0:36 Where does all this stuff come from? 1:04 God Created The Heavens and The Earth 1:48 The Big Bang Theory ❗️ 2:46 Charles Darwin 3:11 Creationism 4:28 Intelligent Design 5:04 Intelligent Design 6:13 Where did Man come from? 6:38 Orthodoxy embraces science, but not everything. It is a continuing revelation. Revealing more the miracles and wonders God has for mankind.
@@mythologicalmyth that Canon is saying opposite of what you are saying. That whosoever says that Adam, the first man, was created mortal, so that whether he had sinned or not, he would have died in body - that is, he would have gone forth of the body, not because his sin merited this, but by natural necessity, let him be anathema.
St John the Evangelist, St Paul, St Basil, St Gregory of Nyssa, the Council of Nicea come to mind as supporting what Father Magos said. Is is standard belief in the Orthodox world. Americans have issues because they have been accustomed to the Protestant and Catholic ideas. This debate shows what the real difference between eastern and western Christianity is, more than the filioque, what is the real obstacle in uniting the Churches and why there was no Inquisition in the Orthodox world.
@@NicholasAggelopoulos I am not arguing, but I want to understand what your belief is: Do you believe there was millions of years of death before the fall of man brought death into creation? Do you believe that man is merely an ape who at some point God decided to breathe a unique spirit into?
@@bigol9223 - God does not breathe. These are not serious starting points to consider theological issues such as God or God's essense. If you are interested in such issues, you could perhaps read some of the Orthdoox theologians, St Gregory of Nyssa, St Maximus the Confessor and others who have presented these issues sufficiently.
@@bigol9223 he did not give an answer, so I will. 1. I believe that spiritual death was started by Adam and Eve, but physical death has always existed. 2. By definition, humans are apes.
I was a member of the atheist religion for almost 35 years. I lost the faith required to believe in theory and conjecture. What happened to the fish, bird, and reptile like humanoid people?
Saying there was death before the fall of Adam and Eve is essentially saying God is the author of death. It’s heretical…. This provides an anthropological and dogmatic problem.
You are confused. To put it simply, no human died in the biological sense until the first human came to be. Even then, the genes of the parents of one generation are passed onto the next generation, so humanity lives on. The information in the genes does not "die" as long as it helps in the survival of the species. A perfect plan, so ingenious perhaps only a God could have provided for such an eventuality.
Dear@@stevelenores5637 can you find some Church Fathers / Saints from any century who believed in the Darwinian evolution? Plus, the Scripture tells very openly that Adam and Eve would die only after they would eat from the Tree of Knowledge, not before that. That was the whole deception of the serpent and the fall into disobedience to God. The Tree of Life is the Archetype of the Cross of Christ, both in Revelation and in Genesis.
Does that "everyrthing" include computers, and Covid-19? Whoever upvotes this comment understands little or nothing about Orthodoxy, misunderstands a lot and perhaps should show some humility in approaching Orthodoxy when understanding so little and should listen again to Fr Maggos' presentation. The Saints are not pronouncing oracles. Christianity is not the idolatry of written text. In Orthodox Christianity we say we do not understand God. The idolatry of written text is an American Evangelical belief. The Saints used rational thinking and the science of their day to interpret the Old Testament (OT), which was the legends and beliefs of Jews prior to Christianity, including prophesies of a Messiah, moral teachings and a belief in a Creator. The saints obviously considered the OT as received legend and many aspects of it were outright rejected by Orthodox Christianity, i.e. the statement in Deuteronomy that children are punished by God in the 3rd or 4th generation for the sins of their parents. Of course, where a Saint did not have the full scientific knowledge of his time - let alone of our times - they made the best interpretation they could. The Saints interpreted received tradition logically and in Orthodox theological language in ways that modern Americans are simply unable to perceive, because they are not acculturated to that language and ethos. The principle in Orthodoxy is to use reason and scientific knowledge to arrive at an understanding of the energies of God, a fact that American converts from Evangelical Christianity seem completely unable to comprehend and seemingly intentionally try to misunderstand, so as to align Orthodoxy with their former irrational "Fundamentalist" beliefs, because they have been raised for generations in such a bizarre and illogical tradition.
Thank you for bringing some reason into this debate. In the literal interpretation of the Bible the earth is flat, the stars are simply "lights" affixed onto the firmament above the earth and beyond the firmament are the waters above and above those was the spirit of God. Dry land was created (on flat earth) by putting the waters to one side to create the seas. Plants and the 24-hour day existed before the lights, including the sun, were created and affixed onto the firmament, etc. Even the original Fathers of the Church tried to intepret this story using their best understanding of the facts of nature (e.g. that there was no voice to be heard before anything was created, that the earth must be understood as spherical, that the waters above should be understood as those of the rain coming from the clouds), despite their more limited scientific knowledge.
I disagree. When reading the Father's they take it at face value. God made Adam from dust and breath. Not from a million years and apes. The earth was made before the sun, none of the early Father's dispute this. But on the flipside, none claim the earth to be flat, because a straight forward reading doesn't grant this. There's a difference between a "literal" reading and a direct one. Ie...the " four corners" of the earth doesn't have to mean corner. The four corners is simply an expression that means all of the region. Ha, but don't get me wrong. I love a good flat earth debate.
@@mikemolaro4198 - The Fathers always used reasoned arguments, because logos was an accepted doctrine in philosophy and everyone in classical antiquity was acculturated to arguing through reason. St Basil says that God made Adam in His image. That does not mean that God has a head, a mouth, appendages and bodily functions or needs to eat apples in a garden to survive. Presumably that must be the American Evangelical literal interpretation. The subsequent Fall of Adam is an allegory: the fallen Adam is a mortal Adam and not Adam as pure logos. That is the Christian interpretation and the interpretation of the Fathers of the Church of the meaning "in the image of God". The fallen Adam needed to eat apples and other food as long as he lived. But the soul after its resurrection will be in the image of God (St Gregory the Theologian: On the Soul and its Resurrection). St Basil provided a reasoned analysis of the 6 days of creation, whenever the scientific facts were available. On the topic of the sun made after the earth, there was no science in his time to dispute it, so he accepted it, taking as his starting point that the Old Testament is history (that was the word the Fathers used) in the same sense as Herodotus, Xenophon, or Pausanias wrote history. Accepted, known facts. For want of any other information, St Basil for example, argued that there must have been a 24-hour day before the Sun was created. We know today that the division of the day into 24 hours was an abritrary invention of the Sumerians but St Basil was not aware of it. We also know that the sun was not created after the earth. No Orthodox Christian today believes that there can be a day without the sun. We use the same method that St Basil used to put the facts and reason in first place, when the facts are known - because God is the living Logos, as the Orthodox liturgy clearly states. That is the Orthodox starting point, before anything else is considered. St Basil argued that the earth is round because that was a known fact at least since Plato. But an ancient Jew reading the Old Testament would simply understand that there was earth below and waters above. This is for example what a child would understand today hearing that passage, had it been unaware of the actual scientific facts. Not that there is a spherical earth floating in 3-D space with oceans over its surface. Next, God puts the firmament (heavens) as a sheet in place to divide the waters above the earth into the lower and upper waters. That is the literal reading. Now, there is earth below, then waters, then the firmament (heavens), then more waters above the firmament. Lights (stars) are then affixed onto the firmament. If the firmament is above the earth, as opposed to around the earth, earth must presumably extend forever below the firmament - this is the literal straightforward reading. This is the root of the Flat Earth theory among American Evangelists. However, it is not the reading of St Basil or any other rational person knowledgeable of the scientifc facts as known at the time of Christianity. I suppose the problem is that outside the classical world, ordinary people had no clue of what logos means or what principles (axioms) are and had not heard of, let alone been acculturated to, philosophical logic. So a different Christian tradition developed in western Europe culminating over the intervening 2000 years into the ridiculous and embarassing out of context and out of mind beliefs of modern American Evangelists: Creationism and the Flat Earth theories, that the world was created in six 24-hour days, etc.
@@NicholasAggelopoulos @NicholasAggelopoulos Appreciate the honest dialog but you're incorrect about several things. Several fathers mention light before the sun. They state that it was the light of God illuminating the earth. Several fathers also mention 6 literal days of creation. Now to be fair a lot of the time when "day" is mentioned we are not told its 24 hours, but it's clear in the Father's texts that God's act of creation were instantaneous(even if the days were longer). So most certainly from the collection of Father's evolution is explicitly out of the question. Several Father's even state quite clearly that kind always reproduces kind. I'm not sure why we should allow modern myths to change our theological beliefs. Making best guesses about things that happened in the past is not science, it's history and guess work. Science requires independent variables. I urge you to look into all the assumptions required for carbon and radioactive dating to work. And to call the big bang "science"..well, I don't even know where to begin. It's a cool story that's a fun fantasy to put on top of certain scientific ideas, but that's about it. The flat earth doesn't have to "extend forever" for the Biblical reading to work. Most flat earthers believe a flat earth because the Bible mentions the four corners of the earth, therefore according to their own readings it couldn't be forever. Father Seraphim Rose's Genesis, Creation and Early Man is a great resource for a compilation of the Father's writings on these issues.
@@mikemolaro4198 - Most certainly you are not Orthodox or at least you do not live in an Orthodox country and do not understand Orthodoxy at all. St John Chrysostom says the days of creation were the like of 1000 years each, St Basil calls the first day an aeon and so does St Gregory the Theologian for the last day. St Gregory clearly gives an account of creation following the principle of the evolution of life from simpler organisms to more complex, eventually to organisms with the capacity for cognition, a principle well known at his time, indeed for many centuries. St John Chrysostom presumes the origin of life in the breath of God above all creation already in the first day of creation. Indeed, some among the Fathers say that creation was instantaneous i.e. not in 7 days. After all God is unbounded by time (a statement in the anaphora of the Orthodox liturgy). They also say that the account in the OT was made for humanity at its infancy and has been superceded by the statement of the New Testament (and the Nicene Creed, where everything is created by the Son) that everything was created by Logos, i.e. certainly not contrary to reason. The important principle is that of living Logos, i.e. reason and reasoning, which guides the discourse of the Fathers. They are, of course, limited by the facts as known at their time. We today know more and the correct approach should be to use their method of discourse, i.e. reason, to further interpret the OT in our even more developed understanding. That is the guiding principle, that is what is stated in the Orthodox liturgy. There is nowhere a statement that one must blindly read the OT the way a 7 year old (or an American Evangelist) would read it - quite the opposite!
@@NicholasAggelopoulos Bummer. It was a great conversation but now you resort to attacking my character? I'm a member of GoArch in the States. Eprhaim the Syrian teaches literal days. But again, i agree most Father's do not. But they also dont generally teach each "day" was millions of years. And even if we assume the days were longer than 24 hours, it's still clear from many Father's that God's creation in those aeons was immediate and instantaneous. You mention Basil, but he states "...all the dense woods appeared, all the trees shot up...likewise all the shurbs were immediately thick with leaf and bushy...all came into existence in a moment of time". That's exactly counter to macro evolution. Ambrose also speaks of God's intention as to "express the incomprehensible speed of the work(creation)....'He created', lest it be thought there was a delay in creation" And here is Athanasius the Great, "As to the separate stars and great lights, not this appeared first, and that second, but in one day and by one command, they were all called into being. And such was the original formation of the quadrapeds, and of birds, and fishes, and cattle and plants....No one creature was MADE BEFORE ANOTHER, but all things original subsited at ONCE TOGETHER upon one and the same command". That's pretty darn clear. Again, I'm not saying the Bible teaches flat earth or literal days as being exact 24 hours. But the Church most certainly teaches an instantaneous creation of plant life, and an instantaneous creation of animal life, an earth existing without light from a sun (many Father's mention the light of God as sustaining the life of the plants). Of course God can do this. He created the light, so of course He can very easily replicate it's rays. So you can attack me or my country. That's fun I suppose. But it has nothing to do with the arguments I'm presenting. Read the first few chapters of the Father Seraphim Rose book. He only quotes Fathers. And this is a man who many think will be deemed a Saint. and here are some more quotes: St. John Chrysostom writes: "He created the sun on the Fourth Day so that you might not think that it produces the day. " !! Right there. From Saint John, the author of our Liturgy. And here is Saint Basil himself: St. Basil teaches: The heavens and the earth had come first; after them, light had been created, day and night separated, and in turn, the firmament and dry land revealed. Water had been collected into a fixed and definite gathering. The earth had been filled with its proper fruits; for, it had brought forth countless kinds of herbs, and had been adorned with varied species of plants. However, the sun did not yet exist, nor the moon, lest men might call the sun the first cause and father of light, and lest they who are ignorant of God might deem it the producer of what grows from the earth. . . . If the creation of light had preceded, why, now, is the sun in turn said to have been made to give light?. . . . At the time [the First Day] the actual nature of light was introduced, but now this solar body has been made ready to be a vehicle for that first-created light....* And do not tell me that it is impossible for these to be separated. I certainly do not say that the separation of light from the solar body is possible for you and me, but that that which we are able to separate in thought can also be separated in ac tuality by the Creator of its nature. . . . "Let them serve," He says, "for the fixing ofdays," not for making days, but for ruling the days. For, day and night are earlier than the generation of the luminaries." How do you rebut Saint Basil on this issue? I understand your critique, Americans love to reinvent the wheel. We're great at that. But that's now what I'm doing here, unless you're accusing the Father's of being too American? ;)
Why do carnivores (animals that consume only meat, like tigers and lions) have sharp claws and teeth, which are perfectly suited for hunting, if they were never meant to kill other animals?
@@SuperGreatSphinx Why do thorns grow on beautiful bushes? Why do many people call marijuana an herb when it is an invasive species of noxious weed? Why did the fall of Adam create discord, decay, and entropy? Why was the predeluvian world different ecologically?
Who said dinosaurs lived side by side with man.....Today we have many wild animals such as bears lions cougar alligator Gorilla etc.but we don't live side by side with them...Grizzly bears. Can't get to close to a lot of them either.
Dinosaurs lived before Adam's sin????? I think not... St Seraphim Rose writes a good book on Genesis and Creation...The early church Father's provide some good information... Most of Genesis was literal with some symbolism.....
Yeah, I don't get it either. I'm Orthodox and I thought that the Church Fathers said that the universe was created by God in six literal 24-hour days. It's possible that dinosaur fossils are a demonic deception.
All the empirical evidence points toward Dinosaurs existing millions of years before man. Rose was out of his depth on this issues and so we’re the church fathers. They weren’t scientists.
1) Fr. Rose’s book is not dogma 2) there isn’t a consensus among the Church Fathers about creation 3) the Ancient near east was more concerned about why and who created all things, not how they were created.
@@NicholasAggelopoulosnothing is a universal negation and therefore can’t have the property “can be created out of by God”. Therefore creatio ex nihilo = false. Only A can = A. -A can’t = A because it isn’t anything to = anything. Many early Christians didn’t even believe in creation out of nothing. Creatio ex nihilo was invented by gnostics in the 3rd century.
As a Greek I can tell you that was the view very much everyone in Greek society always had and Greece has been predominantly Christian from the early centuries of Chritianity. That was the view of the Fathers of the Church, too, St Basil, St Gregory the Theologian, St John Chrysostom and others. That was how Christianity was presented in our classes on Theology at school, as school seniors. The creationist view was something I only heard on youtube. It is a new development, not a traditional belief.
@@NicholasAggelopoulos I have come across instances in person where some Orthodox Priests interpret Genesis as a myth. However, if we consider Genesis to be a myth, it raises questions about how Christ can be viewed as the second Adam. Additionally, there seems to be a significant emphasis on the seventh day in the Old Testament. It's a mystery indeed but If God said it, why should we believe anything less? (Exodus 20:11, John 5:46-47) According to St. Basil(in the Hexaemeron), Genesis can be seen as a summary, rather than simply a myth. While Genesis does contain symbolic and mysterious elements, in my experience, I haven't encountered any statements from the Fathers suggesting that it should not be taken literally. It is the teachings of modern seminary professors that diverge from this view. Personally, I place my trust in the Scriptures and the teachings of the Fathers rather than in the opinions of those professors. I don't think we should be afraid of what the sectarians or what pseudo-science has to say. Do you have any examples of The Fathers saying it's not literal?
@77You are right, this is a more modernist interpretation. Literal interpretation of ancient writings is medieval peasant thinking if anything. God wants humanity to progress. Through progression, the complexity of the world was starting to reveal itself and is still being revealed. God is also unfathomably complex, hence why we can never truly know what He is. With that in mind, what could possibly make you think that His creation is anything less but complex? St Augustine also thought of a more metaphorical interpretation of Genesis and he lived a thousand years ago. Christianity(orthodox too) does not reject science, it embraces it. Lastly, calling scientists who oppose the idea of literal 6 day creation pseudo-scientists is flat-earther-like logic. I hope you ain't a flat earther, if you are not, take this advice so you don't think like one either.
@@LDGRXR If we take everything as a myth or a metaphorical it presents disastrous theological problems. For instance, Christ was born of a virgin, that's not a metaphor. Christ’s birth is a miracle, just as creation is a miracle. If such a thing was truly metaphorical we would be in deep trouble as Christians. I don't appreciate the strawmen. I'm not a flat earther, I’m not a medieval peasant, I’m not a creationist, and I never said creation isn't complex. What I refer to as pseudo-science would be something like Evolution. St. Augustine's views of the book of Genesis, and creation in general, are allegorical mixed with literal interpretation, and not so much metaphorical. He believed God created all things simultaneously, with the 6 days of creation being an allegory and a logical framework. This is very similar to how Saint Basil viewed creation in the Hexaemeron, and very likely where Saint Augustine got this from. Saint Basil viewed Genesis literally and allegorically, he viewed it as a summary of events. Which is different than how a creationist would view Genesis.
The big bang theory does not state nothing was there and then a bang happened. The big bang is just the event that started the universe to expand as it currently is. There are theories as to the state of the universe before it.
I think there are some inconsistencies in this presentation. If Orthodoxy denies the evolution of species, then it cannot embrace Intelligent Design at the same time, because ID accepts evolution in general, but picks some point saying that they cannot be explained. Another problem about that presentation is that is completely ignores the theistic evolution. Theistic evolution embraces the man's godd-likeness but accepts evolutionary proecesses at the same time.
ID accepts micro-evolution, which has been observed, and denies macro-evolution, which hasn't. Micro-evolution doesn't contradict the Scriptures, since it says, they reproduce after their own kind.
Othodoxy does not deny evolution, why do you think it does? Evolution was the accepted world view of classical antiquity at least among the educated. Logos created all there is. It is in the Gospels, in the Nicene Creed, in the writings of the Father of the Church and in the Orthodox liturgy. There is nothing that prevents God to create through evolution. To create without evolution, by magical words, rather than logos, would even seem odd for a God that is logos. St Grgeory of Nyssa in his Apology for the Hexameron: "For everything that came to be, within reason is engendered, and no things at all can be conceived as existing in God without reason, at random and automatically. We have to believe, therefore, that a certain wise and organising principle/reason lies within each of the [created] beings."
Sorry, but this is just a bad video. Orthodox don't necessarily believe what this guy says. We can most certainly be Creationists. It's not like a Council declared the existence of dinosaurs at said time. Nonsense. I'm Orthodox and I trust the Father's writings on this. God made the earth prior to the Sun, He also made plants and light before the Sun. Adam was a literal man who lived peacefully with all animals prior to the fall. Nowhere in the Bible can you get any inkling of man coming from an ape. Kinds are kinds and do not change. Mirco evolution is real, but macro is unproven. I'm Orthodox, and I am allowed to believe all of the above without falling into heresy. You can also have other beliefs (as he fairly addressed in this video) as an Orthodox Christian without falling into heresy.
The Fathers used their best knowledge based on the science of their time and reational thought to arrive at some Christian lessons from the reading of the Old Testament (that was written prior to Christianity). Therefore, read literally, the Old Testament is not Christianity, it is simply tradition. Fr Maggos is not a guy, he is a priest representing the Orthodox Church and does so very well. If you do not understand what he says one thing is certain: that you have not lived in an Orthodox country and do not understand the Orthodox way of thinking, instead you have lived in a country where the main philosophical tradition is belief in the idolatry of some written text that defies reason.
@@NicholasAggelopoulos you've managed to address not a single point I've mentioned, and I doubt you're going to read Fr Rose's response letter, so I think the convo ends hear. I'm currently reading Fr Kalomiros six days, and only feel more strongly now on Rose's position. Thanks for sharing. You say, Fr Maggos is not some guy... I know. I never implied that. But I assure you the consensus of the Father's hold a bit more weight than Fr Maggos, and I think he would agree. And for the record...I linked you to a video with quotes from multiple Saints and Elders (I don't think a single one is American) who explicitly stated that the theory of evolution, as proposed by modern science, is at odds with Orthodoxy (Saint Paisios of Mt Athos calling it blasphemy). So you can insult America and claim I'm ignorant because I'm from here, but I've literally now quoted or linked to quotes of probably 15 Fathers or Saints. I'm not stating MY arguments and opinions, but theirs. It seems as of your argument is people from non Orthodox countries can't read. :) But my reading comprehension is fine thank you.
@@mikemolaro4198 - No you cannot read as an Orthodox Christian, you read as an American Evangelical Protestant, same as Fr Seraphim Rose. You do not see that the Fathers are using the O.T. as a vehicle to present the views of Orthodox Christianity (even though the O.T. as written is pre-Christian), you do not see their logic and thinking. You only see words as some kind of oracles or revelations from God, as an Evangelical Christian would read them. Fr Paisios uses the same style of argument as other Orthodox fathers but comes to the wrong conclusion because his understanding of the science of our time, e.g. on the topic of evolution, is imperfect. Of course, no Christian thinks that Jesus was a monkey. St Paisios came from a former communist country and in Eastern Europe at the time Communism and materialism were presented as being scientifically based, so he had a gut reaction against anything scientific, just like American Evangelists do. The beliefs of Fr Seraphim Rose are not the beliefs of Orthodox Christianity, they are fringe beliefs popular only in America because American Christians have an Evangelical Protestant background of rejecting evolution in particular and all science in general.
LOL @@NicholasAggelopoulos Oh my.....Holy Tradition is from the Holy Spirit......This transcends mortal reason. Canon 109 Council of Carthage. Modern and ancient saints are creationists. God wrote Genesis with his finger and gave it to Righteous Moses.
There is some good Science and there's a lot of pseudo Science. Evolution is a flawed philosophy.. So what is important are the facts..Not the fairy tales of evolutionists... The Orthodox I grew up in believed in young earth and that wasn't billions of years ago....Best guide to learn by is Jesus...It's a matter of discerning truth from lies..
The Orthodox Church has an established tradition that agrees with this presentation even while not every Orthodox Christian necessarily understands the same things in the same way, because we are all different and have read or heard different things. A 3 year old would certainly not understand what is being said here and hearing the story of creation, the 3 year old would probably take it literally like all children like to take literally all they hear. From then on, all interpretaions become possible but more educated audiences will likely favour some over others. Father Maggos explains the Orthodox Church's understanding for rational educated adults.
There is some good science and there’s a lot of pseudo science. Young earth creationism is a flawed philosophy.. So what is important are the facts.. not the fairy tails of young earth creationists..
Evolution teaches dinosaurs lived millions of years ago and man has only been around for 6000 years ...How could dinosaurs die before Adam's sin? And what is prehistoric if the Bible is historic? You can't go any farther back than In the beginning unless you were God without beginning... He always existed..
Hominids have been around for about a million years, Homo Sapiens for about 300,000 years. That is not what evolution "teaches", evolution is not a person. This is the scientific knowledge of our time. There is no overlap between typical dinosaurs (i.e. excluding birds) and hominids. What does Adam's sin have to do with the dinosaurs? Humans die after the dinosaurs, because dinosaurs no longer exist.
@@Nektarios0316 - So where is the problem with that? The same stuff makes other apes. It is not as if the ancient Jews who came up with the story of a flat earth and a firmament above it on which lights were glued, would have known anything about deoxyribose nucleic acids, amino-acids, the TCA cycle ... Even the words themselves had not been invented yet.
@@Nektarios0316 1) scripture also says we are all made from the dust Ecc. 3:20. Were you made from the literal dirt from the ground? 2) from the dust is an idiom for humiliation and lowliness “Since I exalted you from the dust and made you leader over My people Israel, and you have walked in the way of Jeroboam and have misled My people Israel into sin, provoking Me to anger with their sins, -1 Kings 16:2 “He raises the poor from the dust, He lifts the needy from the garbage heap.”-Psalm 113:7
I wouldn't get too hung up on this. There's a variety views that are acceptable within Orthodoxy on this topic. There isn't ONE view. For what it is worth, most Church Fathers took a more historical and typological/mystical interpretation of the Old Testament. Many of them believed in a young earth. St Augustine was more open-minded than a literalist reading, but the point is, don't make this a hill to die on because it's not a dogma in Holy Orthodoxy either way. Patristic creationism to theistic evolution to "I have no idea" are acceptable positions. Personally I'm somewhere between "I have no idea" to Patristic creationism.
I recommend David Bentley Hart's book _The Experience of God_ about this question (many are going to tell you that he is a cursed heretic; I advise to ignore that). This is the topic of my doctoral thesis. A couple of years ago I took a class on evolutionary ecology. It was quite fascinating. It was even more fascinating when I encountered the teacher of that class in the Easter night liturgy.
@@ivanvlatkovic4686 It's even _more_ fascinating when some people seem to think that to be a follower of Christ---the embodiment of Truth and Wisdom of God---one necessarily needs to be dumb, uneducated, and objectively wrong.
@@ivanvlatkovic4686 On the contrary, brother! I am in fact very much of the opinion that followers of Christ should be as well educated as possible. Many of the early Fathers of the Church shared this belief of mine. I have pursued a career in scholarship because in Christ 'are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,' as Colossians 2:3 says. It would be very harmful for our Faith indeed to be badly educated.
I appreciate the willingness to be accepting of science, but be very careful of endorsing "intelligent design" because it removes the name of Jesus Christ. Science itself says nothing either way about God. As Christians, there is already a perfectly valid explanatory framework of God Almighty the creator, so there is no need to invoke some ambiguous "designer" which is actually a step towards syncretism i.e. the idea that all religions are the same. Evolution as presented in the scientific literature glorifies the God of the Bible. It shows His creativity, judgment, long suffering patience, wisdom, foresight, and more.
There is no willingness to be accepting of science, Fr Maggos explains the traditional view of the Orthodox Chuch. Fr Maggos has to speak a simple language because he is addressing an audience that includes individuals some of whom think of themselves as Chsristian or otherwise religious but seem to have the mental age of a 3 year old, which can happen you know, about a 10th of all humans would be classed as imbeciles in the old style IQ test.
@@NicholasAggelopoulos he says that the earth is billions of years old, and that dinosaurs were real and lived long ago. That's not at all a traditional view, that is a view which is accepting of science. And that's a good thing. However, he says the framework of an "intelligent designer" best fits this past, and that is an idea taken directly from the Discovery Institute, an organization who lies about science and removes Christ.
@@theTavis01 - It is the view of the Fathers of the Church and of the body of the Church as a whole. When he speaks of an idea similar to that of an intelligent designer, the meaning of intelligence to people of antiquity such as Aristitole was the presence of rationality or reason. St John starts his gospel with the words In the first principle there was Logos (i.e. Reason). So that is the original understanding of the Church. The Nicene Creed also asserts that the world was created by the Son (i.e. by Logos). Part of the problem is that the original meaning was lost in translation and now we have creationists trying to assert that the earth is flat and we should believe them because it is in the Bible (specifically in the Old Testament). In any case, the Orthodox Church for sure has not borrowed its beliefs from the Discovery Institute. Americans have a very short term view of history. History did not begin with some American Institute or even with Darwin or Isaac Newton.
@@NicholasAggelopoulos the specific phrase of "intelligent designer" is directly traceable to the Discovery Institute. It is not found in the scientific literature and it is not found in historical church documents. The way he is using the phrase in this video is directly taken from the Discovery Institute's usage. He even acknowledges at 4:35 that intelligent design is some sort of vague catch-all for a creator, and is not specific to the God of the Bible. But then he says that Orthodoxy is "closest to the idea of intelligent design" which is really a very bad idea, for that exact reason that it removes Christ and places some vague designer in His place.
@@steffann1177 there where church fathers that didn't believe the days in Genesis where literal. Church fathers didn't have any knowledge of science, so obviously they didn't think of it.
Well Adam was created on the 6th day and the animals were created on the 5th, so dinosaurs only existed for a day? They were all 1 day old when they died?
This is not our Holy Tradition. As much as Intelligent Design deftly shows the impossibility of evolution, it is not the fullness of the deposit entrusted to us. It is only a modern realization that points to the reality that creation is itself a holy mystery which defies all rationalistic attempts to comprehend it with our fallen intellects. We Orthodox certainly have no grounds for following the atheist’s millions of years. Truly, they worship Chronos believing that time is magic and will create all things eventually, when that lazy sluggard gets around to it. And Chronos is sloppy and all his lesser creatures kill each other on their unending march towards slight improvements. The main thing Chronos creates is death, and therefore there is no need to save us from it, for death was both the hammer and chisel with which he carved us. This is the false god of time. But we Orthodox worship the Divine Logos the intelligent Word, An Briathar, the Verb- active and mercurial, the King of Mysteries Who created the entire cosmos and everything in it with unspeakable perfection from the beginning. The Hexamerons of Sts. Basil and Ambrose attest to six literal days. The Tree of Life was a literal tree. The fruit which hung upon its sacred branches was mystically God Himself. This Tree which was lost to us has been revealed again in the form of the Cross, and Christ’s Body and Blood is the food which hangs upon it, for us to consume once more. Let us not be dazzled by the falseness of this age, and let us be confident in the truth of Genesis as well as the Gospels, for they are linked. Nice kilt though.
I will point out Georges Lemaitre and Charles Darwin both were Christians and it didn’t conflict with their Christianity. It’s a great video on orthodoxy beliefs on creation and evolution.
So there were millions of years of death & disease before Adam sinned? Do you not see the hermeneutical knot you’ve created by failing to believe Genesis literally? Rom 5:12: “Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned.” So the question remains: how did dinosaurs die before Adam sinned?
something that happens later can cause something that happened earlier. For instance, the reason I get up from my chair is to get a drink from the refrigerator. I get up and go get the drink and then sit back down. The cause of my getting up is getting a drink, although getting the drink happened after getting up from the chair. So Adams sin which happens in paradise , which can be understood as outside of time, caused death to enter creation. Adams sin "caused" death to enter creation and then Adam and Eve are exiled from paradise (timeless) into a fallen world (time). When Man appears in history its already as fallen man having been exiled from paradise and the world is already fallen due to Mans fall outside of time. If man had not sinned then creation would have operated differently from the beginning of time as death/the evil one would not have had any power in creation, but because of mans sin in paradise (outside of time) creation had death/the evil one working in it from the beginning. The good news is that the death of the Lamb, the death of Christ was also from the beginning and meant that all death would ultimately serve the purpose of the Cross in bringing all creation back to God. This is my understanding as an Orthodox, hope this helps someone, thank you
The age of the earth is based on many assumptions. Theres no problem interpreting Genesis literally. In fact thats the only real way to read it. Read Father Seraphim's Genesis, Creation, an Early Man
In the creationist view, the story of creation is based on the assumption that the earth is flat, that there is a firmament above it that holds the lights including the sun and that above the firmament are waters and above these waters the spirit of God (who by the way is not a trinity but a monad). God does not do anything after woking for 6 days, so God is not responsible for your creation or for anyone or anything that came into existence after the first 6 days of the world. God did not create the invisible, contrary to the Creed, the Son was not born of the Father, contrary to the Creed, the world was not created through the Son, contrary to the Creed, etc. You basically would rather believe (in the literal sense) in a story originating in ancient Judea when people thought that the earth was flat than in the more developed understanding of the Apostles and the Fathers of the CHRISTIAN Church, while also ignoring the scientific facts not known to the Jewish storytellers of 400-500 BC.
@@NicholasAggelopoulos If only you could prove the earth were not dynamically spherical. Could you defy reality and provide us with just one High Definition, unmolested video of earth from space. Im not a flat earther but I am a dynamic earther. I do believe the ante-deluvian earth had different form. But keep up the good apologetics for the anti-theists. The saints oppose your view. Literally. Council of Carthage Canon 109.
0:36 Where does all this stuff come from?
1:04 God Created The Heavens and The Earth
1:48 The Big Bang Theory ❗️
2:46 Charles Darwin
3:11 Creationism
4:28 Intelligent Design
5:04 Intelligent Design
6:13 Where did Man come from?
6:38 Orthodoxy embraces science, but not everything. It is a continuing revelation. Revealing more the miracles and wonders God has for mankind.
Love how you are explaining all things of god 🙏 thank you so much.
I am an orthodox priest. I respectfully disagree with you completely
I respectfully agree with you Fr Borjan!
Canon 109 COUNCIL OF CARTHAGE anathematizes those who embrace a mortal Adam.
@@mythologicalmyth that Canon is saying opposite of what you are saying.
That whosoever says that Adam, the first man, was created mortal, so that whether he had sinned or not, he would have died in body - that is, he would have gone forth of the body, not because his sin merited this, but by natural necessity, let him be anathema.
@@chimera-gd6yc you just reinforced what I said.
It is saying that Adam died from sin, not evolutionary “natural” causes. Death is not natural.
Name a saint that holds this position. I can name more than a dozen who oppose this take.
YES
St John the Evangelist, St Paul, St Basil, St Gregory of Nyssa, the Council of Nicea come to mind as supporting what Father Magos said. Is is standard belief in the Orthodox world. Americans have issues because they have been accustomed to the Protestant and Catholic ideas. This debate shows what the real difference between eastern and western Christianity is, more than the filioque, what is the real obstacle in uniting the Churches and why there was no Inquisition in the Orthodox world.
@@NicholasAggelopoulos
I am not arguing, but I want to understand what your belief is:
Do you believe there was millions of years of death before the fall of man brought death into creation?
Do you believe that man is merely an ape who at some point God decided to breathe a unique spirit into?
@@bigol9223 - God does not breathe. These are not serious starting points to consider theological issues such as God or God's essense. If you are interested in such issues, you could perhaps read some of the Orthdoox theologians, St Gregory of Nyssa, St Maximus the Confessor and others who have presented these issues sufficiently.
@@bigol9223 he did not give an answer, so I will.
1. I believe that spiritual death was started by Adam and Eve, but physical death has always existed.
2. By definition, humans are apes.
I was a member of the atheist religion for almost 35 years. I lost the faith required to believe in theory and conjecture.
What happened to the fish, bird, and reptile like humanoid people?
Hilarious images throughout the explanation.
Thank you!
Saying there was death before the fall of Adam and Eve is essentially saying God is the author of death. It’s heretical…. This provides an anthropological and dogmatic problem.
You are confused. To put it simply, no human died in the biological sense until the first human came to be. Even then, the genes of the parents of one generation are passed onto the next generation, so humanity lives on. The information in the genes does not "die" as long as it helps in the survival of the species. A perfect plan, so ingenious perhaps only a God could have provided for such an eventuality.
Dear@@stevelenores5637 can you find some Church Fathers / Saints from any century who believed in the Darwinian evolution? Plus, the Scripture tells very openly that Adam and Eve would die only after they would eat from the Tree of Knowledge, not before that. That was the whole deception of the serpent and the fall into disobedience to God. The Tree of Life is the Archetype of the Cross of Christ, both in Revelation and in Genesis.
Canon 109 Council of Carthage anathematizes those who accept the materialist view of Adam. BOOM.
@@stevelenores5637 blood decay and death in paradise with Adam and before Adam?..........NO.....
@@stevelenores5637 All of the saints. You are a protestant for diluting the holy tradition and the affirmation of modern saints as creationists.
All saints believed in literal Six Days and that Christ was born in ~5500 years after Creation of everything
Does that "everyrthing" include computers, and Covid-19? Whoever upvotes this comment understands little or nothing about Orthodoxy, misunderstands a lot and perhaps should show some humility in approaching Orthodoxy when understanding so little and should listen again to Fr Maggos' presentation.
The Saints are not pronouncing oracles. Christianity is not the idolatry of written text. In Orthodox Christianity we say we do not understand God. The idolatry of written text is an American Evangelical belief. The Saints used rational thinking and the science of their day to interpret the Old Testament (OT), which was the legends and beliefs of Jews prior to Christianity, including prophesies of a Messiah, moral teachings and a belief in a Creator. The saints obviously considered the OT as received legend and many aspects of it were outright rejected by Orthodox Christianity, i.e. the statement in Deuteronomy that children are punished by God in the 3rd or 4th generation for the sins of their parents. Of course, where a Saint did not have the full scientific knowledge of his time - let alone of our times - they made the best interpretation they could. The Saints interpreted received tradition logically and in Orthodox theological language in ways that modern Americans are simply unable to perceive, because they are not acculturated to that language and ethos. The principle in Orthodoxy is to use reason and scientific knowledge to arrive at an understanding of the energies of God, a fact that American converts from Evangelical Christianity seem completely unable to comprehend and seemingly intentionally try to misunderstand, so as to align Orthodoxy with their former irrational "Fundamentalist" beliefs, because they have been raised for generations in such a bizarre and illogical tradition.
Only real shizos accept that.
@@Gravelpitdiver Death didn’t exist before Adam. Reject modernity.
@@Gravelpitdiver I did quite clearly. It is currently 7532.
@@PanagiotisDemetriosIsn't it like 6010 or something?
Thank you for bringing some reason into this debate. In the literal interpretation of the Bible the earth is flat, the stars are simply "lights" affixed onto the firmament above the earth and beyond the firmament are the waters above and above those was the spirit of God. Dry land was created (on flat earth) by putting the waters to one side to create the seas. Plants and the 24-hour day existed before the lights, including the sun, were created and affixed onto the firmament, etc. Even the original Fathers of the Church tried to intepret this story using their best understanding of the facts of nature (e.g. that there was no voice to be heard before anything was created, that the earth must be understood as spherical, that the waters above should be understood as those of the rain coming from the clouds), despite their more limited scientific knowledge.
I disagree. When reading the Father's they take it at face value. God made Adam from dust and breath. Not from a million years and apes. The earth was made before the sun, none of the early Father's dispute this. But on the flipside, none claim the earth to be flat, because a straight forward reading doesn't grant this. There's a difference between a "literal" reading and a direct one. Ie...the " four corners" of the earth doesn't have to mean corner. The four corners is simply an expression that means all of the region. Ha, but don't get me wrong. I love a good flat earth debate.
@@mikemolaro4198 - The Fathers always used reasoned arguments, because logos was an accepted doctrine in philosophy and everyone in classical antiquity was acculturated to arguing through reason. St Basil says that God made Adam in His image. That does not mean that God has a head, a mouth, appendages and bodily functions or needs to eat apples in a garden to survive. Presumably that must be the American Evangelical literal interpretation. The subsequent Fall of Adam is an allegory: the fallen Adam is a mortal Adam and not Adam as pure logos. That is the Christian interpretation and the interpretation of the Fathers of the Church of the meaning "in the image of God". The fallen Adam needed to eat apples and other food as long as he lived. But the soul after its resurrection will be in the image of God (St Gregory the Theologian: On the Soul and its Resurrection).
St Basil provided a reasoned analysis of the 6 days of creation, whenever the scientific facts were available. On the topic of the sun made after the earth, there was no science in his time to dispute it, so he accepted it, taking as his starting point that the Old Testament is history (that was the word the Fathers used) in the same sense as Herodotus, Xenophon, or Pausanias wrote history. Accepted, known facts. For want of any other information, St Basil for example, argued that there must have been a 24-hour day before the Sun was created. We know today that the division of the day into 24 hours was an abritrary invention of the Sumerians but St Basil was not aware of it. We also know that the sun was not created after the earth. No Orthodox Christian today believes that there can be a day without the sun. We use the same method that St Basil used to put the facts and reason in first place, when the facts are known - because God is the living Logos, as the Orthodox liturgy clearly states. That is the Orthodox starting point, before anything else is considered.
St Basil argued that the earth is round because that was a known fact at least since Plato. But an ancient Jew reading the Old Testament would simply understand that there was earth below and waters above. This is for example what a child would understand today hearing that passage, had it been unaware of the actual scientific facts. Not that there is a spherical earth floating in 3-D space with oceans over its surface. Next, God puts the firmament (heavens) as a sheet in place to divide the waters above the earth into the lower and upper waters. That is the literal reading. Now, there is earth below, then waters, then the firmament (heavens), then more waters above the firmament. Lights (stars) are then affixed onto the firmament. If the firmament is above the earth, as opposed to around the earth, earth must presumably extend forever below the firmament - this is the literal straightforward reading. This is the root of the Flat Earth theory among American Evangelists. However, it is not the reading of St Basil or any other rational person knowledgeable of the scientifc facts as known at the time of Christianity.
I suppose the problem is that outside the classical world, ordinary people had no clue of what logos means or what principles (axioms) are and had not heard of, let alone been acculturated to, philosophical logic. So a different Christian tradition developed in western Europe culminating over the intervening 2000 years into the ridiculous and embarassing out of context and out of mind beliefs of modern American Evangelists: Creationism and the Flat Earth theories, that the world was created in six 24-hour days, etc.
@@NicholasAggelopoulos @NicholasAggelopoulos Appreciate the honest dialog but you're incorrect about several things. Several fathers mention light before the sun. They state that it was the light of God illuminating the earth. Several fathers also mention 6 literal days of creation. Now to be fair a lot of the time when "day" is mentioned we are not told its 24 hours, but it's clear in the Father's texts that God's act of creation were instantaneous(even if the days were longer). So most certainly from the collection of Father's evolution is explicitly out of the question. Several Father's even state quite clearly that kind always reproduces kind.
I'm not sure why we should allow modern myths to change our theological beliefs. Making best guesses about things that happened in the past is not science, it's history and guess work. Science requires independent variables. I urge you to look into all the assumptions required for carbon and radioactive dating to work. And to call the big bang "science"..well, I don't even know where to begin. It's a cool story that's a fun fantasy to put on top of certain scientific ideas, but that's about it.
The flat earth doesn't have to "extend forever" for the Biblical reading to work. Most flat earthers believe a flat earth because the Bible mentions the four corners of the earth, therefore according to their own readings it couldn't be forever.
Father Seraphim Rose's Genesis, Creation and Early Man is a great resource for a compilation of the Father's writings on these issues.
@@mikemolaro4198 - Most certainly you are not Orthodox or at least you do not live in an Orthodox country and do not understand Orthodoxy at all. St John Chrysostom says the days of creation were the like of 1000 years each, St Basil calls the first day an aeon and so does St Gregory the Theologian for the last day. St Gregory clearly gives an account of creation following the principle of the evolution of life from simpler organisms to more complex, eventually to organisms with the capacity for cognition, a principle well known at his time, indeed for many centuries. St John Chrysostom presumes the origin of life in the breath of God above all creation already in the first day of creation. Indeed, some among the Fathers say that creation was instantaneous i.e. not in 7 days. After all God is unbounded by time (a statement in the anaphora of the Orthodox liturgy). They also say that the account in the OT was made for humanity at its infancy and has been superceded by the statement of the New Testament (and the Nicene Creed, where everything is created by the Son) that everything was created by Logos, i.e. certainly not contrary to reason. The important principle is that of living Logos, i.e. reason and reasoning, which guides the discourse of the Fathers. They are, of course, limited by the facts as known at their time. We today know more and the correct approach should be to use their method of discourse, i.e. reason, to further interpret the OT in our even more developed understanding. That is the guiding principle, that is what is stated in the Orthodox liturgy. There is nowhere a statement that one must blindly read the OT the way a 7 year old (or an American Evangelist) would read it - quite the opposite!
@@NicholasAggelopoulos Bummer. It was a great conversation but now you resort to attacking my character? I'm a member of GoArch in the States.
Eprhaim the Syrian teaches literal days. But again, i agree most Father's do not. But they also dont generally teach each "day" was millions of years. And even if we assume the days were longer than 24 hours, it's still clear from many Father's that God's creation in those aeons was immediate and instantaneous.
You mention Basil, but he states "...all the dense woods appeared, all the trees shot up...likewise all the shurbs were immediately thick with leaf and bushy...all came into existence in a moment of time".
That's exactly counter to macro evolution.
Ambrose also speaks of God's intention as to "express the incomprehensible speed of the work(creation)....'He created', lest it be thought there was a delay in creation"
And here is Athanasius the Great, "As to the separate stars and great lights, not this appeared first, and that second, but in one day and by one command, they were all called into being. And such was the original formation of the quadrapeds, and of birds, and fishes, and cattle and plants....No one creature was MADE BEFORE ANOTHER, but all things original subsited at ONCE TOGETHER upon one and the same command".
That's pretty darn clear. Again, I'm not saying the Bible teaches flat earth or literal days as being exact 24 hours. But the Church most certainly teaches an instantaneous creation of plant life, and an instantaneous creation of animal life, an earth existing without light from a sun (many Father's mention the light of God as sustaining the life of the plants). Of course God can do this. He created the light, so of course He can very easily replicate it's rays.
So you can attack me or my country. That's fun I suppose. But it has nothing to do with the arguments I'm presenting. Read the first few chapters of the Father Seraphim Rose book. He only quotes Fathers. And this is a man who many think will be deemed a Saint.
and here are some more quotes: St. John Chrysostom writes: "He created the sun on the Fourth Day so that you might not think that it produces the day. "
!! Right there. From Saint John, the author of our Liturgy.
And here is Saint Basil himself:
St. Basil teaches:
The heavens and the earth had come first; after them, light had been created, day and night separated, and in turn, the firmament and dry land revealed. Water had been collected into a fixed and definite gathering. The earth had been filled with its proper fruits; for, it had brought forth countless kinds of herbs, and had been adorned with varied species of plants. However, the sun did not yet exist, nor the moon, lest men might call the sun the first cause and father of light, and lest they who are ignorant of God might deem it the producer of what grows from the earth. . . . If the creation of light had preceded, why, now, is the sun in turn said to have been made to give light?. . . . At the time [the First Day] the actual nature of light was introduced, but now this solar body has been made ready to be a vehicle for that first-created light....* And do not tell me that it is impossible for these to be separated. I certainly do not say that the separation of light from the solar body is possible for you and me, but that that which we are able to separate in thought can also be separated in ac tuality by the Creator of its nature. . . . "Let them serve," He says, "for the fixing ofdays," not for making days, but for ruling the days. For, day and night are earlier than the generation of the luminaries."
How do you rebut Saint Basil on this issue?
I understand your critique, Americans love to reinvent the wheel. We're great at that. But that's now what I'm doing here, unless you're accusing the Father's of being too American? ;)
Why would you put the disproven tool of carbon dating above the Scriptures? Very strange.
Carbon dating is proven reliable actually.
Why do carnivores (animals that consume only meat, like tigers and lions) have sharp claws and teeth, which are perfectly suited for hunting, if they were never meant to kill other animals?
Father will be answering this question in tonight's Orthodoxy Questions Answered live show!
sharp claws and teeth can open coconuts, walnuts, apricot seed kernels, .........need I go on? sharp claws help climbing?
@@mythologicalmyth
Why do scorpions and snakes possess deadly venoms?
@@SuperGreatSphinx Why do thorns grow on beautiful bushes? Why do many people call marijuana an herb when it is an invasive species of noxious weed? Why did the fall of Adam create discord, decay, and entropy? Why was the predeluvian world different ecologically?
@@SuperGreatSphinx Have you never considered entropic recirculation of matter that did. not exist in Paradise?
I like how you did the video and how you explained it very visuals were good to
Who said dinosaurs lived side by side with man.....Today we have many wild animals such as bears lions cougar alligator
Gorilla etc.but we don't live side by side with them...Grizzly bears. Can't get to close to a lot of them either.
Pandas also live contemporaneously humans. We also dont find many human-panda fossils together.
@@evangelosnikitopoulos - Maybe you have no idea about how evolution works?
Ahora educa a los creacionistas sobre el calendario gregoriano y cuántos minutos tiene un año
Dinosaurs lived before Adam's
sin????? I think not... St Seraphim Rose writes a good book on Genesis and Creation...The early church Father's provide some good information... Most of Genesis was literal with some symbolism.....
Yeah, I don't get it either. I'm Orthodox and I thought that the Church Fathers said that the universe was created by God in six literal 24-hour days. It's possible that dinosaur fossils are a demonic deception.
All the empirical evidence points toward Dinosaurs existing millions of years before man. Rose was out of his depth on this issues and so we’re the church fathers. They weren’t scientists.
1) Fr. Rose’s book is not dogma
2) there isn’t a consensus among the Church Fathers about creation
3) the Ancient near east was more concerned about why and who created all things, not how they were created.
You believe there was death before sin?
Do you believe that a human died before the first human lived?
Nothing created everything....so scientific!
The cause of creation creates everything.
Can you elaborate on what exactly you mean?
@@NicholasAggelopoulosnothing is a universal negation and therefore can’t have the property “can be created out of by God”. Therefore creatio ex nihilo = false. Only A can = A. -A can’t = A because it isn’t anything to = anything. Many early Christians didn’t even believe in creation out of nothing. Creatio ex nihilo was invented by gnostics in the 3rd century.
@@zytr0x108he can't
This is a more modernist interpretation
As a Greek I can tell you that was the view very much everyone in Greek society always had and Greece has been predominantly Christian from the early centuries of Chritianity. That was the view of the Fathers of the Church, too, St Basil, St Gregory the Theologian, St John Chrysostom and others. That was how Christianity was presented in our classes on Theology at school, as school seniors. The creationist view was something I only heard on youtube. It is a new development, not a traditional belief.
@@NicholasAggelopoulos I have come across instances in person where some Orthodox Priests interpret Genesis as a myth. However, if we consider Genesis to be a myth, it raises questions about how Christ can be viewed as the second Adam. Additionally, there seems to be a significant emphasis on the seventh day in the Old Testament. It's a mystery indeed but If God said it, why should we believe anything less? (Exodus 20:11, John 5:46-47)
According to St. Basil(in the Hexaemeron), Genesis can be seen as a summary, rather than simply a myth. While Genesis does contain symbolic and mysterious elements, in my experience, I haven't encountered any statements from the Fathers suggesting that it should not be taken literally. It is the teachings of modern seminary professors that diverge from this view. Personally, I place my trust in the Scriptures and the teachings of the Fathers rather than in the opinions of those professors. I don't think we should be afraid of what the sectarians or what pseudo-science has to say.
Do you have any examples of The Fathers saying it's not literal?
@77You are right, this is a more modernist interpretation. Literal interpretation of ancient writings is medieval peasant thinking if anything. God wants humanity to progress. Through progression, the complexity of the world was starting to reveal itself and is still being revealed. God is also unfathomably complex, hence why we can never truly know what He is. With that in mind, what could possibly make you think that His creation is anything less but complex?
St Augustine also thought of a more metaphorical interpretation of Genesis and he lived a thousand years ago. Christianity(orthodox too) does not reject science, it embraces it. Lastly, calling scientists who oppose the idea of literal 6 day creation pseudo-scientists is flat-earther-like logic. I hope you ain't a flat earther, if you are not, take this advice so you don't think like one either.
@@LDGRXR If we take everything as a myth or a metaphorical it presents disastrous theological problems. For instance, Christ was born of a virgin, that's not a metaphor. Christ’s birth is a miracle, just as creation is a miracle. If such a thing was truly metaphorical we would be in deep trouble as Christians.
I don't appreciate the strawmen. I'm not a flat earther, I’m not a medieval peasant, I’m not a creationist, and I never said creation isn't complex. What I refer to as pseudo-science would be something like Evolution.
St. Augustine's views of the book of Genesis, and creation in general, are allegorical mixed with literal interpretation, and not so much metaphorical. He believed God created all things simultaneously, with the 6 days of creation being an allegory and a logical framework. This is very similar to how Saint Basil viewed creation in the Hexaemeron, and very likely where Saint Augustine got this from. Saint Basil viewed Genesis literally and allegorically, he viewed it as a summary of events. Which is different than how a creationist would view Genesis.
@@IgnatiusSeventy7Okay, but there's nothing wrong with believing the 7 day creation isn't literal
1:40 love that image.
Great video and explanation.
Thank you!
The big bang theory does not state nothing was there and then a bang happened. The big bang is just the event that started the universe to expand as it currently is. There are theories as to the state of the universe before it.
I've chosen the right religion
I think there are some inconsistencies in this presentation. If Orthodoxy denies the evolution of species, then it cannot embrace Intelligent Design at the same time, because ID accepts evolution in general, but picks some point saying that they cannot be explained. Another problem about that presentation is that is completely ignores the theistic evolution. Theistic evolution embraces the man's godd-likeness but accepts evolutionary proecesses at the same time.
ID accepts micro-evolution, which has been observed, and denies macro-evolution, which hasn't. Micro-evolution doesn't contradict the Scriptures, since it says, they reproduce after their own kind.
Dumb
Othodoxy does not deny evolution, why do you think it does? Evolution was the accepted world view of classical antiquity at least among the educated. Logos created all there is. It is in the Gospels, in the Nicene Creed, in the writings of the Father of the Church and in the Orthodox liturgy. There is nothing that prevents God to create through evolution. To create without evolution, by magical words, rather than logos, would even seem odd for a God that is logos.
St Grgeory of Nyssa in his Apology for the Hexameron: "For everything that came to be, within reason is engendered, and no things at all can be conceived as existing in God without reason, at random and automatically. We have to believe, therefore, that a certain wise and organising principle/reason lies within each of the [created] beings."
Sorry, but this is just a bad video. Orthodox don't necessarily believe what this guy says. We can most certainly be Creationists. It's not like a Council declared the existence of dinosaurs at said time. Nonsense. I'm Orthodox and I trust the Father's writings on this. God made the earth prior to the Sun, He also made plants and light before the Sun. Adam was a literal man who lived peacefully with all animals prior to the fall. Nowhere in the Bible can you get any inkling of man coming from an ape. Kinds are kinds and do not change. Mirco evolution is real, but macro is unproven. I'm Orthodox, and I am allowed to believe all of the above without falling into heresy. You can also have other beliefs (as he fairly addressed in this video) as an Orthodox Christian without falling into heresy.
The Fathers used their best knowledge based on the science of their time and reational thought to arrive at some Christian lessons from the reading of the Old Testament (that was written prior to Christianity). Therefore, read literally, the Old Testament is not Christianity, it is simply tradition. Fr Maggos is not a guy, he is a priest representing the Orthodox Church and does so very well. If you do not understand what he says one thing is certain: that you have not lived in an Orthodox country and do not understand the Orthodox way of thinking, instead you have lived in a country where the main philosophical tradition is belief in the idolatry of some written text that defies reason.
@@NicholasAggelopoulos you've managed to address not a single point I've mentioned, and I doubt you're going to read Fr Rose's response letter, so I think the convo ends hear. I'm currently reading Fr Kalomiros six days, and only feel more strongly now on Rose's position. Thanks for sharing. You say, Fr Maggos is not some guy... I know. I never implied that. But I assure you the consensus of the Father's hold a bit more weight than Fr Maggos, and I think he would agree.
And for the record...I linked you to a video with quotes from multiple Saints and Elders (I don't think a single one is American) who explicitly stated that the theory of evolution, as proposed by modern science, is at odds with Orthodoxy (Saint Paisios of Mt Athos calling it blasphemy).
So you can insult America and claim I'm ignorant because I'm from here, but I've literally now quoted or linked to quotes of probably 15 Fathers or Saints. I'm not stating MY arguments and opinions, but theirs.
It seems as of your argument is people from non Orthodox countries can't read. :) But my reading comprehension is fine thank you.
@@mikemolaro4198 - No you cannot read as an Orthodox Christian, you read as an American Evangelical Protestant, same as Fr Seraphim Rose. You do not see that the Fathers are using the O.T. as a vehicle to present the views of Orthodox Christianity (even though the O.T. as written is pre-Christian), you do not see their logic and thinking. You only see words as some kind of oracles or revelations from God, as an Evangelical Christian would read them. Fr Paisios uses the same style of argument as other Orthodox fathers but comes to the wrong conclusion because his understanding of the science of our time, e.g. on the topic of evolution, is imperfect. Of course, no Christian thinks that Jesus was a monkey. St Paisios came from a former communist country and in Eastern Europe at the time Communism and materialism were presented as being scientifically based, so he had a gut reaction against anything scientific, just like American Evangelists do.
The beliefs of Fr Seraphim Rose are not the beliefs of Orthodox Christianity, they are fringe beliefs popular only in America because American Christians have an Evangelical Protestant background of rejecting evolution in particular and all science in general.
LOL @@NicholasAggelopoulos Oh my.....Holy Tradition is from the Holy Spirit......This transcends mortal reason. Canon 109 Council of Carthage. Modern and ancient saints are creationists. God wrote Genesis with his finger and gave it to Righteous Moses.
Where did it say you couldn't be a creationist? You can maintain the flawed belief, there's nothing wrong with that.
There is some good Science and there's a lot of pseudo Science.
Evolution is a flawed philosophy.. So what is important are the facts..Not the fairy tales of evolutionists... The Orthodox I grew up in believed in young earth and that wasn't billions of years ago....Best guide to learn by is Jesus...It's a matter of discerning truth from lies..
The Orthodox Church has an established tradition that agrees with this presentation even while not every Orthodox Christian necessarily understands the same things in the same way, because we are all different and have read or heard different things. A 3 year old would certainly not understand what is being said here and hearing the story of creation, the 3 year old would probably take it literally like all children like to take literally all they hear. From then on, all interpretaions become possible but more educated audiences will likely favour some over others. Father Maggos explains the Orthodox Church's understanding for rational educated adults.
There is some good science and there’s a lot of pseudo science. Young earth creationism is a flawed philosophy.. So what is important are the facts.. not the fairy tails of young earth creationists..
Even if you don't believe in evolution, believing the universe is only around 1000 years old is insane
Evolution teaches dinosaurs lived millions of years ago and man has only been around for 6000 years ...How could dinosaurs die before Adam's sin? And what is prehistoric if the Bible is historic? You can't go any farther back than In the beginning unless you were God without beginning... He always existed..
Hominids have been around for about a million years, Homo Sapiens for about 300,000 years. That is not what evolution "teaches", evolution is not a person. This is the scientific knowledge of our time. There is no overlap between typical dinosaurs (i.e. excluding birds) and hominids. What does Adam's sin have to do with the dinosaurs? Humans die after the dinosaurs, because dinosaurs no longer exist.
The flaw in thought is assuming that humanity has only existed for 6 millennia, when in reality it has been around for much longer
Couldn’t man evolve from apes and still also be a creation of God?
that would contradict the scriptures in Genesis because God created man out of the dust of the earth
@@Nektarios0316 - So where is the problem with that? The same stuff makes other apes. It is not as if the ancient Jews who came up with the story of a flat earth and a firmament above it on which lights were glued, would have known anything about deoxyribose nucleic acids, amino-acids, the TCA cycle ... Even the words themselves had not been invented yet.
Yes, he could have
Could, but didn't.
@@Nektarios0316
1) scripture also says we are all made from the dust Ecc. 3:20. Were you made from the literal dirt from the ground?
2) from the dust is an idiom for humiliation and lowliness
“Since I exalted you from the dust and made you leader over My people Israel, and you have walked in the way of Jeroboam and have misled My people Israel into sin, provoking Me to anger with their sins,
-1 Kings 16:2
“He raises the poor from the dust,
He lifts the needy from the garbage heap.”-Psalm 113:7
Been researching Orthodox lately. I am very disappointed in the statement made.
I wouldn't get too hung up on this. There's a variety views that are acceptable within Orthodoxy on this topic. There isn't ONE view. For what it is worth, most Church Fathers took a more historical and typological/mystical interpretation of the Old Testament. Many of them believed in a young earth. St Augustine was more open-minded than a literalist reading, but the point is, don't make this a hill to die on because it's not a dogma in Holy Orthodoxy either way. Patristic creationism to theistic evolution to "I have no idea" are acceptable positions. Personally I'm somewhere between "I have no idea" to Patristic creationism.
I recommend David Bentley Hart's book _The Experience of God_ about this question (many are going to tell you that he is a cursed heretic; I advise to ignore that). This is the topic of my doctoral thesis.
A couple of years ago I took a class on evolutionary ecology. It was quite fascinating. It was even more fascinating when I encountered the teacher of that class in the Easter night liturgy.
@@ivanvlatkovic4686 It's even _more_ fascinating when some people seem to think that to be a follower of Christ---the embodiment of Truth and Wisdom of God---one necessarily needs to be dumb, uneducated, and objectively wrong.
@@ivanvlatkovic4686 On the contrary, brother! I am in fact very much of the opinion that followers of Christ should be as well educated as possible. Many of the early Fathers of the Church shared this belief of mine.
I have pursued a career in scholarship because in Christ 'are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,' as Colossians 2:3 says. It would be very harmful for our Faith indeed to be badly educated.
You are not obliged to accept this take. I personally do subscribe to ID, but it is not an official doctrine of the Church.
I appreciate the willingness to be accepting of science, but be very careful of endorsing "intelligent design" because it removes the name of Jesus Christ. Science itself says nothing either way about God. As Christians, there is already a perfectly valid explanatory framework of God Almighty the creator, so there is no need to invoke some ambiguous "designer" which is actually a step towards syncretism i.e. the idea that all religions are the same. Evolution as presented in the scientific literature glorifies the God of the Bible. It shows His creativity, judgment, long suffering patience, wisdom, foresight, and more.
There is no willingness to be accepting of science, Fr Maggos explains the traditional view of the Orthodox Chuch. Fr Maggos has to speak a simple language because he is addressing an audience that includes individuals some of whom think of themselves as Chsristian or otherwise religious but seem to have the mental age of a 3 year old, which can happen you know, about a 10th of all humans would be classed as imbeciles in the old style IQ test.
@@NicholasAggelopoulos he says that the earth is billions of years old, and that dinosaurs were real and lived long ago. That's not at all a traditional view, that is a view which is accepting of science. And that's a good thing. However, he says the framework of an "intelligent designer" best fits this past, and that is an idea taken directly from the Discovery Institute, an organization who lies about science and removes Christ.
@@theTavis01 - It is the view of the Fathers of the Church and of the body of the Church as a whole. When he speaks of an idea similar to that of an intelligent designer, the meaning of intelligence to people of antiquity such as Aristitole was the presence of rationality or reason. St John starts his gospel with the words In the first principle there was Logos (i.e. Reason). So that is the original understanding of the Church. The Nicene Creed also asserts that the world was created by the Son (i.e. by Logos). Part of the problem is that the original meaning was lost in translation and now we have creationists trying to assert that the earth is flat and we should believe them because it is in the Bible (specifically in the Old Testament). In any case, the Orthodox Church for sure has not borrowed its beliefs from the Discovery Institute. Americans have a very short term view of history. History did not begin with some American Institute or even with Darwin or Isaac Newton.
@@NicholasAggelopoulos the specific phrase of "intelligent designer" is directly traceable to the Discovery Institute. It is not found in the scientific literature and it is not found in historical church documents. The way he is using the phrase in this video is directly taken from the Discovery Institute's usage. He even acknowledges at 4:35 that intelligent design is some sort of vague catch-all for a creator, and is not specific to the God of the Bible. But then he says that Orthodoxy is "closest to the idea of intelligent design" which is really a very bad idea, for that exact reason that it removes Christ and places some vague designer in His place.
@@NicholasAggelopoulos I've explained myself several times now and you have not shown any acknowledgement of what I've already told you.
God did not created death
We will be addressing your statement in tonight's Orthodoxy Questions Answered!
Evolution obliterates 'the fall' and Original Sin and thus makes the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross unnecessary.
It actually strengthens the case for sin. Have faith, not fear.
Survival of the fittest as it applies to humans is in practice often a synonym for what Christians mean by sin.
It most certainly does not!
Those are not the teachings of the Church and of the Holy Fathers. This is your interpretation, father...
@@steffann1177 there where church fathers that didn't believe the days in Genesis where literal. Church fathers didn't have any knowledge of science, so obviously they didn't think of it.
Dinasours lived before Adams
Well Adam was created on the 6th day and the animals were created on the 5th, so dinosaurs only existed for a day? They were all 1 day old when they died?
This is not our Holy Tradition. As much as Intelligent Design deftly shows the impossibility of evolution, it is not the fullness of the deposit entrusted to us. It is only a modern realization that points to the reality that creation is itself a holy mystery which defies all rationalistic attempts to comprehend it with our fallen intellects. We Orthodox certainly have no grounds for following the atheist’s millions of years. Truly, they worship Chronos believing that time is magic and will create all things eventually, when that lazy sluggard gets around to it. And Chronos is sloppy and all his lesser creatures kill each other on their unending march towards slight improvements. The main thing Chronos creates is death, and therefore there is no need to save us from it, for death was both the hammer and chisel with which he carved us. This is the false god of time.
But we Orthodox worship the Divine Logos the intelligent Word, An Briathar, the Verb- active and mercurial, the King of Mysteries Who created the entire cosmos and everything in it with unspeakable perfection from the beginning. The Hexamerons of Sts. Basil and Ambrose attest to six literal days. The Tree of Life was a literal tree. The fruit which hung upon its sacred branches was mystically God Himself. This Tree which was lost to us has been revealed again in the form of the Cross, and Christ’s Body and Blood is the food which hangs upon it, for us to consume once more. Let us not be dazzled by the falseness of this age, and let us be confident in the truth of Genesis as well as the Gospels, for they are linked.
Nice kilt though.
I will point out Georges Lemaitre and Charles Darwin both were Christians and it didn’t conflict with their Christianity. It’s a great video on orthodoxy beliefs on creation and evolution.
Charles Darwin was a freemason
@@Herr_Flick_of_ze_Gestapo he still professed Jesus as his lord and saviour
@@tommywilliams9414 One cannot serve two masters. One cannot be a Christian AND a freemason at the same time. It is forbidden.
Unicorns!? Millions of years?? No.
So there were millions of years of death & disease before Adam sinned? Do you not see the hermeneutical knot you’ve created by failing to believe Genesis literally? Rom 5:12: “Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned.” So the question remains: how did dinosaurs die before Adam sinned?
Are dinosaurs people?
All creation fell to dead with Adam's sin.
Dinosaurs never died! They still live!
@@FlakeTillmanlol I was gonna write a whole big explanation for him, but literally what you said is good enough
something that happens later can cause something that happened earlier. For instance, the reason I get up from my chair is to get a drink from the refrigerator. I get up and go get the drink and then sit back down. The cause of my getting up is getting a drink, although getting the drink happened after getting up from the chair. So Adams sin which happens in paradise , which can be understood as outside of time, caused death to enter creation. Adams sin "caused" death to enter creation and then Adam and Eve are exiled from paradise (timeless) into a fallen world (time). When Man appears in history its already as fallen man having been exiled from paradise and the world is already fallen due to Mans fall outside of time. If man had not sinned then creation would have operated differently from the beginning of time as death/the evil one would not have had any power in creation, but because of mans sin in paradise (outside of time) creation had death/the evil one working in it from the beginning. The good news is that the death of the Lamb, the death of Christ was also from the beginning and meant that all death would ultimately serve the purpose of the Cross in bringing all creation back to God. This is my understanding as an Orthodox, hope this helps someone, thank you
The age of the earth is based on many assumptions. Theres no problem interpreting Genesis literally. In fact thats the only real way to read it. Read Father Seraphim's Genesis, Creation, an Early Man
In the creationist view, the story of creation is based on the assumption that the earth is flat, that there is a firmament above it that holds the lights including the sun and that above the firmament are waters and above these waters the spirit of God (who by the way is not a trinity but a monad). God does not do anything after woking for 6 days, so God is not responsible for your creation or for anyone or anything that came into existence after the first 6 days of the world. God did not create the invisible, contrary to the Creed, the Son was not born of the Father, contrary to the Creed, the world was not created through the Son, contrary to the Creed, etc. You basically would rather believe (in the literal sense) in a story originating in ancient Judea when people thought that the earth was flat than in the more developed understanding of the Apostles and the Fathers of the CHRISTIAN Church, while also ignoring the scientific facts not known to the Jewish storytellers of 400-500 BC.
If you were to interpret Genesis literally then that would mean that it were completely wrong.
@@NicholasAggelopoulos If only you could prove the earth were not dynamically spherical. Could you defy reality and provide us with just one High Definition, unmolested video of earth from space. Im not a flat earther but I am a dynamic earther. I do believe the ante-deluvian earth had different form. But keep up the good apologetics for the anti-theists. The saints oppose your view. Literally. Council of Carthage Canon 109.
@@mythologicalmyth nope, if you're a literalist when it comes to this, you're a flat earther
This is completely ridiculous. This priest does not represent Orthodoxy. Viewers beware.
@@SunshineCarpetCleaning how?