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 first 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. (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.) But I’ve never seen this view expressed by someone of a religious tradition so far removed from us. 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 (See Chapter Ten of my book, (“Dinosaurs an Adventist View”), many of them dating from before the book of Genesis was written. So the Genesis narrative is not really trying to convince people that a global flood happened, re-cast the pagan telling of that narrative, to de-glorify that lost epoch of high achievement and technology, and explain that God’s wrath against the world of that time as a 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.
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 obviously I do not agree with their views on this, or many other things in this video.
De Young is more yielding to the strictures of modern science than he should be, and than Tucker wants to be. At one point (I cannot find it now) Tucker mentions the well documented 19th century finds of the skeletal remains of giants, in mounds and elsewhere, and that the Smithsonian Institute has been covering up the evidence. De Young demurs, saying that science has found no hard evidence. But Tucker is right. I’ve researched and written on this topic extensively. 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.