/lit/ - Literature

You say this because you are most likely still trusting in the words of man more than the Word of God. The Earth isn’t more than 10,000 years old. The conception that this doesn’t make sense is governed by your already-held assumptions and preconceptions. Man was created from nothing in order to share love with God and to grow ever closer to Him, but when we fell into sin, we fell from the very Source of life, love, beauty and truth into a state of corruption, tending towards the non-being that we came from.

>>19521368
I agree. It’s quite funny honestly. Because first the author declares that evolution and similar theories are just *too* established to probably ever refute, and then he goes on to spend sixty odd pages discussing Kuhn’s ideas of paradigm shifts, the theory-laden character of data, and the fact that theories are always ‘underdetermined’ by data, i.e. multiple theories can explain the available data, so one cannot easily speak of ‘verification’ of theories. As you say, people like this are essentially undermining their own case when they engage in stuff like this. It’s even funnier in the case of this book, given how he was so triumphant about science in the beginning, and seems to be pushing Christians to uncritically accept the reigning scientific paradigm and to thereby conform to worldly science and philosophy. It’s always Christianity that they want to conform to the world.

And along with all of the other things mentioned, this whole house of cards falls apart when we question the assumption of the uniformity of nature into the indefinite past. Though it may be ‘unscientific’ in the sense of essentially being unfalsifiable, if the Eden narrative happened in any way whatsoever, it presupposes a break in the uniformity of nature in the past, rendering it outside of the scientific method.

But you’re completely right about atheists. I used to uncritically believe a lot of this stuff before I adopted a more critical and inquisitive mind, and began exploring paradigms, presuppositions and similar ideas. It really comes down to absurdity without God, and without Orthodoxy in particular. I recommend everyone look into these topics, as they have greatly helped me in many things.

>>19487243
The snake was Satan. It’s not hard to believe that a spiritual being such as Satan could change forms. Also, we must keep in mind that the world prior to the Fall in general was of a much different nature than the world we find ourselves in now. Adam and Eve were without sin, without death, without suffering, etc. There was no death in the whole world. This also makes the pre-Fall world completely outside of the domain of science which assumes a uniformity of nature in order to reason inductively, make predictions and to investigate nature.

And sure, God had foreknowledge. What we are offered in Christ is actually far greater than what Adam and Eve possessed in Paradise, so God brings about a higher and greater good