Evolution and an Orthodox Patristic understanding of Genesis

[ChristosVoskrese]

Evolution is nothing more than a false pagan religion. No-one has ever seen one life form evolve into another. No-one has ever witnessed spontaneous generation of life from non-living matter. It's accepted by faith - the same faith that Christians put in God as Creator. And for those who would argue about evolution being a religion, well, teachers who teach criticisms of evolution or present the problems with the theory of evolution are criticized and even fired for teaching 'religion'.

Evolution was created to show how the universe could come about without God. It is necessary to the secular, atheist, humanist agendas. It is therefore the enemy of Christianity.

Evolution is totally incompatible with Orthodoxy. Christianity says that there was no death until Adam sinned. Evolution says that death was there from the beginning. This therefore makes God the author of death and suffering and makes a mockery of the Incarnation. Why would God seek to save us from that which he created? If his creation is good, then death and suffering must be good, and therefore we would have no need to be saved from them. Evolution also posits that we have progressed from a lesser to a more developed state. Therefore sin is also part of God’s creation, and we have no need to be delivered from it. This means that Our Lord Jesus Christ died for no reason, and it makes a mockery of the Crucifixion. Christianity claims that everything God created is good, and that it was man’s rebellion that brought death and sin into the world. To accept evolution means to say that sin is good, because God supposedly created it.

Do you believe in the Bible? Because, if you do, then it poses quite a few problems for theistic evolution. The Bible says that God created Adam and Eve, and that Adam and Eve sinned and thus lost the grace of God. Man was created in the image of God. Surely that rules out evolution from a primate. The Bible also says that living things reproduce only "according to their kinds".

Some, however, take the Genesis Creation account to be symbolic, not literal. How, then, does one decide which parts of Scripture are to be taken literally and which parts are to be taken symbolically? If you say that the Genesis Creation account was symbolic, then how do you determine which parts of Scripture are to be taken literally, and which are to be taken symbolically? Using the same argument, you could say: "Jesus wasn't really born from a virgin - that was just symbolising how great He was". Or, "The Eucharist isn't really Christ's literal Body and Blood - He was just showing us how important it is and how reverently we must treat it."

The changing of the water into wine at Cana, the raising of Lazarus from the dead, and the Glorious Resurrection of Christ were all miraculous events. None can be explained biologically. Did these events literally take place as described, or, as some liberal theologians assert, may we assume rather that these passages of Scripture were given only to establish certain spiritual truths?

Evolution Must be Combatted

The utter incompatibility of Darwinian evolution and Sacred Scripture must be recognized. If belief in Adam and Eve is destroyed, then our entire Orthodox Faith falls to pieces.

Because, if evolution is true then Adam and Eve did not even exist.

If Adam and Eve did not exist, then there is no such thing as the Fall.

If there's no such thing as the Fall and sin there is no need to be redeemed from sin.

If there is no need for a redeemer, then there is no need for the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity to become Man and die on the Cross for our sins.

If there is no such thing as the Sacrifice of the Cross then there is no such thing as the sacrifice of the Holy Liturgy, etc., etc., etc.

Evolution: Critical for the Atheist Agenda

Evolution is a theory that is believed, not because it can be proven true, but because the alternative, special creation by God, is quite clearly incredible.

[Pravoslavnik]

"The utter incompatibility of Darwinian evolution and Sacred Scripture must be recognized."

Dear C.V.,

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  This is the thesis of the Fundamentalist Protestants which I have tried to elucidate and refute on this thread.  What does the original  Hebrew text of [i]Genesis [/i]acutally say about God's creation of the universe and the "adamah"? If we carefully translate the Hebrew text of [i]Genesis[/i], as Gerald Schroeder has done in his book [i]The Science of God,[/i] it has profound consistency with many of the findings of modern astrophysics.  The Holy Fathers have always believed that God brought the universe into existence ex nihilo, and modern physicists have theorized that the Big Bang may have occurred by the splitting of nothing--of matter and anti-matter. During the next 15 billion years, measured from our earth-time perspective, the stars and solar systems of the galaxies coalesced.  For most of the 3.5 billion yeas of earth's existence, life consisted of only unicellular organisms, which formed an oxygenated atmosphere.  There was then the Cambrian era proliferation of multicellular organisms, with the very gradual development of more complex, differentiated organisms and ecosystems.  Through the millenia, there were many "blind alleys" and extinctions of species, along with the appearance of new species, some of which have, of course, survived on the earth to this day, including differentiated primates like ourselves, who appeared very lately in the biosphere.

      If God "micro-managed" this entire multi-billion year biological sequence by deliberately genetically engineering speciation, why did "He" make so many mistakes?  Why did "He" create the Triceratops,  Stegosaurus, and T. Rex, only to watch them become extinct millions of years before homo sapiens walked the earth?  Isn't the scientific data of paleontology better explained by scientific laws and mechanisms like genetic variation and natural selection in response to environmental conditions? In short, is there a more elegant, viable scientific theory to explain the data of paleobiology than Darwinian evolution?

      As an Orthodox Christian, I believe that God created the "adamah" ("man from the earth") through evolution.  I also believe that He created [i]Adam[/i] through a special act of creation (involving a different Hebrew verb for creation than the adamah.) Adam was given a living soul in the image and likeness of God (the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.)  As descendants of Adam, we all have the Divine Archtype, but have fallen from the image and likeness of God through our sins.  Christ God, through his incarnation, has enabled us to regain the lost Archtype through repentance and the grace of the Holy Spirit which is available through the sacramental life of the Holy Church.

       My point, all along, is that the Protestant Fundamentalist interpretations of [i]Genesis[/i] are not correct, and should not be incorporated into the teachings of the Orthodox Church.  There is a mystical aspect to [i]Genesis[/i] that is truly consistent with our limited scientific knowledge of the cosmos, and goes far beyond our rudimentary understanding of the time-space contiuum, but it is not the interpretation of [i]Genesis[/i] promoted by Henry Morris and the Young Earth Creationists.  Furthermore, I believe that the Orthodox Christians who have promoted Henry Morris's Fundamentalist interpretation of [i]Genesis [/i]are potentially damaging the Orthdox Church by insisting that Orthodox Christians must believe things which are simply untrue in order to be Orthodox.

[joasia]

This entire thread, and several of your recent posts, are based on the thesis--included in the poll-- that one cannot be a true Orthodox Christian and also accept the scientific validity of the Darwinian theory of evolution based on natural selection.

Yes, that is the fact.

I have simply tried to clarify why your position on this issue makes no sense.

You have failed miserably. Move on. Gain some humility and realize that you are blaspheming.

I have also offered an alternative, scientifically-based interpretation of the text of Genesis (from Gerald Schroeder) which draws upon the theory of relativity with respect to the passage of time in the cosmos.

You are listening to liars. You will loose all sense of rationality if you persist.

If you are bored by this subject, why are you posting your opinions so dogmatically?

For your sake and for the sake of others that might be reading.

Pravo, listen. I have talked to my family, long ago about why I converted to Orthodoxy. They fought me every step. At one point, a person has to say...that's it. Let them learn for themselves and all I can do is pray for them.

Believe what you want, but stop trying to convince me to believe it too. Because you are wrong. Swallow your pride and examine yourself. Why are you really so persistant about believing the evolutionist view? Don't answer here. Just ask yourself.

If you want to continue discussing this then I will honor that. We can explore the different views in order to glorify God. Are you willing to approach it that way?

My question to you is, are you still searching for the perfect answer to your personal queries of life or are you trying to preach evolution?

In Christ, Joanna

[stumbler]

I was raised in the Orthodox faith, and we were instructed, by clergy, when we questioned whether to believe science or the Bible, that there was no conflict.

I hardly think that the old-time ROCOR clergy were exactly liberals with regard to theology.

I took particular interest in this very question, because as a child who attended both Catholic schools and Orthodox school, I often had the gut feeling that the Catholics were a bit too quick to dismiss uncomfortable questions by relying on the old "It's just symbolic" answer.

I see the whole question of "evolution" as a Protestant distraction from important spiritual matters.

The literal truth of the Bible is a protestant concept which evolved from their breaking with the Church and its teachings. They felt they had no other rock to anchor on, and it has led to these distractions. The Bible is meant to be understood within the context of the Church and ALL of its teachings.

One of the great beauties of the Orthodox faith is that we recognize that there are mysteries. We recognize, much moreso than other faiths, that there is room for the faithfull to say "We don't know."

Scientists also admit that they don't know everything. That is compatible with Orthodoxy. God can have made the world any way He wanted to, and can have told us in Scripture anything He wanted to. What is arrogant and incompatible with Orthodoxy, in my opinion, is to believe in limiting God.

I am reminded of a miracle of St John of Shanghai and San Francisco. He is said to have visited someone with a head wound at a hospital in Shanghai. Doctors refused to do surgery because they said the patient would never survive, and if they did they would be a vegetable, and that it was too dangerous to try.

He prayed over them, and they recovered just enough that the doctors agreed to do the surgery.

They survived and recovered completely.

Faith, prayer, God and science all worked together.

Was God not in the equation because science had a role? Should God have done the healing Himself, without the intercession of the surgeon? If so, why did St. John ask the doctor to examine the patient anew and reconsider doing the surgery?

Science is not at odds with faith, unless you are perhaps a Christian Scientist or some other form of Protestant.

The Jehovah's witnesses don't believe in education of any kind because they say the end is so near that time is better spent elsewhere - as if they know how God intends each of us to spend our time.

The examples are myriad.

My belief, as someone who was raised in Orthodoxy, is that we should remain humble and open minded and trust in God and His Holy Church - not a youTube video of a heretic.

God calls us to wisdom, not foolishness. He asks us to see, not blind ourselves.

That is my humble opinion. You may take it for what you feel it is worth.

[ChristosVoskrese]

This is the thesis of the Fundamentalist Protestants which I have tried to elucidate and refute on this thread. What does the original Hebrew text of Genesis acutally say about God's creation of the universe and the "adamah"? If we carefully translate the Hebrew text of Genesis, as Gerald Schroeder has done in his book The Science of God, it has profound consistency with many of the findings of modern astrophysics.

Pravo, you are inconsistent. First you accuse me of holding a thesis made by "Fundamentalist Protestants" and then you turn around and try to justify your position by referring to a book written by a Jew. You attack my beliefs by saying that they are "fundamentalist", yet you yourself quote from a book written by someone who denies Christ and whose holy book contains horrible blasphemies against Our Lord Jesus and His all-Holy Mother.

In short, is there a more elegant, viable scientific theory to explain the data of paleobiology than Darwinian evolution?

Yes, there is - God created the earth and all living creatures.

Darwinian evolution is full of holes. Even scientists disagree with it or outright reject it. Dr. Walter Brown interviewed a molecular biologist who told him that no-one in his profession really believes that life just evolved, yet they appear to hold to this theory in order to keep their jobs and not be fired for being "religious fanatics"

The scientific magazine Discover puts the situation this way.

Evolution....is not only under attack by fundamentalist Christians, but is also being questioned by reputable scientists. Among paleontologists, scientists who study the fossil record, there is growing dissent from the prevailing view of Darwinism.

As an Orthodox Christian, I believe that God created the "adamah" ("man from the earth") through evolution. I also believe that He created Adam through a special act of creation (involving a different Hebrew verb for creation than the adamah.) Adam was given a living soul in the image and likeness of God (the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.) As descendants of Adam, we all have the Divine Archtype, but have fallen from the image and likeness of God through our sins. Christ God, through his incarnation, has enabled us to regain the lost Archtype through repentance and the grace of the Holy Spirit which is available through the sacramental life of the Holy Church.

Can you find any support for your theory from the Church Fathers or the deposit of faith? Does the Orthodox Church agree with such a theory. I think you'll find that Blessed Seraphim Rose was a firm opponent of evolution. I choose to accept the Church Fathers' teaching, that God created the world and all living things.

My point, all along, is that the Protestant Fundamentalist interpretations of Genesis are not correct, and should not be incorporated into the teachings of the Orthodox Church.

And you think that your view, based on a book written by a Jew, should?

There is a mystical aspect to Genesis that is truly consistent with our limited scientific knowledge of the cosmos, and goes far beyond our rudimentary understanding of the time-space contiuum, but it is not the interpretation of Genesis promoted by Henry Morris and the Young Earth Creationists. Furthermore, I believe that the Orthodox Christians who have promoted Henry Morris's Fundamentalist interpretation of Genesis are potentially damaging the Orthdox Church by insisting that Orthodox Christians must believe things which are simply untrue in order to be Orthodox.

So you're saying that what the Church Fathers and Blessed Seraphim Rose believed is simply untrue?

This entire thread, and several of your recent posts, are based on the thesis--included in the poll-- that one cannot be a true Orthodox Christian and also accept the scientific validity of the Darwinian theory of evolution based on natural selection.

Whereas you seem to believe that one cannot be a true Orthodox Christian unless you believe in evolution. According to what you've written, you think that Orthodoxy and Creationism are incompatible.

Think about what you're saying for a minute. Are you trying to tell us that you believe that the vast diversity of life has come about due to random mutations and natural selection? For a start, most mutations are harmul, not helpful. In fact many of them are lethal. Experiments have found that for every helpful or useful mutation, there are thousands of harmful ones. Also, even if mutations are beneficial, they do not produce anything new. A mutation can only result in the variation of a trait that is already there.

Also, natural selection does not produce new genetic information. In fact, genetic information is lost through natural selection. For example: the original dog probably had genetic information for various fur lengths. The first animals probably had medium-length fur. In the picture below a single gene pair is shown under each dog as coming in two possible forms. One form of the gene (L) carries instructions for long fur, the other (S) for short fur.

In row 1, we have two medium-furred dogs (LS) mating. Each of the offspring of these dogs can get one of either gene from each parent to make up their two genes.
In row 2, we can see that their offspring have either short (SS), medium (LS) or long (LL) fur.
Now imagine that the climate cools drastically. It is so cold that only those with long fur survive to give rise to the next generation. So from then on, all the dogs will be a new, long-furred variety.

The dogs are now adapted to their environment. They are now more specialized than their ancestors on row 1. This has occured through natural selection.

However, there have been no new genes added. In fact, genes have been lost from the population—i.e., there has been a loss of genetic information, the opposite of what microbe-to-man evolution needs in order to be credible. Now the population is less able to adapt to future environmental changes—if the climate became hot, there is no genetic information for short fur, so the dogs would probably overheat.

So, genetic information is lost through natural selection. Therefore, it can't account for the huge diversity of different kinds of living creatures.

[joasia]

Stumbler,

The literal truth of the Bible is a protestant concept...

Can you expand on that? Doesn't Orthodoxy teach us that we should believe the events in the Bible, literally? The evolutionists want us to believe that it was symbolic.

There are events, in the Bible, that can be proven by scientific examination, like the Flood and other events like the parting of the Red Sea was a miracle and has to be believe in faith, that it did happen.

And, I've read explanations, by the holy fathers, that these literal events also have an underlying spiritual teaching. Noah's Ark is the symbol of the Church; the parting of the Red Sea was a spiritual teaching of baptism, as the Jews passed through it, and the drowning of the Egyptian soldiers as the deliverance from death; a prefiguration of Christ's Ressurection.

So if some non-Orthodox have a solid scientific explanation of showing that these events happened, then is that so detrimental? And I'm referring to creation, not evolution.

Was God not in the equation because science had a role? Should God have done the healing Himself, without the intercession of the surgeon? If so, why did St. John ask the doctor to examine the patient anew and reconsider doing the surgery?

I agree. God is the Creator of this world and obviously the Source of all the science we learn about. There are times when He uses scientific intervention and times when it's a clear miracle with no scientific explanation.

In this example, I think it was in order, to first glorify God, through an Orthodox saint and second, perhaps to reach out to whoever was witnessed to this event. I would go one step further and say that there might have been one person who came to Orthodoxy because of this situation. Am I right? Who was it??

[Pravoslavnik]

Dear Joanna and C.V.,

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     There are so many flaws in your arguments that one hardly knows where to begin.  Let me preface my comments by saying that I have studied these creationist vs. evolution issues for the past 15 years, and that I have rather personal familiarity with people who were involved with the (posthumously) published manuscripts of blessed Father Seraphim Rose on the subject of evolution.

    Let me begin by asking you to comment upon your belief about how old the earth is, and a brief summary of your understanding of the history of life forms on our planet.  As a specific example, when do you believe that the dinosaurs lived on the earth?  When, in the course of earth's history did homo sapiens appear?  Let us try to establish some basic benchmarks for our discussion.  Otherwise, we have no objective data to refer to in resolving the differences of opinion.

   Secondly, would you agree that any text can be best understood in the language in which it was written?  If [i]Genesis[/i] was written, and faithfully transcribed for thousands of years, in Hebrew, is it too much to expect that it can best be translated and understood by those who know the Hebrew language?  How much of Shakespeare or Pushkin is lost in Chinese translation?  None?  If Gerald Schroeder knows astrophysics, Hebrew, and the scholarly tradition of Hebraic interpretation of Genesis, we probably have a lot to learn from him. 

    Finally, the rather simplistic example of genetic variations in the length of a dog's hair is flawed in several ways.  For one thing, the model presents a closed environmental system.  What if the original dogs were at liberty to roam through temperate and tropical climate zones?  Ulitmately, the short-haired genes would predominate in the warmer climates, and vice versa.  Some environments would select for increasingly large dogs, others for smaller.  (For example, there are skeletal remains of pygmy elephants on the island of Crete.  The best explanation is that these pygmies descended from continental African elephants prior to the end of the last Ice Age, when the Mediterranean basin was flooded via the Straits of Gibraltar.)  Island fauna, over time, like Shetland sheep, ponies, and dogs, almost invariably become smaller through the generations than their mainland cousins, due to the scarcity of food under insular conditions.  

    Genetic information is not lost through natural selection, but becomes differentiated and more complex through adaptation to diverse, changing ecological conditions.  The time scales involved are quite immense--millions of years--so these genetic variations causing speciation seem counterintuitive with species larger than microbes to us.  But we certainly see these genetic variations in microbes!  Why do you think that bacteria are continually becoming resistant to our antibiotics?

       I have no doubt that many Holy Fathers of the Orthodox Church firmly believed that the earth was flat, and that the sun and stars rotated around the earth.  Does that make me think less of their Orthodox wisdom?  Absolutely not!  To quote blessed St. Augustine of Hippo, again, we Orthodox Christians should not make dogmatic statements about matters of science that may turn out to be incorrect.  This is why the Papacy should never have condemned Galileo.  This latter day Protestant Fundamentalism that promotes Young Earth Creationism is formally similar to the Rennaissance Papacy's condemnation of Galileo.  As I said originally, it is a tragedy of recent Orthodox history that blessed Father Seraphim embraced Henry Morris's Institute.  Does that make me think less of Father Seraphim's Orthodox wisdom?  Not really.  He was grappling with complex issues relating to St. Basil's [i]Hexameron[/i].  I don't think that Father Seraphim knew about the cosmological clock--based on the theory of relativity--which the MIT physicist Gerald Schroeder has applied to the text of [i]Genesis.[/i]