Creation

https://orthochristian.com/132885.html

https://www.rocorstudies.org/2022/12/10/a-patristic-perspective-on-a-crucified-mind-fr-seraphim-rose-and-the-doctrine-of-creation/

https://www.goldenmouth.org/st-seraphim-of-platina/genesis-creation-early-man

our behavior is directly linked to our understanding of our origins, and our behavior reveals our desire or lack thereof for salvation and eternal life, to which Genesis, as a book of Scripture, points us.

teaching that men are descended from apes in order to justify treating one another as animals.

Fr. Seraphim writes that a vague understanding of the future age of blessedness, leaving men open to chiliastic theories of a “paradise on earth,” is due in large part to a poor understanding of the origin of man and the universe.

St. Basil the Great writes: “Those who do not admit the common meaning of the Scriptures … have attempted by false arguments and allegorical interpretations to bestow on the Scripture a dignity of their own imagining. But theirs is the attitude of one who considers himself wiser than the revelations of the Spirit and introduces his own ideas in pretense of an explanation. Therefore, let it be understood as it has been written.”

and against those who reject the plain meaning of Genesis, St. John Chrysostom exhorts: “let us pay no heed to these people, let us stop up our hearing against them, and let us believe the Divine Scripture, and following what is written in it, let us strive to preserve in our souls sound dogmas.”

As Fr. Seraphim takes his cue from the Fathers, so the Fathers took their cue from Scripture itself which declares that God spoke to Moses, not in dark sayings and riddles but face-to-face as a friend (Num. 12:6-8)

Of course, no man has or can directly observe the creation of the world apart from spiritual vision, but it can only be guessed at by extrapolating from the modern world that we do experience. Only God Himself observed in real time the creation of the world and therefore only God can reveal the un-speculative truth of it to man.

as Fr. Seraphim himself would say, we cannot rely on our own rational understanding of the Holy Scriptures, but we must instead ask how the holy Fathers have understood the days of Creation.

both the Fundamentalist view that the literal interpretation of Genesis rests on the length of the days being twenty-four hours, and the evolutionist view which rests upon the length of the “days” being millions or billions of years, and concludes: “I think we can safely say that both these views miss the mark,”

cosmogony, origin and evolution of the universe

Only God Himself observed in real time the creation of the world and therefore only God can reveal the un-speculative truth of it to man.

St. Maximus the Confessor also presents a profound connection between time and eternity, “for eternity is time when it stops moving, and time is eternity when it is measured as it is borne by movement, so that I arrive at the all-embracing definition of eternity as being time deprived of movement, and time as eternity measured by movement.”

But he also teaches that when man is united to God, as was Adam before his Fall, he is freed from the subjection to change brought on by time

St. Theophilus of Antioch and the Christian father of chronography, Julius Africanus (c. 160 – c. 240), specifically argue against the pagan notions of an “old earth,” older than that given by the Old Testament genealogies