Defanging The Atheist Tiger - Volume Five

Audio Lectures by Father Thomas Hopko - The Autonomous Orthodox Metropolia

Written Observation by Fr Symeon Elias  - The Autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the U.S.A.

 "Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite." President Dwight Eisenhower's Farewell Address to the Nation, Jan. 17, 1961.

Audio only streaming or download for Ipod.

Feb 11, 2010

Darwin and Christianity - Part 4 In part 4 of Fr. Tom Hopko's talks on the Darwinian revolution, he looks at what Charles Darwin may have experienced in terms of Christianity in his day.

56:18

I am sure that Father Tom knows where he is going and knows why Charles Darwin's personal conception of Christianity is important. I don't know why it is.  To read the sayings of Buddha or Lao Tae Tsu or Einstein and gain whatever is to be gained, or the ideas of Aristotle or Plato, do I really have to know about their home life, the tragedies in their lives, their financial station in life, who their father was, who their grandfather was, their religious perceptions?  Would not the ideas that each produce tell me that?  How much less it seems to me to matter, when what we should rightly view in Darwin's work is his actual work, which is to put it simply, primitive science. The fact remains that two things in this discussion have been totally disproved. One is Darwinism per se, and the other is the views of the Biblical Literalist, Christian Fundamentalists of the Orthodox, Roman and Protestant varieties and Scholasticism.  So, in my opinion and I think ultimately where Father Tom is headed is to say that the only view that has context, that may hold truth in the discussion between "Christianity and Darwinism" is when the Ancient Christian grasp of the Bible is the basis of the Christian argument and an interdisciplinary view of Science is the basis of the other side. Any modern theory of Evolution has to include the vast increases in knowledge held in many discipline of science to have any meaning whatsoever. Anthropology isolated cannot tell us, Geology isolated cannot tell us, Biology cannot tell us, Molecular Biology cannot tell us, Practical Physics and Theoretical Physics cannot tell us . . . it is a long list of the "sciences" that are clueless as to the "origins."  The nature of BEING  viewed through the scientific lens cannot disclose the cause of LIFE inside that BEING, or the origin of Being itself.  If science remained inside this observable boundary I would have less trouble with it. Besides science "guessing" and calling its guesses "fact in the realm of metaphysics and ontological origins," science is also manipulative, inside matter, inside biology and chemistry, and now inside D.N.A. chains, inside the very nature of what it means to be a species. Science is nothing that any of us have right to ignore.

Father Tom says that he is not "guessing" about Darwin's mindset, vis a vis Christianity.  Experience tells me differently.  If you took my parents, grand parents, siblings and did a survey of their consciousness, you would not uncover me. My life parallels theirs not so much. Of my family living, if you asked their opinion of me some would view me a genius and some would view me a fool. We can conjecture what a person's outlook might likely be because of parentage, environment and financial circumstances. That's a matter of playing the odds. In the end, to suggest that we in any way in the end "know them" by that method is an overstep. We can know them to a certain degree by what they produce. We could know them in a way by judging what they produce compared to the environment in which they were raised and live.  But it takes both, a view of their environment and what their life produced. 

To Wit:

I have a dear friend who is a multi-talented musician, concert quality pianist, music director and conductor, Julliard trained, assistant conductor of a major opera company in New York, the protege of a world famous Opera singer, assistant conductor of a multiple-Grammy-award-winning major Symphony Orchestra (which actually made history in the digital age), and head of a major American city's opera company.  He and I were friends for many years. I'm also friends with his brother, same parents, same household, who is now retired, but was for many years a "bakery delivery man."  Both are wonderful warm people.  One is an agnostic, the other an Anglo-Catholic and proud of it.  And in case you are confused it is the retired delivery man who is the agnostic and the multi-talented musician that is the Anglo-Catholic. 

I can give you about ten more examples like the paragraph above. Here is the bottom line, this religious psychoanalyzing is pure fantasy.   I'm trying to understand what is the purpose of the exercise? I hear Father Tom saying of Charles Darwin, "The things that he seeeeeeeemed . . . . " etc. Conjecture all and to what end?  I'm patient and will spend the hours to discover "to what end."

Okay, Charles Darwin didn't have access to the early Eastern Orthodox writers, or the early Western Orthodox writers. He didn't know anything about them and further as Father said in one of the earlier presentations, "wasn't of a mindset" to be interested in such things.  "He wasn't a man predisposed to have those interests." Darwin was raised in an atmosphere of "non-belief."  Okay? Is that a surprise? No.

Now Father Tom suggests that Darwin's chronic illness was because, he (Darwin) didn't want to "shake up the life he lived."  This suggested insight is merely pop psychology. What purpose to psychoanalyze a man who has been dead for one-hundred and twenty seven years (at the time of this recording).  I'm really hoping that the quality of this increases shortly. I have enjoyed in this particular talk at least Father Tom taking pains to "open up the dialogue" to make the field of communication larger and to drive home the false paradigms that make communication and understanding between the two camps impossible. This hour was worth it for that purpose alone. 

In Father Tom's favor, there is that story of Archbishop James Ussher calculating the creation of the world to be 4004 B.C. A few years later, John Lightfoot, who was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge and Master of St Catharine's College, Cambridge, calculated that Adam was created on October 23rd at 9:00 A.M.  One scholar, quoted in The Christian View of Science and Scripture, commented dryly that "Closer than this, as a cautious scholar, the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University did not venture to commit himself."  This was one-hundred and fifty years before Darwin, so there is no doubt that scholarship and "the faith" lacked much in England, lacked much truthfully in the entire Christian and Western world and I include the Byzantine and Russian sections as well. 

Okay, finally!  The over-simplification of Christianity in the extreme, making it impossible for Darwin and his contemporaries to come to faith.  That was the point!  I stated this in the previous article as, "Their faith was destroyed by the ignorance of the Roman Catholic Church's centuries of narrow-rationalism applied to holy scripture and the natural sciences called “Scholasticism”  which deciphered scripture by literal-rational means and limited scientific discovery to its own narrow (religious) paradigm. Since the observation and experience of things as they are exposed so many of the foolish superstitions created by ignorant churchmen of the dark ages and arrogant Scholastics of pre-Renaissance, that the Enlightenment crowd did not grasp that the errors and ignorance of churchmen created a distorted ICON of God."  


Father Tom is right that the problem lies within the clash between "fundamentalism and liberalism."  The truth being that fundamentalism has taken hold of the scientific establishment, presently the evolutionary fundamentalists (who seem to be mostly atheists) control the Academy.  I love this picture Father Tom draws of a certain segment of bible-believers:  "There are those who say that the Bible is sort of like a Koran that fell from the sky ready made, every word in it is truth about absolutely everything. It is the truth about Science, It is the truth about history,  It is the truth about natural history, about natural science, and every word is more or less on the same level"  - equally valid etc. I've often used this same analogy, even making a list of the supposedly "channelled books" purported to be from angels and/or God. The assault that solo-scriptura heretics make upon the truthful foundations of the scriptural literature is not just ignorance but a shame. This is the foolishness that leaves us defenseless against the atheists and those who assault Faith In Christ.  I've often said that these sorts, these Biblical fundamentalist, enter the debate unarmed. The fundamental view of the Bible literature actually does violence to the Bible itself.

Of course those on the other side, who through "rational theology" reduce God to their comprehension and the bible to mythology do violence to the sacred writings as well.  - Good Points.