Young Earth Creationism

Hello,

All the Church Fathers believes that the earth was less than 6,000 years old at the time they lived. Young earth Creationism is rooted in Scripture and the Church Fathers.

Albert

Hello Albert,
I must begin to differ. Accepting evolution has little or nothing to do with special creation, but rather ALL THOSE OTHER THEORIES which it superceded. Vitalism, Lysenko-ism, etc, are examples of the older, incorrect theories is replaced.

Special Creation is this around too, as a matter of faith. It doesn’t contribute to the modern scientific process, nor does anyone really expect it to do so.

Hello, my point was to show the universal belief of the Church Fathers. I completely embrace their theology and worldview. They were illumined by God, and everything else is rubbish.

I think perhaps “everything else is rubbish” is too vague a statement to be of any value.

BUt you wrote this"

“The Fathers of the Church believed the Genesis account of the creation of Eve literally, although they sometimes superimposed allegorical interpretations on it. The creation of Eve from the side of Adam is so strongly affirmed in Magisterial teaching”… (Warkulwiz, 262).

Are you aware that science cannot contradict a specially created Adam & Eve more than ~6000 years ago?

I find it difficult to tell what close friends believe. It is a lot harder to determine what people believed 2000 years ago.

In my teenage years, OEC (old earth creationism) was widely accepted within the churches.

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Well then, you are satisfied in your beliefs, and you are most welcome to express them. What I am curious to, however, is why you feel inclined to present them here? Anything we could say, you would dismiss as rubbish, so what is up for discussion?

As for the church fathers, they were representative of their day, did not have access to microscopes and analyzers, and could not be expected to understand atomic theory, genetics, or even the solar system.

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I would note that it was not Evolution that consigned pre-modern belief in a ‘Young Earth’ to the dustbin, but rather Geology, most notably Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (published in the 1830s). Belief in a ‘Young Earth’ was dead as a doornail before Darwin ever published On the Origin of Species. This is why, for the first century after its publication, opposition to it came principally from Old Earth Creationism. YEC was a minority view, proposed by Seventh Day Adventist George McCready Price, and accepted mainly in Adventist circles, until The Genesis Flood brought it to a wider American Protestant audience in 1961.

Modernists and unbelievers who claim to be Orthodox, but are not fully convinced of our faith, should not use the canard that young earth creationism (YEC) comes from Protestants. This is the informal fallacy of false cause (non causa pro causa). No, young earth creationism comes from Holy Scripture and the Holy Fathers of Orthodox Christian Tradition. If you do not believe in YEC, you are not Orthodox.

Sloppy and fallacious balderdash!

(Parenthetically, in the context of Christianity, “Orthodox”, capitalised, is usually taken to mean the Eastern Orthodox Church, just as “Catholic”, capitalised, is taken to mean the Roman Catholic Church. If you are talking about the orthodoxy of beliefs, you should used the word “orthodox”, uncapitalised, for clarity.)

Whether a set of beliefs is orthodox or not depends on whether they align with some authoritative Creed, not on the extent that they align with the beliefs of your “Holy Fathers of Orthodox Christian Tradition”. This can be seen from the fact that many of the beliefs of one prominent Church Father, Tertullian of Carthage, were rejected by, or a rejection of, orthodox Christian theology. It would also seem likely that the Church Father believed in Geocentricism, and probably a large number of other erroneous, pre-modern beliefs about the natural world – and therefore, by your argument ‘orthodox Christians’ must likewise accept these beliefs as well.

@Dan_Eastwood: Lysenko was long after Darwin’s time, so is hardly an example of an “older” theory. You are perhaps thinking of Lamarckism (from which Lysenkoism is derived)?

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Yes, I stand corrected!

It’s been a good but very tiring weekend, so I’m not at my best.

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4 posts were split to a new topic: Young Earth Evolution vs. Young Earth Creationism

It’s easy to know what the ancient Church believed, because we have the primary sources which have always been preserved within the proper custody of the Church. Old earth creationism is only accepted by heretics, liberals and modernists, not Orthodox or traditional Catholics.

That would be the officially approved statement. But it does not tell us what individual Christians actually believed.

That may be what you believe. But when I do a google search for “catholic creationism” I get a bunch of pages with ambivalent statements.

As @Tim said a few posts up, the modern version of YEC mostly originated with George McCready Price.

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Sorry, but calling nice people heretics is not the way we do things here. You can have a little time-out until I figure out what to do with you.

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Actually, we don’t. A number of early sources have been lost, or only preserved to the extent that they are quoted in later works.

But you have failed to establish:

  1. That any of the Church Fathers’ preserved writings make a ‘Young Earth’ an issue of orthodoxy (as opposed to merely an assumption that they might have made).

  2. That this statement by the Church Fathers, even if it existed, was ever accepted by any major denomination as part of its Creed, or other authoritative statement of doctrine.

This statement is FALSE.

(Parenthetically, @Dan_Eastwood, whether a belief is orthodox or heretical to a particular denomination is largely a matter of fact not opinion. Each denomination has a Creed and/or other authoritative statements of doctrine. Beliefs that contradict these are “heretical” according to that doctrine, and thus that denomination. Thus, ‘Papal Infallibility’ is part of Catholic doctrine, so Protestants and members of the Eastern Orthodox Church, who reject this doctrine, are “heretics” according to Catholic doctrine.)

Catholic doctrine makes no authoritative statement on the Age of the Earth, therefore belief in an Old Earth cannot be ‘heretical’ under Catholic doctrine. In fact acceptance of both an Old Earth and of Evolution appears to have wide acceptance within the Catholic Church, without its hierarchy demurring in any way.

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Augustine didn’t. He thought the days of Genesis were a logical framework, not a literal passage of time, and so didn’t limit the age of the Earth.

Have you actually read the works of the Church Fathers, or are you just repeating what you’ve been told about them?

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To be fair it’s really strange language to describe a logical framework in, that it consists of days partitioned into mornings and evenings.

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I like being called a heretic and blasphemer.

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That just shows for how long theologians have recognized that Scripture is incompatible with physical reality, and that great acts of mental gymnastics are needed to keep Scripture at all relevant.

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