a layman's thoughts on Christianity, Theistic Creationism and Neo-Darwinism are they mixable?

Glory to God!

 

  The combination of Christianity, the mixing, with Neo Darwinism (evolutionism – without Deity) to make Evolutionary (Theistic) Creationism is a curious thing. It is a bit of the Hegelian fallacy where we take bits of both and come to some agreement in the middle way. We agree or, often, forced to agree with Scientism, which is a religion of its own, because we fear the fallacy of ad hominem (a personal attack on those who disagree with the established institution of facts as “idiots” who disagree with reality and obvious things). But then fear is its own master is it not:

Beware lest in your anxiety to avoid war you obtain a master.

 

Demosthenes (384 BC - 322 BC)

 

So we reach or endeavor to meet in the middle. We do not give up all our ground, but concede to some things in order to sound more scientific minded or to not sound so “naïve.” However, what are we really giving up in order to enter this contest which is weighed heavily in the favor of the Neo Darwinist? Are we giving up on Christianity and Divine revelation completely or modernizing the ancient book to better fit-in with our modern age and isms?

 

   If human nature is not really human nature but animal nature evolved into a higher form that we see today in mankind, then man is still in “animal nature” and the idea of the common ancestor from Adam and Eve is really a common ancestor from animal or animal nature. But what about Christ, in His Incarnation, being of Divine and human nature? His human nature restores the one “human nature” that all men share and therefore raises all men up to their original standing before the fall. The common nature fell once and was restored once and for all. If we are animal nature as posited, we can profit in no way from this act and must remain fallen.

 

   And what of the Divine Image given to man with his human nature as opposed from animal nature? If Christ’s humanity comes from the animals then there is no existential difference between human nature and animal nature, they are one and the same. One would simply be a greater animal in this sense as a lion is from a mouse, but both are animal. And it is the same difference between man and ape, man is a higher animal and human nature is blurred and lost altogether.

 

   This animal or let’s say mammalian nature of man, in its philosophical sense, is no greater or lesser than animal, he is just a smarter animal with language, abstract and conceptual thinking, and moral law. Man has no existential distinction over animal; he is simply more intelligent and adaptable or evolved, evolving. And thus, his being is in a process of flux or transition. The form we are now is changing as we speak, evolving and not static. So this animal nature is changing and so with it would our laws, morals, and “absolutes” be changing with it. We could not use the word absolute because an absolute does not change; so therefore, an absolute becomes meaningless, for an absolute by definition is unchanging and set as a standard. In this sense the god of evolution is changing as well and so the theory that it begets is in flux. Philosophically to define something in flux is not possible as it has nothing to take hold of it.

 

No man ever steps in the same river twice

 

Heraclitus (535BC – 475BC)

 

Therefore how do you define the river you are standing in as it is in constant change, movement? This is a philosophical question and it does have vast breadth for our lives today in the westernizing of the world. How do we define truth if it is subjective? If we are in an evolving mode, then there is no such absolute to govern or measure oneself, no absolute moral law, but only change. It makes sense in the age we live today for this philosophy has flooded our world. Even Neo Darwinism is a theory in transition and will not be the same theory it is today and neither is “mammalian man” the same creature he was, is and will be in the future. For no definition can stand of him.

 

  The Patristics of the Church of Christ did not merge the created with the Uncreated. They clearly kept them separate, distinct things in themselves. As the Incarnation of Christ is defined as fully God and fully man, never confused or mixed, we see in the Fathers of the Church the same idea of creation by God as separate and distinct from Himself (Uncreated). One is Divine and incomprehensible “Uncreated” and the other is discerned by reason as is discoverable by men and “created”, but fallen it remains. These two ideas of created and Uncreated are the two points of distinct separation, never mixed or confused. We have science and what science can discover by reason and then there is the Uber-reason (mystical, mysterious) or the realm of the Divine, which is not discernable by the same tools and methods of the created world. In Christ and His Incarnation, by the Glory of God, is the schema to understanding good science as opposed to Scientism, which resembles a type of fundamental, legalistic religiosity. Science and Christianity are distinct things and separated for a reason.

    

In mixing Science and Christianity we beget a hybrid of both and confuse mankind and the Divine Image given to him by God as distinct from the animal world. This hybrid blend is Evolutionary (Theistic) Creationism. And as all Isms go, we should we wise to not trust them as they are too enmeshed with fallen human philosophy, conjecture and imagination.

 

   The Church Fathers saw Genesis as a non-anthropocentric history. That is a sense of history or pre-history. For history can be defined by men only when men are present. In the first few days of creation there was no mankind to observe and therefore record “history”. His early sense of pre-history or shall we say non-history, in the sense that it was before mankind, is and was written in this sense, in this style, a poetic-prose but not in the least sense false or untrue. The early Church Fathers saw the first 6 days as literal days but unlike any day we would experience today. Man was between the corruptible and the incorruptible, he was in paradise as a distinct place from earth and Heaven. Paradise was like nothing we can experience today in the fallen earth. Man ate of incorruptible food and was called to become God-like or Divine by participation in the Uncreated energies of God. Man did not eat corruptible food and therefore need to secrete waste material. He did not die so he could not drown, suffocate, get burned by fire or smothered by earth. He was immortal by the ever growing and participation in the Eternal God. He was not mammalian that he needed to copulate or have fear of starving or thirst. These mammalian ways were a potential in that God foresaw man’s error, but they were not God’s end for man. Man was to move forward in the Divine and participate in the Eternal God. The potential for the fall was seen by God and when man lost his divine covering, his participation in God, he became naked and covered with coats of skin. Thusly, all of mankind fell and so did all of the material created world, which man was supposed to raise up to God and offer it back to Him. Animal life fell as well and became corrupt to death. Man of course did not die right away, physically. However, spiritually, he died instantly and the body was soon to follow as it did not have life on its own.

 

   Time and space were different then as well and not to be measured in the same way that we measure time today or understand time. There is a deeply theological sense to these writings not understood by modern science nor could they be understood. We measure things now in the fallen sense. How could our understanding of radio decay today be assumed into studying and measuring a cosmos that was very existentially different than today. We assume the same fallen laws will work in an unfallen universe and there is, exactly, the disconnection, there is the grandiose of errors. Eternity when applied to time and space changes the laws of time/space if there was such a law of time or a law of space. Time becomes meaningless in eternity or not applicable. How much so for space as well? This is a glaring incoherence forced in by a grand assumption of our meaning and knowledge from a fallen time/space continuum. And it is from this fallen view that we look back on time and assume all is as it is today, radioactive decay is at the same rate, time flows the same, matter is the same, and the natural laws are the same, etc. Really, how do we know this is true and not a grand assumption? “Because Science says!” Regardless, the Patristic writings are clear that the early creation was something that we cannot conjecture or imagine, it was other worldly and unknowable, unimaginable.

 

   With man becoming corruptible to death and decay of his body, he had to eat of corruptible foods and now was under bondage to the elements, the spirits of the air (false gods), and was now feared by the animals, which he once was on friendly terms. He now as “mammalian” was able to drown, starve, and die. This was not the plan of God, but became the way of man. His body made up of spirit and lighter materials unknown became heavier and denser. He now resigned himself to toil the earth and become a slave to the little gods and his passions. Man, however, retained his Divine image and has in his soul two compartments: the higher soul or “nous” and the lower soul, the rational mind. Animals do not have this higher and lower soul in the same way (they have some sense of the lower soul only) and that is why we must keep man and animal in their natures distinct. For if we come from animals, then there is no human nature only animal nature. With this comes the loss of the Divine Image and a mess of philosophical problems as described above. And should this theory win out, that we are just animal, then it will be truly the abolition of man as C.S. Lewis has written a book about this very thing. For it is this Divine Image that makes us distinct and foreshadows our ascent into the Divine by participation.

 

   Jesus Christ by God the Father united mankind and God in one person. In Jesus Christ human nature and The Divine, never mixing or confusing them, fully God and fully man become one. This restoration of “Human Nature” and its place at the Right Hand of God makes our participation in the Divine life through theosis a reality. We too can become God-like as the Saints of Christ’s Church have shown throughout time and space. It was not animal nature that was restored but human nature, and this potentiality raises man first and foremost, not his mammalian/animal or fallen status, but his humanity which can now partake of the Divine. Until this realization, the fallen nature of humanity could not partake of God in this way, but only in the Old Testament sense via participation in the Law. Where we were once servants, we are now sons, adopted by God’s good cheer and love for us.

 

   We again must make the distinction between animal nature and “human nature”. It is human nature that has been received into God as restored and complete at His Right Hand by Christ the Incarnate God. Human nature is one and when Adam transgressed, human nature was stained. It is not that because of one man all are guilty of his sin, but since we all share “one” human nature, we all share in this stain since we all share the “one” nature. Hence the life, death and resurrection of Christ, who shares with us that one human nature and restores it for all. And because of this man may now share in the restoration to life, life eternal, blessing eternal. As opposed to temporal and eternal death, mankind is either realizing this state of eternal life or he chooses to remain as he is now. He either is moving into theosis in the now or he is remaining in the mammalian state of existence, which is death. The animal nature cannot mix with the human nature as to think of Christ as coming from animals is blasphemy as Elder and now Saint Paisios has exclaimed. Animal nature was not restored by the Incarnation of Christ only Human Nature. And truly it was not animal nature that was stained and needed redemption, but the human one by which all things fell including the beasts and the earth. That is not to say that the animals will not receive immortality by man’s restoration to His original state of becoming God-like. This was the original purpose of man to be immortal by and through God, Who is Life and Eternity, and then so too where the animals to participate in this incorruptibility through man’s obedience. Fallen human nature can only be restored by a “new” human nature that is traced to one man, one descendant and not an animal or common animal ancestor. Christ was not fully God and fully animal.

 

    It is well known in the Eastern Church that God created the world and man through the Logos who is the same Logos who had to redeem the creation He made by coming into the world. In making man, we see the plural in Scripture where God the Father, the Logos (Pre-Incarnate Christ), and the Holy Spirit made man in God’s image. “Let Us make man in our image.” The Godhead: The Mind (The Father), The Logos (The Word), The Holy Spirit (The Life or Breath). He who made the world had to come into the world to restore it to Himself. This is great news. And it is far removed from the idea of constant evolving or change and the philosophical problem it hatches which eliminates absolutes for moral relativism.

 

  To conclude and as a model for our faith as Orthodox Christians, in one Holy, catholic, and apostolic church, we must remember as we do not mix or confuse Christ’s humanity and Divinity, we must remember not to do the same with the Divine “Uncreated” and man’s science “created”. The Uncreated and the created are distinct and not to be confused. What is a materialistic philosophy must not be fused with what has been revealed by God. Neo-Darwinism and its kin Evolutionary (Theistic) Creationism through evolutionary mechanics are materialistic at their root. This system seeks to explain creation with no Creator but instead through time plus matter plus chance. That somehow, nothingness could plan, engineer and build a universe and life and have the intelligence and the multi-dimensional thinking (to be able to think far ahead) to create food for these beings to eat, air to breath, water to drink, and elements to build and create, as well as recycling dead things for new life, etc. And also to create one place among billions of hostile planets for life to take root.

   The question is asked that why could not God make the world and life through the evolutionary model over billions of years? Could not God use evolution as a tool? In Christian theology there is no “tool” that God needs. He creates and sustains through His Word (Christ) and does not need a tool or any man made idea or theory to create. We error in mixing God in with his creation rather than being wholly, and Holy, outside of it. In Evolutionary Creationism, we are simply blending man’s theories into God’s wonder, interjecting it so as not to seem “dumb” by those “illumined” by scientism. And so the answer is why would a Divine omnipotent Being create the world in this most miserable, long-suffered, excruciatingly slow and barbaric way? It’s as if this theory sees God as handicapped and weak, using some foreign mechanism or imagined machine to build his universe and life. Even the Big Bang speaks of a beginning and instantaneous explosion, wondrous and in an instant. God does not need matter to create, he can create without matter already in existence. As the early materialists did not know (Anaximander, Thales)...(later moving forward to Rene Descartes, Marx, Freud, Darwin, Richard Dawkins, etc) and we now do know, that matter is not eternal and neither is it wise or conscious. God is not the Great Mover as, Aristotle thought, who assembles existing matter, He is, simply, the Creator of matter and all things; the creation is not Him. We would be wise to retain a certain mystery about creation, a certain riddle and awe since truly no one was there to see it, and come to terms that our theories will remain tiny and fallen. And the more we think we know is the less we know as Socrates was humble enough to understand. The Fathers of the Church were clear on understanding Genesis as theological and not in the sense we understand our current creation which we can study and see. Genesis before mankind is to be understood in the theological sense and not the scientific sense. The earth that was is not the earth of today and neither was Adam the same man that is fallen today. If we mix the Divine Image with the created world and make into it something utterly different, we in essence create a new religion or way. This is not what the apostles, saints and church fathers where here to do. They instead have shown us the way upward, to transcend, from the dead life and into the new life in Christ, eternal, incorruptible, forever in peace, joy and love. God is love and does not change unlike theories and conceptions of men.

 

 

Much thanks to Fr. Pat Reardon, Fr. Seraphim Rose and The Fathers of Christ’s Church for inspiring.

http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/orthodoxylive/september_7_2014

Genesis, Creation, And Early Man: The Orthodox Christian Vision. Fr. Seraphim Rose.

 

 

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And with the intercession prayers of the Theotokos, Saint Peter, St. Demetrios Myrrh streaming, St. Paisios of the Holy Mountain and all the Saints. And may we receive a good account before the awesome judgment seat of Christ.