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"Biblical Inerrancy" so named is certainly a post-reformation protestant invention. The point is that until the "reformers" decided that the only trustworthy part of Christian tradition was the canon of Scripture, no Christian, East or West, thought of using Holy Scripture as an axiom system.

Six-day literalists (the kind of creationist most readily lampooned and turned into a readily toppled straw-man as PatrickHenry did in his earlier post on this thread) grasp at straws when they try to find a Church Father who would support their idea of Scriptural exegesis. They usually point to St. Basil the Great's Hexameron, his commentary on the creation account in Genesis. The trouble is, in that very work he wrote, "it matters not whether you say 'aeon' or 'day' the thought is the same." St. Gregory of Nyssa, while maintaining their truth, plainly discounted the literal historicity of the first two chapters of Genesis, describing them as "doctrines in the guise of a narrative."

I am told by the webmaster of the newly revived Orthodox Christian publication The Christian Activist that the article "The Eternal Will" should soon be available on-line again. When it is I'll start a thread with it. The author (if I remember correctly, it was Alexander Kalimoros) argues that the Genesis account, when read in light of patristic commentaries, actually gives essentially the same chronology as modern scientific accounts (both cosmological and evolutionary).

That being said, I have come to the conclusion that the evolution/creation debate is viscious and heated primarily because the most vocal proponents of the two sides (committed pious protestants on the one and atheistic proponents of scientism on the other) both share a common misconception of the relationship between stochastic processes and intent or purpose. Both believe that a stochastic element in the description of the origin of biological diversity and humankind precludes there being any intent behind those events. The former therefore, believing firmly in God, hotly deny the theory of evolution. The latter rejoicing in using it as an iron with which to brand theists as obscurantist, retrograde, and anti-scientific.

This common assumption, however, is wrong, as two examples suffice to show:

First, there is a well-known physical system in which thermal (and thus random) effects produce an increase in the order of the system. (It is an open system, in the process energy is added and removed from the system, so the creationists can shut up about violations of the second law of thermodynamics.) The system is the hardening of metal: by a suitable sequence of heating and quenching, a metal is made harder by increasing the average size of the crystals in the metal, that is increasing the order of the system.

Now, the curious thing about this system is this: any archeologist upon finding a shard of hardened metal will immediately conclude that it is a fragment of an artifact, something made intentionally.

From this example, we see that the fact that a random process is involved in a material change most assuredly does not show that it is not an intentional or willed change. Rather, in this example (which like the evolutionary description biological diversity involves an increase in the order in an open system via stochastic effects) the natural conclusion is the opposite: the state of the system is intentional. This observation is absolutely contrary to the common assumption of the polemicists on both sides.

A second example is that of options markets. The best predictor of the behavior of options markets is a stochastic differential equation, the Black-Scholes Option Pricing Formula. Now, we all know that options markets function by the interaction of intentional actors, traders, buyers, sellers (of the options and the products or securities they are options on), all of whom are seeking to maximize their profits, and act with intent. Nonetheless, the best model of this activity is stochastic, and not because it is accounting for extraneous influences, but rather because market dynamics when the actors do not have complete information share some features with Brownian motion.

Here, the stochastic element is epistemological only and not ontological at all: it gives a good model, even though a microscopic model in which the actors willingness to make certain trades was known could be completely law-driven, deterministic, and based on intentional actions. There is good reason to argue that much of the randomness incorporated into evolutionary theory is epistemological and not ontological. Again a fact which tells against the common assumption of the most vociferous debaters on both sides.

any archeologist upon finding a shard of hardened metal will immediately conclude that it is a fragment of an artifact, something made intentionally.

Why?

That being said, I have come to the conclusion that the evolution/creation debate is viscious and heated primarily because the most vocal proponents of the two sides (committed pious protestants on the one and atheistic proponents of scientism on the other) both share a common misconception of the relationship between stochastic processes and intent or purpose.

I am not an atheist.