People often forget the divine inspiration behind the writings of the Prophets, Apostles and Saints, even regarding what seems like the simplicity of their observations of creation. Saint Paisios the Athonite informs us how in fact the Saints wrote empirically about creation by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and not speculatively, and why they did so in the way they did.
One day the Elder was conversing with a monk who referred to the Psalm "I went down into the depths of the waters" [Ps. 68 (69):2], and he said to him:
"The prophet David, our Saints, Basil the Great, who wrote about creation, all of them, with the Grace of God knew everything about the creation by God. The Holy Spirit took them to the depths of the waters, He showed them and they saw the earth revolving around the sun, and many other things. The Saints, however, spoke to people according to the knowledge of their age. This is so that they wouldn't look like fools by revealing everything to their age that they saw with the Grace of God. Since simple people were not able to see all those things and understand them, they would not have believed them!"
From the book ΣΚΕΥΟΣ ΕΚΛΟΓΗΣ: ΓΕΡΩΝ ΠΑΙΣΙΟΣ 1924-1994 (ΔΕΥΤΕΡΟΣ ΤΟΜΟΣ), ΙΕΡΟΜΟΝΑΧΟΣ ΧΡΙΣΤΟΔΟΥΛΟΣ ΑΓΓΕΛΟΓΛΟΥ (ΑΓΙΟΡΕΙΤΗΣ), p. 142. Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
