Evolution

Evolution Not A Problem For Orthodox Christianity

"If evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time." - G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Six-Day Creationism A Form Of Madness

"What about the theory of evolution? If that's the way God created, who am I tell God how he should have created? Should I say, 'Gee God, I think you made a mistake. I think you should have done it much more instantaneously and eight thousand years ago'? We know of course by now that humans lived several million years ago, and we know we have living remnants of human beings twenty thousand years ago in North America. All of these things are realities. The idea that dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time is just madness. Once upon a time it was a sincere error, but to continue to assert that really is a kind of madness. There is no way that you can continue to assert such ludicrous notions and expect people to still continue to come to Christ, and to find their salvation." -- Archbishop Lazar Puhalo, All Saints Monastery YouTube broadcast, October 17, 2008.

Paradise (Eden) Not Necessarily A Place

"Evolution is a fact which cannot be successfully denied. I remember somebody saying it could not be denied and we corrected them and said that, 'Oh yes, it can be denied, but not successfully.' There was some form of evolution that took place. At some point God created Adam and Eve by breathing the spirit of life into them, and bringing them into a particular place which he called paradise. Paradise, after all, doesn't have to be a geographical location. I've read some wild 1,001 Arabian Knights type stories about paradise where fruit fell to the ground and didn't rot, but turned to fresh pure earth instantly, and that sort of thing. Paradise is there where mankind experiences the uncreated light of God, and participates in the uncreated energies of God. Wherever there is present the uncreated light of God, the presence of that uncreated light makes paradise. Perhaps this is why St. John Damascus says that paradise was a place both material and immaterial." -- Archbishop Lazar Puhalo, All Saints Monastery YouTube broadcast, October 17, 2008.

Genesis, DNA, and Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA)

We know there is a population bottleneck at about 8,000 BC, right after the Younger Dryas era. This is the start of the Neolithic Revolution. It is possible for this bottleneck to coincide with the existence of our MRCA. From Wikipedia:

Depending on the survival of isolated lineages without admixture from Modern migrations and taking into account long-isolated peoples, such as historical tribes in central Africa, Australia and remote islands in the South Pacific, the human MRCA was generally assumed to have lived in the Paleolithic period.

However, Rohde, Olson, and Chang (2004)[2], using a non-genetic model, estimated that the MRCA of all living humans may have lived within historical times (3rd millennium BC to 1st millennium AD). Rohde (2005)[4] refined the simulation with parameters from estimated historical human migrations and of population densities. For conservative parameters, he pushes back the date for the MRCA to the 6th millennium BC (p. 20), but still concludes with a "surprisingly recent" estimate of a MRCA living in the second or first millennium BC (p. 27). An explanation of this result is that, while humanity's MRCA was indeed a Paleolithic individual up to early modern times, the European explorers of the 16th and 17th centuries would have fathered enough offspring so that some "mainland" ancestry by today pervades even remote habitats. The possibility remains, however, that a single isolated population with no recent "mainland" admixture persists somewhere, which would immediately push back the date of humanity's MRCA by many millennia. While simulations help estimate probabilities, the question can be resolved authoritatively only by genetically testing every living human individual.

Other models reported in Rohde, Olson, and Chang (2004)[2] suggest that the MRCA of Western Europeans lived as recently as AD 1000. The same article provides surprisingly recent estimates for the identical ancestors point, the most recent time when each person then living was either an ancestor of all the persons alive today or an ancestor of none of them. The estimates for this are similarly uncertain, but date to considerably earlier than the MRCA, according to Rohde (2005) roughly to between 15,000 and 5,000 years ago.[4] [1].

1. ^ a b c Dawkins, Richard (2004). The Ancestor's Tale, A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. ISBN 0-618-00583-8.
2. ^ a b c Rohde DLT, Olson S, Chang JT (2004) "Modelling the recent common ancestry of all living humans". Nature 431: 562-566.
3. ^ Notions such as Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam yield common ancestors that are more ancient than for all living humans (Hartwell 2004:539).
4. ^ a b Rohde, DLT , On the common ancestors of all living humans. Submitted to American Journal of Physical Anthropology. (2005)

So, three things happen at once: The Younger Dryas event; a population bottleneck; and the Neolithic Revolution. Thus, the theory that a common ancestor of mankind (Adam and Eve) lived in the near East (The Fertile Crescent, The Levant, or Upper Mesopotamia) is as good a theory as any other, and is supported by the Genesis story, as well as other creation myths.

See also

Fundamentalism