Is Theistic Evolution Orthodox?

Everyday Theology or Speculative Theology?

Eagle River Institute, I’m disappointed.  Your institute has produced consistent edifying lectures for the Orthodox Christian. Yet, you allow someone to present on Evolution as if this is the only sensible position for an Orthodox Christian.  It is not! The presentation is upsetting. Maybe you found the arguments edifying for the average Orthodox Christian, but please qualify it. This is a historical aberration and deserves to be contrasted in the light of the historic Christian position.

This article stands as a counterpoint to the theistic evolutionary position held by Dr. Gayle Woloschak in her presentation at the Eagle River Institute in August. There are more episodes to come, and depending on their content, I may put together another response.

First of all, I am not judging this person’s Christian faith and commitment to Christ and Orthodoxy.  I am not judging her piety or personal holiness. I am judging her ideas about theistic evolution (TE), and her belief that it is necessary for an Orthodox Christian to accept these ideas. My purpose in this response is that TE is not the historic position of the Church, is theologically destructive, and scientifically unnecessary.

Evolution is Scientific Fact

Early in her lecture, Dr. Woloschak claims evolution as indisputable scientific fact, and not mere theory.  One analogy she gives is to equate the theory of evolution with the theory of gravity. This is an attempt to show how silly it is for a Christian, who readily accepts the theory of gravity, to reject evolution. This is a false comparison.  Evolution is not like gravity. Gravity is observable and testable. Evolution is not observable and testable. There are no observable changes of one species into another.

Evolution is not science. Science can get done inside of evolutionary frameworks, but evolution reaches far beyond scientific data. It is a philosophy built upon empiricism and immediately negates non-empirical explanations.  It is not scientific fact, but a paradigm or lens for viewing data. It is an explanation and interpretation of fact. At times it does a serviceable job of explaining scientific data, but it is not an airtight explanation.

The examination of Origins is the realm of philosophy and theology.  No one was there and could observe the beginning of the universe and life. Evolution was born out of the desire to create a naturalistic explanation of the universe without the need for an active God. Once those presuppositions are established, the data looks different and different conclusions are reached about origins.

Evolution is Limited to Biology

Dr. Woloschak claims to limit Darwinian evolution strictly to biology. She pigeonholes biology into this paradigm, refusing any bleedover into other disciplines. This paradigm can’t be pigeonholed into this one aspect of earth origins. Once Darwinian explanations for human biology are accepted, millions of years are needed to explain the potential accretions of mutations that would lead to a diversity of Earth species as well as human origin. The millions of years bleed into geology, because if you accept millions of years for biology, then you must interpret geological data in the same light. That same framework then seeps into cosmological origins which in turn becomes billions of years for all these chance events of explosions to form physical laws that in turn spin out matter becoming stars and galaxies and planets, and conditions for chemistry that could in turn potentially have life.

Once a paradigm for origins exists without the necessity for a Creator, this philosophy becomes the ground for all human endeavor. Dr. Woloschak wants to limit evolution to biological life, but prevent it from seeping into the culture. This is impossible, primarily because evolution is an explanatory device in a naturalistic universe, and the paradigm gets extended into all spheres once God gets pushed away. Theistic evolutionists want to have their cake and eat it too on this important point, without actually dealing with the historically observable and tragic consequences of their worldview.

Death is Necessary

Dr. Woloschak states that “evolution depends upon death.”  This is a bold admission. My experience is that either TE has not thought about these implications or are afraid to admit to them. Later in her talk, she tries to tease out the spiritual meaning of the Genesis account by pointing out that God made the world good.  This is a real theological problem. If the mechanism for creation is death, God the creator (via evolutionary means), becomes the author of death. Nowhere in Scripture or the Fathers can this be supported. In fact, it was man’s sin that brought death, not just to humanity but into all the cosmos. The incarnation of Jesus is an overturning of death: “Christ is risen from the dead trampling down death by death!”  Creation itself groans for this salvation.

Biology Necessitates Evolution

“Biology cannot be understood apart from Evolution.” This is a broad all-encompassing statement that is unprovable.  Evolution is not the only paradigm to understand biology. I’ve known successful biologists in research fields as well as areas such as medicine who are thoroughgoing creationists. Rejection of Darwinian evolution has not been a barrier to their understanding or success in their fields of study.  There are multiple biologists that espouse creationism successfully in a peer review format. They are not hard to find. Michael Behe and Todd Wood come to mind.

Intelligent Design Dismissed

I am surprised at her attack on the intelligent design movement. She quickly dismisses the movement as though it was a brief scientific fad waning in influence among the scientific community. Intelligent Design (ID) is a big tent term that includes everyone from theistic evolutionists to young earth creationists and everyone in between. The philosophy that holds everyone together is the belief that there is design in the universe that can’t be explained through purely naturalistic processes, and the world is bigger than just matter.  On the leading ID proponents, William Dembski said:

“Intelligent design, by contrast [to evolution], teaches that biological complexity is not exclusively the result of material mechanisms but also requires intelligence, where the intelligence in question is not reducible to such mechanisms.”

I would think she would celebrate this movement as a stand against a strict material universe that rejects any action of God inside of it.

Contradictory Creation Accounts

Multiple Creation accounts in Scripture reveal contradictions and prove the need for a non-literal approach, according to Dr. Woloschak. This is a tiresome TE argument. Yes, there are “two” creation stories in Genesis, but she mentions more, including creation accounts in Job and the Psalms.  Let me address the non-Genesis accounts first. To act as if these are unique expressions of the creation narrative is to do injustice to the texts of Scripture. These particular texts like others in the Psalms are poetic expressions of God’s act of creation. They are not intended as a narrative chronological description of the text. The average reader of Scripture with no knowledge of original languages can easily determine the differences in the genre here.

The other passages mentioned are in the early chapters of Genesis. Yes, there are 2 accounts, but not until modern times do people like to point out this fact as if 2 accounts mean opposing accounts.  Intelligent people from Jewish commentators to Church Fathers have easily reconciled these texts. In fact, you have to look hard and do some hermeneutical gymnastics to make them feel contradictory. One is a narrative of the creation week and the other is an expansion of the creation of man on Day 6.

Insisting on contradictory creation accounts in Scripture is a TE red herring. What is problematic for TE is not repeated insistence in Scripture for God as Creator but God as Sustainer. He is praised throughout Scripture for not only creating but upholding the world (Colossians 1:17). An evolutionary world set on course by a Creator doesn’t allow for an intimate Sustainer of creation.

Literal Readings Miss the Point

Dr. Woloschak states, “If we take literally we miss what the text is telling us”. Literal and symbolic reading can be both held as true. Christians & Jews have read Scripture this way since the beginning. A four-fold interpretative approach to Scripture meaning has been the standard, and never rejected the historical nature of the text as opposed to a symbolic meaning. She is setting up a false dialectic between literal and spiritual.  Understanding a literal narrative doesn’t prevent a spiritual understanding. Stepping away from the literal actually undermines the spiritual significance. These passages are written in a way not as a parable or poetry of fiction but with the intent of expressing a true retelling of historic events. All Scripture that references these chapters of Genesis assumes the real nature of these events and the veracity of the story. Jesus and Paul refer to Adam and Eve as real people and not metaphorical.

The Fathers Don’t Read Genesis Literally

There are no Fathers of the Church that treat these narratives as anything but historic and to say otherwise is to proof text their writing. It is not only those ancient Fathers of the Church but even the post-Darwinian “modern” saints who continually uphold the historicity of these accounts.

To separate literal from spiritual and set these ideas at odds does not solve a problem for her, but creates more.  Where do you stop ignoring the literal in favor of the symbolic? Do you only apply this hermeneutic to the first several chapters of Genesis? Why not Abraham?  Or Moses and the Exodus? Perhaps the Old Testament as a whole? What about Jesus? If the literal is unimportant, then the historicity of His life, death, and resurrection are not crucial to our faith, only the symbolic reality of what it teaches.

God works in creation and always reveals Himself there.  There is no central revelation disembodied for our minds and spirits to grasp. To jettison the literal in one section of Scripture is to jettison it all.  The literal understanding of the creation account undergirds the totality of the Bible.

To further illustrate the Fathers on Genesis, I want to quote multiple passages as well as more modern Fathers of the Church. I could quote St. Chrysostom, St. Iraneaus, St. Andrew of Crete, St. Ephrem the Syrian, etc., but because she mentions Sts. Basil & Maximos, let me quote their works.

St. Basil in his commentary of the 6 days of creations says:

“Those who do not admit the common meaning of the Scriptures say that water is not water, but some other nature and they explain a plant and a fish according to their opinion…[But] when I hear “grass”, I think of grass, and in the same manner, I understand everything as it is said, a plant, a fish, a wild animal, and an ox. Indeed, “I am not ashamed of the Gospel”...[Some] have attempted by false arguments and allegorical interpretations to bestow on the Scripture a dignity of their own imagining. But theirs is the attitude of one who considers himself wiser than the revelations of the Spirit and introduces his own ideas in pretense of an explanation. Therefore, let it be understood as it has been written.”

St. Basil on the authorship of Genesis by Moses says,

“This man [Moses], who is made equal to the angels, being considered worthy of the sight of God face to face, reports to us those things which he heard from God.”

St. Maximos the Confessor referring to the Fall says,

“God, at the very moment humanity fell,...gave the body the capacity to suffer, undergo corruption, and be wholly dissolved---as was evinced when God covered the body with garments of skin.” also “In not wishing to be nourished by Him, the first man rightly fell away from the Divine life, and took death as another parent. Accordingly, he put on himself the irrational form, and blackened the inconceivable beauty of the Divine, and delivered over the whole of nature as food for death. Death is living on this through the whole of this temporal period, making us his food.”

This assumes a literal reading and excludes belief in evolutionary death and suffering prior to the creation and fall of man.

Evolutionary theory was not unknown to educated men like St. Basil and St. Maximos. It was part of the Ancient Greek tradition, and one of the uniquenesses of Christianity was its rejection of that origin story. Anaximander of Miletus (610-546 BC) is the first evidence we have of evolutionary thought. He suggested the world began with a watery primordial sludge, and out of this sludge, man emerged, believing him to have been a fish at one time. Empedocles (490-430 BC) proposed a theory similar to modern natural selection. Epicureans also held that life originated out of the earth and thinned out and changed due to a process of natural selection. The Roman Lucretius held a naturalistic view of origins as well.

As Christianity wrestled with Paganism in the early centuries of the Church, apologists and theologians argued with Pagans regarding the Origin of man.  One Bishop of Antioch, St. Theophilus (115-181) wrote to the pagan Autolycus:

“For my purpose is not to furnish mere matter of much talk, but to throw light upon the number of years from the foundation of the world, and to condemn the empty labour and trifling of these authors, because there have neither been twenty thousand times ten thousand years from the flood to the present time, as Plato said, affirming that there had been so many years; nor yet 15 times 10,375 years, as we have already mentioned Apollonius the Egyptian gave out; nor is the world uncreated, nor is there a spontaneous production of all things, as Pythagoras and the rest dreamed; but, being indeed created, it is also governed by the providence of God, who made all things; and the whole course of time and the years are made plain to those who wish to obey the truth.”

As for more modern saints, I could quote men like Sts. Ambrose of Optina (1812-1891), Theophan the Recluse, John of Kronstadt, Nectarios, Nikolai of Zica, Justin Popovich, Sophrony of Essex, St. Paisius, and Fr. George Calciu, etc.  Many Christians died as martyrs during the Communist era partially for their rejection of Darwinism. Hieromartyr Paul Andreyev for exampled was imprisoned and eventually martyred under the Soviets. One of his cellmates overheard him in a prison cell: “The priest Andreyev...said that the Soviet authorities preach the teaching of Darwin, that man proceeded from apes, but that this is a blasphemy and a lie.”

St. Nikolai writes often against Darwinism and in one place says, “It takes a million years, say the ignorant minds of our day, for a monkey’s spine to become straight and a monkey to become a man. Thus they speak, not knowing the power and the might of the living God.”

Hiero Confessor Luke of Simferopol, a doctor of medicine, professor, and pioneering surgeon said: “Darwinism, which declares that man, by means of evolution, has developed from the lower species of animals, and is not a product of the creative act of the Godhead, has turned out to be merely a supposition, a hypothesis, which has become obsolete even for science. This hypothesis has been acknowledged as contradictory not only to the Bible, but to nature itself…”

For a more comprehensive look at the Fathers regarding their views on Jesus pick up the expansive volume by Fr. Seraphim Rose entitled Genesis, Creation, & Early Man.

Concluding Thoughts

Darwinism at its heart is a faith claim.  No one observed the creation of the universe or of man and life on this planet. These are areas where science can not generate reliable answers. Only philosophy, metaphysics, and theology can approach the question of origins, and this is what Darwinism has done. Darwinism created a naturalistic approach to the origin of the universe without the intervention of a personal Creator.  From that materialistic perspective, all scientific data is filtered and generates Evolutionary science. That same data can be filtered through the paradigm of creation and generate equally valid and often times more accurate results.

Origins, whether naturalistic or creationist, is not science, but a paradigm for understanding scientific data, and more importantly a faith commitment. It is this commitment that makes the Orthodox acceptance of the evolutionary faith all the more disturbing.

No doubt, we live in times where rejecting the majority dogma about our origins is hard. Being in the minority is nothing new for Christians. St. Athanasius among the Arians, St. Maximos standing firm on the nature of Christ, St. John of Damascus living with the Muslim elite, Christians under the Islamic and Communist yoke, all felt the pressure to conform and compromise, but held fast. I pray for the committed Creationist who lives, breathes, and work in the scientific community. Yet, many have done it and continue to do it, finding success in their work and research.

If you are curious to explore this topic, see the below resources:

Fr. Seraphim Rose, Genesis, Creation & Early Man

John Mark Reynolds, Reconciling Faith & The Theories of this Age, Parts 1, 2, 3, & 4

Seraphim Hamilton’s excellent articles about his journey from TE to young earth creationism

Biologist Dr. Todd Wood’s blog

The Netflix documentary, Is Genesis History?

Michael Behe’s, Darwin’s Black Box

Jay Dyer’s collection of articles and videos, for example: Darwinism, Genesis and the Creation Mysteries, Genesis vs Atheism and Paganism

Leonard Brand, Faith, Reason, & Earth History

Cornelius Hunter, Darwin’s God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil

Philip Johnson, Darwin on Trial

John Mark Reynolds, Three Views on Creation and Evolution