Tucker Carlson recently interviewed another Orthodox priest, this time the Rev. Dr. Stephen de Young, who pastors an Orthodox church in Lafayette, Louisiana. Although the initial question is about the Nephilim, one of the first things that comes up, around the 4:00 minute mark, is that the pre-Flood world was an age of high technology.
This, of course, is the teaching of Ellen White and the Seventh-day Adventist Church, but I seldom see this view expressed outside of the Adventist tradition (or, for that matter, within the Adventist tradition). (Two non-Adventist books that hold that view are, “The Puzzle of Ancient Man” by Donald E. Chittick, now in its second addition, and “The Genius of Ancient Man” by Don Landis.)
I’ve certainly never seen the view that the pre-Flood world was a world of high technology expressed by someone of a religious tradition so far removed from Adventism. Yet here is an Orthodox priest articulating this belief as something widely understood among scholars, and really not even controversial.
He notes that every civilization and culture has a story of the Flood—I reproduce many of these stories in Chapter Ten of my book, “Dinosaurs an Adventist View.” Several of these near eastern Flood legends predate the writing of the book of Genesis. For example, the Epic of Gilgamesh predates Genesis by over 300 years.
So the Genesis narrative is not trying to convince people that a global flood happened; everyone already knew that. Rather, Genesis is putting a different emphasis on the story. The Genesis narrative seeks to de-glorify that lost epoch of high achievement, and explain that God’s wrath against the world of that time was a just response to an intensely sinful people, a people whose every thought was “only evil continually.” (Gen. 6:5)
de Young: “We have to understand that the flood story is not a new story when Genesis is telling it. . . . Everyone had a flood story in the ancient near east. . . . You could have asked anybody from Greece to Mesopotamia to Egypt, they would have all agreed, at that point, that, yes, there was this advanced civilization, there was a Flood that destroyed it, current civilization is rebuilt after that.
Carlson: Yes.
de Young: Now, one of the key differences in Genesis 6, that you already have in those first four verses, is Genesis recasts what that civilization was like. So, in the pagan sources, that pre-Flood world was this golden age of, for the time, high technology . . . losing that world was this great tragedy.
Carlson: But everyone agreed it was a more advanced world than the world they lived in.
de Young: Yes, yes. That there was knowledge there that had now been mostly lost.
Carlson: Interesting.
This view of history has a very important apologetic resonance. In the Darwinian story, mankind works his way up by thousands of generations of striving and struggle from a simian to a human, and once we achieve humanity, then we go from simple tools to high technology. It is a story of tremendous, really miraculous achievement, without the help of any superior being. It also totally removes the notion of God, a “Fall” into sin, and the need for a Savior.
The view I espouse is that when God created man, mankind was as good as he was ever going to be: taller, stronger, longer-lived, and much smarter than he would ever be again. When that humanity fell into sin, he sinned in an outsized ultra-violent way; he had the intelligence to tinker with, and re-engineer, the life forms God had created, and he used it. That kind of fallen humanity was simply intolerable, and God had to destroy him. After the Flood, mankind grew rapidly smaller, weaker, shorter-lived, and much, much less intelligent. We have less time and ability to do good, but also less time and ability to do evil, which, sadly, is what fallen humanity is so prone to do.
As with every video I post, whether featuring an Adventist or a non-Adventist, I do not endorse everything this man says. For example, there is a fairly lengthy discussion of the Nephilim; both men believe the Nephilim were the products of the mating of fallen angels or demons with human women. Adventists do not agree with this conclusion. I have discussed this issue at length both in my dinosaur book (see, Chapter 18, pages 395-404, and footnotes 18, 23, and 26) and in my series on giants, here. So I do not agree with their views on the Nephilim or many other things in this video.
De Young concedes more to atheistic origins science than he should, and than Tucker wants to concede. At the 1:01 minute mark, Tucker mentions the well documented 19th century finds of the skeletal remains of giants in mounds, caves, and elsewhere, and that the Smithsonian Institute has been covering up the evidence:
There are a million reports from the 19th Century in North America and the U.S. of people finding nine foot-tall skeletons in some cave in Nevada. They were all destroyed by the Smithsonian. Is any of that true?
De Young demurs, saying that science has found no hard evidence. But Tucker is right. I’ve researched and written on this topic extensively. There are many reports of such finds, more than enough to conclude, in a biblical model of history, that mankind has gradually evolved from larger to smaller. It is almost as though Tucker read my article.
Like Pastor Ron Kelly, I am impressed that Tucker Carlson is a genuine seeker for truth. He is seeking truth on topics I would not expect him to. The heresy of Dispensationalism and Christian Zionism have pushed Tucker away from conservative American evangelicalism and toward the Orthodox, who at least get that issue right. But he is going to need to keep seeking.