Orthodox Reflections

A very sad state of affairs exists in Christianity today in which the faithful, including our own Orthodox faithful, are trying to reconcile the evolutionary doctrine they were taught by their high school biology teachers with Christianity.  This cannot be done.  In this vain attempt at reconciliation, the result is only double mindedness.

But the mind intuitively recognizes this double mindedness, even if we are not consciously aware of the problem, and tends to edit our ideas accordingly.  In the contradiction between Christian theology and evolutionary theory, sadly it is our Christianity that the mind all too frequently edits out.

Here is how that works.  Let’s say that I am a Christian who accepts Darwinian evolution as science.  The first thing I do is question the historical/literal account of Creation in Genesis.  So far this is not a disaster because Orthodox theologians have differed on this point, and some of the best have believed it is allegorical.  Whether it is allegorical or literal, we must and should all agree that it is typological.  That is, Adam is a type for you and me.  So, if we are to understand ourselves, we must begin by understanding Adam.

But if I have accepted Darwinian evolution as science, then I cannot understand Adam as a type.  He is created, not evolved.  According to the prevailing orthodoxy, we have to go to an evolutionary typology to understand ourselves.  And herein lies a fundamental problem:  evolutionary doctrine tells us we are not created in the image and likeness of God; we are the result of random collisions of molecules over time.  Nor is rebellion against God our problem.  Man’s problems, according to evolutionary theory, stem from the fact that we still operate on instincts that were evolved mechanisms necessary for survival, but no longer function in the same way in advanced civilized society.  In fact, our instincts, necessary for survival in pre-historical, pre-civilizational times, lead to our destruction today.

But as Freud claimed, we cannot suppress our instincts in order to live according to the limits that civilization imposes upon us without producing neuroses.  One option is to not repress our instincts, especially the sexual ones, let our passions roam free, and this, according to the cultural revolutionaries like Herbert Marcuse, will produce human happiness of the first order!

Gone is the problem of sin, and life is made easy.  Man’s misery is caused by guilt and shame imposed by religious and civilizational restraints.  And if we as Orthodox Christians feel guilt and shame, there are no sins to confess.  When we make our confession, we confess our “traumas.”  This is what is being taught in at least one major seminary in the U.S.  A certain type of false compassion prevails in which virtually every traditional Christian moral standard is called into question.  Why?  Because we have evolved.

Recently a member of our parish council stated that he believed the Church’s traditional position on suicide should be rejected for this very reason.  He thought it not compassionate.  In truth, because Orthodox anthropology is the highest truth, we opposed suicide, and we rejected Christian burial for suicide victims because it is the very worst of sins.  Why?  Because the person who commits suicide removes the possibility of repentance and forgiveness, whereas someone who murders another can still repent to be reconciled to God and his neighbor.  Here we can begin to understand that our Christian doctrine is far more compassionate than evolutionary doctrine which implicitly, and more and more explicitly, exempts us from having to take moral responsibility for anything.

Darwin was confident that his theory would lead to a revolution in the science of human psychology and he was right.  And so today our problem is not one of sin, being first among sinners, but rather caused by mal-adjustments and neuroses.  In any troubling or difficult cases, the priest has to refer his flock to a psychologist or psychiatrist, due, in part, to the fact that he must reconcile evolutionary psychology with created psychology and this cannot be done.  Almost always, Christian psychology yields to evolutionary psychology.

The modern mind is a lazy one indeed, and is perfectly capable of holding to two contradictory ideas at the same time.  To be clear, Orthodoxy affirms the paradoxical nature of reality and our theological doctrine and this affirmation is repeated in our hymns.  But some sets of ideas are so contradictory that they cannot possibly be paradoxical in nature.  One refutes the other.  The opposing doctrines of evolution and Christianity are the supreme example of this.

I am not going to attempt to completely refute Darwinian evolutionary theory by relying on Christian theology, but only partly because there are legitimate differences in how we are to interpret the Genesis accounts of creation.  Fortunately, Darwinian evolution is so irrational that it can be easily refuted on its own terms as unscientific.

The Bible does not contain a refutation of evolutionary theory, nor, as far as I know, do the Church Fathers.  It was simply not an issue requiring refutation.  There were no Jews or Christians advocating evolutionary theory, although one might argue that Arianism represents a kind of evolutionary theory of Christ’s Divinity.   But the Greeks did, which is not surprising, since they pretty much thought of everything!

In the Symposium, Plato uses one of the sophists as a foil to present a fairly ludicrous account of evolution as a basis for his refutation.  Remember that sophistry is Plato’s diagnosis of the deformed soul of the educated Athenian of his day who is in love with his opinions and believes that his opinions matter.  What doesn’t matter is if they are grounded in anything real.  And so, when Socrates addresses an argument propounded by a sophist and shreds it to pieces, the sophist doesn’t really care.  He just changes the subject or resorts to a personal attack.  You will recognize this method if you have ever attempted to have an intelligent, rational argument with an evolutionist.

Not to be outdone, Aristotle delivers the final blow to the evolutionist claim that his theory can be an explanation of origins.  Remember, of course, that Darwin’s theory is explicitly a theory of origins.  It’s in the title of his famous book!  In the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle demonstrates that an evolutionary explanation of origins is irrational.  It is the problem of infinite regression.  If I were to ask you who or what caused you to exist, you would likely say that it was your parents that caused you to exist.  If I then were to ask you who or what caused your parents to exist, then you would likely say that it was their parents, your grandparents that caused them to exist.  And so on, ad infinitum.

Are you beginning to sense the problem here?  At each stage of the question, the problem remains the same.  Just going back further and further in time does not solve the problem.  Each answer to the question in the regression is equally irrational.  Aristotle recognized that for there even to be such a thing as rationality, there had to be a “first cause,” a “prime mover.”  You cannot explain anything by means of an infinite regression.

Now, Aristotle did not believe in the same kind of God that you or I as Orthodox Christians do, nor even the same God as Plato.  Plato’s god was the ground of all existence and intimately involved in all human affairs in a beneficial way.  Aristotle’s god was more deistic in nature, although there is debate on that point.  But that is irrelevant to the problem here, which is the problem of what constitutes reason-based science.  And reason-based science clearly demonstrates that no theory of evolution, even if you happen to believe that salamanders evolved into humans, can ever be a theory of origins.  And yet that is exactly the claim of all evolutionists.  They have to claim that it is the theory of the origin of everything that exists, which is why you will hear so many evolutionists embracing something called the Big Bang Theory.  When you ask them where the matter and energy came from for the Big Bang, they will change the subject or give you some kind of convoluted sophistical explanation of why you do not need any matter or energy to precede the Big Bang.  In the end, of course, you are just stupid and narrow minded for questioning the basis of evolution.

A key part of Darwin’s theory is that life, and the wide diversity of life, and the progression of simple to complex, is the result of gradual, random interaction over time.  The geological record disproved this part of Darwin’s theory at the time, and he admitted that it did so, but stated his confidence that in time the science of Geology would improve, that new discoveries would be made, and the geological strata would reveal evidence of the gradual evolution of life over the eons.  When no evidence appeared that would prove his theory, the Darwinists moved from gradualism to something they call “punctuated equilibrium” to account for the fact that over billions of years nothing much changes, and then in the span of millions of years there is an explosion of new types.  This remains a phenomenon in search of answers, but randomness and gradualism remain logical necessities if any evolutionary theory is to have any validity.  That is, in fact, the definition of EVOLUTION!

A considerable amount of computational and lab analysis has been conducted over the last few decades to test the theories of randomness and gradualism.  These experiments were not conducted by Billy Bob who has a degree in Scripture from Bethea Bible College.  These are actual scientists!  Pretty smart people.  And they have demonstrated that nothing in the science of probability allows for one molecule to find and combine with another molecule to produce a different type of molecule.  Extensive lab experiments have demonstrated that random interactions of amino acids over time cannot produce functioning protein molecules.  None of these experiments of course deal with the underlying problem of how molecules came to be in the first place.  If you press an atheist on this point, he may say that life was seeded on earth by aliens from outer space.  If you press a Darwinist on this point who is not strictly speaking an atheist, then he will likely say that God created matter and energy and the natural laws of the universe and then sat back to let nature take its course.

By trying to reconcile Orthodox Christianity with Darwinism, you end up being a deist and you cease being any kind of Christian I know of.  You are a pretend Christian who is lying to yourself.  Everything you are doing to claim you are a Christian is a pretense.  Because you cannot be a Christian and a deist at the same time.  A deist cannot possibly believe that God is so intimately involved in His creation, that in every Divine Liturgy we become partakers of divinity by consuming the body and blood of Jesus who is the Christ.

We are told that evolution is probably still happening, although the conditions have changed.  After all, there needn’t be any natural selection based on survival of the fittest if we live in an age of abundance.  Evolution Theory today assumes that human beings have taken charge of the evolutionary process through social and biological engineering.  If evolution were occurring, we still wouldn’t notice it because it is so gradual.  Randomness plus gradualism remains the logic imposed on Evolutionary Theory that the evolutionists simply cannot escape from.

We are far from an adequate understanding of genetics, of how genetic information operates and interacts.  But Darwinism does not depend on the science of genetics.  It depends on randomness and gradualism producing superior types.  Darwinism is the theory that nature, on its own, produces not only diversity, but over time it produces superior types.

Darwinism is inherently racist and has been used since by Nazis and eugenicists to justify racial genocide.  The title of Darwin’s book is On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.  A shortened version of this title could just as easily be Mein Kampf.

While Hitler did not explicitly base his theories of racial superiority on Darwinian evolution, the Nazi intellectuals in Germany did.  This problem is decisively confronted by Eric Voegelin’s Race and State, published in Germany shortly after Hitler came into power.  Voegelin undertakes perhaps the most thorough review of modern biological theory preceding Darwin, unwinds the scientific fallacies of Darwinism, and reveals how it is fundamentally an economic and social theory, not a biological one.

Darwin plagiarized the idea of natural selection due to survival of the fittest from Herbert Spencer who was a member of his intellectual circle in London at the time.  It is a myth that Spencer borrowed from Darwin’s theories to produce his theory of “Social Darwinism.”  It is, in fact, just the other way around.

Voegelin, who barely escaped arrest by the Gestapo for his book, argues that Darwin’s book is nothing other than British 19^th Century liberal economics applied to biology.  It’s almost inevitable that such a theory would develop.  If Darwin hadn’t written it, someone else would have.  It simply reflected the spirit of the age.  Historical progressivism had been around for a while.  The “Whig Theory of History,” as explained by Matthew Arnold, stated it succinctly:  “in each and every day, the world is getting better, in each and every way.”

Karl Marx derided bourgeois progressivism and hated British liberals, but he did recognize liberalism as a necessary stage toward communist revolution.   But Karl Marx LOVED Darwin’s book and wrote to him asking if he could dedicate his Communist Manifesto to Darwin.  He described Darwin’s book as the intellectual foundation for dialectical materialism.  Darwin politely refused and one can imagine that he was quite horrified by the thought of any association, not realizing himself that there was no fundamental difference between his theories and those of Marx.  Marx is evolutionary theory applied to economics.  Darwin is evolutionary theory applied to biology.  Hitler is evolutionary theory applied to race.

It is intellectual malpractice to propound a theory with obvious implications, and then wash your hands of them.  While Jesus is not responsible when I, as a Christian, do bad things, we have to hold Darwin accountable for making Hitlerism and eugenics intellectually respectable.  We have to be willing to face up to the fact that Darwinism was propounded in a time and place in which the British empire was at its peak, in which the British gentleman was believed to stand on the pinnacle of historical and, yes, racial evolution, that the British race was superior to all other races, which gave them not only the right but the obligation to colonize them.

The British Empire did not practice eugenics.  That was left to the more innovative Germans and Americans.  Eugenics was a very popular idea in pre-World War II America.  Teddy Roosevelt was a eugenicist.  Planned Parenthood was founded on the principle of eugenics, i.e. that evolution had produced “favoured races,” and that it was incumbent upon us not to corrupt the gene pool of the favoured races.  Which means the less favoured races could not intermarry with the favoured races, and preferably be prevented from breeding at all.  Which is why to this day Planned Parenthood targets black neighborhoods for their clinics.

Eugenics and abortion are almost inconceivable ideas in Christian, pre-Darwinian nations.  For a hundred and fifty years, Darwinians have won battle after battle.  It is time for Christians to win the war.

No matter how much Darwinists want to argue over the Cambrian explosion or the Big Bang, or carbon dating, they must accept moral responsibility for what is a vile, anti-human, brutal ideology that reduces human beings to be meaningless products of random interactions that can be used or dispensed with as one likes by those in charge.

As Christians we should not buy into any of this.  There are those who do not precisely believe in the Biblical timeline who nevertheless believe that God shaped the nature He created over a long period of time. A theory that would explain the Cambrian “explosion.”  There are those who believe that carbon dating is seriously flawed and the Biblical timeline is the correct one.  I am personally agnostic over the issue of the age of the Earth, but I am open to be persuaded either way.   I suspect that we have only scratched the surface of the science of genetics and that much more will be revealed.  I am perfectly open to what science, when duly applied, tells us.  I am not going to be persuaded by anyone that Darwinism is in any way scientific or intellectually valid, or anything other than an evil, demonic idea, not just because it rejects the Christian idea of man, but because of its obvious consequences:  the violent abolition of the human.

The latest scheme, if you have been following the statements issued by leaders of the World Economic Forum and others, is for all work to be conducted by robots.  The income from this economic production will then be distributed to the people according to certain algorithms based on your usefulness.  Very few human beings will be useful.  Which will allow a culling of the “herd” down to about half a billion people world-wide from its current eight billion.  The people remaining will be the “favoured races” so to speak.  The ones with the technical skills required to manage this Brave New World.  This will have the added benefit of saving the planet from humans.

What is the appeal of Darwinism?  The decline of Christian faith over the centuries is a complex subject.  But what is apparent is that you cannot simply eliminate faith and belief.  It has to be replaced with a substitute faith.  Darwinism offers a substitute faith and hope in the perfectibility of man.

Unless you are a heroin addict or Joseph Campbell, that is, unless you think that everything is just fine at this moment, you probably experience the world as messed up.  Why is it messed up and what can we do about it?  Christianity teaches us that mankind’s problems result from rebellion against God.  The consequence is death, which is an unnatural state.  To return us to our natural, created condition, God sent his Son, our Savior, to achieve victory over death and set us on the right and true path of salvation through His ecclesia.

There is an apocalyptic element to Christian theology.  There will be a time of tribulation leading to Christ’s return and final judgment.  Each and every one one of us is responsible for how we live our lives.  We can no longer blame Eve!  Each one of us is asked to live a life of repentance in obedience to His commandments. Only now, as we try each day, to the best of our ability, to fully live our lives in the Trinity, it is no longer an insurmountable task because we can be partakers of divinity.  Nor do we fret over the evil other men do, or wring our hands over the precarious times in which we live.

It’s not by accident that evolutionists have an apocalypse also.  With Darwinism, it has been slow and steady until now, but human beings can now violently speed up the process.  Naziism and Marxism both contain a violent, apocalyptic vision.  Without this violence we cannot perfect mankind.

In the current intellectual environment, maintaining faith in God isn’t easy.  Faith can be a tenuous bond for many of us.  Especially when under persecution, either overt or subtle.  As faith is less and less supported culturally, people search for alternatives.  Darwinism is very appealing as a substitute because it is essentially a very optimistic, utopian vision of man evolving and evolving, making progress toward perfection, and we really don’t have to do anything!  It’s pre-determined.  Baked in.  But by believing in it we partake in its sacramental vision:  human perfectibility.  If you disbelieve, then you are a heretic.  You are not permitted to make your case in public, let alone in public schools because you are endangering the whole premise upon which contemporary society is founded:  limitless possibilities.  You cannot stand in the way of progress!

But that is exactly what we must do.  We must resist the temptation to believe in this irrational nonsense which can only come from Satan.  Whenever irrationality exists, we know that Satan has been at work, trying to convince us that faith in the Holy Trinity is irrational superstition.  But what can be more irrational and superstitious than turning our genes into gods?

While the predominance of stupidity is frustrating, and can lead to either anger or despair, it is important to trudge forth in faith with love and compassion and understanding.  We need to learn to see every human who is lost as a potential good thief.  We need to learn to love those who persecute, mock and revile us.  We need to recognize that, as it says in the Didache, the Christian has no enemies.

As pious as we may be in our personal lives, we also have an obligation to understand the spirit of the age, to consciously weed out bad ideas from our minds, so that we can become Christian apologists, like St. Hyppolytus of Rome, St. Clement of Alexandria, St. John Chrysostom and St. John of Damascus.  We don’t have to be scholars and theologians.  We simply need to do a better job of knowing what we believe and why.  This will enable us to recognize bad ideas– in ourselves first–and then in others, and speak up when these bad ideas are proclaimed, starting within our own churches.

– Seraphim Owen Jones, a member of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America