Defanging The Atheist Tiger - Volume Ten

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

May 04, 2010

Darwin and Christianity - Part 9:  The Genesis Account (part 3) Part 3 of the teachings from Genesis as a section in the larger series on Darwin and Christianity.

52:31

What a relief.  This lecture is absolutely great! Make no mistake they all have been great. It is just that this one has not presented questions for me. But . . .  <smile> - I am again reminded of how the whole complex of sin and fallenness, which if we know anything at all, we know we are fallen, we know we have sinned, yet theologically it hangs by a thread, based upon the picture of a garden paradise no one can describe, where human ancestor lived, who no one really knows who they were, and no one really knows how long they lived there or if they actually lived there at all for any length of time.  When I think about the topic of "fallenness" I don't have to look far to find an example.  That would be my own heart, my own ego, my own fears, my own pride.  I know that from my earliest memories I pressed forward boldly, but always from a base of fear into an arena called life, that was a place of fear.

The fact is we don't need much theology to witness to us the reality of the fall. The history of man is ample witness to that fact. In the past century alone just by genocide, 49 to78 million slaughtered in the Chinese cultural revolution, 23 million slaughtered by Stalin in Ukraine and other purges, 12 million slaughtered in concentration camps and civilians in WWII, Leopold II of Belgium killed 8 million in the Congo, 5 million Japanese civilians in WWII,  2.5 to 12 million by the Turks, persecuting the Armenians, the Pontian and Anatolian Greeks and at least half a million Assyrians, 2 million by Pol Pot, 1.6 million by Kim Il Sung purges and concentration camps, 1.5 million in Ethiopia, one million in Biafra, a million by Leonid Brezhnev in Afghanistan, another million at least in Rwanda, more than half a million by Saddam Hussein, more than half a million by Tito in Yugoslavia,  . . . and the list goes on and on and we haven't named the soldiers killed in war, the victims of crime, etc.  A man who can face the reality of one single human century and hold an idealized view of the fallen human animal is naive and even deluded.  There is something basic about the fallenness of man.

A slight digression, a means of speaking about the sense of "fallenness" common to every religion and I dare say, common to every individual upon the earth whether held consciously or unconsciously. I'm talking about the sense that man has something bad from which he must be rescued, and something good to which he must be restored. Every society and every religion hold this recognition of fallenness. And when they choose to ignore it, they become murderous. Islam sees itself as the superior master of the human race and it is murderous. The National Socialist, the Communists, the Progressivist, all the utopian seekers by pride thinking they can manage a rational answer, become murderous. This is a primal thing present in every religion, every primitive tribal mythology, if only stated in the rights of passage, and the things that must be recognized that are killing, that stunt growth both physical, mental and spiritual. As Father Tom stated it, "the stuff you know will kill you."  Even the so-called enlightened of every new age psychology, deal with awakening from sleep and becoming "actualized," a "sleep they know is death wearing on their psyche. Many deal with soul destroying bitterness they cannot name.  Facing death is our common link and the common link of every thought about fallenness, about sleeping even while we are awake and not being fully aware of even our own lives. Millions walk through life, with consciousness little above the beasts, following their primal instinct and truthfully not even doing that well. 

I chuckle every time I see this picture that demonstrates too much of Western life. The retreat into sickness and disease by the constant pleasure of food is epidemic in our society and over indulgence in every way is common.  So you see, we can't even say that these millions even follow their primal instincts, they follow a deformed version of primal instincts, where the object become the god, the idol. Sex, drugs, constant entertainment, these things are the things that we retreat into to stave-off the grinding anxiety common to humankind that one writer called, "lives of quiet desperation." These are the things we used to escape the constant knowledge of death. 

If we did not have this inhumane record of the bloody 20th century, if all life were peace, we would not be at peace. Why? Because deep in our ancestral memory we carry the knowledge of the cataclysms, the world shaking catastrophes, the things that threw us from Eden and block even our clear memory the confligration. The Egyptian and Hebrew account places disasters and wonders in the period of Exodus around 1500 BC. There are parallels in the writing of other cultures as well, suggesting that the same sequence of catastrophes beset the entire globe and was experienced by all people, maybe even simultaneously.  That was Velikowsky's hypothesis for which he was ostracized and persecuted, since the theory attacked, "uniformentarianism" that the natural sciences, and the secular humanist mindset of the day needed for its story of evolution. His thoughts were about the anomalous data concerning the planet Venus. The fact that Venus rotates in the opposite direction of all the other planets in the solar system, that Venus has a "tail" (unseen but measurable) like a comet, and that many cultures call Venus a "comet" instead of a planet. And many ancient pictograms picture Venus much, much closer to the earth. 

When we peer into ancient history, the truth is we are blind to it, cut off from it in every way except this certain knowledge that there is something bad from which we need to be rescued and something good to which we need to return. Our "written history" goes back much further than the writings of Genesis. If you look up "the oldest written languages" you will see the oldest listed as Sumerian, Egyptian, Akkadian, Eblaite, Elamite, Hurrian, Luwian, Minoan, Hittite, Canaanite, Greek, Hattic, Ugaritic, Old Chinese.  Would it surprise you to learn that the largest collection of ancient writing at least rivals the Sumerian in antiquity and is probably older, and even today we look at its marking with complete ignorance. That is the Indus language and we have no idea what the oldest record of human history says. 

How about this.  As Father Tom has stated several time the actual written record of the "Torah" or "Pentateuch" those books labeled "the books of Moses" were older oral traditions reduced to written form and then edited and combined in the writings we have today about the 5th century B.C. We have an extant copy, a complete copy of Isaiah recovered in the Dead Sea scrolls that dates to the 2rd century B.C. And of course copies of copies of the entire Old Testament contained in the Septuagint Old Testament, that is the oldest biblical record and the copies of copies of copies of the Hebrew, the oldest extant copy I believe from 1200AD.  The scribes, putting to written form the oral traditions of their heritage are really rather modern, and were reporting "history" that was indeed ancient.  Consider why I say this. "The oldest known fossils of modern humans have been discovered in Herto, Ethiopia. An international team led by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, found the skulls of two adults and a child dating from 160,000 years ago - 40,000 years earlier than the previous oldest remains of Homo sapiens.  The discovery, described today in the journal Nature, fills a big gap in the human fossil record; the absence of accurately dated hominid remains in Africa between 120,000 and 300,000 years ago."  -Clive Cookson, Science Editor for the Bradshaw Foundation. Notice he says, "fills a big gap in the human fossil record."  That is merely one picture you can give it and that picture is incomplete.  It does not fill in any record of "transient species."  In fact from the present fossil record is appear as if Homo sapiens  just "appeared."  We are left with same mystery of the non-flowering and flowering plant fossil record. The fact remains that we find fossils of early and extinct primates, hominids, Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, but no fossils of the transition linking ape to man or whatever to man. "During a college lecture in 1967, the world-renowned anthropologist Louis B. Leakey was asked about "the missing link." He replied tersely, "There is no one link missing - there are hundreds of links missing."  - Will Hart, Forbidden History.  I can correct Leakey, there are not hundreds but tens of thousands of links missing.  The biochemist Michael Behe in his studies in his book, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, reposted that he "focused on five phenomena:  blood clotting, cilia, the human immune system, the transport of materials within cells, and the synthesis of nucleotides." He repeatedly analyzed each phenomenon systemically and arrived at the single startling conclusion: "There are systems that are so irreducibly complex that no gradual, step-by-step Darwinian route could have led to their creation."

Our history is a mystery, as is the true nature of the universe. So here we are, humans living in the 21st century forced to depend not merely on the written history or the fossil record, or even the bio-chemical impossibility of Darwinism, but upon our own experience of life. Ultimately, whether there is a God energizing all that is, as I believe or there is something called "matter" into which, for some unexplained reason sprang life, we are dependant upon our experience of LIFE to come to a judgement.  And Life is not a simple thing for those who "think about it."  I don't know the hundreds of times in my youth that my brain literally jumped in my skull as if receiving a shock, and I looked around at the phenomena of BEING and marveled, wondered, in awe of everything I saw, even looking at my arms and hands in the sunlight and thinking, "What sort of creature am I, and what is this place, really?"  I think that this child like wonder is the only door to even entertaining the idea that there is a God and that we may "communicate with him."  This childlike wonder has to be the foundation of all truth seeking, it denote humility, wonder and the willingness to learn.  Those who approach research with cynicism only discover doubtful things. There was great wisdom in Jesus' words, "Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein."  I'm told that Einstein had such a personality, a child like wonder. But we are told something quite the opposite of Darwin, what started out as wonder turned cynical and loaded with death.  

As a visual artist I am blown away at the creative paintings of primitive man. As a musician I was blown away to discover that flutes made of cave bear bone, found in the caves of France where the famous cave painting were found, when reconstructed were discovered to play the diatonic scale! These were made and played by Homo Sapiens 30,000 years ago. MORE amazing than that, a 50,000 year old flute was discovered with Neanderthal fossils in Slovenia recently, it too, played a "very clear pentatonic or diatonic scale." All modern western music is based upon this. Raised in my father's auto shop in the 1950s, I wonder at that nano-sized powerful rotary motor we talked about in volume one! Engineers know that explanations given by the evolutionary mirco-biologists is fantasy. What do you do with the obelisk at Luxor, which is made of a single stone that weighs more than four hundred tons?  Scientists do not have the slightest idea how is was quarried and transported. The engineers know the methods the anthropologists have suggested are fantasy.  There are anomalies in the record every where you turn. What do you do with a map drawn by a famous Turkish Admiral in 1513 that accurately depicts the coast line of Antarctica, which has been buried under thousands of feet of ice for thousands of years? The ice shelf is in places hundreds of miles from shore! It wasn't until very recent times that by radar the Antarctic coast was mapped. There are other maps of the same period that depict continents that no longer exist. Modern geologists will tell you this is foolishness and fantasy. But then let the modern geologist explain Admiral Piri Ri' map of Antarctica.  

Inside the mystery of our history, the record of Sacred Writings we know as the Bible stand as THE light of hope, which tells us that from the chaos came order, which also came with a future for us, if we will exercise our right to take hold of it.  And the first step is admitting what we know in our gut to be true, that we need to be rescued from something bad, and hold the hope in our hearts naturally, part of our make up, to return to something good.  We have to admit our fallenness, and not pretend, and next to reach out in the dark, and pray, to make connection to the healing force who is God in Christ.