I’m not their
descendant, and that’s it. That’s why it sounds so scandalous. I’ve read a lot
on this topic, but just as I didn’t believe in it before that, I still don’t
now.
I’ll also mention that on a social media
page, one Orthodox girl wrote a beautiful thought: “I’m not ashamed to be a
daughter of the Heavenly Father. Let those whose ancestors are apes be
ashamed.” (Note: Later in the article Fr.
Valery refers specially to “primitive apes,” referring to the common ape-like
ancestor that humans and apes supposedly share in common.) I am also not ashamed that I
am a son of the Heavenly Father (albeit a sinner, but a son; after all, in the
Gospel there is the Prodigal Son—a son not rejected by his father), and my soul
does not accept the theory of evolution.
I’m ashamed when
fellow priests write to me, who say with conviction, “Evolution is a proven
fact; every student knows this; it’s obvious! How can you so ignorantly dismiss
the evidence?” Sometimes they send articles and materials on the topic. But you
might as well talk to a brick wall: Just as my soul wouldn’t accept it before,
it still won’t accept it now.
For some reason,
the words of St. Paisios the Athonite and the Holy Hierarch Luke
(Voino-Yasenetsky) sound more convincing. One was uneducated in worldly terms
but acquired the Holy Spirit and therefore also the gift of insight; the other
was the greatest of scientists who thoroughly knew the human body. And they
both speak as one about the falsity of the theory of evolution. And it’s not
just them. It’s a common Patristic intuition, whether it’s St. Theophan the
Recluse or St. Seraphim of Sarov (to whom people attribute evolutionary views
in vain, apparently not having read his pages in full, taking only a few
words), or whether it’s the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church:
Hieromartyr Vladimir (Bogoyavlensky), Hieromartyr Nikolai (Pokrovsky),
Monk-Martyr Varlaam (Nikolsky), the Holy Hierarch Makary (Nevsky), and many
others. In the Greek Church there is St. Nektarios of Aegina, and in the
Serbian Church—St. Nicholai (Velimirovic). No matter which saint—they reject evolution.
The same St.
Theophan openly wrote about the ideologues of evolution:
They have heaped up a multitude of fanciful
suppositions for themselves, elevated them to the status of irrefutable truths
and plumed themselves on them, assuming that nothing can be said against them.
In fact, they are so ungrounded that it is not even worthwhile speaking against
them. All of their sophistry is a house of cards – blow on it and it flies
apart. There is no need to refute it in its parts; it is enough to regard it as
one regards dreams. When speaking against dreams, people do not prove the
absurdity in their composition or in their individual parts, but only say,
‘It’s a dream,’ and with that they resolve everything. It is the same with the
theory of the formation of the world from a nebula and its supports, with the
theory of abiogenesis and Darwin’s origin of genera and species, and with his
last dream about the descent of man. It is all like delirium. When you read
them you are walking in the midst of shadows. And scientists? Well, what can
you do with them? Their motto is “If you don’t like it, don’t listen, but don’t
prevent me from lying.”
St. Ambrose of
Optina counseled those who came to him: “Don’t believe at face value all kinds
of nonsense without investigation: that something can come into being [of
itself] from dust, and that people used to be apes.”
Why can’t I agree
with the position of the saints?
And how much should
I distort Scripture to argue that Adam had anthropoid parents, that is, a redundant
couple that fell away into nothingness after their purpose was up? How would
Adam feel, seeing their deaths in Paradise, himself being a descendant of
death, giving birth to likewise mortal descendants? Where is life here, if
death reigns all around the primordial Adam? Why redeem him from sin if he is a
child of death not because of sin, but because of biological laws? What sin is
there to speak of if there are just animal instincts, subject neither to reason
nor human will?
How should I
interpret revelation, believing that Adam’s poor ancestors chased one another
with mouths agape, and whoever was smarter found the first club? What is this
crown of creation, crammed with ancient irresistible instincts that we
mistakenly call passions? What sin is there to speak of if, I repeat, the whole
theory of evolution speaks of passions as animalistic necessities, inherent in
any biological creature? Let’s not deceive ourselves: There’s nothing angelic,
and what’s more, nothing according to the image of God in principle in such
creatures. Conscience, and ethics, and etiquette—everything in this paradigm is
a result of evolution, driven by death.
And the Bible
itself, in their conception, is, to add insult to injury, the product of the
evolution of ancient myths and epic tales, included in religious collections
and carefully redacted through the centuries. What Divine revelation is there
here if everything is the continuous evolution of myths?
No, we will not be
deceived. The theory of evolution works for destruction.
Now I’ll say
something that won’t be scandalous because it’s an obvious fact.
Science studies the
world in its fallen state, according to the loss of the paradisiacal harmony,
according to the Fall of man and the invasion of the law of death and
corruption into the universe created by God. Therefore, the starting axiom of
the theory of evolution is death: How would species have evolved if no one died
before Adam? How does an ape become human if the weakest don’t die to leave
space for the miracle-mutation—man?
Therefore, the
cosmogony of evolution moves from the unsuccessful to the accidentally
successful, from the excess waste material of living beings that didn’t limp
their way to biological perfection to new species accidentally fixed at new
stages. That is, in their conception, God couldn’t hold on until the creation
of a beautiful, harmonious, perfect world. But then, what God is there in
evolution?! Their God is evolution itself, a kind of wizard, alchemist, casting
magic spells from one nature to another, from a crocodile to a pterodactyl,
from a bear to a whale, from a lama to a giraffe, from a primitive ape to a
human. All of this is taken from their books. What would he do—this crocodile—when
his feet morph over the generations into stumps, to then turn into pterodactyl
wings? Who will help this evolutionary invalid, whose paws mutate but has no
wings yet? But for those to whom it’s interesting, evolution was contrived by a
wily alchemist.
Science sees a
picture of the world in its broken state, with the remnants of a harmony, but
the obvious loss of the paradisiacal harmony. How can the current realities be
transferred to the beginning of our existence?
Let these scholars
of the mind tell us what microscope or what super-electron equipment, what
analysis they can use to study the Resurrected Christ and the state of His Body
at His Resurrection; His nature—in need of no food, of breathing the air,
lacking natural necessities, inaccessible to microbes and bacteria, diseases,
and ailments—in general, a nature in which there is no death, but life, and
moreover, life everlasting, without old age and wrinkles, without “I want to
eat” or “I have to go to the bathroom;” a nature fully human but equal to the
angels, having defeated death and corruption? How would they define the nature
of the True Man, resurrected for us in order to return the paradisiacal harmony
to us? How can they touch the nature of the first Adam, whose qualities we lost
as soon as Adam severed his connection with God? This is why the New
Adam—Christ—came. He returned immortality to people, returned that which was
lost in Paradise, and gave us yet more; and they say that Adam was born from
death and the entire first-created world was filled with death, destruction,
and ruination as something wholly natural. What would Christ return to us then
if everything was controlled by mutation from the beginning?
How can they
investigate the ever-virginity of the Mother of God, where God the Holy Spirit
acted rather than the laws of biology?
No, science will
not say a word about what is higher than the created world and higher than
disintegrating nature, about deification, about the transfiguring action of the
grace of God. It can say nothing about the condition of the world before the
entrance of the law of sin into it.
Studying the world
according to the Fall, we only see part of the picture of the universe. So how
can we believe such science?!
This is why those
who have acquired grace, who ascended to the contemplation of Christ and His
Uncreated Light even during this life, that is—neither you nor I, but holy
people—live by a different intuition. This intuition leaves the scientific data
of the moral world behind in view of the first-created paradisiacal world.
Studying the world according to the Fall and man in his sinful state, we only
see part of the picture—that is, not even close to everything. Science that has
studied only part is not objective, not seeing the whole picture—neither in the
universe nor in man himself.
It’s hard to reach
an agreement with people who have varying views on origins. The connection with
our genealogy is like a pillar of existence, the core, defining the man and his
behavior. Everyone takes something from his genealogy, copies it in life, and
some justify themselves, citing their ancient origins. The choice is up to us
all.
I understand that
in response they’ll splatter formulas and data from biology, geology,
archaeology, paleontology and all the rest, and evidence from Ilya Prigogine,
Stephen Hawking, and the other luminaries of this world. They’ll say, “How are
you not the descendant of a primitive ape? Look, see for yourself.” No, my
friends, I am not their descendant, though you may kill me with the same
ancient club. The proponents of evolution are my brothers and sisters, but a
chimpanzee is not my brother, and a monkey is not my sister.
In the Gospel of
Luke, we read about the genealogy of Christ, and it is written there that He,
according to His humanity, traces back to the root of the species, the son of
…. Enos, Seth, Adam, and God (Lk. 3:38). There is no other ancestor between the
first man Adam and His Creator God—no transitional link.
Which is closer and
dearer to us—Christ with His transfigured nature, or a myth about the origin of
the tailed primates?
By Fr. Valery Dukhanin
Translated by Jesse Dominick
Source: http://orthochristian.com/115053.html
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