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Genesis, Creation, and Early Man

A Brief Critique of the Evolutionary Model

1. Introduction

Now we come to a key concept which is extremely important for understanding both the religious and the secular outlook of contemporary man.1 This idea is an extremely complex one, and here we can give only a sketchy outline of the problems involved in this question.

Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species came out in 1859, was instantly accepted by many people, and soon became very popular. People such as T. H. Huxley and Herbert Spencer in England, together with Ernst Haeckel in Germany (author of The Riddle of the Universe, 1899) and others, popularized the ideas of Darwin and made evolution the very center of their philosophy. It seems to explain everything. Of course, people like Nietzsche picked it up and used it for their so-called spiritual prophecies. Thus, the people who were in the main school of Western thought—which was rationalism carried as far as you can take it—accepted evolution. To the present day, one can say that evolution is a central dogma of “advanced” thinkers, of people who are in harmony with the times.

From the very beginning, however, there were people who were arguing about this. In the time of Darwin, there was a Catholic thinker, St. George Jackson Mivart (author of On the Genesis of Species, 1871), who believed in evolution but not in Darwin’s idea of natural selection. Especially in the last ten to thirty years, there have come out many critical accounts of evolution from an objective point of view. As these works demonstrate, most of the books supporting evolution begin with certain premises and assumptions arising from the naturalistic outlook.

Now there is even a society in San Diego called the Institute for Creation Research, which has come out with several good books. They themselves are religious, but they have several books which discuss evolution from a scientific, not a religious standpoint. They say there are two models for understanding the universe: one is the evolution model, and another is the creation model. They take the evidence of the history of the earth, for example—the geological layers and so forth—and they try to see which model it fits. They have discovered that fewer adjustments have to be made if one follows the model of creation—if there was a God Who created things in the beginning and if the earth is not billions of years old but only some thousands of years old. The evolutionary model, on the other hand, requires a good many corrections. In this regard, it can be compared to the old model of the Ptolemaic universe (vs. the Copernican model). Like the Ptolemaic model, the evolutionary model is now proving quite cumbersome.

Some members of this Institute travel around to various universities. In the last year or two, they have held several debates before thousands of spectators at universities in Tennessee, Texas, etc. Interest has been quite high. Those defending evolution have not been able to give sound evidence in support of it and, in fact, on several points were caught on their ignorance of recent discoveries in paleontology.

There are very sophisticated and knowledgeable people defending both points of view. Here we will not even discuss the question of atheistic evolution because it is obviously a philosophy of fools, of people who can believe, as Huxley said, that if you put a group of monkeys together with typewriters they will eventually give you the Encyclopedia Britannica, given enough time—if not millions then billions of years, according to the laws of chance. Someone calculated evolutionary theory according to the laws of chance and found that in fact such a thing would never happen. Anyone who can believe that can believe anything.

The more serious dispute is between theistic evolution—that God created the world and then it evolved—and the Christian point of view. Here we must say that the fundamentalist point of view is incorrect in many instances because the fundamentalists do not know how to interpret Scripture. They say, for example, that the book of Genesis must be understood “literally,” and one cannot do this. The Holy Fathers tell us which parts are literal and which parts are not.

The first misunderstanding that must be cleared away before even discussing this question—one that causes many people to miss the point—centers on the failure to distinguish between evolution and variation. Variation is the process by which people make various hybrids of peas, different breeds of cats, etc. After fifty years of experimentation, for example, they came up with a new breed of cat: a combination of Siamese and Persian, called the Himalayan cat, which has long hair like a Persian with the coloring of a Siamese. At first this had happened accidentally, but the cat was never able to reproduce itself purely; and only now after all these years of experimentation have they come up with a new breed which breeds true. Likewise, there are different breeds of dogs, different varieties of plants, and the very “races” of men are all quite different: Pygmies, Hottentots, Chinese, Northern Europeans—all different types of human beings who came from one ancestor. Therefore, the question of variation is one thing, and must be distinguished from evolution.

There are undoubtedly many variations within one kind of creature, but these variations never produce anything new; they only produce a different variety of dog or cat or bean or people. In fact, this is more of a proof against evolution than for it because no one has ever been able to come up with a new kind of creature. The different “species”—and this term is itself quite arbitrary—for the most part are not able to bear offspring with each other; and, in the few cases where they can, the offspring is not able to reproduce itself. Thus, St. Ambrose of Milan says: This is an example to you, O man, to stop meddling in the ways of God. God means for each creature to be separate.

2. Historical Background

During the period of the Enlightenment, the worldview was quite stable. Just before this time, the Anglican Archbishop Ussher of Armagh calculated all the years given in the Old Testament genealogies and came up with the idea that the world was created in the year 4004 B.C. Newton believed this, and the Enlightenment worldview was in favor of the idea that God created the world in six days and then left it to develop itself, and that all the species were just as we see them today. The scientists of that time accepted that.

At the end of the period of Enlightenment, however, as the revolutionary fever began to come on, this very stable worldview began to break down, and already some scientists were coming up with more radical theories. At the end of the eighteenth century, Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, had already come up with the hypothesis that all of life comes from one primordial filament—which is exactly what is meant today by the theory of evolution. His theory did not concern only one species or kind of creature, but proposed that a primordial blob or filament developed into all the different kinds of creatures by transmutations.

This new explanation of Erasmus Darwin was an attempt to continue in the spirit of the Enlightenment: a spirit marked by utter rationalism and simplicity. As rationalism entered deeper into the mind, it was simpler (he thought) to explain life as coming from a single living filament than to give the more “complicated” explanation that God gave being all at once to all different kinds of creatures.

There was one naturalist, Chevalier de Lamarck (author of Philosophie zoologique, 1809), who had a definite evolutionary theory just after this, but he had the idea that the changes necessary to account for the evolving of one species into another were due to the inheritance of acquired characteristics. This could never be proved, and has in fact been quite disproved. Hence, the idea of evolution did not take hold.

There was, however, one important geologist at this period of the early nineteenth century who gave a great impetus towards the acceptance of this idea of evolution. This was Charles Lyell, who in 1830 came up with the theory of uniformitarianism, that is, that all we see in the earth today is due not to catastrophes—to a sudden flood or something similar—but rather to the fact that the processes operating today have been operating in past ages, from the beginning of the world, as far back as we can see. Therefore, if we look at the Grand Canyon, we see that the river has been eating away the canyon, and we can calculate—by taking into account how fast the water flows, how much water there is in it now, the quality of the soil and so on—how long it must have taken to wear away the canyon. Lyell thought that if we assume that these processes were always going on at the same rate—this being very rational and given to calculation—we can come up with a uniform explanation of things. Of course, there is no proof of this; this is merely his hypothesis.

This idea, together with the idea which was now gaining sympathy—that species evolve into each other—led to another idea. If you put these two ideas together, you get the idea that most likely the world is not just a few thousand years old like the Christians seem to say, but that it must be very many thousands or millions of years old, or even more. Thus arose the idea of the greater and greater age of the earth. But again this belief (that the world must be very old) was only a presupposition; it was not proved.

Already this idea was sinking into the minds ofmen when in 1859 Charles Darwin came out with his book propounding the idea of natural selection. Darwin’s idea was opposed to that of Lamarck, who said that the giraffe evolved because a short-necked creature stretched its neck to eat the higher leaves, its offspring had a neck an inch longer, the next one stretched a little more, and gradually it became what we know today as a giraffe. This is against all scientific laws, because such things don’t happen. An acquired characteristic cannot be inherited. For example, when Chinese women had their feet bound, their daughters were always born with normal feet.

Darwin, on the other hand, came up with the idea that there were perhaps two longer-necked creatures which survived because they had longer necks; they were joined together because all the rest died off due to adverse circumstances or disaster; and their offspring did have longer necks because a change had occurred within them: what scientists today call a “mutation.” This might have been a chance thing at first, but once reproduction between two such creatures has taken place, it continues down through the ages.

Of course, this is a guess because no one has observed such a thing happen. But this guess struck the consciousness of the people; they were like tinder, all ready for it, and this was the spark. The idea sounded so plausible; and the idea of evolution took hold—not because it was proved.

As a matter of fact, the speculations of Darwin were based almost entirely upon his observations, not of evolution, but of variation. When he was traveling in the Galápagos Islands, Darwin wondered why there were thirteen different varieties of one kind of finch, and thought that it was because there was one original variety which had developed according to its environment. This is not evolution but variation. From this, he jumped to the conclusion that if you keep making small changes like that, eventually you will have an absolutely different kind of creature. The problem in trying to prove this scientifically is that no one has ever observed these larger changes; they have only observed changes within a kind.

3. “Proofs” of Evolution

Let us look now at the so-called proofs of evolution to see what they are. We are not going to try to disprove evolution, but just to try to see the quality of the proofs that are used—what it is that seems convincing to people who believe in evolution.

  1. There is a standard textbook of zoology used twenty years ago, General Zoology by Tracy I. Storer, which lists a number of proofs. The first proof in the book is called “comparative morphology,” that is, a comparison of body structures. Man has arms, birds have wings, fish have flippers—the book has convincing diagrams which make them look very much alike. The birds have claws and we have fingers—the book shows how one might have developed into the other. All creatures are shown to have a very similar structure, and the different structures are arranged according to different phyla and genera. Of course, this is not a proof. It is very logical, however, to one who believes in evolution.

On the other hand, the scientific creationists say that if you believe that God created the universe, He must have had a basic master-plan of creation; therefore, all kinds of creatures would have basic similarities. If you believe that God created all the creatures, these diagrams convince you that, yes, God created them according to a plan. If you believe that one creature evolved into the other, you look at the same diagrams and say, yes, one evolved into the other. But there is no proof either for or against evolution in this. In actual fact, people accept evolution on some other basis and then look at such diagrams, and the diagrams convince them even more.

  1. Secondly, there is “comparative physiology.” The book General Zoology states: “The tissue and fluids of organisms show many basic similarities in physiological and chemical properties that parallel morphological features.”2 For example,

from the hemoglobin in vertebrate blood, oxyhemoglobin crystals can be obtained; their crystalline structure … parallels that of vertebrate classification based on body structure. Those of each species are distinct, but all from a genus have some common characteristic. Furthermore, those of all birds have certain resemblances but differ from crystals obtained from blood of mammals or reptiles.3

We can say the same thing here as we said of morphology. If you believe in creation, you say that God made similar creatures with similar blood, and there is no problem. If you believe in evolution, you say that one evolved into the other.

A dating system has been devised from precipitations from blood. Scientists see that the precipitations are similar in each species, that they have something in common within one genus, and that they are quite distinct in different genera: birds and monkeys, for example. From this they make certain calculations and decide how many years apart on the evolutionary scale these different creatures are. As it happens, their calculations throw everything else off. If this is to be accepted, other dating systems have to be changed; so it is still controversial. It actually proves nothing, because you can accept it as a proof either of evolution or of God’s creation.

  1. There is a third argument called “comparative embryology.” Textbooks like General Zoology used to have pictures that show an embryonic fish, salamander, turtle, chicken, pig, man, etc., demonstrating that they all look very much alike and saying that they gradually develop differently. You can see that man has so-called “gill-slits” in the embryo. Therefore, this is supposed to be a remembrance of his ancestors. Ernst Haeckel, in his “theory of recapitulation” and “biogenetic law,” stated that “an individual organism in its development (ontogeny) tends to recapitulate the stages passed through by its ancestors (phylogeny).”4 Today this theory is no longer accepted by evolutionists. Scientists have found that the “gill-slits” are not gill-slits at all, but are just preparing for what is to be developed in the neck of the human being. So this proof has been pretty well discarded. Again, they used the argument that similarity means proof, which in fact it does not.

  2. Another proof, which used to be more powerful than it is today, is that of “vestigial” organs. Evolutionists claimed that there are certain organs, like the appendix in man, which seem to have no function now and therefore must be left over from a previous stage of evolution, when a monkey or another of man’s ancestors used these organs. But more and more these “vestigial” organs are found to have a certain use; the appendix, for example, is found to have some kind of glandular function, so this argument is also losing weight. And just because we do not know what a certain organ does, this does not mean that it is left over from some lower form of life.

  3. Then there are the arguments from paleontology: the study of fossils. Of course, the first seemingly convincing proof is the geological strata, as, for example, in the Grand Canyon where you see all kinds of strata; and the lower you get the more primitive the creatures there seem to be. Scientists date the strata by what kind of creatures are found in them.

In the nineteenth century they discovered these strata and determined which were older and which were younger; and now they have a rather elaborate system by which to tell which strata are older and which younger. However, the whole dating system is rather circular. Since often these strata are “upside down” according to the evolutionary model, they have to make certain readjustments. Just like the Ptolemaic system needed certain adjustments (epicycles had to be devised, because the planets were not going around the earth uniformly), in the same way evolutionists must make adjustments when they find that, according to evolutionary theory, the strata are “upside down.” They have to date them by the fossils in them. But how do they know that the fossils in them are in the right order? They know because somewhere else the fossils were in the “right” order according to the evolutionist model, and they got the system from that. If you look at it closely, you see that it is a circular system.* One has to have faith that this actually corresponds to reality.

There are a number of flaws in this. For one thing, the creatures appear quite suddenly in each strata, with no intermediary types leading up to them. Besides this, as research continues, they are finding animals in the strata which are not supposed to be where they are. For example, now in the Precambrian level they are finding jellyfish-like creatures [Tribrachidium] and all kinds of complex animals, which should not be there because they supposedly should not have evolved until some hundred million years later. Either you have to change your idea of the evolution of such creatures, or you have to say that these were exceptions.

In general, there is no proof that these strata were laid down over millions of years. The creationists who talk about the Flood of Noah say that it is equally conceivable that the Flood caused exactly the same thing. The simpler marine animals on the sea-bottoms would generally be the first to be buried, followed by fish and other organisms living nearer the ocean surface. The more advanced animals, including man, would be going on higher ground trying to get away from the Flood. There would be few remnants of man because man would be trying to get on ships and other things to get away.

Moreover, there are only very particular conditions which cause a fossil to be left at all. A creature has to be buried suddenly in a certain kind of mud which allows it to be preserved. The whole idea of the gradualness of these phenomena is being called more and more into question. There is now proof that oil and coal and such things can be made in an extremely short time—in a matter of days or weeks. The formation of fossils itself is very much in favor of some catastrophe.

In the realm of paleontology, the most important argument against evolution is that it is hard to say that there has ever been found a single thing which can be called an intermediary species. In fact, Darwin was extremely worried about this. He wrote:

The number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed, [must] be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely-graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.5

Today’s scientists say that the fossil record is extremely abundant: there are more fossil species known than living species. Still, there have not been found more than a couple which might be interpreted as somehow being an intermediary species. They will tell you about the pterodactyl—a reptile with wings-and say that this reptile is becoming a bird. But why can’t you simply say this is a reptile with wings?

There are certain fossils called “index fossils” which, when seen in a certain stratum, determine that that stratum cannot be any older or younger than a certain date because that animal supposedly became extinct at a certain period. They found a fish swimming around in the ocean which was supposed to be extinct seventy million years ago. Because it was thought to be an index fossil, it threw off the whole thing; and that particular layer which was dated according to this supposedly extinct fish was no longer correct.

Why is it that certain species evolve and others stay the same as they were? There are many species found in the “ancient” strata which are exactly the same as currently living species. Evolutionists have ideas that some are “reprobate” species that do not go anywhere for some reason, and others are more progressive species since they have the energy to go forward. But that is faith, not proof. The fossil species which have been preserved are just as distinct from each other as are living species.

  1. Then there are the “obvious” family proofs of evolution. In most textbooks of evolution, there are artistic renderings tracing the evolution of the horse and the elephant. There is a great deal of subjectivity involved in this, just as when artists make Neanderthal Man look bent over to resemble an ape. This is not scientific proof but imagination based on one’s philosophical idea. There is quite a bit of evidence in the fossil record which is either against evolution or shows that there is no proof one way or the other; and there are some things which are quite remarkable and are unable to be explained by evolution.

  2. The final so-called proof of evolution is mutations. As a matter of fact, the serious scientist will tell you that all the rest is not really proof, but the one proofis mutations.

There are some evolutionists, such as Theodosius Dobzhansky, who say, “I have proved evolution because I have made a new species in the laboratory.” After thirty years of working on fruit flies, which multiply very quickly, you can get the generational equivalent of several hundred thousand years of human life in a few decades. Dobzhansky experimented by irradiating fruit flies and finally came up with two which had changes, and which no longer interbred with the other type of fruit fly. This is his definition of species—that they do not interbreed; therefore, he said, “I have evolved a new species.”

In the first place, this was done under extremely artificial conditions, with radiation; and you have to come up with a new theory of radioactive waves from outer space in order to justify it. Secondly, it is still a fruit fly. So it has no wings or it is purple instead of yellow; it is still a fruit fly and is basically no different from any other fruit fly; it is simply another variety. So he has actually proved nothing.

Furthermore, mutations are 99 percent harmful. All experiments, including those by evolutionists who have worked on them for many decades, have proved unsuccessful in showing any real change from one kind of creature to another, even the most primitive creature that reproduces itself every ten days. If anything, the evidence in that sphere is for the “fixity” of the kinds.

But in the end, we have to say that there is no conclusive scientific proof for evolution; and likewise there is no conclusive proof against evolution, because even though it might not seem too logical or too plausible according to the evidence, still there is no proof that given a billion or trillion years a monkey might not be produced from an amoeba. Who knows? If you don’t consider for a moment what the Holy Fathers say, you might think that perhaps it’s true, especially if there is a God. If you think it happened “by chance,” you have no argument at all. To believe it happened by chance requires much more faith than to believe in God. In any case, the evidence we have just examined will make sense to you according to what your philosophy is. The creationist philosophy requires less adjustment of the evidence, and so is more plausible.

  1. There is one more thing that has been used as a kind of “proof of evolution,” and that is radiometric dating: radiocarbon, potassium-argon, uranium decay, and so on. These were all discovered in the present century, some of them just recently. It is said that these systems prove the world is really very old. One textbook says they have brought about a revolution in dating, because before we had only relative ideas of age and now we have absolute ideas. One can test a certain rock according to the potassium-argon system and come up with the idea that the rock is two billion years old; they allow a margin of error of about ten percent.

The fact of the matter is that the great age of the earth was supposedly already “known” by scientists before these dating systems were developed. From their inception, the dating systems were based on the unproven uniformitarian presuppositions of Charles Lyell, which had led to the idea that the world was many millions if not billions of years old. Thus, they are not really revolutionary in dating; they simply fit into an already accepted view. If these new dating systems had said that the world was only five thousand years old, instead of three billion, scientists would not have accepted them so easily.

Secondly, there are certain basic assumptions which the radiometric dating systems must make. The systems, which trace the decay rate of radioactive minerals to “daughter” components, require: (1) that there is absolute uniformity—that the decay rate has always been the same for as long as the process has been going on; (2) that the thing being dated has been isolated, that there has been no contamination from outside sources—which they admit does happen; and finally, (3) that there was none of the daughter component in the first place, but only the “parent” component. All these things are assumptions; they are not proved.

Many people, even among non-evolutionists, will admit that carbon-14 is the most reliable of all the dating systems; even the scientific creationists admit that it has a fair accuracy back perhaps 3,000 years. It has been tested on certain articles whose age has been determined, and it has proved to be not too far off in many cases. But beyond 2,000 or 3,000 years it becomes extremely dubious. Even those who are adherents to this system admit that, because the half-life of carbon-14 is 5,700 years or so, it cannot be accurate beyond 25,000 or 35,000 years at the most. The other systems, such as potassium-argon, uranium decay, etc., claim to measure a half-life of 1.3 and 4.5 billion years respectively; and therefore when they talk about proving the age of old rocks they are using these systems.

The carbon-14 system is used only on organic matter; and the potassium-argon and uranium systems are used on rocks. In the latter, one must assume that there was a uniform decay rate not just for thousands but for billions of years, as well as no contamination during that time and no daughter components initially. In the potassium-argon method, for example, you must assume that it was all potassium-40 in the beginning before it decayed to argon-40. All these things you have to take on faith. If you try to measure anything “recent,” say only a million years ago, and use this system with a half-life of over a billion years, it is like trying to measure a millimeter with a yardstick: it is not very accurate even assuming it is valid. There have been numerous cases when they have applied this system to new rocks and have come up with ages of millions of years. Therefore, the whole thing is very shaky. It requires that those millions of years exist in the first place.

There are other kinds of tests which have been used at various times as, for example, the rate at which sodium and various chemicals are discharged into the ocean. You measure the amount of the elements that are now in the ocean, measure approximately how much of it goes into the sea every year, and from that you come up with a guess of how old the ocean must be; and probably the ocean is as old as the world. They did this with sodium and discovered the world was no more than 260 million years old. But it was found that you get different answers depending on which element you use: lead gives an age of 2,000 years, others give 8,000 years, some 18,000 years, some 11 million—there is absolutely no uniformity.6

There are other tests. For example, a test was done based on the rate at which helium is entering the atmosphere; this indicated that the atmosphere of the earth is but several thousand years old.7

Therefore, these tests are very unsure; and some of them make it very dubious that the world could be anything like 5 billion years old.

When it comes down to it, it depends what your faith is. Some scientists think the earth is very old because evolution is unthinkable unless the earth is very old. If you believe in evolution, you must believe the earth is very old, since it is obvious that evolution does not work on a short time scale. But as far as scientific proof goes, there is none whatsoever that the earth is 5 billion years old, or 7,500 years old—it could be either. It depends on what kind of suppositions you start with.

So evolution is not, in fact, a scientific problem; it is a philosophical question. We have to realize that the theory of evolution is acceptable to certain scientists, philosophers, and other people because they have been prepared for it.

4. The Theory of Evolution Is Understandable Philosophically

Let us look now at the philosophical antecedents of the theory of evolution in Western society. As we have seen, the idea of evolution arose at the end of the eighteenth century, which was the end of the Enlightenment and the beginning of the Revolutionary Age—our own age. The Enlightenment was characterized by a stable worldview, but, as we shall see, that stability could not last, and had to give way to the evolutionary worldview.

One of the classical works on the Enlightenment, The European Mind by Paul Hazard, states:

[In this period] a moral clash took place in Europe. The interval between the Renaissance, of which it is a lineal descendant, and the French Revolution, for which it was forging the weapons, constitutes an epoch which yields to none in historical importance.8

The Enlightenment was the classical age of modern Europe. This period between the Renaissance and modern times was the first real attempt to make a harmonious synthesis of the new forces let loose by the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, without losing the spiritual base of some kind of Christianity.

The first aspect of this new classical age, this new harmony, was the dominance of the scientific worldview, which took the form of the world-machine of Isaac Newton. The age of Newton, the early Enlightenment, was a time when science and rational religion seemed to agree that all was right with the world, and the arts flourished in a way in which they were never again to flourish in the West.

Before this time, the West had known several centuries of intellectual ferment and even chaos as the medieval Roman Catholic synthesis collapsed and new forces made themselves felt, leading to heated disputes and bloody warfare. The religious wars for all practical purposes ended with the close of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, which devastated Germany. Protestantism had rebelled against a complexity and corruption in Catholicism; there was a renaissance in ancient pagan thought and art; a new humanism had discovered the natural man, which pushed the idea of God ever more into the background; and, more significant for the future, science replaced theology as the standard of knowledge, and the study of nature and its laws came to seem the most important intellectual pursuit.

By the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, however, a certain equilibrium and harmony were reached in Western thought. Christianity was not, after all, overthrown by the new ideas, but rather adapted itself to the new spirit, and the difficulties and contradictions of modern naturalistic and rationalistic ideas had not yet made themselves felt. Particularly in the most enlightened part of Western Europe—England, France, and Germany—it almost seemed that a golden age had come, especially in contrast with the religious wars which had ravaged these countries up to the middle of the seventeenth century. The enlightened man believed in a God whose existence could be rationally demonstrated, was tolerant of the beliefs of others, and was convinced that everything in the world could be explained by modern science, whose latest advances he eagerly followed. The world seemed to be a vast machine in perpetual motion whose every movement could be described mathematically. It was one great harmonious universe, ordered as a uniform mathematical system. The classical work expressing these ideas, Newton’s Principia Mathematica, was greeted with universal acclaim when it appeared in 1687, showing that the educated world at that time was thoroughly ripe for this new gospel.

In the new synthesis [of the Enlightenment], “Nature” replaced God as the central idea—even though God was not thrown out until the very end of this period. The age of the Newtonian system was also the age of the religion of Reason. Religion was now subjected to the same standard as was science: to the study of the outward world, that is, the standard of reason. Thus continued the process which had begun with Scholasticism soon after the Schism, when reason was placed above faith and tradition. The Enlightenment was the time when men dreamed of a religion of reasonableness.

[In terms of religion,] deism was perhaps the most typical movement of the eighteenth century. The idea of deism is that God exists, but He’s quite irrelevant; that is, He creates the world and steps back. Newton himself believed that he could not calculate quite everything correctly, as for instance the paths of comets; he had the idea that the universe was like a great watch which God made and then stepped back, and that once in a while He had to step in and correct it, wind it up again. But later astronomers said that no, this is not true; one can actually have a unified theory which explains everything including all irregular movements, and so God is necessary only at the beginning. God becomes extremely vague. Thus miracles and prophecy began to be called into question, and many writers already began to say that they were just superstition. In this the French became more radical than the English. …

[Looking at the Enlightenment worldview,] one can see what a harmonious idea it appeared to be—of Nature ruling over everything, the mysteries of Nature being discovered, God still being in heaven (albeit not doing much), and scientific knowledge progressing over the whole world.

This brings us to the second main aspect of the Enlightenment, which was a faith in human progress. In his book The Making of the Modern Mind, J. H. Randall, Jr., writes:

It was from the spread of reason and science among individual men that the great apostles of the Enlightenment hoped to bring about the ideal society of mankind. And from there they hoped for a veritable millennium. From the beginning of the [eighteenth] century onward there arose one increasing pa:an of progress through education. Locke, Helvétius, and Bentham laid the foundations for this generous dream; all men, of whatever school, save only those who clung … to the Christian doctrine of original sin, believed with all their ardent natures in the perfectibility of the human race. At last mankind held in its own hands the key to its destiny: it could make the future almost what it would. By destroying the foolish errors of the past and returning to a rational cultivation of nature, there were scarcely any limits to human welfare that might not be transcended. It is difficult for us to realize how recent a thing is this faith in human progress. The ancient world seems to have had no conception of it; Greeks and Romans looked back rather to the Golden Age from which man had degenerated. The Middle Ages, of course, could brook no such thought. The Renaissance, which actually accomplished so much, could not imagine that man could ever rise again to the level of glorious antiquity; its thoughts were all on the past. Only with the growth of science in the seventeenth century could men dare to cherish such an overweening ambition. … All the scientists, from Descartes down, despised the ancients and carried the day for the faith in progress.9

Why did the Enlightenment worldview collapse? Its philosophy now seems hopelessly naive, its art a golden age impossible to revive.

There are several causes, and they all perhaps overlap each other. One cause is that which [the Russian philosopher] Ivan V. Kireyevsky spoke about: Once reason is exalted above faith and tradition, its critical approach produces its own destruction. The faith in human reason that first produced Scholasticism then produced the Reformation, because reason criticized religion itself. The Reformation was a criticism of medieval Catholicism, and then a criticism of Protestantism produced the atheist/agnostic philosophers of the nineteenth century. Finally, the critical approach of reason produced the actual suicide of reason. Once one trusts reason as the standard of truth, one must follow it all the way on its destructive course. One has no argument against it.

Since the Middle Ages, rationalism had reduced the sphere of knowledge as it criticized every tradition and the reality of the spiritual world-everything except the outward world. With the English philosopher David Hume in the latter part of the eighteenth century, autonomous reason finally went as far as it could go: it destroyed all certain knowledge, even of the outward world. Hume said we cannot know absolute truth through our reason; we can only know what we experience. … He wrote:

Reason is a subjective faculty which has no necessary relation with the “facts” we seek to know. It is limited to tracing the relations of our ideas, which themselves are already twice removed from “reality.” And our senses are equally subjective, for they can never know the “thing in itself,” but only an image ofit which has in it no element of necessity and certainty-”the contrary of every matter of fact is still possible.”10

This, in fact, is a deep thing in our modern thinkers of the last two hundred years: this despair at never being able to know anything, which dissolves the very fabric of life. Believe in rationalistic philosophy and start thinking things through, and you come against Hume and other thinkers like him, and suddenly the whole world dissolves. Thus, with justice one writer on the philosophy of the Enlightenment has the following thing to say about Hume:

To read Hume’s dialogues after having read with sympathetic understanding the earnest deists and optimistic philosophers of the early part of the eighteenth century, is to experience a slight chill, a feeling of apprehension. It is as if at the high noon of the Enlightenment, at the hour of the siesta when everything seems to be quiet and secure all about, one was suddenly aware of the short, sharp slipping of the foundations, a faint far-off tremor running under the solid ground of common sense.11

(This, of course, later produced the great earthquakes of our own times.)

The experimental ideal in science had a function similar to that of reason in destroying the stabiliry of the Enlightenment worldview. Being itself based in rationalism, this ideal is never satisfied; it never stops, but always waits to test its conclusions and come to new ones. That is why scientific ideas are constantly changing, and why the scientific synthesis at the time of Newton was overthrown.

Finally, the idea of progress helped to dissolve the old synthesis. In the Renaissance, as we have seen, the ancients were looked to as the true standard. It was thought that, if only we could get back to them and away from the Middle Ages and superstition, we would be fine. Then when the sciences became the dominant mode of thought, the scientific worldview arose. People began to see that anyone living today has more scientific knowledge than anyone living in antiquity. Now science for the first time has moved forward dramatically with its experiments, etc.

The very idea of progress—that the present is building upon the past, that the future generations will improve upon us, and that man will go constantly ahead—this obviously obliterates the idea that there is one constant standard.12 One’s existing standard is left to the fate of the future people who are going to improve upon it. After a while, people begin to realize that this is a philosophy of constant change, constant movement. Then the soul begins to be upset. It senses there is no peace, no security. [By the end of the eighteenth century] this idea of progress had given birth to the “evolutionary” worldview, which was quite different from the stable worldview of Newton, and which rose to the fore in the nineteenth century.

And so the eighteenth century began with great optimism, but most people did not realize that by the end of the century the most advanced philosophers would destroy any possibility of any real knowledge of the external world and any constant standard of truth. It takes time for deep ideas like that to filter down to the people, but when they do they produce disastrous effects.

These disastrous effects were seen in the French Revolution of 1 789, which was the revolutionary application of rationalistic ideas to the changing of society and the whole outward order of life. The end of the eighteenth century brought with it the end of the Old Order—the end of an age of stability when human institutions and art and culture were based on at least a remnant of Christianity and Christian feeling. The outbreak of the French Revolution coincided with the end of Christian civilization. Before 1789 it was still the “Old Regime”; after that, it is the age of Revolution, our own times.

In view of all this, the theory of evolution is understandable philosophically. It arose out of a search for a scientific law of progress to justify the modern Revolutionary advance.

5. Scientific Faith

J. H. Randall, Jr., who is himself an evolutionist, is sophisticated enough to admit that the theory of evolution is a faith, not a proven fact:

At present biologists admit that we do not, strictly speaking, know anything about the causes of the origins of new species; we must fall back upon the scientific faith that they occur because of chemical changes in the germ plasm.13

Evolutionists must fall back upon this faith because, as they say, “Anything else is unthinkable”—the “anything else” being that God created the world 7,000 or 8,000 years ago.

Randall continues, describing the effect of evolution on the world:

In spite of these difficulties, the beliefs of men today have become thoroughly permeated with the concept of evolution. The great underlying notions and concepts that meant so much to the eighteenth century, Nature and Reason and Utility, have largely given way to a new set better expressing the ultimate intellectual ideas of the Growing World. Many social factors conspired to popularize the idea of development and its corollaries. … Perhaps the fundamental emphasis brought by Evolution into men’s minds has been upon the detailed causal analysis of the specific processes of change. Instead of seeking to discover the end or purpose of the world-process as a whole, or to discern the ultimate cause or ground of all existent things—the fundamental task of earlier science and philosophy—men have come to examine just what the process is and just what it does in its parts. They have rejected the … contemplation of a fixed and static structure of Truth, and adopted instead the aim of investigating all the little truths which experimentation can reveal. Not that Truth which is the source of all truths, lifting man’s soul above all human experiences to the realm of the eternal … but the patient, tireless, and endless search after an infinity of finite truths in our experience—this is the present-day goal of all scientific and philosophical endeavor.14

Randall mentions how the changing human institutions—the different ideas of morality, etc.—enforce one’s faith in evolution:

The conception of man as an organism reacting to and acting upon a complex environment is now basic. All ideas and institutions are today thought of as primarily social products, functioning in social groups and springing from the necessity of effecting some kind of adaptation between human nature and its environment. All the fields of human interest today have undergone this general sociologizing and psychologizing tendency; the example of religion and theology will be a sufficient illustration. Whereas the eighteenth century thought of religion and theology as a deductive and demonstrative set of propositions, men now consider religion as primarily a social product, a way of life springing from the social organization of men’s religious experiences, and theology as a rationalization of certain fundamental feelings and experiences of human nature. We no longer prove the existence of God, we talk of the “meaning of God in human experience”; we no longer demonstrate the future life, we investigate the effect of the belief in immortality upon human conduct.15

We see very clearly that this is the next stage beyond Hume, who destroyed all these things. You can no longer believe in those old ideas. This is the next stage, and it has nothing to do with the “scientific discovery” of evolution—it is simply what is in the air. Once reason continues its march, it will end in its own suicide.

Randall continues:

Evolution has introduced a whole new scale of values. Where for the eighteenth century the ideal was the rational, the natural, even the primitive and unspoiled, for us the desirable is identified rather with the latter end of the process of development, and our terms of praise are “modern,” “up-to-date,” “advanced,” “progressive.” Just as much as the Enlightenment we tend to identify what we approve with Nature, but for us it is not the rational order of nature, but the culmination of an evolutionary process, which we take for our leverage in existence. The eighteenth century could think of nothing worse to call a man than an “unnatural enthusiast”; we prefer to dub him an “antiquated and outgrown fossil.” That age believed a theory if it were called rational, useful, and natural; we favor it if it is “the most recent development.” We had rather be modernists and progressives than sound reasoners. It is perhaps an open question if in our new scale of values we have not lost as much as we have gained. … The idea of evolution, as it has finally come to be understood, has reinforced the humanistic and naturalistic attitude.16

6. The Conflict between Christian Truth and Evolutionary Philosophy

Now we must look to see what Orthodoxy says about the question of evolution, where it touches upon philosophy and theology.

According to the theory of evolution, man is coming up from savagery, and that is why books show Cro-Magnon Man, Neanderthal Man, etc., looking very savage, ready to beat someone over the head and take his meat. This is obviously someone’s imagination; it is not based upon the shape of the fossils or anything else.

If you believe that man came up from savagery, you will interpret all past history in those terms. But according to Orthodoxy, man fell from Paradise. In evolutionary philosophy there is no room for a supernatural state of Adam. These are obviously two different systems which cannot be mixed. Those who want to keep both Christianity and evolutionism are forced to stick an artificial Paradise onto an ape-like creature. What finally happens, however, is that the people who do this (including many Catholics in recent decades) see that it results in the two systems becoming muddled, and therefore they come to accept that evolution must be right and Christianity a myth. They begin to say that the fall ofman is only a fall from cosmic immaturity: that when ape-like creatures, being in a state of naivete, evolved into human beings, they acquired a guilt complex—and that is the fall. Furthermore, they come to believe that originally there was not just one pair of human beings, but many. This is called polygenism—the idea that man came from many different pairs.

Once you give in to the idea that Genesis and the origin of man must be inspected rationalistically—on the basis of the naturalistic philosophy of modern thinkers—then Christianity has to be put away. Naturalistic philosophy is a realm of relative truths. In the teaching of the Holy Fathers, on the other hand, we have truths which are revealed and are given to us by God-inspired men.

In the writings of the Holy Fathers, there is a great deal of material about evolution, although one wouldn’t think so. If one thinks through what evolution is philosophically and theologically and then looks up those questions in the Holy Fathers, there is a great deal of information to be found. We cannot go into much of it right now, but we will cover a few points in order to characterize evolution according to Patristic teaching.

First, we should note that, according to the Holy Fathers, creation is something quite different from the world we see today; an entirely different principle is involved. This goes against the thinking of modern “Christian evolutionists.” One such evolutionist, the noted conservative Greek theologian Panagiotis Trempelas, writes that “it appears more glorious and divine-like and more in harmony with the regular methods of God which we daily see expressed in nature to have created the various forms by evolutionary methods.”17

(We will note here that oftentimes theologians are quite behind the times. In order to apologize for the scientific dogma, they often come up with things which the scientists have already left behind, because the scientists are reading the literature. The theologians often are scared that they are going to be old-fashioned or say something which is not in accordance with scientific opinion. So, often they can quite unconsciously fall for an evolutionary idea by not thinking the whole thing through, by not having a thoroughgoing philosophy, and not being aware of scientific evidence and scientific questions.)

The idea that Panagiotis Trempelas sets forth—that creation is supposed to be in accordance with the methods which God uses all the time—has certainly nothing Patristic about it, because creation is when the world came into being. Every Holy Father who writes about this will say that those first Six Days of Creation were quite different from anything else that ever happened in the history of the world.

Even Blessed Augustine says that the creation is a mystery. He says we really can’t even talk about it because it’s so different from our own experience: it’s beyond us. We simply cannot project present-day laws of nature back into the past and come up with an understanding of the creation. Creation is something different; it’s the beginning of all this, and not the way it is now.

Some rather naive theologians try to say that the Six Days of Creation can be indefinitely long periods, that they can correspond to the different geological strata. This, of course, is nonsense because the geological strata do not have six easily identifiable layers, or five or four or anything of the sort. There are many, many layers, and they do not correspond at all to the Six Days of Creation. So that is a very weak accommodation.

As a matter of fact—even though it looks as though it might be terribly fundamentalistic to say it—the Holy Fathers do say that those Days were twenty-four hours long. St. Ephraim the Syrian even divides them into two periods, twelve hours each. St. Basil the Great says that, in the book of Genesis, the First Day is called not the “first day” but “one day” because that is the one day by which God measured out the entire rest of the creation; that is, this First Day, which he says was twenty-four hours long, is exactly the same day which is repeated in the rest of creation.

If you think about it, there is nothing particularly difficult in that idea, since the creation of God is something totally outside our present knowledge. The accommodation of days to epochs does not make any sense; you cannot fit them together. Therefore, why do you need to have a day that is a thousand or a million years long?

The Holy Fathers say again with one voice that the creative acts of God are instantaneous. St. Basil the Great, St. Ambrose the Great, St. Ephraim and many others say that, when God creates, He says the word and it is, faster than thought.

There are many Patristic quotations about this, but we will not go into them here. None of the Holy Fathers say that the creation was slow. There are Six Days of Creation, and they describe this not as a long process. The idea that man has been evolving from something lower is totally foreign to any Holy Fathers. Rather, they say that the lower creatures came first in order to prepare the realm for the higher creature who is man, who must have his kingdom already created before he comes. St. Gregory the Theologian says that man was made by God on the Sixth Day and entered into the newly created earth.

There is a whole Patristic teaching concerning the state of the world and of Adam before the fall. Adam was potentially immortal. As Blessed Augustine says, he was created with the possibility of being either mortal or immortal in the body, and he chose by his fall to be mortal in the body.

The creation before the fall ofAdam was in a different state. About this the Holy Fathers do not tell us very much; it is really beyond us. But certain Holy Fathers of the most contemplative sort, such as St. Gregory the Sinaite, do describe the state of Paradise. St. Gregory says that Paradise exists now in the same state it was in then, but that it has become invisible to us. It is placed between corruption and incorruption, so that when a tree falls in Paradise, it does not rot away, like we see around us, but is turned into the most fragrant substance. This is a hint which tells us that Paradise is beyond us, that some other law exists there.

We know of people who have been to Paradise, like St. Euphrosynus the Cook, who brought back three apples from there. These three apples were kept for a little while; the monks divided them up and ate them, and they were very sweet. The account says that they ate them like holy bread, which means this had something to do with matter, and yet it was something different from matter. Nowadays people are speculating about matter and antimatter, about what is the source or root of matter—they don’t know any more. So why should we be surprised that there is a different kind of matter?

We know also that there will be a different body, a spiritual body. Our resurrected body will be of a different kind of matter than we know now. St. Gregory the Sinaite says it will be like our present body, but without moisture and heaviness. What that is we do not know, because, unless one has seen an angel, one has not had experience of this.

We do not have to speculate about exactly what kind of matter this is, because that will be revealed to us when we need to know it, in the next life. It is enough for us to know that Paradise, and the state of the whole creation before the fall ofAdam, was quite different from what we know now.

The law of nature we know now is the law of nature that God gave when Adam fell; that is, when He said, “Cursed is the ground for thy sake” (Gen. 3:17) and, “In pain thou shalt bring forth children” (Gen. 3:16). Adam brought death into the world, so it is very likely that no creature died before the fall. Before the fall, Eve was a virgin. God made male and female knowing man would fall and would need this means of reproducing.

There is an element of great mystery in the state of creation before the fall of Adam, which we do not need to pry into because we are not interested in the “how” of creation. We know that there was a creation of Six Days, and some Holy Fathers say they were twenty-four-hour days. There is nothing surprising about this—that the acts were instantaneous: God wills and it is done, He speaks and it is done. Since we believe in God Who is Almighty, there is no problem whatsoever. But how it looked, how many kinds of creatures there were—for example, whether there were all the different kinds of cats we see or whether there were five basic types—we don’t know, and it’s not important for us to know.

To add to the theory of evolution the idea of God, as some Christian evolutionists do, gives no help at all. Or rather, it gives only one help: it gets you out of the problem of finding out where everything came from in the first place. Instead of a great tapioca bowl of cosmic jelly, you have God. That is more clear; it is a straight idea. If you have the tapioca jelly in space somewhere, it is very mystical and difficult to understand. If you are a materialist, it makes sense to you, but that is purely on the basis of your prejudices.

But apart from this—the question of where everything came from to begin with—there is no particular help to be derived from adding God to the idea of evolution. The difficulties in the theory are still there, no matter if God is behind it or not.

The modern philosophy of evolution and Orthodox teaching differ in their understanding not only of the past of man, but also of man’s future. If the creation is one great filament which evolves and is transmuted into new species, then we can expect the evolution of “Superman”—which we will discuss shortly. If, however, the creation is made up of distinct creatures, then we can expect something different. We do not have to expect creatures to change or to rise up from the lower to the higher.

Concerning the transmutability of “kinds” of creatures, the Holy Fathers have quite a definite teaching. (The Holy Fathers use the word “kinds,” according to the word used in Genesis; “species” is a very arbitrary concept, and we do not have to take it as a limit.) Briefly we will quote a few Holy Fathers about this.

St. Gregory of Nyssa quotes his sister St. Macrina on her deathbed, when she was speaking about this very question, opposing the idea of the preexistence and transmigration of souls, which was taught by Origen. She says, in the words of St. Gregory:

Those who would have it that the soul migrates into natures divergent from each other seem to me to obliterate all natural distinctions; to blend and confuse together, in every possible respect, the rational, the irrational, the sentient, and the insensate; if, that is, all these are to pass into each other, with no distinct natural order secluding them from mutual transition. To say that one and the same soul, on account of a particular environment of body, is at one time a rational and intellectual soul, and that then it is caverned along with the reptiles, or herds with the birds, or is a beast of burden, or a carnivorous one, or swims in the deep; or even drops down to an insensate thing, so as to strike out roots or become a complete tree, producing buds on branches, and from those buds a flower, or a thorn, or a fruit edible or noxious—to say this, is nothing short of making all things the same and believing that one single nature runs through all beings; that there is a connection between them which blends and confuses hopelessly all the marks by which one could be distinguished from another.18

This shows very dearly that the Holy Fathers believed in an orderly arrangement of distinct creatures. There is not, as Erasmus Darwin would have it, a single filament which runs through all beings. Rather, there are distinct natures.

One of the basic works of Orthodox teaching is The Fount of Knowledge by St. John Damascene. This great work of the eighth century is divided into three parts. The first part is called On Philosophy; the second is On Heresies, which tells exactly what the heretics believed, and why we do not believe that; and the third part is On the Orthodox Faith, which is one of the standard books of Orthodox theology. In On Philosophy, St. John begins with chapters which go into such things as “what is knowledge?” “what is philosophy?” “what is being?” “what is substance?” “what is accident?” “what is species?” “what is genus?” “what are differences?” “what are properties, predicates?” The entire Orthodox philosophy he presents is based on the idea that reality is quite distinctly divided up into different beings, each of which has its own essence, its own nature, and not one of them is confused with another. St. John Damascene meant that this part be read, and this philosophy understood, before one undertook to read his book of Orthodox theology, On the Orthodox Faith.

There are a number of basic books by Orthodox Fathers which deal with the kinds of creatures. There are books called Hexaemeron, which means “Six Days”: these are commentaries on the Six Days of Creation. There is one by St. Basil the Great in the East, one by St. Ambrose of Milan in the West, and other, lesser ones. There are commentaries on the book of Genesis by St. John Chrysostom and St. Ephraim the Syrian, and there are many writings on these subjects scattered in the writings of many other Holy Fathers. The recent Holy Father St. John of Kronstadt also wrote a Hexaemeron.

These books are very inspiring, because they are not mere abstract knowledge; they are full of practical wisdom. The Holy Fathers use a love of nature and the splendor of God’s creation to give examples for us human beings. There are many quaint little examples of how we should be like the dove in its love for its mate, how we should be like the wiser animals and not be like the dumber animals, etc. In our own monastery, we can take an example from our squirrels. They are very greedy. We are not supposed to be like that; we should be gentle like the deer. We have all around us examples like that.

In his Hexaemeron, St. Basil quotes God’s words in Genesis, “Let the earth bring forth.” “This brief command,” says St. Basil, “was immediately a mighty nature and an elaborate system which brought to perfection more swiftly than our thought the countless properties of plants.”19 Elsewhere, about God’s commandment, “Let the earth bring forth vegetation” (Gen. 1:11), St. Basil says, “At this saying all the dense woods appeared; all the trees shot up … all the shrubs were immediately thick with leaf and bushy … all came into existence in a moment of time.”20

In the Ninth Homily of his Hexaemeron, St. Basil has a quote on the very question of the succession of creatures, one after the other. He quotes Genesis: “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth” (Gen. 1:24). St. Basil says about this:

Consider the Word of God moving through all creation, having begun at that time, active up to the present, and efficacious until the end, even to the consummation of the world. As a ball, when pushed by someone and then meeting with a slope, is borne downward by its own shape and the inclination of the ground and does not stop before some level surface receives it, so too the nature of existing objects, set in motion by one command, passes through creation without change, by generation and destruction, preserving the succession of the kinds through resemblance, until it reaches the very end. It begets a horse as the successor of a horse, a lion of a lion, and an eagle of an eagle; and it continues to preserve each of the animals by uninterrupted successions until the consummation of the universe. No length of time causes the specific characteristics of the animals to be corrupted or effaced, but, as if established just recently, nature, ever fresh, moves along with time.21

This is a statement not of science but of philosophy. This is the way God created creatures: each one has a certain seed, a certain nature, and transmits that to its offspring. When there is an exception, then it is a monstrosity; and this does not invalidate the principle of the natures of things, each one of which is quite distinct from the other. If we do not understand the whole variety of God’s creation, that is our fault, not God’s.

St. Ambrose has a number of quotations along the same line. His Hexaemeron is very close to St. Basil’s in spirit.

We have other quotes from Holy Fathers which show us a very interesting thing: that they were combating in ancient times something akin to the modern theory of evolution. This was the heretical idea that the soul of man was created after his body. The same idea is taught today by “Christian evolutionists,” although of course the ancient heresy is not the same as the modern theory. Those who taught the ancient heresy based their idea on a misinterpretation of Genesis 2:7: “And God formed man of the dust from the earth, and breathed into his face the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” Even today, “Christian evolutionists” seize on this passage and say, “That means man was something else first, and then he became human.”

In ancient times, this false idea (that the soul was created after the body) was contrasted by the opposite—and equally false—idea of the preexistence of souls. The Holy Fathers, in refuting both these theories, clearly stated that the soul and body of man were created simultaneously. Thus, St. John Damascene writes:

The body and the soul were formed at the same time—not one before and the other afterwards, as the ravings of Origen would have it.22

St. Gregory of Nyssa goes into greater detail in refuting both heresies. First, he describes Origen’s idea of the preexistence of souls, that is, that souls “fell down” into our world:

Some of those before our time who have dealt with the question of “principles” think it right to say that souls have a previous existence as a people in a society of their own, and that among them also there are standards of vice and of virtue, and that the soul there, which abides in goodness, remains without experience of conjunction with the body; but if it does depart from its communion with good, it falls down to this lower life, and so comes to be in a body.23

Then St. Gregory describes the other heresy, which corresponds to the ideas of modern “Christian evolutionists”:

Others, on the contrary, marking the order of the making of man as stated by Moses, say that the soul is second to the body in order of time, since God first took dust from the earth and formed man, and then animated the being thus formed by His breath. And by this argument they prove that the flesh is more noble than the soul, that which was previously formed [more noble] than that which was afterwards infused into it. For they say that the soul was made for the body, that the thing formed might not be without breath and motion, and that everything that is made for something else is surely less precious than that for which it is made.24

Surely this theory, although it is in a different climate of ideas, is very close to the modern evolutionists’ idea that matter indeed is the first thing, and the soul is secondary.

St. Gregory of Nyssa refutes this theory as follows:

Nor again are we in our doctrine to begin by making up man like a clay figure, and to say that the soul came into being for the sake of this; for surely in that case the intellectual nature would be shown to be less precious than the clay figure. But as man is one, the being consisting of soul and body, we are to suppose that the beginning of his existence is one, common to both parts, so that he should not be found to be antecedent and posterior to himself, as if the bodily element were first in point of time and the other were a later addition. For we are to say that in the power of God’s foreknowledge (according to the doctrine laid down earlier in our discourse), all the fullness of human nature had preexistence. (And to this the prophetic writing bears witness, which says that God “knoweth all things before they be” [Susanna 42] ) . And in the creation of individuals, we are not to place the one element before the other: neither the soul before the body, nor the contrary, that man may not be at strife against himself by being divided by the difference in point of time. For as our nature is conceived as twofold, according to the apostolic teaching, made up of the visible man and the hidden man, if the one came first and the other supervened, the power of Him that made us will be shown to be in some way imperfect, as not being completely sufficient for the whole task at once, but dividing the work, and busying itself with each of the halves in turn.25

Of course, the whole basis for an idea of evolution is that you do not believe that God is powerful enough to create the whole world by His word. You are trying to help Him out by letting Nature do most of the creating.

The Holy Fathers also talk about what it means that Adam was created from the dust. Some people take the fact that St. Athanasius the Great says in his writings, “The first-created man was made of dust like everyone, and the hand which created Adam then is creating also and always those who come after him,” and they say, “That means Adam could have been descended from some other creature. He didn’t need to be taken from literal dust. You don’t have to take that part of Genesis literally.” But it so happens this very point is discussed in great detail by many Holy Fathers. They come up with many different ways of expressing it, and make it absolutely clear that Adam and Cain are two different kinds of people. Cain was born of man, whereas Adam had no father. Adam was created of the dust, directly by the hand of Christ. Many Fathers taught the same: St. Cyril ofJerusalem, St. John Damascene, and others.

When we come to the question of what is to be interpreted literally in Genesis and what is to be interpreted figuratively or allegorically, the Holy Fathers set forth for us very clear teachings. In his commentary, St. John Chrysostom even points out in certain passages exactly what is figurative and what is literal. He says those who try to make it all allegorical are trying to destroy our faith.

For the most part, the truths in the book of Genesis are on two levels: there are literal truths, and there are also—many times for our spiritual benefit—spiritual truths. In fact, there are systems of three or four levels of meaning; but it is sufficient for us to know that there are many deeper meanings in the Scriptures, and very seldom is the literal meaning destroyed. Only occasionally is the meaning entirely figurative.

In general, we can characterize evolution in its philosophical aspect as a naturalistic “heresy” which comes closest of all to being the opposite of the ancient heresy of the preexistence of souls. The “preexistence of souls” idea is that there is one kind of soul nature which runs throughout creation, while evolution is the idea there is one kind of material being which runs throughout creation. Both of these ideas destroy the idea of the distinct natures of created beings.

The idea of evolution was a heresy that was lacking in ancient times. Usually Orthodoxy is midway between two errors: for example, between the doing away with the Divine Nature by Arius, and the doing away with the human nature by Monophysitism. In this particular case, the other heresy (evolution) was not incarnated in ancient times. This heresy “waited” until modern times to make its appearance.

We will see much more clearly the philosophical side of evolutionism when we look at a few of the so-called Christian evolutionists.

Footnotes

  1. See Editor’s Note, Genesis, Creation, and Early Man: An Orthodox Vision, 2nd ed. p. 512:
    This chapter has been transcribed from a taped lecture that Fr. Seraphim gave during his “Orthodox Survival Course” in the summer of 1975. The section titles and some additions to the text have been taken from his written outline of the course. Additions have also been taken from previous lectures in the same course, which provide necessary background to the present discussion. ↩

  2. Tracy I. Storer, General Zoology, p. 216. ↩

  3. Ibid. ↩

  4. Ibid., p. 220. ↩

  5. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 6th ed. of 1882, reprint (London: J. M. Dent, 1972), chap. 10, pp. 292-93. ↩

  6. See J. P. Riley and G. Skirrow, ed., Chemical Oceanography, vol. 1 (1965), p. 164. ↩

  7. Melvin A. Cook, “Where Is the Earth’s Radiogenic Helium?,” Nature, vol. 179 (Jan. 26, 1957), p. 213; Henry Faul, Nuclear Geology (1954). ↩

  8. Paul Hazard, The European Mind, 1680-1715, p. xviii. ↩

  9. John Herman Randall, Jr., The Making of the Modern Mind, pp. 381-82. ↩

  10. Edwin A. Burtt, ed., The English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill, pp. 593-94, quoting David Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. ↩

  11. Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, pp. 68-69. ↩

  12. Just as in Hume’s subjectivism, everything becomes relative. — Bl. Seraphim ↩

  13. Randall, Making of the Modern Mind, p. 475. ↩

  14. Ibid., pp. 475-77. ↩

  15. Ibid., p. 478. ↩

  16. Ibid., pp. 478-79. ↩

  17. “Evolution: A Heresy?,” Orthodox Observer, no. 666 (Aug. 8, 1973), p. 3. ↩

  18. St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, P. Schaff et al., eds. Reprint, Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1952-1956; Reprint, Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1994, p. 454. ↩

  19. St. Basil, Hexaemeron 5.10, Fathers of the Church vol. 46, p. 82 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1947-). ↩

  20. Ibid. 5.5-6, p. 74. ↩

  21. Ibid. 9.2, p. 137. ↩

  22. St. John Damascene, On the Orthodox Faith 2, Fathers of the Church vol. 37, p. 235 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1947—). ↩

  23. St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man 28.1, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, P. Schaff et al., eds. Reprint, Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1952-1956; Reprint, Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1994, p. 419. ↩

  24. Ibid. ↩

  25. Ibid., 29.1-2, pp. 420-21. ↩