Fr. Seraphim's Last Talk on Creation and Evolution

The question of how we approach the book of Genesis is bound up with our modern outlook on life.¹ We have all been brainwashed. Whoever watches television or goes to school hears certain ideas put across in the name of science, some of which are scientific and some of which are not scientific—they are speculations. Some of what is put across is philosophy, and some of it even comes close to a kind of religion.

This is especially strong in the Soviet Union, where they teach that man has descended from monkeys. The Soviet state pushes this idea as a kind of dogma. Therefore, when people become Christian, they throw off this idea that had been forced upon them. Here in the West, on the other hand, it is not quite so easy to see it as dogma, because here we are free; science is supposed to be free and have its own theories and its own reasons for having these theories. Therefore, often we think something is a scientific truth when it is not so at all, but rather is open to speculation and to discussion. Unfortunately, this very subject of evolutionism is very emotion-charged, and therefore a lot of people are not willing to discuss it. They would rather accept whatever is in the air, whatever is taught in the science class, without thinking too much.

Another reason why people do not want to think about or discuss this issue is because it is very complicated. You can get involved in all kinds of complex questions which are totally irrelevant. For example, you tell somebody, “I don’t believe that man comes from a monkey”; and he says, “But science doesn’t teach that man comes from a monkey.”

“Well, I don’t believe that he comes from an ape."
"But science doesn’t teach he comes from an ape. Science teaches he comes from a lower creature which is not an ape, but something else.”

In fact, nowadays some evolutionists say that some of the apes descended from men, instead of vice versa. There are all kinds of evidence you can add up on whatever side you want to take. All these details aside, however, there are certain basic questions one can ask. “Does man come directly from the hand of God, or does he come from some lower creature?”—That is a very basic question which should be open to discussion. And there are two ways of approaching the discussion: one from the side of Genesis (and we have to know how to understand what the book of Genesis says), the other from the side of science.

It so happens that science is not at all as certain about this question as some people claim it is. The Soviets say that everything is quite certain and dogmatic about it, and you simply accept what the scientists tell you and that is the truth. In the West, fortunately, there has been a lot of criticism and discussion of this matter.

When Darwin’s theory first came out in the late nineteenth century, there was a lot of discussion, most of it not on a very high level. People in the Church of England, for example, were very upset by the whole idea that man came from a lower creature, but they did not have any really scientific preparation to discuss the question; therefore, they became “fundamental” about it. In fact, up to this day, there are fundamentalists who get up in arms whenever you mention the subject. They say everything is absolutely literal in the book of Genesis; they go to the opposite extreme and make it very difficult to have a rational discussion on the subject.

On the whole, the scientific discussion was still not on a very high level when, in 1925, there occurred the famous “Scopes Monkey Trial,” which you have all heard about. In Tennessee there was a law against the teaching of evolution, and a teacher volunteered to be a nominal defendant in a test case. Actually the state won that case; but the famous lawyer Clarence Darrow made such a case for how ridiculous it is to stand by these old Biblical ideas—which are not “scientific,” and so forth—that from that time everybody became scared to be against evolution. Thus, those who were against it just remained quiet and did not have any particular argument. (There were actually some good books in that period which criticized the theory of evolution, but they were outside the main trend.) Even very fundamentalist people often would give way on various points about the theory of evolution, or else they would not want to discuss evolution because it was too difficult. And there are so many complex issues involved that it is a very difficult subject to discuss rationally unless you are prepared.

However, in the last twenty years or so there have been a number of people who have been looking at this whole question a little more objectively, criticizing and discussing sometimes various small points, sometimes the whole theory. This has been a very good thing. Science should welcome it. Unfortunately, it has not been too well received in scientific circles.

I’ve become acquainted with these people. There is one group in San Diego called the Institute for Creation Research; they put out a monthly newsletter called Acts & Facts which discusses what is happening in their research. Usually it has an insert which goes into a specific scientific question. For example, one is on the law of entropy and creationism, another one is on experimental psychology, and so forth; there are often quite sophisticated discussions. They discuss the age of the earth, the age of the solar system, and all those questions which you have to know about if you are going into the scientific side of this issue.

These people are very good. Their Institute is a Protestant religious school, but they are operating purely on the basis of scientific criticism. They put out a number of textbooks, including a very good one called Scientific Creationism, in which they discuss all the various points about evolution and creation without mentioning anything religious, because if they were to start mentioning religious things, of course, their textbook could never be used in a high school or a college. In the last few years especially, they have gotten quite a bit of impetus behind them. They have been having a number of debates in big universities all over the country, and there has been great interest—students come out by the thousands. The student response depends on where the debate takes place. If it occurs in a university in California, the students will be more against creationist ideas. In the South, the students are more in favor of them. In fact, in one place the evolutionists who were debating said they felt like they were a lion in a den of Daniels: everything was reversed.

The discussions of the creation scientists are very interesting. They are quite up on the latest literature and discoveries. On the other hand, recently some of the evolutionists have stopped debating creation/evolution because they generally are not prepared. A number of them recently admitted that, since these creationists are so up on their details and so sharp in debate, they are putting the evolutionists to shame. It is time, they say, that evolutionists go back and begin to find out what their arguments are, because through all these years they have been taking for granted that everyone thinks like they do. They were not ready for all the criticism from the side of creationism, which goes into quite specific points which are very dubious according to the evolutionist interpretation.

The Creation Research Society in Michigan now has a voting membership of well over six hundred scientists, all of whom signed a statement that they were in favor of the creationist interpretation of origins. Therefore, if someone tells you that evolution is the only scientific interpretation, you should be aware that there are at least six hundred scientists who say no. There are thousands more who, although they would not make that actual statement, nevertheless sympathize and are willing to discuss the issue. In fact, one of our friends who is a scientist told us that more and more people in the scientific world, although they still stick to the evolution model, do not even insist that it is truth; it is for them a model that helps to explain how things came to be, how they are now developing, and so forth.

The creationists offer a visual presentation of two models—the creationist and the evolutionist—by which you can see what should happen according to the former and what should happen according to the latter. They say that the situation now is like it was in the time of Copernicus. Before Copernicus there was the geocentric model: that the sun, planets, and stars go around the earth. In order to explain how the planets move according to this interpretation, it was necessary to make so-called cycles and epicycles. For example, astronomers noticed that Mars appeared to go faster than the stars for a while, and then it suddenly went backwards. They had to figure out what kind of movement it needed to have in order to make it do this. If it was simply going around the earth, it was a very strange thing that it should be suddenly going backwards. Therefore, they had to make all kinds of adjustments in the sky to account for the fact that it did not follow a regular movement. Finally these movements and adjustments became so complicated that Copernicus said it was much easier to explain everything as if the earth and the planets went around the sun. The stars out there are comparatively fixed; they are further away than the planets. According to this concept, you have to make fewer epicycles and fewer adjustments in the calculations.

The creation scientists say that this is exactly what is happening with the evolutionary theory. Whenever something comes up which goes against the evolutionary theory, the evolutionists put in another cycle or epicycle. They explain that it cannot really be that way because it goes against the theory, and that is why they have to make an adjustment for this particular exception. The creationists say, why not change the theory and make it more simple?

Unfortunately, there is a lot of prejudice in this area because people say that if you talk about creation, you’re talking about religion. Actually, every scientific theory has to have something which is assumed on faith. The evolutionists assume their belief on faith. The really rigorous ones insist that once there was nothing or there was a point of tremendous energy which suddenly exploded and produced the universe. It requires a great amount of faith to believe that. If you believe in God, you have a whole different approach. Of course, if you believe in God, then, since He is infinite, He can do whatever He wants. Then you can be free to see what fits the scientific facts and what fits the text of Genesis.

One common mistake in approaching the book of Genesis is to say that it is something religious, maybe even myth, while science treats the factual aspect. That is an oversimplified view, because Genesis talks about truth, and thus there will be an overlapping between what science talks about—because science is trying to get to truth—and what Genesis talks about. We have to be aware that we cannot put them in two different categories. When people try to separate them in this way (which they very frequently do as an answer to the question) they do not treat Genesis as a serious text. They say Genesis is not to be interpreted as a text that actually talks about the origins of nature, except as a kind of speculation or as a handing down of ancient myths, Babylonian creation tales, or something like that.

Therefore, the question is: how are we going to approach this whole text of Genesis? I think we have only one answer. We have to understand how this text has been understood by the Church over the past two thousand years, because it is a text which comes from God—a revealed text—and the Church which has preserved the revelation of God must have the way to understand it. Therefore, you cannot trust someone who simply opens up the text, in the English translation he has, and gives what seems to him to be a very basic interpretation. Furthermore, you cannot trust your own interpretation, because you are going to put your modern ideas into it. You are going to make it evolutionist or anti-evolutionist, according to your prejudice. That does not tell us what the text of Genesis says. To understand what it says, we have to understand how the Church understands it. In other words, what is the Patristic reading of it, how do the Fathers understand the text? That is what this course is about.

We discussed in the last year’s course the first three chapters of Genesis, which are of course the “thickest” ones, requiring the most interpretation. These chapters discuss the whole Six Days of Creation, the creation of man, the fall of man, the state of Paradise, and man’s banishment from Paradise.

Last year we saw that the interpretation of the Holy Fathers is not exactly what the Protestants would be satisfied with because it is not “fundamental” enough in some respects; and the people who want to combine Genesis with the modern theory of evolution would also not be satisfied with it because it is much too “fundamental” for them. Actually, if you want one word to describe how the Fathers interpret Genesis, I think you can say they interpret it very realistically. That is, first of all, they accept that (and this is a very basic point) the text is Divinely inspired. In fact, St. John Chrysostom says that it is a book of prophecy. Some books prophesy the future, but the book of Genesis is a prophecy of the past. This is necessary because, when the world was created, there was no witness. You cannot possibly have someone give you a firsthand account of what happened at the beginning of the world, because there was no one there. Therefore, unless the One Who made the world Himself tells you, you will never know—all you will have will be guesses.

According to the Holy Fathers, however, we do have this knowledge because God revealed it to the prophet Moses. Moses was in a state of ecstasy when he received this text about the beginnings of the world; therefore, we have to read Genesis rather as we would read the book of the Apocalypse, the last book of the Bible, which deals with prophecies which have not been fulfilled yet and so is rather difficult to understand.

Genesis, then, should be understood as prophecy, according to the Holy Fathers, according to the rest of the Holy Scripture, and according to our own experience in the Church. A lot of it, of course, is beyond us; therefore we can say only a few things about some parts of the text.

So we approach this text as Divinely revealed, realizing that we will obtain a basic understanding of it not through our common sense, nor through science (although of course we have to use common sense also, and we can use science where it applies to a given text), but through the Holy Fathers.

This raises another question. People who are scientifically aware will say the Fathers made mistakes in science. For example, St. Basil the Great, in his writings on the Six Days of Creation, states that there are some creatures, such as certain frogs, which spontaneously come from the dust.² This was according to the science of his day. Knowing this isn’t true, people in modern times say that the man made a mistake, since the science of his day, through which he was interpreting the scientific aspect, was wrong. And it is true that, in this respect, when there are scientific facts, we can correct the writings of the Holy Fathers. Some people, however, think this means we can correct the text of Genesis. But if you look at the text of Genesis, you will see that whenever the Fathers make these misinterpretations because of their knowledge of the science of their day, it is not because the text of Genesis says that. It is because that is the most logical way to read it on the basis of the scientific knowledge. Today we would have a little different way of reading it, and we might be more correct. The text remains the same.

Actually there is not a single statement in the text of Genesis which commits one either to the idea that the sun is going around the earth or the earth around the sun, or anything of the sort. That is all a matter of later interpretation, dependent upon our scientific awareness. Thus the text of Genesis is not open to this criticism of science.

We might correct the interpretation of the Fathers if it deals with specific scientific questions like where frogs come from or something like that.

By the way, we should also not be afraid of science in interpreting the book of Genesis because all the writings of the Holy Fathers about the Six Days of Creation are filled with scientific facts, based on the science of their day. For example, when St. Basil discusses the creation of the birds, fish, or land animals, he goes into all the different kinds and explains their customs. He then tells how we can draw examples of moral life from them, like a bird that is faithful to its mate. That is all very nice and interesting, but the text of Genesis does not stand or fall on that. This is explanatory material. Actually, someone today could go into the scientific facts we have about creation, using these as explanatory material, and could write a tremendous book on this very subject of the Six Days of Creation. Unfortunately, people tend to be too narrow-minded nowadays; the scientists will not broaden their horizon enough to take in the whole aspect of Genesis. The ones who read Genesis usually are not prepared enough for the scientific side. Nevertheless, we can keep this possibility in mind; the subject is a very fruitful area for discussion.

Also, we are not to be afraid of science because science cannot possibly contradict revealed truth. If it’s truth, it’s truth. There’s one kind revealed from God, and one kind revealed in nature. The kind revealed from God is absolute, we say, because it comes directly from God. But its interpretation relies upon our wisdom, which we obtain from the Church and the Holy Fathers as we go. When we have understood that, then we can even make our own speculations, as long as we do not say that those speculations are on the same level as the text itself. Science is much more speculative, especially when it comes to these very early things like the creation of the world, since no one was there to see it.

I should mention also a basic fact about the first Six Days of Creation that we discussed last year: those Six Days are quite different from what is going on now. The Holy Fathers make it quite clear that you cannot make deductions based upon what is happening now and derive an understanding of the first Six Days of Creation, because what was happening then was the creation of the world out of nothing. That is not happening today. Now we have the continuous creative activity of God. St. John Chrysostom discusses this very matter in his commentary on Genesis. As he points out, in Genesis it is said that God rested from His works (c£ Gen. 2:2), that is, ceased to create, but our Lord in the Gospel of John says that the Father continues to work (c£ John 5:17), and therefore He must still be creating. So these are two different things. What was in the beginning was the creation of God, from which He rested. That is no longer taking place. What happens after that is His continuous Providence over the world, which is actually a continuous creation, because without the living Word of God, how could a seed become an individual person or plant or animal? It is all very miraculous and a work of creation, but it’s different from the creation which was at the beginning, in the first Six Days. If you do not see that, you will make a lot of mistakes.

We will see in our reading of the next chapters of Genesis—four through eleven—that there is even a basic difference between the way men were before the Flood and the way they were after the Flood. There are a number of things which changed with the Flood. But it was in the Six Days that everything we know now came to be, and after that is simply the continuation of those things which were already created, according to the laws which God made and gave to nature.

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Footnotes

1. See Editor’s Note, Genesis, Creation, and Early Man: The Orthodox Vision, 2nd ed., p. 677: The following talk, taken entirely from a tape transcription, was given as an introduction to the second segment of Fr. Seraphim’s course on Genesis, August 9, 1982. Several of his students were new, not having attended the first segment in August 1981. Therefore, before providing a Patristic commentary on the fourth to eleventh chapters of Genesis (from Cain and Abel to the Tower of Babel), Fr. Seraphim recapped what he had said during the first segment about science as it relates to Scripture and the Holy Fathers. A few weeks after giving this talk, he was taken to the hospital, and on September 2 he reposed in the Lord. ↩

2. St. Basil the Great, Hexaemeron 9.2, Fathers of the Church vol. 46, p. 137 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1947-). ↩