My beloved spiritual children in Christ Our Only True God and Our Only True Savior,
CHRIST IS IN OUR MIDST! HE WAS, IS, AND EVER SHALL BE.
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FAITH AND SCIENCE
Faith and science are not in opposition. A scientist of our time says: "One of the greatest tragedies of our time is this impression that science and religion have to be at war." Another scientist advanced a principle he calls "noma" or "non-overlapping magisteria of science and religion, "according to which "the magisterium of science covers the empirical the composition of the universe ('fact') and the way it works ('theory'). Religion, on the other hand, examines questions of 'ultimate meaning and moral value.' These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry. Science gets the age of rocks, and religion the rock of the ages; science studies how the heavens go, religion how we go to heaven." Darwin himself wrote: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one, and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved."
The Orthodox Church is not far from these views. Saint Gregory Palamas (A.D. 1296-1359), basing himself on the Holy Scripture (1 Corinthians 1:2; 2:4-8, Saint James 3:15), "distinguishes between two kinds of wisdom and two kinds of knowledge. There cannot be any confusion between the two." The antinomy is created when we make God another object of our natural knowledge when we try to rationalize the truths of our faith when we use the intellect "as the instrument or tool of knowing both the natural as well as the supernatural. Father George Metallinos also stresses this point. "The antithesis and consequent collision of faith and science is a problem for Western (Franco-Latin) thought and a pseudo-problem for the Orthodox Patristic Tradition." Why? Very simply, he answers, because "faith is the knowledge of the Uncreated, and science is the knowledge of the created," two very different, but complementary forms of truth.
The perceived antinomy between religion and science was furthermore exacerbated because of two erroneous assumptions made by Western (Latin) Christianity: that the Holy Scripture is interpreted literally (scriptural literalism), and that religious truths, like all truths, must be discovered and explained exclusively by reason (rationalism). There are certain truths that cannot be arrived at by logic alone. Reason is not the only source of knowledge. Accepting a truth by faith does not make it unreasonable. Accepting a truth by blind faith is as bad as not accepting any truth that cannot be arrived at rationally. That God created the universe is more rational than accepting that the universe created itself. The perceived problem with certain Christian truths is due to the erroneous principle of scriptural literalism, which is based on the equally erroneous principle of biblical inerrancy. We believe that the Holy Scripture is infallible in matters of Christian faith and life.
According to our understanding the Holy Bible is not a scientific textbook, therefore we are not to take every geographic, historical, and scientific detail as error-free, and we should not read it that way. The Holy Scripture seems to follow the view that God created a stationary, flat earth, with the heaven being a dome over it, and the sun and the moon circling it (Psalm 104); that He created the universe in six 24-hour days, some 10,000 years ago, and that He took mud to form man out of it, and woman out of his rib. Scientific, discoveries, from Galileo to Darwin, supported views at odds with a literal understanding of the biblical accounts. As more scientific discoveries were made explaining the laws of nature and the workings of the universe and of life, belief in God was pushed back farther and farther, but only for those who follow a literalistic reading of the Bible.
In the Orthodox Church's understanding, the biblical account of the creation of the world is an anthropomorphic account, relating, in a way expressed by and understandable to the people of the time, sublime truths and facts. The Holy Fathers of the Church were open to the learning and experience of their contemporary world. They embraced the knowledge available to them and applied it in their exegesis of the Holy Scripture and in their views of the mysteries of the cosmos. "If they had had access to the technology and information which is at hand today, there is every reason to believe that they would utilize such knowledge to explain the scripture to contemporary man."
Thanks to their legacy Orthodoxy is science-friendly, it has understood science not as a competitor, but as a blessing of God, placed in man's service.
A specific problem existing between faith and science concerns the origin of life and particularly the existence of man. The theory of evolution holds "that all living things are descended from a common ancestor as a result of changes accumulated over geological time." This troubles many Christians who view this theory as "an essentially atheistic doctrine, holding that Man is only another animal, a naked ape, the product of 'chance' in a purposeless and hostile world. By implication, whatever behavior patterns are seen in animals, particularly in apes, must, therefore, be natural and hence acceptable as alternative lifestyles of Man." Two things have to be mentioned in this regard. First, the theory of evolution is by no means the explanation for the origin of life. This theory explains some things to some degree but it does not provide all the answers. Like any scientific theory, the theory of evolution, despite the mass of evidence behind it, is not a proven fact. Science itself, and the theory of evolution along with it, is constantly evolving and revised based on new scientific evidence. One only needs to look at a science textbook from thirty years ago, whether in the fields of biology, astronomy, archeology or paleontology, and will see that scientists have changed/updated their views on many of subjects. (Source: The Heavenly Banquet. Understanding the Divine Liturgy by Fr. Emmanuel Hatzidakis)
(To be continued)
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"Glory Be To GOD For All Things!"-- Saint John Chrysostom
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With sincere agape in His Holy Diakonia,
The sinner and unworthy servant of God
+Father George