Metropolitan Kallistos Ware Preaches Evolution Heresy

[Cyprian]

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware Preaches Evolution Heresy
http://www.tangle.com/view_video.php?vi ... 0e84e66464

Please remember to give clergy their proper title, even if we are not in communion with them.

[joasia]

Astounding. When I faced an Orthodox Christian Evolutionist, I'd always ask: when did God create the soul during these stages of evolution? God created mankind in His image, not phyiscally, of course, but in the spiritual context. So how does a pool of goo retain that image? And if we go to their so-called evolution of man, when in this process, just logically, does he create the soul? That means that the "parents" previous to that had no soul or, put another way, had a mortal soul, like animals. How is it justified, logical, orderly? God is not chaos. Even the ranks of the angels are arranged in an orderly fashion. Anyway, they can never answer that. Because, with evolution, the soul has no place and therefore it's a purely atheistic concept and has no relationship with the Christian faith.

[Pravoslavnik]

When I faced an Orthodox Christian Evolutionist, I'd always ask: when did God create the soul during these stages of evolution?

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   [b] A fair question, deserving a considerate response.  In the original Hebrew text of [i]Genesis[/i] there are two different verbs used to describe the process of God's "creation" of the cosmos.  One verb is used to describe multiple stages of the creation, including the creation of men from the earth-- literally, the "adamah."  The other verb refers to the special, distinct creation of Adam-- wherein God breathed into Adam "and he became a living soul."  The [i]Genesis[/i] text goes on to describe the eventual marriage of Adam's sons to "the daughters of men."  Who were these "men" and their "daughters?"  One possible interpretation is that Homo Sapiens evolved from hominids--as seems evident from the scientific data-- and that Adam was the first Homo Sapien given an immortal soul-- denoted by the specific verb.  

P.S. Which Orthodox Christian "heresy" refers to evolutionary theory as un-Orthodox? Certainly not chiliasm, which refers to eschatology rather than to any scientific theory regarding the origin of cosmic phenomena.[/b]

[Cyprian]

Pravoslavnik,

You did not answer Joasia's most excellent question. All you did was babble on a bunch of nonsense.

I don't understand why you incessantly bring up the question of Genesis ch. 6 and the "sons of God" who took wives of "the daughters of men". You have been informed of the Church's teaching on this matter, and you have been directed to the interpretations of the holy fathers, which you clearly have set aside, favoring your own private interpretation.

Why is it that you insist on voicing your personal and vain opinions contrary to the tradition of the holy fathers?

Perhaps you would find a Protestant sectarian group more to your way of thinking.

If you wish to be a member of the body of Christ, you need to abandon your own delusional opinions, and receive and preserve the teachings of holy tradition unaltered.

[Pravoslavnik]

Cyprian,

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On the contrary, the Holy Fathers have not been nearly as dogmatic about this matter as you pretend.  St. Augustine of Hippo specifically commented-- at a time in history subsequent to the writing of the [i]Hexamerae[/i] of both St. Basil and St. Ambrose--that the Church Fathers needed to be particularly careful about any scientific (or unscientific) assertions related to the mechanism and time frame of God's creation.  Of course, some people insist that St. Augustine was not an Orthodox saint or Father, but Father Seraphim Rose has dealt with this subject quite cogently.  How prescient Augustine was in this case!  He was writing some 1,600 years prior to the insights of Darwin, and of Einstein's theory of relativity, which has properly interpreted the nature of cosmic time as a function of relative velocity.  It is truly a pity that sincere Orthodox Christians like yourself have been virtually incapable of grasping the relationships between time, relativity, and an accurate, non-Fundamentalist interpretation of the [i]Genesis[/i] text.  You have also consistently failed to realize that evolutionary theory is not only scientifically correct, but fully Orthodox.  The truths of science and of Orthodox Christianity are an intercalated whole.

  And, by the way, can you kindly explain again who these "daughters of men" were who mated with Adams sons?  The last explanation that you offered here made no sense whatsoever, as I indicated at the time.  I believe that you insisted that these "daughters of men" were, in fact,  [i]Adam's[/i] own daughters.  And who, then, were the "men" who sired them?  Was there more than one "Adam" constituting this plurality? 

   Also, can you kindly name the Orthodox "heresy" which condemns the scientific theory of evolution?  If you presume to call a fellow Orthodox Christian a heretic for accepting a scientific theory as true, I should think that, at the very least, you would have the courtesy to [i]name [/i]the "heresy" for us!!

[joasia]

Pravo wrote: You have also consistently failed to realize that evolutionary theory is not only scientifically correct, but fully Orthodox.

Prove it.

The original evolution theory claims that life began from a pool of goo and evolved into different forms of species, on it's own. The Christian Evolutionists try to interpret that definition into the moment that God created man from the ground, hence Genesis. But, the point they(C.E.) seem to not see is that they are adopting an atheist explanation of how we got here in order to water down the act of Holiness of God and how He created us. They are giving into an erroneous man-based logic instead of raising their souls to divine revelation.

They are like chickens who think they are birds. The birds will look at them and say: hey buddy, you're a fowl because you're wings can't make you sour in the sky like us. So quit calling yourself a bird. That is Christian Evolution in a nutshell(in this case, an eggshell).

[Pravoslavnik]

Joasia wrote: "... they are adopting an atheist explanation of how we got here in order to water down the act of Holiness of God and how He created us."

Joasia,

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   Here is the essence of the misunderstanding.  Why do you assume, a priori, that the mechanism of evolution is an "[i]atheist[/i] explanation?"  How do you know that God DIDN'T bring the complex flora and fauna of the created world into existence through a gradual process of natural selection and genetic mutation?  Where are the anti-evolutionists getting the notion that evolutionary processes are not [i]divine[/i]?  One reason that this misunderstanding occurred, historically, is that some modern atheistic biologists-- like Stephen Jay Gould-- have insisted that evolutionary mechanisms prove that God did[i] not [/i]create complex life on the earth.  This is a false claim of "scientism," the quasi-religious belief that science ALONE can account for the existence of all natural phenomena.  Stephen Jay Gould ventured beyond the realm of science by making such assertions about the nature of ultimate reality.  The flip-side of this false dichotomy between science and Orthodoxy is the insistence by Fundamentalist Protestants (and some Orthodox) that modern astrophysics, paleontology, and biology are false because they seem to contradict Fundamentalist misinterpretations of [i]Genesis[/i].   Henry Morris and the Protestant "Young Earth Creationists" have been the leading proponents of this anti-scientific nonsense.  Unfortunately, in one of the singular misfortunes of modern Orthodox writing on this subject, the bogus Young Earth Creationist "data" was favorably embraced by Father Seraphim Rose and some of his colleagues at Platina.  What Father Seraphim and other Orthodox writers did not realize in the 1970s is that-- based upon the theory of relativity-- the 15 billion year age of the universe (measured in earth time) has lasted only about SIX DAYS when time is measured from the theoretical point at which the Big Bang occurred.  Hence, Father Seraphim-- like St. Basil and St. Augustine-- sought to reconcile the six "days" of Biblical creation with a very brief earth time-frame, something which is clearly contradicted by the scientific data.  The astounding reality is that there is a rather remarkable fit between the traditional Orthodox understanding of [i]Genesis[/i] and modern science-- once the concept of relativistic time is applied to cosmogenesis.  For example, the fifth "day" of creation, when the "great reptiles" were created by God, according to the [i]Genesis [/i]account would have occurred during the Jurassic period of earth history, using the relativistic cosmic "clock."

   I certainly understand precisely what you have been saying, repeatedly, on this subject.  But please take a moment to think about the paragraph above and tell me if you truly understand what [u]I[/u] have been saying on the subject.  My impression from our discussions of this topic hitherto have left me with the impression that you, Cyprian, and others simply do not really grasp what I am saying about the theory of relativity, time, and the mystical interpretation of the [i]Genesis[/i] text by the Holy Fathers.  For example, do you think that St. Basil realized when he wrote the [i]Hexameron[/i] in the fourth century that 4 billion years in earth time had only lasted about 24 hours when time is measured at the theoretical point where the Big Bang occurred?  Or, do you think that St. Basil believed the earth to be a large sphere orbiting a small star in a vast galaxy?  Or that life forms were genetically encoded in DNA?  St. Basil was writing, accurately, in the idiom and worldview of his time about the process and time frame of creation.  There were scientific aspects of time and process (mechanism) which he would not have known, or, if he had known them, no one would have understood what he was saying.