadn't been conceived of. The errors of their lifetime were the theories that the material pre-existed and that the divine simply shaped it, and that the material was intrisically "evil" in contrast to the "good" divine. Further back, the competition for the Genesis account involved copulating pantheons and the corpses of slain monsters. As far as science is concerned, all of these are surely wrong-- indeed, one of the striking things about Genesis 1 is how much it resembles the modern secular vision of creation. "Let there be light" leads directly into the Big Bang; the progression through the six days expresses the very much longer progression science sees.
So when you say, in the other thread:
But when men make observations which contradict the revealed truth, we have the right to disagree.
... I don't know about "rights", because rights are very much about being allowed to do things that are
wrong. But I do know that this sets up the foundation for atheism. It's important to differentiate between the observational and analytical powers of sciences; it's another when one relies on theology in saying, "you can't believe what you see." This is a principle that can only be pushed so far. It demands the uttermost rigor, something that the YEC crowd conspicuously lacks.
Beyond that, there's the notion that, well, theology is so much more important than, well, science, that theologians don't ahve to be, well, good scientists, or even listen much to scientists. This, folks, is
hubris.
