Young Orthodox Mail

This holds that all living things are descended from a common ancestor as a result of changes accumulated over geological time. It is not concerned with origin of life.

A fact is an observation, something that can be verified by any competent observer. For example, it is a fact that you are reading this article. It is a fact that the World Trade Center is taller than the Empire State Building. A scientific theory, such as the Theory of Evolution, is something seen in the mind, a human construct. It is not a wild guess or hunch on the part of a scientist but is based on evidence and has explanatory value. For a theory to be scientific, it must be falsifiable, a technical term meaning that there must be circumstances imaginable that, if shown to be true, would invalidate the theory. The Theory of Evolution would be falsified if, for example, human remains were ever to be discovered along with those of dinosaurs, thus radically upsetting the order currently perceived in the fossil record.

Many are concerned that it seems that the Bible always has to give way to the advances of science. The other side of the coin is a sort of challenge to science: "Science cannot explain. ..." Regardless of the nature of the phenomenon that science cannot explain, that this is said at all reveals a concern that, as science explains more and more in naturalistic terms, there is seen to be less and less room left for God. But the only "God" that is being squeezed out is God-of-the-Gaps, an idol, a meaningless reduction of God to the status of a scientific explanation.

When all is said and done, "creation science" is based on a fundamentalist Protestant approach to the Bible, an approach that is different from that of the Orthodox Church. While individual pieces of fundamentalist interpretation may bear a superficial resemblance to some of the literal biblical interpretation found in the Church fathers, it belongs to a very different theological understanding. For one thing, to assume, as the Fathers did in the absence of evidence to the contrary that the Genesis creation accounts are broadly historical is a far cry from making this assumption today in the face of such evidence. ut more importantly, in the Church's understanding, the Bible is not primarily a cosmological book which speaks about creation and history. It is not transparent and self-interpreting: its truth does not stand or fall by the accuracy of all its statements that are historical in form, when they are given a literal reading. Scripture is not to be seen as the word of God but rather a book which speaks of the Only-Begotten Word of God who has "put on words" for our sakes, "clothing Himself in our metaphors", as St Ephrem says. The creationists' more or less literal reading of Genesis is a world away from the richly layered depths of meaning which the Fathers find.

Because "creation science" sets itself up as a scientific alternative to evolution, it must, like evolution, stand or fall on the basis of scientific criteria. Except for the "flood geology" creation scientists have proposed, "creation science" is not falsifiable because it claims that the natural laws we know did not hold in the "creation period" and because it invokes the supernatural. There is no scientific test for the supernatural; this does not mean that the supernatural cannot be a reality but rather that the supernatural is beyond the reach of science. Science can neither verify nor disprove the supernatural.

"Someone beholding God and understanding what he saw has not actually seen God Himself but rather something of His which has being and which is knowable" (Dionysius the Areopagite: Letter 1 to Gaius).

More recently, "creation scientists" have by and large distanced themselves from the Biblical account of Creation. The irony of this position can be seen, for example, in John C. Whitcomb's book, The Genesis Flood. Here, he discusses the fossil record and notes that certain organisms appear in the fossil record abruptly, without any apparent ancestors. He interprets this as evidence of creation, but nowhere in the book does the word creator appear nor is the reader told anything about this creator. More recently, some creation scientists, in a further attempt to distance themselves from the Bible, talk of a doctrine of abrupt appearance. If, in this purportedly scientific context, "creation" and "abrupt appearance" are code-words for an abrupt appearance in the fossil record, they merely describe a feature of the fossil record and have no explanatory power. But even if "creation" and "abrupt appearance" in this context are meant to imply a creator, that "creator" can only be God-of-the-Gaps.

Whatever else "creation science" is, it is not science. If it is to be taught in the schools, it should not be taught as science but elsewhere in the curriculum. By the same token, evolution should be taught within a strictly scientific frame of reference and not made a vehicle for a purely materialistic philosophy (see "Science vs. Scientism" below).

Much of the debate between "creation science" and evolution is really a manifestation of a perceived contest between creation and evolution. It is a mislabeled debate because there is no conflict between religious faith and science, between creation and evolution unless one chooses to make one.

As understood by the Church Fathers, the beginning of Genesis is not a myth answering a scientific question about physical origins, but instead a very sophisticated expression of how God works in the world, of what it means that all things are His creation. This comes across with clarity in St Gregory of Nyssa who speaks of Moses "philosophizing":

"... Moses thus philosophizing on physical matters in the form of a narrative" (St Gregory of Nyssa: Apologetic Treatise on the Hexameron)

Although some of the Fathers held that animals and plants were created fully formed, in accordance with a literal reading of Genesis, this is by no means the only Orthodox understanding of what creation, "In the beginning", means:

"All things were virtually in the first Divine impulse for creation, existing as it were in a kind of spermatic potency, sent forth for the genesis of all things. For individual things did not then exist actually." (St Gregory of Nyssa: Apologetic Treatise on the Hexameron).

Far from being a kind of intervention in the natural order -- as if there were some other force at work that would take the world in another direction if God did not step in -- creation refers to the Divine origin of the natural order as we know it. The powers of change, movement and generation that we see in the world and its creatures are nothing other than the working out of His creative "word":

"'Let the earth bring forth living creatures.' Behold the word of God pervading creation, beginning even then the efficacy which is seen displayed today, and will be displayed to the end of the world. ..." (St Basil: Hexameron, Hom. 9).

"The word of God, which orders the birth of every creature, is the law of nature, which has remained on the earth, prescribing how far generation and fructification is to extend" (St Ambrose of Milan: Hexameron).

The working out of God's creative "word", then, is ongoing. In this context, evolution may be understood as one aspect of the general evolution of the Cosmos, as one aspect of the working out of this "word", God working through miracle and natural laws. But here, we have gone beyond the limits of science.

Let us back up a bit and consider what science is.

Science is humanity's intellectual response to the material world, a language about a certain kind of human experience. Science seeks naturalistic explanations and its fundamental assumptions are twofold: first, that the material world is real, not an illusion; second, that the world is ordered.

These assumptions are fully in accord with the Christian faith. First, the Church holds that the material world is real. To argue otherwise is to argue that the Incarnation is an illusion; the Church insists on the reality of the Incarnation. Secondly, if that world were not ordered, were capricious, the miracles of Christ could not possibly have been seen as signs of the promised Messiah.

Although science has discovered a lot about the material world, it has its limits because it is reductionist, focusing exclusively on the material. Nevertheless, it is absolutely vital to distinguish science clearly from scientism, a materialistic philosophy based on the assumption -- an assumption that is itself not scientific because it cannot be falsified that answers to all questions can be discovered by the scientific method.

"... an understanding of Scripture that does not go beyond the literal meaning and a view of the sensible world that relies exclusively on sense perception, are indeed scales, blinding the soul's visionary faculty and preventing access to the pure Logos of truth" (St Maximos the Confessor: Centuries of Love, II 75).

Science has discovered a lot about the Cosmos, a cosmos immensely old, immensely large, in constant change; and also about the orderly succession of life on this planet, interacting with and changing the Earth environment. Yet, we should not think of this picture as superior to the Genesis account; rather, it addresses different questions and is richer in the details of the visible creation. A picture hardly easy to grasp in its entirety, this can only inspire awe and wonder. But God who created all this, and more besides, simply has to be infinitely greater than anything we have previously thought, infinitely greater than anything that we can even imagine.

One implication of organic evolution, troubling to some, is that Man originated by evolution from an ape-like, pre-human ancestor. Moreover, this evolutionary progression from pre-human to human is seen as being driven by natural selection and thus a product of "chance." It is troubling if we take the view that this necessarily means that Man is only another animal.

Although a leading evolutionary scientist and a confessed humanist, drawing on his scientific findings, can say "I see nothing special about Man," Metropolitan John of Pergamon is of the opinion that the Theory of Evolution can help us regain a more profound understanding of the essential element which makes us human, which distinguishes us from animals, which constitutes the image of God in Man ("Preserving God's Creation -- Part I': Sourozh 39 (March 1990) 8).

That the present diversity of life is the product of evolution is well established and, in the classical Darwinian and neo-Darwinian view, the course of evolution is directed by natural selection. But the way in which evolution occurs is still not fully understood. Be that as it may, Man's kinship with the animal is not the problem; the Church Fathers insist that Man's nature is compound. For example, St. Gregory of Nyssa states:

"... while two natures -- the Divine and incorporeal nature, and the irrational life of brutes are separated from each other as extremes, human nature is the mean between them; for in the compound nature of Man we may behold a part of each ..." (On the Making of Man, XVIL, 9).

Genesis addresses the origin of Man is a mystery in terms of the cosmology known to the writer of Genesis. The scientific evidence points to and is concerned only with the origin of the physical nature of Man. But Man is more than flesh and bone: his life in the material world is only part of his life. In any discussion of the origin of Man, this is the point that must be insisted on.