December 24, 2025 • 51 mins
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Those the hell dragons in the Bible. Here, so the
original language terms, we're gonna move through this document quickly.
We wrung skip the whole section on the fire symbolism.
(00:23):
Could have already showed you guys that. But the primary
Hebrew words involved are tannin or tannem, and it can
mean serpent, dragon, sea monster, great reptilian creature used for
chaotic creatures, destructive beings, sometimes desert monsters. Appears approximately fourteen
to fifteen times in the Hebrew Bible. Here's the few
(00:43):
examples I could find Genesis one, Exodus seven, Uteronomy thirty two,
Psalm seventy four, Isaiah twenty seven, and Jeremiah fifty one.
In regards to the word for Leviathan, who again, as
I said, was we'll look here that dragons actually began
as sort of sea monsters. A specific named chaos dragon,
(01:05):
multi headed sea dwelling explicitly hostile appears six times Job three,
Job forty one, Psalm seventy four, Psalm one, O four
In Isaiah twenty seven, Leviathan is clearly a dragon type being,
not a normal animal. And then in the Greek context
the Greek New Testament, as I said, the word for
(01:25):
dragon comes from dracon, the Greek word. This is the
clearest and least ambiguous term because it literally means dragon
and is used only in the Apocalyptic tax So nine
times it appears in the Book of Revelation, Revelation twelve four, seven, nine, thirteen,
(01:45):
sixteen seventeen, and then Revelation thirteen two and four, Revelation
twenty verse two, and Revelation twelve nineteen explicitly defines it
that ancient serpent who is called the devil and Satan
the deceiver of the whole world. Here, dragon is not poetic,
(02:06):
it is a personal ontological being. So in the Book
of Revelation it is referring to a specific dragon in
association with Satan. Now English Bible countsl New New King
James version, we see it appears thirty four times in
the Old Testament, a total of forty three references. So
(02:28):
major dragon slaying saints, as I said, par excellence, there's
no competition. The number one dragon slaying saint and the
Orthodox Church is Saint George the Great Martyr, reposed in
three O three. Remember I talked about how it was
three o three to three oh six that uh Saint
(02:51):
Nicholas of Mira was incarcerated by Diocletian and held in
prison for six to ten years. Again, we don't exactly
know how long, at least six years, though we believe
in a cell that was very small and dark. Right,
you know, the ancient Roman world wasn't great to its prisoners.
But Saint George was also persecuted under died in Cletian.
(03:13):
That's where that's where his martyrdom actually occurs, is under Diecletian.
But for Saint George is story of slaying the dragon.
We have it in Greek, Syriac and Arabic Vita. We
have it in the Byzantine Sanasaria. We have it later
medieval elaborations in both in the Byzantine East and the
Latin West. So a dragon terrorizes the city, often near water,
(03:37):
demands human victims. Saint George wounds or subdues it, it
is killed, and the city converts. It's universally commemorated. As
I'll show you. There are some legends of saints with
dragons that are much more regional or more local narratives.
They're not universally recognized by the Church, like Saint George's
and the dragon obviously is present, and all I can
(03:59):
not the Church never defines what exactly the dragon was.
Was it a real dragon, was it demonic? Was it
a hybrid? Was it symbolic? Is it satan? But what
is affirmed is the real danger and real deliverance. And
so I just feel like, because today's stream is about
(04:19):
dragon slaying, I feel obligated, obligated that we must watch
at least this eight minute video on Saint George, because
when else are we gonna watch it? I mean, if
we're gonna be talking about dragons, we better actually have than,
you know, the most notorious dragon slayer of all time.
(04:40):
So let me pull this up real quick. Now, let's
play this video of Saint George, because if you guys
haven't heard of the story of Saint George, it is
definitely worth being familiar with. I mean, he's one of
my favorite saints. He's obviously one of the if not
the most notorious warriors saying of the church, but he's
(05:01):
obviously the most notorious dragon slayer probably in history, honestly,
I mean cross culturally, is there a single person that
exemplifies the slag or at least has a myth associated
whether you think it's a myth or not a narrative
associated with slaying dragons that is more famous than Saint George.
I can't think of one. So we're gonna watch this
(05:23):
little This isn't an Orthodox channel. I couldn't find a
short Orthodox video. Trisaggyon Films has a good one on
Saint George, but it's like twenty some almost thirty minutes long.
I don't want to put you guys through that. I
got so much other stuff I want to get into.
So we're just gonna watch this quick video. Just an
honoring of Saint George, the Great dragon Slayer from the world.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
He is the patron of hundreds of cities around the
world and surely one of the most beloved saints among
the Catholic and Orthodox churches. He's onned in portrayed riding
a white horse and dressed as a Roman soldier piercing
a dragon. With this Saint George is an iconic character
in the struggle between good and evil, representing courage, faith
and warding off adversity. Today's video shows us more about
the amazing story of this saint, loved by millions of
(06:10):
people worldwide. Born in Cappadocia, Turkey. His story is steeped
in legend and mystery. Born to Christian parents of Greek nobility,
George was raised in a profoundly pious household, molding his
faith and character from an early age. When he was fourteen,
George suffered the loss of his father, who was a
Roman legionary officer, something that impacted deeply on his life.
He moved with his mother to Palestine, where his bonds
(06:32):
with the Christian faith grew stronger. This stage in his
life was marred by loneliness and the quest for a
greater purpose, guided by his religious heritage. When he was seventeen,
and following in his father's footsteps, George joined the Roman Army.
His military career took off in the imperial city of
Nicomedia in eastern Turkey. There he showed courage and honor,
qualities that quickly made him stand out among his peers.
(06:53):
George's ability and loyalty did not go without notice, leading
to his promotion to tribune and the highly prestigious rank
of Imperial Guard under Emperor Diocletian. This appointment was not
only a testament to its military prowess, but also showed
the trust the powerful Roman emperor had in him. But
Diocletian still revered the old Roman gods, and after having
made an inquiry to the Oracle, he began a widespread
(07:16):
persecution campaign against the Christians. He destroyed churches and imprisoned priests.
George's allegiance was challenged. Halfway through the anti Christian campaign, George,
steadfast in his faith, defined the emperor, rejecting the anti
Christian laws and openly declaring himself a Christian. This brave
act of faith led to his imprisonment, and this decisive
moment would define the rest of his life. When he
(07:38):
bravely rebelled against a Diocletian, Saint George was locked up
and subjected to him.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
This is one of the terrifying tortures that the Romans use.
They put Saint George on a wheel like this, and
then they had all these knives, metal spikes that would
tear flesh, and they would turn the wheel so that
you would slowly like have they would have like knives,
and you would be tied to it and they would
(08:03):
slowly turn it where it would cut you. And as
it's going to talk about, there's the church describes these
miracles that would occur that every time they tortured Saint George,
he claimed Christ would visit him at night, and miraculously,
many of his wounds would actually be healed.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
To unthinkable torment, according to accounts, he was forcibly fed poisons,
his body was crushed between two wheels, studded with metal spikes,
and other cruel and inconceivable acts of torture, But miraculously,
none of these atrocities took George's life, as he was
protected by the Creator himself. Every night, Jesus is said
to have come to heal his wounds, bolstering his faith
and resilience. Although facing him and in death, George stood
(08:45):
his ground in his belief, rejecting all of Diocletian's attempts
to make him abandon his faith, including offerings of pardon
and gifts such as land, money, and slaves. Having seen
George's unwavering faith, Diocletian decided to have him executed on
April twenty third, three oh three, which was beheaded on
the walls of Nicomedia. His death not only signaled the
end of the devout and valiant life, but also the
(09:06):
beginning of a legacy that would last for centuries. He
became a Christian symbol of resistance, inspiring countless others with
his fortitude and selflessness. This fund extreme suffering. The well
known legend of how Saint George faced a dragon only
emerged in the twelfth century, many years after his death.
In desperate times, a distant city endured the shadows of
a terrible dragon, the flame.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
And that's why I said, this isn't an Orthodox channel,
And that's not exactly true. There are stories about well
before the twelfth century. So this is again, this is
a non believer. He's probably not familiar with the Orthodox tradition.
But our tradition actually describes earlier the legend of Saint
George slaying the dragon. It doesn't just appear in the
(09:48):
twelfth century.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Names of its fury burned the sky, and its breath
was a billowing death cloud. Human sacrifices were made daily
to appease the beast's rage, sadness, and hopelessness in gul
To the city, as one young girl after another was
delivered to a grim fate, the king himself had to
sacrifice his daughter. When news arrived that a noble Roman
knight had arrived in the city. This was Saint George,
(10:11):
whose gallantry was as wide as the seeds. Riding on
his white horse, he pronounced that the horses of evil
would no longer take the lives of innocent maidens in
that place. On meeting the dragon, an epic battle ensued.
Saint George's spear gleamed in the sunlight, and his armor
sparkled like a shooting star as the holy warrior made
his way through the darkness and gloom surrounding the monster.
(10:33):
The beast stuttered a scream that shattered the heavens as
Saint George smote the dragon, causing it to collapse to
the ground and squirm in agony. Once he had rescued
the princess, Saint George bound the defeated dragon and took
it back to the city, no longer as a terrifying monster.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
See that it leaves out a bunch of details, but
it'd be too time consuming to watch a whole video
on it. And this is like a nice little eight
minute video. I got sped up. But he actually takes
the garter of the princess. So the way that the
legend goes is that he found her tied up on
a tree in the wilderness outside the city, and upon
riding his horse and coming to the city, he sees
this princess tied up to a tree. He asks her
(11:10):
what's going on, and she tells him that essentially, the
city has offered her as a sacrifice to the dragon
that's terrifying the village, and that's when he pronounces that,
you know, basically, this is going to stop. The forces
of good are going to stop evil. And when he
subdues the dragon, he actually takes her garter, which again
(11:31):
symbol of virginity, wraps it around the head of the
demon of Satan of the dragon, and then pulls it
or guides it all the way back to the city
to show the people that he has subdued the beast.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
But as a trophy of his bravery before the astonished
and grateful citizens, he offered them not only physical but
also spiritual salvation, preaching the Christian thing. According to legend,
many were converted that day, moved by Saint George's heroic
act and words. Having defeated the dragon, he refused any compensation,
revealing his humility and generosity. He donated everything he was
(12:06):
given to the poor underlining his commitment to the Christian
values of charity and material detachment. The story of Saint
George and the Dragon became a symbol of courage, faith,
and the triumph of good over evil, reverberating through the centuries,
drawing inspiration from generations in their pursuit of heroes and miracles.
Saint George's England's patron saint, and his cross is featured
on the nation's flag. During the famous fourteen twenty five
(12:28):
Battle of Agincourt, where the English army faced the mighty
French cavalry, both sides claimed to have seen a vision
of Saint George during the battle. Obviously, if he did appear,
it was to help the English, who, despite being outnumbered,
succeeded in humiliating the French. Between three o six and
three thirty seven eighty a church dedicated to Saint George
was built in the dak It has been destroyed and
(12:49):
rebuilt several times over the centuries. Churches dedicated to saints
or martyrs were traditionally raised over their tombs, although many
churches throughout the world claimed to hold Saint George's relics
of St. George and Lida is regarded as his final
resting place.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
Okay, we're dealt with that video. I do want to
share this one. We're not gonna watch it, but I've
gone through it, and this is basically it's just so
a collection of some of the examples of saints that
dealt with dragons. It's kind of boring because I would
just sit here and read it to you guys, but
I do want to share it in case any of
you guys want to watch it later. It's something I
(13:25):
found and prep for the stream. So there's that video. Okay,
let's go back to the document because I want to
I want to walk through you guys some of this stuff. So, okay,
we talked about Saint George. Other saints. Saint Theodore Tiro
the Recruit early fourth century. His examples are in Greek hagiographies,
(13:47):
military cult traditions. A dragon and habits as spring or well,
kills people on livestock. Theodore slays it, often after fasting
and prayer, and that's an Asia Minor in Cappadocia. Another
Saint Theodore often actually presented together again paired with Theodore
Tiro dragon terrorizes the countryside. Saint kills it publicly he becomes,
(14:11):
he's a military saint and his dragon is beneath his feet.
In the iconography of Saint Theodore, the Stratlites, and then
Eastern saints with more localized dragon traditions, you have Saint
Marina of Antioch. She is not a dragon slayer but
a dragon conqueror. The narratives that she is swallowed by
(14:31):
a dragon often identified as Satan burst forth unharmed by
the sign of the Cross, and then of course she's
a saint shows dragon imagery used for spiritual combat, not
not a literal zoology per se. So Saint Romanus of
Roun seventh century, venerated in the East via shared Preschism tradition,
(14:54):
dwells near uh saying or the sign floods and terrorizes
the region. Saint subdues the dragon, townspeople kill it. And
interesting thing I found is that this was believed to
be the origin of gargoyles in Western Europe. It actually
has to do with Saint Romanis. I wasn't aware of that.
He's more prominent in Western traditions but pre Schism and
(15:18):
known in Byzantine sources. And then these are more even
more localized urban and civic dragon traditions, the Saint Sylvester
of Rome and dragon dwells beneath Rome, its breath kills citizens,
and Sylvester descends and binds it, meaning dragon linked to
imperial pagan power. Defeat symbolizes Christianization of the city. Saint
(15:42):
Donatus dragon poisons a spring, Saint kills it, and so forth.
And then we have some desert ascetics that encounters some
great beast like Saint Anthony the Great and Athanasius Life
of Saint Anthony a terrifying beast, and serpentine forms demonic
manifestations with physical effects, and sets the paradigm that demons
(16:03):
can appear as monstrous creatures, including dragon like forms. Saint
Pocomias desert tradition includes serpent monsters, dangerous creatures driven away
by prayer, not always called dragons, but functionally similar. And
then Saint Arcinius the Great encounters with monstrous beings in
isolation emphasis on spiritual authority over hostile entities. So then
(16:27):
I thought, I wanted to know what are the actual
historical records of dragons, like do we have what are
the works that people actually wrote describing what they believe
to be real traditions of dragons. And here's what I found.
So what counts as a real and historical sources. It's
when historians say an ancient or medieval author describes real dragons,
(16:50):
we mean that it's not intended as a myth or poetry.
It's a literal at least the author perceives it as literal.
Natural history, chronicle, geography, travel account biography, hagiography, and so
on and so forth. So this is crucial because again
this is my argument between the pre modern and the modern.
(17:11):
Pre modern authors did not distinguish between mythical versus real
as we do today because they weren't tainted by rationalism.
So if something was reported by witnesses or tradition, it
was often treated as part of the natural world. So
here's what I found. Going back to the earliest references
that I could find of dragons, and we find Herodotus,
(17:33):
So this is fifth century BC in his histories he
describes winged serpents and Arabia. So this is where the
argument for literal dragons. And I was looking up YouTube videos.
I didn't find one YouTube video that referenced any of
this stuff. And I found all these videos trying to
(17:54):
talk about the literality of dragons, and I'm thinking, well,
how come none of the videos actually go and try
to find historical sources that reference literal dragons. They just
talk about cross cultural references, symbolic interprets this type of thing.
It's like what so I found Herodotus. He mentions their bones,
(18:16):
their migration, routes local populations who kill them, and then
treats them as real fauna, though dangerous and rare. So
Heroditis is cautious, but does not frame this as a myth.
If you read it, it sounds very literal. Another one
I was surprised with was Aristotle. Now he doesn't specifically
reference dragons, but in his History of Animals and Parts
(18:40):
of Animals, he mentions very large serpents and operates with
his this is the Riscitilian sort of biological continuum of surpents,
giant surfents than dragons, And I, you know, just throwing
this in here for fun. His silence on wings does
not negate dragon belief. It reflects empirical caution. Now, this
(19:01):
is probably the most important of the historical sources I found,
and that's plenty of the Elder in his naturalis Historia.
This is he describes the largest of serpents living in India, Ethiopia,
and North Africa. He describes them as fighting elephants by
coiling around them and suffocating them being hunted by humans,
(19:22):
So could be massive, very large pythons or snakes, but
plenty explicitly classifies dragons as animals, not spirits or gods.
And again that's first century AD. Okay now alien Uh
second to third century AD on the Nature of Animals
(19:44):
describes dragons as intelligent, territorial capable of affection or vengeance,
and mentions dragon guardianship of treasures. And he presents this
as natural history, not a legend, not a myth, not
a story. And then near Eastern and Indian Asian sources,
the Indian epics, the Mahabartas, the Puranas, the ire Vedic
(20:08):
text Nagas. Again the serpent semi divine, anthropomorphized deity is
capable of interbreeding, territorial control, warfare with humans not presented
as metaphors. Indian cosmology assumes a plural inhabited world, not
closed natural system, so that's another at least for the Indians.
(20:31):
They took that as a literal historical reference, not symbolic
Chinese historical examples the Shiji, the record of Grand historian
Han dynasty, natural histories, tongue and song records. So that's
what I was surprised, is you find multiple dynasties. Now,
we talked about East Age of use these as auspicious,
(20:51):
beneficent creatures that symbolize the authority of the emperor. But
it is interesting. Now maybe it's just part of tradition
and culture, and it's with now the new dynasty is
in the ruling the ruling power, and so they then
present this as historical record. I'm not sure, but dragons
are described as real animals, rare but observable. You can
(21:15):
actually see them, and they're associated with rainstorms, rivers occasionally
captured or killed. Chinese scholars debated dragon physiology, not dragon existence,
which is interesting. I found an example of Marco Polo
thirteenth century in his book in his work The Travels,
describes giant serpents in Southeast Asia, mentions their size, their
(21:38):
hunting methods, local fear and avoidance, explicitly states they are
real animals. And again, while he may exaggerate, he believed
his account and described it very literally. Medieval European sources.
Isidore of Seville seventh century, in his Etymologia, defines dragons
(21:58):
as the largest of serpents living in caves and deserts,
and this text was the standard medieval encyclopedia. Dragons were
thought as part of the natural world, very interesting. The
Anglo Saxon Chronicles obviously Beowulf and stuff like that reports
of flying dragons seen in the sky, dragon signings as
(22:19):
ominous events, treated as actual phenomenon and not allegory. The
beastiaries of the twelfth to thirteenth century often moralized but
based on earlier natural histories. Dragons described anatomically wings, poison
habitat used for education and not for fiction. Gerald of
(22:40):
Wales twelfth century mentions dragons and serpent monsters, treats them
as rare but real, not mythologized, not symbolic. Early modern
transitional sources Ulysses Aldrovandi sixteenth century and is serpentum at
drachkonum historia. Early zoologists catalogs dragons, dragons, skulls, preserved specimens,
(23:08):
attempts actual classification. Now this is sixteenth century guys. Once
we get into the seventh century seventeenth century, all this
stuff's going to begin to disappear, and he presents this
as not medieval fantasy but proto science. Conrad Gesner sixteenth
century includes dragons acknowledges uncertainty, does not dismiss their existence outright,
(23:30):
And so in regard to the historical record, yes, there
are numerous historical writings across Greece, Rome, India, China, medieval Europe,
and early modern science in which authors explicitly described dragons
as real, living beings that were seen, killed, feared, and studied.
Interesting stuff there. Now, the next section is getting into
(23:53):
the origins of fire breathing dragons. And this is what
I was surprised by, is that how can textual it
is so fire breathing dragons are not universal. The belief
emerges relatively late and has concentrated geographically and basically Christian nations.
And so you do find early references in some of
(24:14):
the Indo European heroic traditions, but it's mostly within the
Christian context. So chronological development, prehistoric, early ancient period, no
fire breathing dragons. They are associated giant serpents or dragons
are associated with water, chaos, floods, fertility, poison. Again, many
(24:35):
of the examples I discussed with the opening symbolism Mesopotamia, Egypt,
Early China, Vadic India, there is no fire breathing dragon.
Now by the Bronze Age transition period, fire becomes associated
with divine judgment, smithing and metallurgy, warfare, kingship. But dragons
(24:56):
still kill by poison. They crush their prey, they guard treasure,
they block rivers. They do not breathe fire. Once we
get into the classical antiquity, so eight hundred BC to
four hundred a d fire breathing emerges clearly for the
first time. This is a critical turning point. In the
Greek world, the Greek term dracone initially means large serpent.
(25:17):
By the time of the Hellenistic period, dragons began to
be associated with burning breath, heat, and lethal vapors. Examples
are the Chimera of Homer and later Greek sources. Is
not universal, but it is becoming established. In the Roman world.
Romans intensify this imagery. Plenty of the elder dragons primarily
(25:38):
killed by constriction, but it acknowledges burning heat and lethal exaltations.
Roman military iconography begins associating dragons with destructive force by
the time of late Antiquity. In early Christianity fourth to
seventh century AD, fire breathing becomes theologically stabilized. We see
(26:00):
the biblical apocalyptic influence revelation. The dragon is associated with fire, destruction, judgment, hell.
Fire becomes moral eschological, impunitive. Dragons now symbolize satanic power, tyranny, persecution.
Fire is no longer natural, it is moralized. Early Medieval
period seventh to eleventh century, fire breathing becomes standard in
(26:21):
Northern Europe, so Germanic Norse bo Wolf's dragon especially breathes fire,
burns villages, melts, shields, and swords. It's one of the
earliest fully developed fire breathing dragon accounts. By the time
of the High Medieval period, that's twelfth to fifteenth centuries,
fire breathing dragons become dominant in Europe chivalric, romance, hagiographies, beastiaries, art,
(26:47):
and iconography. At this point, a dragon that does not
breathe fire is unusual in Western Europe, and then geographic
distribution is fire breathing cross cultural Europe and Near East. Yes,
we find it in that context. As we already mentioned,
one of the interesting things I had to dive into
(27:08):
is I wasn't finding much explicitly on Russian dragons, and
so I dove specifically into what is the Russian tradition
of dragons and what do they look like? And this
is what I found. Unlike many early dragon traditions, Russian
dragons very clearly breathed fires, destructive weaponis associated with devastation
of land and people. This aligns Russian dragons more closely
(27:31):
with BeO Wolf's apocalyptic industry and Christian demonology. The zimmy
Gorinich is the archetypal Russian dragon, sometimes has three heads
six nine to twelve, breathes fire. It flies, dwells in mountains,
near rivers, at borders between realms, terrorizes villages, kingdoms and
(27:53):
trade routes. The most famous legend within the Russian context
is this Dobrynya Nikotic and his fighting the Zimmi. This
is the single most famous dragon slang story in Russia,
and just the narrative outline is the dragon terrorizes the land,
(28:15):
It kidnaps women, sometimes a princess, It breathes fire, dwells
near a river or a cave. And then Dobrynya confronts
the dragon is initially overwhelmed pray, so we see the
human evoking the transcendent power of God, invokes higher help
and then ultimately slays the dragon. So the dragon represents chaos,
foreign domination, pagan or demonic power, and the hero restores order, justice,
(28:39):
and social stability, mirroring Saint George, Saint Theodore, and Beowulf.
In East Asia, no example of a fire breathing dragon
couldn't find any, so it's totally foreign to classical Chinese
dragon low in India, it's limited. Fire imagery exists, but
it's not central to the nagas meso America. No, the
(29:03):
you know quets a quattal and cuckoo Klon, they are
not fire breathing deities. They associated with wind sky civilization
has feathers, signifies the union of opposites. Some people have
speculated that the serpent archetype last in the meso American context,
is essentially the unification of the most aerial entity, which
(29:26):
is some type of like predatory bird, and then the
lowest of entities, which is a serpent, and then they
smash those two together to create quotes a quatdal and
their meso American dragon god, and they believe is it
auspicious for whom he is auspicious for the state? Quets
(29:46):
a Quattal is auspicious for the state, for cosmic order,
for ritual stability, but he's actually dangerous for individual human
life victims of sacrifice. Of course, we just talked about
all the human sacrifice these civilizations participated in the Last
Stream and those outside ritual order we're in Africa and
so on. Now I want to get to something that
(30:08):
I have not seen presented, and I'm kind of excited
to present this to you guys. But first I just
want to remind you, guys, we got fourteen more superchats
on YouTube before I will be choosing a winner to
send out this book to today. It'll be a free
copy of Return to Babylon, and I hope to get
it to you before Christmas because I'm going to get
(30:30):
it out in the mail tomorrow. So if we reach
thirty superchat goals, I'm going to find a winner who
super chatted today and send them the book. But here's
what I want to talk to you guys about. How
did dragons become discredited? We just talked about all the
cross cultural references. We talked about how they are depicted
(30:53):
in cultures that had no contact with each other. We
talked about all the saints of the church that have
legends associated with dragons. And I just showed you, guys
the historical examples of people writing these were educated people
writing about dragons as literal entities, not parts of stories
or mythologized figurative figures, no literal And so my question
(31:18):
then was where did all this stuff go wrong? How
did dragons become such a sort of ridiculous topic to
actually speak about. And the medieval world view dragons belonged
to what was lost. Before explaining the shift, we must
understand what dragons fit into. So the pre modern worldview nature,
(31:39):
and this one I always talk about the pre modern
versus the modern, right, this is why I think maybe
the pre modern could actually see spiritual entities and realities
that us modern people no longer see due to our
rationalist presuppositions. But in the pre modern world, nature was hierarchical,
was not uniform. Reality included god, angels and demons, humans,
(32:00):
animals and monsters, border beings, you know, these liminal creatures.
Knowledge was testimonial, it was traditional. It was acumulative, and
you could say I could also add here all that
I didn't because it's obviously part of the modern period too,
is you could say that knowledge was logical right up
before the classical period. You know, knowledge was demonstrated through syllogisms,
(32:25):
through the laws of logic. But all these attributes were
also intact, so rarity did not imply falsehood. The world
was not fully mapped, there was an unknowingness, there was
a mystery about your daily life, and categories were porous
and not rigid like they are today. And this framework,
dragons were possible, They were rare, they were local, they
(32:49):
were dangerous, and they were marginal to ordinary experience. Nothing
about this worldview require dragons to be common or provable
by experiment. And this is where we start to get
the first breaking of the entire history of dragon Low.
It's the seventeenth century, the rise of mechanical philosophy. So
you know your guys's people, you guys know Descartes, Galileo, Galilee, Gacindi,
(33:15):
Hobbes core claims is that nature is now viewed as
a machine, and this is essential for the transition from
the pre modern to the modern worldview. The pre modern
viewed it as a spiritual reality, as mystical, as unique, interesting,
filled with you know, non rational or superrational events, miracles,
monstrous beings. But once we start getting into the age
(33:38):
of science, nature is viewed as a machine, a mechanical
operation that can be measured and can be sort of
operated upon. Matter becomes passive, quantifiable, governed by laws. Only
measurable properties become truly real. The consequences for dragons, they're
too rare, too rare for experimentation, too exceptional for law,
(34:00):
anomalist for mechanical causation, therefore not denied, explicitly, quietly excluded
as methodologically irrelevant. Dragons begin to fall outside what counts
as legitimate knowledge, and then we get the mythological skepticism
of the new epistemology. I've talked to you guys about
the Baconian Revolution. This is it's really hard to underestimate.
(34:23):
I was telling Father Peter this when I was over
on the orthodox ethos is that this was a this
was a revolution and knowledge. But Francis Bacon put forth
as the father of empiricism or the father of modern science,
was he believed what could be measured in average was real,
and in his epistemological overturning of the scholastic Aristotilian world,
(34:45):
he argued that knowledge is utilitarian. Knowledge is empirical, it's repeatable,
and it's utilitarian, meaning it has utility. If you know something,
you do something, you make something, and the fact that
you can make something demonstrates your knowledge. Right, it's the
it's the empirical repeatability concept. Then, put upon knowledge itself,
(35:09):
can you repeatably present that you know how to do something?
Therefore you make and make something do? This is what
totally trans It totally transformed European understandings of what knowledge
was and what it did. And so he was interested
in collected collections of systematical knowledge. Right, we need to
(35:29):
then measure everything we need to He has a famous
quote talking about how we need to rape the secrets
out of nature, and so ancient testimony becomes suspect. Wonders
are then understood as just you know, illusions of some
sort or superstitions, you know, just folk superstitions of people.
(35:49):
They're not as erudite, they're not as sophisticated and educated
as the echelon of European society. And what are the
consequences plenty, and medieval encyclopedia lose all authority. During this period,
eyewitness tradition collapses. Direct contemporary reproducible knowledge is the only
thing that is of important, and therefore dragons are not refuted.
(36:13):
They are downgraded to just rumor mythological rumor. And so
the new scientific institutions, the Royal Society sixteen sixteen nulls
and verbe take no one's word for it becomes the
motto of modern science. It has an emphasis on experiments, instruments,
controlled observation. The effect dragons cannot be summoned, they cannot
(36:37):
be dissected, and they cannot be repeatedly observed. Therefore they
fail institutional criteria for knowledge. Dragons are not false, they
are inadmissible. In the eighteenth century, the philosophical collapse of monsters,
Enlightenment rational Voltaire Hume cor assumptions. Reason alone judges reality.
(36:57):
Nature is uniform, predictable, and law govern exceptions. Employ imply air,
not mystery. David Hume, Testimony must always yield to probability.
Miracles and monsters violate uniform experience. Therefore reports of dragons
are irrational. To believe the birth of modern taxonomy. Uh
(37:18):
Carl Naeus in the eighteenth century introduces fixed species binomial classification.
Reality must be ordered and exhaustively classifiable. Problem for dragons
is there's no specimen, no stable species, traits, no clear
reproductive population. Dragons cannot be placed, therefore cannot exist within
(37:38):
modern taxonomy. The elimination of the entire monster category, which
is where we still get the locknest monster, Bigfoot, right,
all these all these kind of strange you know, like
cryptids that are so popular among conspiracy theorists, that entire
category gets eliminated, and so Medieval thought allowed monsters as
(38:00):
boundary beings, rare exceptions, signed a divine judgment, and natural irregularity.
Enlightenment thought rejected anything between natural and supernatural, normal and abnormal.
Monsters become heirs, malformations, and myths. And then the theological
shifts that accelerated this disbelief is obviously Protestant rationalism, rejection
(38:21):
of hagiography, rejections of the lives of the saints, and
really a rejection of miracle tradition. That's what I would argue.
I mean, you asked the average Protestant, they probably say
they still well, some of them would say they still
believe in miracles, but they're suspicious of medieval sources and
Catholic cosmology and Orthodox cosmology just they're just not as
familiar with it. And so dragon slaying saints are recast
(38:43):
as total allegory or dismissed as superstition. Dragons lose religious
credibility first and Protestant regions, and then deism in the
closed universe deus assumptions God creates the world and withdrawals
no ongoing divine action, no miracles, no monsters. The universe
becomes closed, self sufficient and predictable, therefore making dragons metaphysically impossible.
(39:08):
And then the final blow I argue is the mapping
of the world seventeenth to eighteenth century global exploration, cartography,
colonial administration, natural surveys, unknowned land shrink rapidly. Since dragons
were always somewhere remote, when everywhere becomes mapp there is
nowhere left for them to hide. So again, this document
(39:30):
is like stuff that we talk about over at the
Logos Academy. So if you want access to stuff like
these study guides, go sign up. It's all in a
huge playlist over there for anybody who wants access to
these so they can look over. Now I want to
move into dinosaurs, right, because why is it that if
you believe in dragons, you're mocked and humiliated as some
(39:52):
backward neanderthal, But we're told that we're supposed to believe
in dinosaurs. So this is my attempt to actually provide
a sort of internal critique of dinosaurs themselves. And so
this is my first statement. Here are dragons and dinosaurs
(40:12):
in the same category, because we just talked about all
this stuff and how the development of the modern world
basically eliminates dragons, right, Well, why is it that we
believe in dinosaurs so much? I argue the category dinosaurs
as currently understood non avian reptiles living sixty five to
two hundred and thirty million years ago is an interpretive
(40:33):
construct built on fragmentary fossil evidence, heavy inference, artistic reconstruction,
and assumptions about deep time that are not as empirically
secure as often claimed. Many fossils attributed to dinosaurs may
be misclassified, composite, exaggerated, or reinterpretable within alternative frameworks. So
(41:01):
argument I, fossils are fragmentary and reconstructions are speculative. So
this is more of a philosophical critique of dinosaurs. The
core claim most dinosaur species are named from partial bones, teeth, vertebrae,
or various fragments that they've discovered. Full skeletal mounts and
museums are heavily reconstructed, contain casts, not originals, often rely
(41:26):
on artistic interpolation. Therefore, if a species is defined from
a few bones and reconstructed by analogy to modern animals,
then the final dinosaur image reflects theory laden reconstruction, not
direct observation, and therefore are not actually scientifically verifiable. Supporting
(41:50):
points criticize supporting points. Critics emphasize different paleontologists have produced
radically different reconstructions of the exact same fossils. Some new
species later turn out to be juvenile form, sexual dimorphisms,
pathological specimens. Conclusion, what we call dinosaurs may be a
(42:13):
taxonomic inflation of fragmentary data interpreted through evolutionary assumptions. That's
just a fancy way to say dinosaurs and the entire
legend and story surrounding dinosaurs is a total interpretation based
on people today looking at animals that exist and saying, well,
(42:36):
based on this, you know femur bone, which could be
from anything. That's one of the things I'm going to
get into is the fact that many of these bones
aren't even two dinosaurs because it violates the definition of
being twenty five to two, one hundred and thirty or
three hundred million years old. And so argument too. And
this is you know, I don't know if you guys
(42:56):
have seen this. I just recently watched this guy and
there's like a video that was going on x or something,
maybe it was on Instagram, and some like paleontologists talks about, oh,
we just discovered in dinosaur and he admits, like, we
just found these few fossils, right, and then he has
this whole video presentation on what types of food at
(43:18):
a how big you know, the range of how big
and small they were, the behavior patterns between male and
the females, how they It's like, how did you get
any of that stuff from a few broken pieces of bone?
That makes zero, zero sense. But the circular reasoning in
(43:38):
dating fossils, this is again, this is a philosophical critique.
So I'm not dealing with actual fossils that have been discovered.
I'm doing more of a philosophical critique, But the core
claim is fossils are dated by rock layers, right sediment layers.
Rock layers are dated by the fossils. Therefore, index fossils
are used to create data drata. The same strata then
(44:02):
is used to date fossils. This creates a closed interpretive loop.
You see, the fossils are used to tell you how
old the ground layers are, but then the amount of
ground layers they use to tell you how old the
fossil is. So it creates this loop, this feedback loop
on presuppositions. How the hell do you know how old
(44:23):
the fossil is when you had to construct the dating
of the fossil to describe the layers of sediment, and
then through the layers of sediment, then you can classify
how old the fossil is. That doesn't make sense. Critics
argue radiometric dating depends on assumptions about initial conditions, assumes
constant decay rates cannot be directly verified. For deep time
(44:46):
fossils are rarely dated directly. Dates are often assigned to
stratigraphic context, not measurement conclusion. Dinosaur fossils are dated within
a self referen cential system, not by independent confirmation. Interesting
argument number three questioning dinosaur bird transition. The core claim
(45:10):
is that birds are living dinosaurs, and this rest on
morphological similarity and phylogenetic interpretation. Critics argue that this is
interpretive and not demonstrative. Key points many feathered dinosaurs may
be birds misclassified as dinosaurs, preservation artifacts, collagen fibers mistaken
(45:31):
as feathers, soft tissue claims that this is a big one.
This is a big one. There are so many examples
of dinosaur fossils and bones being discovered and they still
have blood, vessels and proteins in them, which is impossible
based on the timeline that we're told that dinosaurs existed.
(45:53):
So that challenges deep with some deep time assumptions, no
direct observation and reptile to bird transformation, transitional reproductive systems,
and assumes Darwinian evolution. It assumes Darwinian macroevolution. It then,
by that nature, it forces you into the modernist paradigm,
despite the empirical data not actually substantiating it. It's almost
(46:18):
like a modern myth. Now I'm not even here to
say dinosaurs didn't exist. I'm just bringing up that this
is a problem within their own worldview that this is
just my internal critique at a philosophical level, And this
is where I follow up with the soft tissue in
biomolecules and fossils. This is one of the most rhetorically
(46:39):
powerful arguments used by skeptics. The core claim is soft
tissues collagen, blood vessel structures have been reported and dinosaur
fossils protein should not survive tens of millions of years
under unknown chemical laws. Therefore, if organic molecules decay rapidly
and dinosaur and fossils contain such molecules, then either decay
(47:01):
rates are wrong or the fossils are much much younger
than they claim they are. Iron preservation hypothesis, experimental replica
replication is limited and the preservation window is far shorter
than claimed fossil ages conclusion. Soft tissue evidence is in
tension with deep time dinosaur chronology. So that's where I'm
(47:24):
not even saying dinosaurs don't exist or dragons didn't exist.
I'm saying that the evidence for these are not very compelling.
The evidence for dinosaurs are not very compelling, and in
a sense, if we're only using empiricism, as I showed you,
the intellectual trajectory that essentially poop poos and shoe aways dragons.
(47:46):
You very much could use the same epistemological framework of
modern day empiricism and materialism to kind of shoesh you
away some of the dinosaur stuff, or at least demonstrate
it's not as logically plausible if they want you to
believe it is. Argument five. Dinosaur fossils may represent known
animals or misidentified megafauna. And this has been claimed that
(48:10):
they use like whalebones and bones that they find near
the ocean from sea creatures, and then they re appropriate
these and say, well, this is actually the this is
actually the you know, the thigh bone of a t
rex or a philocus raptor dinosaur. Maybe an umbrella category
masking large reptiles could be dragons, extinct mammals, marine reptiles,
(48:33):
or giant birds. Key points. Some fossils originally classified as
dinosaurs were later reassigned, and historical zoology shows frequent misclassification.
Critics argue size inflation, reconstruction bias, and cultural expectation of monsters.
Dinosaurs may be a conceptual category here, not a biological one.
(48:54):
And number six historical absence of dinosaur discovery until the
nineteenth century, which is really interesting, right we have all
these stories about dragons across the entire globe from civilizations
that never met, and yet the first time we even
hear about dinosaurs is like eighteen forty one, So no
(49:15):
unambiguous din dinosaur fossils were identified until the early eighteen hundreds,
despite mining quarrying ancient civilizations. Critics argue, if dinosaurs were
real and abundant, why is there no ancient descriptions, why
no classical taxonomy. Therefore, fossils were often ignored, misidentified, or
(49:36):
mythologized about. But critics maintained the silence is still suspicious, right,
why is it only in the modern period that we
hear about dinosaurs? And my last argument, and this is
more of a cultural argument. That's why I say it's
probably the weakest of my arguments pistemologically, but it's something
that people talk about and it should be addressed. Is
(49:58):
the cultural and institute tutional momentum of dinosaur science. Again,
you could argue that Darwinian evolution is tied to it.
The sort of redating the earth to do away with
traditional religious cosmologies is part and partial of it. But
the core claim is that dinosaur theory is institutionally entrenched,
(50:19):
financially supported, and resistant to any sort of paradigm change. Therefore,
once a framework becomes dominant, descent is filtered out right.
You are actually considered as a weirdo if you say
dinosaurs don't exist. Think about that. We live in a
time now. If you don't believe in dinosaurs, you're the weirdo.
(50:42):
Alternative interpretations struggle for funding, and skeptics argue the narrative
persists partially by a sort of cultural inertia cultural momentum
in regards to this whole dinosaur fiasco. Now, as I said,
this is the weakest argument epistemologically, but still part of
a you know me Steel Manning, you know, the dinosaur case.
(51:04):
So that's a little bit of my overview on how
did dragons disappear? And how are dragons and dinosaurs not
in the same conceptual category given the empirical inverifiability of
both
Those the hell dragons in the Bible. Here, so the
original language terms, we're gonna move through this document quickly.
We wrung skip the whole section on the fire symbolism.
(00:23):
Could have already showed you guys that. But the primary
Hebrew words involved are tannin or tannem, and it can
mean serpent, dragon, sea monster, great reptilian creature used for
chaotic creatures, destructive beings, sometimes desert monsters. Appears approximately fourteen
to fifteen times in the Hebrew Bible. Here's the few
(00:43):
examples I could find Genesis one, Exodus seven, Uteronomy thirty two,
Psalm seventy four, Isaiah twenty seven, and Jeremiah fifty one.
In regards to the word for Leviathan, who again, as
I said, was we'll look here that dragons actually began
as sort of sea monsters. A specific named chaos dragon,
(01:05):
multi headed sea dwelling explicitly hostile appears six times Job three,
Job forty one, Psalm seventy four, Psalm one, O four
In Isaiah twenty seven, Leviathan is clearly a dragon type being,
not a normal animal. And then in the Greek context
the Greek New Testament, as I said, the word for
(01:25):
dragon comes from dracon, the Greek word. This is the
clearest and least ambiguous term because it literally means dragon
and is used only in the Apocalyptic tax So nine
times it appears in the Book of Revelation, Revelation twelve four, seven, nine, thirteen,
(01:45):
sixteen seventeen, and then Revelation thirteen two and four, Revelation
twenty verse two, and Revelation twelve nineteen explicitly defines it
that ancient serpent who is called the devil and Satan
the deceiver of the whole world. Here, dragon is not poetic,
(02:06):
it is a personal ontological being. So in the Book
of Revelation it is referring to a specific dragon in
association with Satan. Now English Bible countsl New New King
James version, we see it appears thirty four times in
the Old Testament, a total of forty three references. So
(02:28):
major dragon slaying saints, as I said, par excellence, there's
no competition. The number one dragon slaying saint and the
Orthodox Church is Saint George the Great Martyr, reposed in
three O three. Remember I talked about how it was
three o three to three oh six that uh Saint
(02:51):
Nicholas of Mira was incarcerated by Diocletian and held in
prison for six to ten years. Again, we don't exactly
know how long, at least six years, though we believe
in a cell that was very small and dark. Right,
you know, the ancient Roman world wasn't great to its prisoners.
But Saint George was also persecuted under died in Cletian.
(03:13):
That's where that's where his martyrdom actually occurs, is under Diecletian.
But for Saint George is story of slaying the dragon.
We have it in Greek, Syriac and Arabic Vita. We
have it in the Byzantine Sanasaria. We have it later
medieval elaborations in both in the Byzantine East and the
Latin West. So a dragon terrorizes the city, often near water,
(03:37):
demands human victims. Saint George wounds or subdues it, it
is killed, and the city converts. It's universally commemorated. As
I'll show you. There are some legends of saints with
dragons that are much more regional or more local narratives.
They're not universally recognized by the Church, like Saint George's
and the dragon obviously is present, and all I can
(03:59):
not the Church never defines what exactly the dragon was.
Was it a real dragon, was it demonic? Was it
a hybrid? Was it symbolic? Is it satan? But what
is affirmed is the real danger and real deliverance. And
so I just feel like, because today's stream is about
(04:19):
dragon slaying, I feel obligated, obligated that we must watch
at least this eight minute video on Saint George, because
when else are we gonna watch it? I mean, if
we're gonna be talking about dragons, we better actually have than,
you know, the most notorious dragon slayer of all time.
(04:40):
So let me pull this up real quick. Now, let's
play this video of Saint George, because if you guys
haven't heard of the story of Saint George, it is
definitely worth being familiar with. I mean, he's one of
my favorite saints. He's obviously one of the if not
the most notorious warriors saying of the church, but he's
(05:01):
obviously the most notorious dragon slayer probably in history, honestly,
I mean cross culturally, is there a single person that
exemplifies the slag or at least has a myth associated
whether you think it's a myth or not a narrative
associated with slaying dragons that is more famous than Saint George.
I can't think of one. So we're gonna watch this
(05:23):
little This isn't an Orthodox channel. I couldn't find a
short Orthodox video. Trisaggyon Films has a good one on
Saint George, but it's like twenty some almost thirty minutes long.
I don't want to put you guys through that. I
got so much other stuff I want to get into.
So we're just gonna watch this quick video. Just an
honoring of Saint George, the Great dragon Slayer from the world.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
He is the patron of hundreds of cities around the
world and surely one of the most beloved saints among
the Catholic and Orthodox churches. He's onned in portrayed riding
a white horse and dressed as a Roman soldier piercing
a dragon. With this Saint George is an iconic character
in the struggle between good and evil, representing courage, faith
and warding off adversity. Today's video shows us more about
the amazing story of this saint, loved by millions of
(06:10):
people worldwide. Born in Cappadocia, Turkey. His story is steeped
in legend and mystery. Born to Christian parents of Greek nobility,
George was raised in a profoundly pious household, molding his
faith and character from an early age. When he was fourteen,
George suffered the loss of his father, who was a
Roman legionary officer, something that impacted deeply on his life.
He moved with his mother to Palestine, where his bonds
(06:32):
with the Christian faith grew stronger. This stage in his
life was marred by loneliness and the quest for a
greater purpose, guided by his religious heritage. When he was seventeen,
and following in his father's footsteps, George joined the Roman Army.
His military career took off in the imperial city of
Nicomedia in eastern Turkey. There he showed courage and honor,
qualities that quickly made him stand out among his peers.
(06:53):
George's ability and loyalty did not go without notice, leading
to his promotion to tribune and the highly prestigious rank
of Imperial Guard under Emperor Diocletian. This appointment was not
only a testament to its military prowess, but also showed
the trust the powerful Roman emperor had in him. But
Diocletian still revered the old Roman gods, and after having
made an inquiry to the Oracle, he began a widespread
(07:16):
persecution campaign against the Christians. He destroyed churches and imprisoned priests.
George's allegiance was challenged. Halfway through the anti Christian campaign, George,
steadfast in his faith, defined the emperor, rejecting the anti
Christian laws and openly declaring himself a Christian. This brave
act of faith led to his imprisonment, and this decisive
moment would define the rest of his life. When he
(07:38):
bravely rebelled against a Diocletian, Saint George was locked up
and subjected to him.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
This is one of the terrifying tortures that the Romans use.
They put Saint George on a wheel like this, and
then they had all these knives, metal spikes that would
tear flesh, and they would turn the wheel so that
you would slowly like have they would have like knives,
and you would be tied to it and they would
(08:03):
slowly turn it where it would cut you. And as
it's going to talk about, there's the church describes these
miracles that would occur that every time they tortured Saint George,
he claimed Christ would visit him at night, and miraculously,
many of his wounds would actually be healed.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
To unthinkable torment, according to accounts, he was forcibly fed poisons,
his body was crushed between two wheels, studded with metal spikes,
and other cruel and inconceivable acts of torture, But miraculously,
none of these atrocities took George's life, as he was
protected by the Creator himself. Every night, Jesus is said
to have come to heal his wounds, bolstering his faith
and resilience. Although facing him and in death, George stood
(08:45):
his ground in his belief, rejecting all of Diocletian's attempts
to make him abandon his faith, including offerings of pardon
and gifts such as land, money, and slaves. Having seen
George's unwavering faith, Diocletian decided to have him executed on
April twenty third, three oh three, which was beheaded on
the walls of Nicomedia. His death not only signaled the
end of the devout and valiant life, but also the
(09:06):
beginning of a legacy that would last for centuries. He
became a Christian symbol of resistance, inspiring countless others with
his fortitude and selflessness. This fund extreme suffering. The well
known legend of how Saint George faced a dragon only
emerged in the twelfth century, many years after his death.
In desperate times, a distant city endured the shadows of
a terrible dragon, the flame.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
And that's why I said, this isn't an Orthodox channel,
And that's not exactly true. There are stories about well
before the twelfth century. So this is again, this is
a non believer. He's probably not familiar with the Orthodox tradition.
But our tradition actually describes earlier the legend of Saint
George slaying the dragon. It doesn't just appear in the
(09:48):
twelfth century.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Names of its fury burned the sky, and its breath
was a billowing death cloud. Human sacrifices were made daily
to appease the beast's rage, sadness, and hopelessness in gul
To the city, as one young girl after another was
delivered to a grim fate, the king himself had to
sacrifice his daughter. When news arrived that a noble Roman
knight had arrived in the city. This was Saint George,
(10:11):
whose gallantry was as wide as the seeds. Riding on
his white horse, he pronounced that the horses of evil
would no longer take the lives of innocent maidens in
that place. On meeting the dragon, an epic battle ensued.
Saint George's spear gleamed in the sunlight, and his armor
sparkled like a shooting star as the holy warrior made
his way through the darkness and gloom surrounding the monster.
(10:33):
The beast stuttered a scream that shattered the heavens as
Saint George smote the dragon, causing it to collapse to
the ground and squirm in agony. Once he had rescued
the princess, Saint George bound the defeated dragon and took
it back to the city, no longer as a terrifying monster.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
See that it leaves out a bunch of details, but
it'd be too time consuming to watch a whole video
on it. And this is like a nice little eight
minute video. I got sped up. But he actually takes
the garter of the princess. So the way that the
legend goes is that he found her tied up on
a tree in the wilderness outside the city, and upon
riding his horse and coming to the city, he sees
this princess tied up to a tree. He asks her
(11:10):
what's going on, and she tells him that essentially, the
city has offered her as a sacrifice to the dragon
that's terrifying the village, and that's when he pronounces that,
you know, basically, this is going to stop. The forces
of good are going to stop evil. And when he
subdues the dragon, he actually takes her garter, which again
(11:31):
symbol of virginity, wraps it around the head of the
demon of Satan of the dragon, and then pulls it
or guides it all the way back to the city
to show the people that he has subdued the beast.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
But as a trophy of his bravery before the astonished
and grateful citizens, he offered them not only physical but
also spiritual salvation, preaching the Christian thing. According to legend,
many were converted that day, moved by Saint George's heroic
act and words. Having defeated the dragon, he refused any compensation,
revealing his humility and generosity. He donated everything he was
(12:06):
given to the poor underlining his commitment to the Christian
values of charity and material detachment. The story of Saint
George and the Dragon became a symbol of courage, faith,
and the triumph of good over evil, reverberating through the centuries,
drawing inspiration from generations in their pursuit of heroes and miracles.
Saint George's England's patron saint, and his cross is featured
on the nation's flag. During the famous fourteen twenty five
(12:28):
Battle of Agincourt, where the English army faced the mighty
French cavalry, both sides claimed to have seen a vision
of Saint George during the battle. Obviously, if he did appear,
it was to help the English, who, despite being outnumbered,
succeeded in humiliating the French. Between three o six and
three thirty seven eighty a church dedicated to Saint George
was built in the dak It has been destroyed and
(12:49):
rebuilt several times over the centuries. Churches dedicated to saints
or martyrs were traditionally raised over their tombs, although many
churches throughout the world claimed to hold Saint George's relics
of St. George and Lida is regarded as his final
resting place.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
Okay, we're dealt with that video. I do want to
share this one. We're not gonna watch it, but I've
gone through it, and this is basically it's just so
a collection of some of the examples of saints that
dealt with dragons. It's kind of boring because I would
just sit here and read it to you guys, but
I do want to share it in case any of
you guys want to watch it later. It's something I
(13:25):
found and prep for the stream. So there's that video. Okay,
let's go back to the document because I want to
I want to walk through you guys some of this stuff. So, okay,
we talked about Saint George. Other saints. Saint Theodore Tiro
the Recruit early fourth century. His examples are in Greek hagiographies,
(13:47):
military cult traditions. A dragon and habits as spring or well,
kills people on livestock. Theodore slays it, often after fasting
and prayer, and that's an Asia Minor in Cappadocia. Another
Saint Theodore often actually presented together again paired with Theodore
Tiro dragon terrorizes the countryside. Saint kills it publicly he becomes,
(14:11):
he's a military saint and his dragon is beneath his feet.
In the iconography of Saint Theodore, the Stratlites, and then
Eastern saints with more localized dragon traditions, you have Saint
Marina of Antioch. She is not a dragon slayer but
a dragon conqueror. The narratives that she is swallowed by
(14:31):
a dragon often identified as Satan burst forth unharmed by
the sign of the Cross, and then of course she's
a saint shows dragon imagery used for spiritual combat, not
not a literal zoology per se. So Saint Romanus of
Roun seventh century, venerated in the East via shared Preschism tradition,
(14:54):
dwells near uh saying or the sign floods and terrorizes
the region. Saint subdues the dragon, townspeople kill it. And
interesting thing I found is that this was believed to
be the origin of gargoyles in Western Europe. It actually
has to do with Saint Romanis. I wasn't aware of that.
He's more prominent in Western traditions but pre Schism and
(15:18):
known in Byzantine sources. And then these are more even
more localized urban and civic dragon traditions, the Saint Sylvester
of Rome and dragon dwells beneath Rome, its breath kills citizens,
and Sylvester descends and binds it, meaning dragon linked to
imperial pagan power. Defeat symbolizes Christianization of the city. Saint
(15:42):
Donatus dragon poisons a spring, Saint kills it, and so forth.
And then we have some desert ascetics that encounters some
great beast like Saint Anthony the Great and Athanasius Life
of Saint Anthony a terrifying beast, and serpentine forms demonic
manifestations with physical effects, and sets the paradigm that demons
(16:03):
can appear as monstrous creatures, including dragon like forms. Saint
Pocomias desert tradition includes serpent monsters, dangerous creatures driven away
by prayer, not always called dragons, but functionally similar. And
then Saint Arcinius the Great encounters with monstrous beings in
isolation emphasis on spiritual authority over hostile entities. So then
(16:27):
I thought, I wanted to know what are the actual
historical records of dragons, like do we have what are
the works that people actually wrote describing what they believe
to be real traditions of dragons. And here's what I found.
So what counts as a real and historical sources. It's
when historians say an ancient or medieval author describes real dragons,
(16:50):
we mean that it's not intended as a myth or poetry.
It's a literal at least the author perceives it as literal.
Natural history, chronicle, geography, travel account biography, hagiography, and so
on and so forth. So this is crucial because again
this is my argument between the pre modern and the modern.
(17:11):
Pre modern authors did not distinguish between mythical versus real
as we do today because they weren't tainted by rationalism.
So if something was reported by witnesses or tradition, it
was often treated as part of the natural world. So
here's what I found. Going back to the earliest references
that I could find of dragons, and we find Herodotus,
(17:33):
So this is fifth century BC in his histories he
describes winged serpents and Arabia. So this is where the
argument for literal dragons. And I was looking up YouTube videos.
I didn't find one YouTube video that referenced any of
this stuff. And I found all these videos trying to
(17:54):
talk about the literality of dragons, and I'm thinking, well,
how come none of the videos actually go and try
to find historical sources that reference literal dragons. They just
talk about cross cultural references, symbolic interprets this type of thing.
It's like what so I found Herodotus. He mentions their bones,
(18:16):
their migration, routes local populations who kill them, and then
treats them as real fauna, though dangerous and rare. So
Heroditis is cautious, but does not frame this as a myth.
If you read it, it sounds very literal. Another one
I was surprised with was Aristotle. Now he doesn't specifically
reference dragons, but in his History of Animals and Parts
(18:40):
of Animals, he mentions very large serpents and operates with
his this is the Riscitilian sort of biological continuum of surpents,
giant surfents than dragons, And I, you know, just throwing
this in here for fun. His silence on wings does
not negate dragon belief. It reflects empirical caution. Now, this
(19:01):
is probably the most important of the historical sources I found,
and that's plenty of the Elder in his naturalis Historia.
This is he describes the largest of serpents living in India, Ethiopia,
and North Africa. He describes them as fighting elephants by
coiling around them and suffocating them being hunted by humans,
(19:22):
So could be massive, very large pythons or snakes, but
plenty explicitly classifies dragons as animals, not spirits or gods.
And again that's first century AD. Okay now alien Uh
second to third century AD on the Nature of Animals
(19:44):
describes dragons as intelligent, territorial capable of affection or vengeance,
and mentions dragon guardianship of treasures. And he presents this
as natural history, not a legend, not a myth, not
a story. And then near Eastern and Indian Asian sources,
the Indian epics, the Mahabartas, the Puranas, the ire Vedic
(20:08):
text Nagas. Again the serpent semi divine, anthropomorphized deity is
capable of interbreeding, territorial control, warfare with humans not presented
as metaphors. Indian cosmology assumes a plural inhabited world, not
closed natural system, so that's another at least for the Indians.
(20:31):
They took that as a literal historical reference, not symbolic
Chinese historical examples the Shiji, the record of Grand historian
Han dynasty, natural histories, tongue and song records. So that's
what I was surprised, is you find multiple dynasties. Now,
we talked about East Age of use these as auspicious,
(20:51):
beneficent creatures that symbolize the authority of the emperor. But
it is interesting. Now maybe it's just part of tradition
and culture, and it's with now the new dynasty is
in the ruling the ruling power, and so they then
present this as historical record. I'm not sure, but dragons
are described as real animals, rare but observable. You can
(21:15):
actually see them, and they're associated with rainstorms, rivers occasionally
captured or killed. Chinese scholars debated dragon physiology, not dragon existence,
which is interesting. I found an example of Marco Polo
thirteenth century in his book in his work The Travels,
describes giant serpents in Southeast Asia, mentions their size, their
(21:38):
hunting methods, local fear and avoidance, explicitly states they are
real animals. And again, while he may exaggerate, he believed
his account and described it very literally. Medieval European sources.
Isidore of Seville seventh century, in his Etymologia, defines dragons
(21:58):
as the largest of serpents living in caves and deserts,
and this text was the standard medieval encyclopedia. Dragons were
thought as part of the natural world, very interesting. The
Anglo Saxon Chronicles obviously Beowulf and stuff like that reports
of flying dragons seen in the sky, dragon signings as
(22:19):
ominous events, treated as actual phenomenon and not allegory. The
beastiaries of the twelfth to thirteenth century often moralized but
based on earlier natural histories. Dragons described anatomically wings, poison
habitat used for education and not for fiction. Gerald of
(22:40):
Wales twelfth century mentions dragons and serpent monsters, treats them
as rare but real, not mythologized, not symbolic. Early modern
transitional sources Ulysses Aldrovandi sixteenth century and is serpentum at
drachkonum historia. Early zoologists catalogs dragons, dragons, skulls, preserved specimens,
(23:08):
attempts actual classification. Now this is sixteenth century guys. Once
we get into the seventh century seventeenth century, all this
stuff's going to begin to disappear, and he presents this
as not medieval fantasy but proto science. Conrad Gesner sixteenth
century includes dragons acknowledges uncertainty, does not dismiss their existence outright,
(23:30):
And so in regard to the historical record, yes, there
are numerous historical writings across Greece, Rome, India, China, medieval Europe,
and early modern science in which authors explicitly described dragons
as real, living beings that were seen, killed, feared, and studied.
Interesting stuff there. Now, the next section is getting into
(23:53):
the origins of fire breathing dragons. And this is what
I was surprised by, is that how can textual it
is so fire breathing dragons are not universal. The belief
emerges relatively late and has concentrated geographically and basically Christian nations.
And so you do find early references in some of
(24:14):
the Indo European heroic traditions, but it's mostly within the
Christian context. So chronological development, prehistoric, early ancient period, no
fire breathing dragons. They are associated giant serpents or dragons
are associated with water, chaos, floods, fertility, poison. Again, many
(24:35):
of the examples I discussed with the opening symbolism Mesopotamia, Egypt,
Early China, Vadic India, there is no fire breathing dragon.
Now by the Bronze Age transition period, fire becomes associated
with divine judgment, smithing and metallurgy, warfare, kingship. But dragons
(24:56):
still kill by poison. They crush their prey, they guard treasure,
they block rivers. They do not breathe fire. Once we
get into the classical antiquity, so eight hundred BC to
four hundred a d fire breathing emerges clearly for the
first time. This is a critical turning point. In the
Greek world, the Greek term dracone initially means large serpent.
(25:17):
By the time of the Hellenistic period, dragons began to
be associated with burning breath, heat, and lethal vapors. Examples
are the Chimera of Homer and later Greek sources. Is
not universal, but it is becoming established. In the Roman world.
Romans intensify this imagery. Plenty of the elder dragons primarily
(25:38):
killed by constriction, but it acknowledges burning heat and lethal exaltations.
Roman military iconography begins associating dragons with destructive force by
the time of late Antiquity. In early Christianity fourth to
seventh century AD, fire breathing becomes theologically stabilized. We see
(26:00):
the biblical apocalyptic influence revelation. The dragon is associated with fire, destruction, judgment, hell.
Fire becomes moral eschological, impunitive. Dragons now symbolize satanic power, tyranny, persecution.
Fire is no longer natural, it is moralized. Early Medieval
period seventh to eleventh century, fire breathing becomes standard in
(26:21):
Northern Europe, so Germanic Norse bo Wolf's dragon especially breathes fire,
burns villages, melts, shields, and swords. It's one of the
earliest fully developed fire breathing dragon accounts. By the time
of the High Medieval period, that's twelfth to fifteenth centuries,
fire breathing dragons become dominant in Europe chivalric, romance, hagiographies, beastiaries, art,
(26:47):
and iconography. At this point, a dragon that does not
breathe fire is unusual in Western Europe, and then geographic
distribution is fire breathing cross cultural Europe and Near East. Yes,
we find it in that context. As we already mentioned,
one of the interesting things I had to dive into
(27:08):
is I wasn't finding much explicitly on Russian dragons, and
so I dove specifically into what is the Russian tradition
of dragons and what do they look like? And this
is what I found. Unlike many early dragon traditions, Russian
dragons very clearly breathed fires, destructive weaponis associated with devastation
of land and people. This aligns Russian dragons more closely
(27:31):
with BeO Wolf's apocalyptic industry and Christian demonology. The zimmy
Gorinich is the archetypal Russian dragon, sometimes has three heads
six nine to twelve, breathes fire. It flies, dwells in mountains,
near rivers, at borders between realms, terrorizes villages, kingdoms and
(27:53):
trade routes. The most famous legend within the Russian context
is this Dobrynya Nikotic and his fighting the Zimmi. This
is the single most famous dragon slang story in Russia,
and just the narrative outline is the dragon terrorizes the land,
(28:15):
It kidnaps women, sometimes a princess, It breathes fire, dwells
near a river or a cave. And then Dobrynya confronts
the dragon is initially overwhelmed pray, so we see the
human evoking the transcendent power of God, invokes higher help
and then ultimately slays the dragon. So the dragon represents chaos,
foreign domination, pagan or demonic power, and the hero restores order, justice,
(28:39):
and social stability, mirroring Saint George, Saint Theodore, and Beowulf.
In East Asia, no example of a fire breathing dragon
couldn't find any, so it's totally foreign to classical Chinese
dragon low in India, it's limited. Fire imagery exists, but
it's not central to the nagas meso America. No, the
(29:03):
you know quets a quattal and cuckoo Klon, they are
not fire breathing deities. They associated with wind sky civilization
has feathers, signifies the union of opposites. Some people have
speculated that the serpent archetype last in the meso American context,
is essentially the unification of the most aerial entity, which
(29:26):
is some type of like predatory bird, and then the
lowest of entities, which is a serpent, and then they
smash those two together to create quotes a quatdal and
their meso American dragon god, and they believe is it
auspicious for whom he is auspicious for the state? Quets
(29:46):
a Quattal is auspicious for the state, for cosmic order,
for ritual stability, but he's actually dangerous for individual human
life victims of sacrifice. Of course, we just talked about
all the human sacrifice these civilizations participated in the Last
Stream and those outside ritual order we're in Africa and
so on. Now I want to get to something that
(30:08):
I have not seen presented, and I'm kind of excited
to present this to you guys. But first I just
want to remind you, guys, we got fourteen more superchats
on YouTube before I will be choosing a winner to
send out this book to today. It'll be a free
copy of Return to Babylon, and I hope to get
it to you before Christmas because I'm going to get
(30:30):
it out in the mail tomorrow. So if we reach
thirty superchat goals, I'm going to find a winner who
super chatted today and send them the book. But here's
what I want to talk to you guys about. How
did dragons become discredited? We just talked about all the
cross cultural references. We talked about how they are depicted
(30:53):
in cultures that had no contact with each other. We
talked about all the saints of the church that have
legends associated with dragons. And I just showed you, guys
the historical examples of people writing these were educated people
writing about dragons as literal entities, not parts of stories
or mythologized figurative figures, no literal And so my question
(31:18):
then was where did all this stuff go wrong? How
did dragons become such a sort of ridiculous topic to
actually speak about. And the medieval world view dragons belonged
to what was lost. Before explaining the shift, we must
understand what dragons fit into. So the pre modern worldview nature,
(31:39):
and this one I always talk about the pre modern
versus the modern, right, this is why I think maybe
the pre modern could actually see spiritual entities and realities
that us modern people no longer see due to our
rationalist presuppositions. But in the pre modern world, nature was hierarchical,
was not uniform. Reality included god, angels and demons, humans,
(32:00):
animals and monsters, border beings, you know, these liminal creatures.
Knowledge was testimonial, it was traditional. It was acumulative, and
you could say I could also add here all that
I didn't because it's obviously part of the modern period too,
is you could say that knowledge was logical right up
before the classical period. You know, knowledge was demonstrated through syllogisms,
(32:25):
through the laws of logic. But all these attributes were
also intact, so rarity did not imply falsehood. The world
was not fully mapped, there was an unknowingness, there was
a mystery about your daily life, and categories were porous
and not rigid like they are today. And this framework,
dragons were possible, They were rare, they were local, they
(32:49):
were dangerous, and they were marginal to ordinary experience. Nothing
about this worldview require dragons to be common or provable
by experiment. And this is where we start to get
the first breaking of the entire history of dragon Low.
It's the seventeenth century, the rise of mechanical philosophy. So
you know your guys's people, you guys know Descartes, Galileo, Galilee, Gacindi,
(33:15):
Hobbes core claims is that nature is now viewed as
a machine, and this is essential for the transition from
the pre modern to the modern worldview. The pre modern
viewed it as a spiritual reality, as mystical, as unique, interesting,
filled with you know, non rational or superrational events, miracles,
monstrous beings. But once we start getting into the age
(33:38):
of science, nature is viewed as a machine, a mechanical
operation that can be measured and can be sort of
operated upon. Matter becomes passive, quantifiable, governed by laws. Only
measurable properties become truly real. The consequences for dragons, they're
too rare, too rare for experimentation, too exceptional for law,
(34:00):
anomalist for mechanical causation, therefore not denied, explicitly, quietly excluded
as methodologically irrelevant. Dragons begin to fall outside what counts
as legitimate knowledge, and then we get the mythological skepticism
of the new epistemology. I've talked to you guys about
the Baconian Revolution. This is it's really hard to underestimate.
(34:23):
I was telling Father Peter this when I was over
on the orthodox ethos is that this was a this
was a revolution and knowledge. But Francis Bacon put forth
as the father of empiricism or the father of modern science,
was he believed what could be measured in average was real,
and in his epistemological overturning of the scholastic Aristotilian world,
(34:45):
he argued that knowledge is utilitarian. Knowledge is empirical, it's repeatable,
and it's utilitarian, meaning it has utility. If you know something,
you do something, you make something, and the fact that
you can make something demonstrates your knowledge. Right, it's the
it's the empirical repeatability concept. Then, put upon knowledge itself,
(35:09):
can you repeatably present that you know how to do something?
Therefore you make and make something do? This is what
totally trans It totally transformed European understandings of what knowledge
was and what it did. And so he was interested
in collected collections of systematical knowledge. Right, we need to
(35:29):
then measure everything we need to He has a famous
quote talking about how we need to rape the secrets
out of nature, and so ancient testimony becomes suspect. Wonders
are then understood as just you know, illusions of some
sort or superstitions, you know, just folk superstitions of people.
(35:49):
They're not as erudite, they're not as sophisticated and educated
as the echelon of European society. And what are the
consequences plenty, and medieval encyclopedia lose all authority. During this period,
eyewitness tradition collapses. Direct contemporary reproducible knowledge is the only
thing that is of important, and therefore dragons are not refuted.
(36:13):
They are downgraded to just rumor mythological rumor. And so
the new scientific institutions, the Royal Society sixteen sixteen nulls
and verbe take no one's word for it becomes the
motto of modern science. It has an emphasis on experiments, instruments,
controlled observation. The effect dragons cannot be summoned, they cannot
(36:37):
be dissected, and they cannot be repeatedly observed. Therefore they
fail institutional criteria for knowledge. Dragons are not false, they
are inadmissible. In the eighteenth century, the philosophical collapse of monsters,
Enlightenment rational Voltaire Hume cor assumptions. Reason alone judges reality.
(36:57):
Nature is uniform, predictable, and law govern exceptions. Employ imply air,
not mystery. David Hume, Testimony must always yield to probability.
Miracles and monsters violate uniform experience. Therefore reports of dragons
are irrational. To believe the birth of modern taxonomy. Uh
(37:18):
Carl Naeus in the eighteenth century introduces fixed species binomial classification.
Reality must be ordered and exhaustively classifiable. Problem for dragons
is there's no specimen, no stable species, traits, no clear
reproductive population. Dragons cannot be placed, therefore cannot exist within
(37:38):
modern taxonomy. The elimination of the entire monster category, which
is where we still get the locknest monster, Bigfoot, right,
all these all these kind of strange you know, like
cryptids that are so popular among conspiracy theorists, that entire
category gets eliminated, and so Medieval thought allowed monsters as
(38:00):
boundary beings, rare exceptions, signed a divine judgment, and natural irregularity.
Enlightenment thought rejected anything between natural and supernatural, normal and abnormal.
Monsters become heirs, malformations, and myths. And then the theological
shifts that accelerated this disbelief is obviously Protestant rationalism, rejection
(38:21):
of hagiography, rejections of the lives of the saints, and
really a rejection of miracle tradition. That's what I would argue.
I mean, you asked the average Protestant, they probably say
they still well, some of them would say they still
believe in miracles, but they're suspicious of medieval sources and
Catholic cosmology and Orthodox cosmology just they're just not as
familiar with it. And so dragon slaying saints are recast
(38:43):
as total allegory or dismissed as superstition. Dragons lose religious
credibility first and Protestant regions, and then deism in the
closed universe deus assumptions God creates the world and withdrawals
no ongoing divine action, no miracles, no monsters. The universe
becomes closed, self sufficient and predictable, therefore making dragons metaphysically impossible.
(39:08):
And then the final blow I argue is the mapping
of the world seventeenth to eighteenth century global exploration, cartography,
colonial administration, natural surveys, unknowned land shrink rapidly. Since dragons
were always somewhere remote, when everywhere becomes mapp there is
nowhere left for them to hide. So again, this document
(39:30):
is like stuff that we talk about over at the
Logos Academy. So if you want access to stuff like
these study guides, go sign up. It's all in a
huge playlist over there for anybody who wants access to
these so they can look over. Now I want to
move into dinosaurs, right, because why is it that if
you believe in dragons, you're mocked and humiliated as some
(39:52):
backward neanderthal, But we're told that we're supposed to believe
in dinosaurs. So this is my attempt to actually provide
a sort of internal critique of dinosaurs themselves. And so
this is my first statement. Here are dragons and dinosaurs
(40:12):
in the same category, because we just talked about all
this stuff and how the development of the modern world
basically eliminates dragons, right, Well, why is it that we
believe in dinosaurs so much? I argue the category dinosaurs
as currently understood non avian reptiles living sixty five to
two hundred and thirty million years ago is an interpretive
(40:33):
construct built on fragmentary fossil evidence, heavy inference, artistic reconstruction,
and assumptions about deep time that are not as empirically
secure as often claimed. Many fossils attributed to dinosaurs may
be misclassified, composite, exaggerated, or reinterpretable within alternative frameworks. So
(41:01):
argument I, fossils are fragmentary and reconstructions are speculative. So
this is more of a philosophical critique of dinosaurs. The
core claim most dinosaur species are named from partial bones, teeth, vertebrae,
or various fragments that they've discovered. Full skeletal mounts and
museums are heavily reconstructed, contain casts, not originals, often rely
(41:26):
on artistic interpolation. Therefore, if a species is defined from
a few bones and reconstructed by analogy to modern animals,
then the final dinosaur image reflects theory laden reconstruction, not
direct observation, and therefore are not actually scientifically verifiable. Supporting
(41:50):
points criticize supporting points. Critics emphasize different paleontologists have produced
radically different reconstructions of the exact same fossils. Some new
species later turn out to be juvenile form, sexual dimorphisms,
pathological specimens. Conclusion, what we call dinosaurs may be a
(42:13):
taxonomic inflation of fragmentary data interpreted through evolutionary assumptions. That's
just a fancy way to say dinosaurs and the entire
legend and story surrounding dinosaurs is a total interpretation based
on people today looking at animals that exist and saying, well,
(42:36):
based on this, you know femur bone, which could be
from anything. That's one of the things I'm going to
get into is the fact that many of these bones
aren't even two dinosaurs because it violates the definition of
being twenty five to two, one hundred and thirty or
three hundred million years old. And so argument too. And
this is you know, I don't know if you guys
(42:56):
have seen this. I just recently watched this guy and
there's like a video that was going on x or something,
maybe it was on Instagram, and some like paleontologists talks about, oh,
we just discovered in dinosaur and he admits, like, we
just found these few fossils, right, and then he has
this whole video presentation on what types of food at
(43:18):
a how big you know, the range of how big
and small they were, the behavior patterns between male and
the females, how they It's like, how did you get
any of that stuff from a few broken pieces of bone?
That makes zero, zero sense. But the circular reasoning in
(43:38):
dating fossils, this is again, this is a philosophical critique.
So I'm not dealing with actual fossils that have been discovered.
I'm doing more of a philosophical critique, But the core
claim is fossils are dated by rock layers, right sediment layers.
Rock layers are dated by the fossils. Therefore, index fossils
are used to create data drata. The same strata then
(44:02):
is used to date fossils. This creates a closed interpretive loop.
You see, the fossils are used to tell you how
old the ground layers are, but then the amount of
ground layers they use to tell you how old the
fossil is. So it creates this loop, this feedback loop
on presuppositions. How the hell do you know how old
(44:23):
the fossil is when you had to construct the dating
of the fossil to describe the layers of sediment, and
then through the layers of sediment, then you can classify
how old the fossil is. That doesn't make sense. Critics
argue radiometric dating depends on assumptions about initial conditions, assumes
constant decay rates cannot be directly verified. For deep time
(44:46):
fossils are rarely dated directly. Dates are often assigned to
stratigraphic context, not measurement conclusion. Dinosaur fossils are dated within
a self referen cential system, not by independent confirmation. Interesting
argument number three questioning dinosaur bird transition. The core claim
(45:10):
is that birds are living dinosaurs, and this rest on
morphological similarity and phylogenetic interpretation. Critics argue that this is
interpretive and not demonstrative. Key points many feathered dinosaurs may
be birds misclassified as dinosaurs, preservation artifacts, collagen fibers mistaken
(45:31):
as feathers, soft tissue claims that this is a big one.
This is a big one. There are so many examples
of dinosaur fossils and bones being discovered and they still
have blood, vessels and proteins in them, which is impossible
based on the timeline that we're told that dinosaurs existed.
(45:53):
So that challenges deep with some deep time assumptions, no
direct observation and reptile to bird transformation, transitional reproductive systems,
and assumes Darwinian evolution. It assumes Darwinian macroevolution. It then,
by that nature, it forces you into the modernist paradigm,
despite the empirical data not actually substantiating it. It's almost
(46:18):
like a modern myth. Now I'm not even here to
say dinosaurs didn't exist. I'm just bringing up that this
is a problem within their own worldview that this is
just my internal critique at a philosophical level, And this
is where I follow up with the soft tissue in
biomolecules and fossils. This is one of the most rhetorically
(46:39):
powerful arguments used by skeptics. The core claim is soft
tissues collagen, blood vessel structures have been reported and dinosaur
fossils protein should not survive tens of millions of years
under unknown chemical laws. Therefore, if organic molecules decay rapidly
and dinosaur and fossils contain such molecules, then either decay
(47:01):
rates are wrong or the fossils are much much younger
than they claim they are. Iron preservation hypothesis, experimental replica
replication is limited and the preservation window is far shorter
than claimed fossil ages conclusion. Soft tissue evidence is in
tension with deep time dinosaur chronology. So that's where I'm
(47:24):
not even saying dinosaurs don't exist or dragons didn't exist.
I'm saying that the evidence for these are not very compelling.
The evidence for dinosaurs are not very compelling, and in
a sense, if we're only using empiricism, as I showed you,
the intellectual trajectory that essentially poop poos and shoe aways dragons.
(47:46):
You very much could use the same epistemological framework of
modern day empiricism and materialism to kind of shoesh you
away some of the dinosaur stuff, or at least demonstrate
it's not as logically plausible if they want you to
believe it is. Argument five. Dinosaur fossils may represent known
animals or misidentified megafauna. And this has been claimed that
(48:10):
they use like whalebones and bones that they find near
the ocean from sea creatures, and then they re appropriate
these and say, well, this is actually the this is
actually the you know, the thigh bone of a t
rex or a philocus raptor dinosaur. Maybe an umbrella category
masking large reptiles could be dragons, extinct mammals, marine reptiles,
(48:33):
or giant birds. Key points. Some fossils originally classified as
dinosaurs were later reassigned, and historical zoology shows frequent misclassification.
Critics argue size inflation, reconstruction bias, and cultural expectation of monsters.
Dinosaurs may be a conceptual category here, not a biological one.
(48:54):
And number six historical absence of dinosaur discovery until the
nineteenth century, which is really interesting, right we have all
these stories about dragons across the entire globe from civilizations
that never met, and yet the first time we even
hear about dinosaurs is like eighteen forty one, So no
(49:15):
unambiguous din dinosaur fossils were identified until the early eighteen hundreds,
despite mining quarrying ancient civilizations. Critics argue, if dinosaurs were
real and abundant, why is there no ancient descriptions, why
no classical taxonomy. Therefore, fossils were often ignored, misidentified, or
(49:36):
mythologized about. But critics maintained the silence is still suspicious, right,
why is it only in the modern period that we
hear about dinosaurs? And my last argument, and this is
more of a cultural argument. That's why I say it's
probably the weakest of my arguments pistemologically, but it's something
that people talk about and it should be addressed. Is
(49:58):
the cultural and institute tutional momentum of dinosaur science. Again,
you could argue that Darwinian evolution is tied to it.
The sort of redating the earth to do away with
traditional religious cosmologies is part and partial of it. But
the core claim is that dinosaur theory is institutionally entrenched,
(50:19):
financially supported, and resistant to any sort of paradigm change. Therefore,
once a framework becomes dominant, descent is filtered out right.
You are actually considered as a weirdo if you say
dinosaurs don't exist. Think about that. We live in a
time now. If you don't believe in dinosaurs, you're the weirdo.
(50:42):
Alternative interpretations struggle for funding, and skeptics argue the narrative
persists partially by a sort of cultural inertia cultural momentum
in regards to this whole dinosaur fiasco. Now, as I said,
this is the weakest argument epistemologically, but still part of
a you know me Steel Manning, you know, the dinosaur case.
(51:04):
So that's a little bit of my overview on how
did dragons disappear? And how are dragons and dinosaurs not
in the same conceptual category given the empirical inverifiability of
both
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