The Orthodox Church Rejects Evolution & Accepts Genuine Science

For thousands of years, Holy Scripture and countless Orthodox Saints have upheld creationism, consistently rejecting various evolutionary theories of origins. But it's not only a matter of dogma. Evolutionary theories also fail the test of science...

Why is the Orthodox Church against the theory of evolution?

"Hello. I read some questions here on evolution, and the priests' answers came down to the statement that supposedly evolution is a false philosophy, and not scientific. However, I am very interested in this issue, and I came to the conclusion that evolution is scientific. Moreover, I know that the Catholic Church recognized evolution. How does the Orthodox Church respond to this?"

Fr. Job Gumerov, a hieromonk at Sretensky monastery, answers:

Now there are two cosmogonies: biblical and evolutionary. The latter arose when a massive decline from the Christian faith began in Europe. The new irreligious worldview manifested itself in various forms. One of them was evolutionism, which is not a science, but rather is a materialistic ideology that has taken on a scientific form.

Fr. Job (Gumerov) — photo: A. Pospelov

Science is built on solid foundations. Assumptions must be proven, and conclusions must be justified. This is impossible to say about the constructions of evolutionists. The foundation of evolutionism is the idea that matter began in an initial disordered state, and then through progressive development has acquired a modern level of organization. The question that is inevitable for any scientist arises: Who asked for this strict focus on improvement for such a long time? No evolutionist can answer this. Therefore, at the very beginning of the construction of the evolutionary concept, an unscientific assumption is introduced.

Science not only does not know such a law, but affirms the exact opposite of this. The second law of thermodynamics proves the impossibility of evolution. This fundamental law was discovered in the first half of the 19th century. Its scientific development belongs to the French mathematician N.L.S. Karno (1824), German physicist R. Clausius (1850), and English physicist W. Thomson (Kelvin) (1851). The wordings given by these scientists are considered equivalent. The essence of the second law of thermodynamics is as follows: In a closed system, entropy can only increase or remain constant. In other words, any isolated system (and evolutionists do not recognize anything outside this physical universe) tends to degrade, because entropy gradually increases within it. 

This law is universal. It is used in biology, physics, chemistry, geology, and other sciences. All the changes we study occur in the direction of increasing entropy, i.e. degradation, deterioration, and decline. My dear friend, if you recognize evolutionism as a science, then you should forget about the laws of thermodynamics, because their statements stand in opposition to evolution. Moreover, the second law of thermodynamics proves that once there was a perfect order (in scientific terms - the optimal state of the system), and the current state of the world is the result of an increase in entropy, i.e. gradual degradation. Thus, the world in its present form must have a beginning. This is fully consistent with biblical teaching.

Against evolutionism, the teleological argument has long been advanced (from the Greek word teleos — goal). Its essence is as follows: The order in the entire Universe, including its smallest parts, show evidence of being the work of the Great Designer. William Paley (1743-1805), in Natural Theology (1802) formulates it as follows:

“If you found a watch in an open field, then, based on the obvious complexity of its construction, you would come to the inevitable conclusion about the existence of a watchmaker.” 

A modern scientist, a specialist in molecular biology, Michael Denton, states:

“Paley was not just right in saying that there is an analogy between a living organism and a machine; he turned out to be a visionary, realizing that the technical idea implemented in living systems far exceeds all human achievements.”

Each cell of the human body contains more information than in all thirty volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. According to the famous physicist, Nobel Prize laureate Fred Hoyle, the probability of a helical DNA molecule arising from a mixture of ready-made nucleotides and sugars, is as close to zero as the probability that a tornado in a garbage dump will spontaneously cause the emergence of a brand new car.

Scientists using the mathematical apparatus of probability theory have proved the impossibility of evolution. What is the probability of accidental nucleation of one living cell from non-living elements? Prominent scientist Marcel E. Golay [Marcel E. Golay, "Reflections of a Communications Engineer," Analytical Chemistry, Vol. 33, (June 1961), p. 23], on the basis of mathematical calculations, estimates the probability of random construction of particles in a self-generating system (even if we allow 30 billion years for it to take place) as 1:10 to 450 degrees. This degree of probability is equivalent to zero, according to professional mathematicians. Studies by other mathematical scientists have also disproved evolution. For example:

  • Harold V. Morowitz, "Biological Self-Replicating Systems," Progress in Theoretical Biology, Ed. FM Snell New York, 1967, pp. 35 ff.
  • Frank B. Salisbury, "Doubts about the Modern Synthetic Theory of Evolution," American Biology Teacher, (September, 1971), p. 336.
  • James E. Coppedge, Evolution: Possible or Impossible, Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 1973, pp. 95-115.

In the mid-18th century, evolutionary concepts were being taught by Kant and Laplace. In contrast to the biblical doctrine of the creation of the world, they proposed an evolutionary hypothesis of the origin of the solar system. Their approach has now been completely abandoned by modern science. At the end of the 18th century, and towards the beginning of the 19th, Lamarck attempted to explain the origin of the plant world through evolution. His constructions were based on the false idea of ​​the inheritance of individual changes, which was later disproven by modern genetics. Erasmus Darwin came up with his own versions of evolutionary ideas, followed by his grandson Charles. The Origin of Species appeared in 1859. By this time, many people were seduced.

With the advent of genetics, evolutionism was dealt a mortal blow. The ingenious work of Gregor Mendel, Experiments on Plant Hybrids, was published in 1866, and by the 20th century the laws of heredity came to be even better understood. The laws of genetics knocked out one of the cornerstones from the foundation of evolutionary assumptions — the presumed transfer of acquired characters by inheritance. In fact, science has shown that each species has a reliable internal mechanism giving it amazing stability. Talking about the evolution of a species was revealed to be scientifically incorrect.

Only a quarter of a century later, supporters of evolution tried to save their “religion” by putting forward the idea of ​​mutational evolution. But this scheme was actually an argument against them. Scientific studies have shown that damage to the genome is constantly monitored and corrected by a special mechanism, because the body has a large number of enzymes, each with its own functions. Their coordinated and sequential actions eliminate 99 to 99.9% of mutations, according to the estimates of the evolutionists themselves. But the most important thing is that, according to statistics, the vast majority of mutations - if they occur - lead not to improvement, but to degradation. It was experimentally found that most phenotype mutations so violate the structure and physiology of the body that they destroy it — they are lethal mutations. The rest, in one way or another, reduce the viability of the body. And only a negligible share, a tiny fraction of a percent, can perhaps increase the adaptive properties of the body to some extent.

Michael Denton, a modern specialist in microbiology, cites a great deal of evidence demonstrating the complete scientific groundlessness of evolutionary constructions. He showed that homologous structures are not represented by either homologous genes or embryonic development. In his book, Evolution: The Crisis of Theory, M. Denton writes:

It is now firmly established that the picture of diversity at the molecular level forms a highly organized hierarchical system. At the molecular level, each class is unique, isolated from the others and not connected by intermediate links. Thus, molecules, like fossils, they do not confirm the existence of mythical "intermediate links” that evolutionary biologists are looking for and still cannot find. Again, the only relationships determined using modern methods are horizontal. At the molecular level, none of the body can not be called "ancestral", "primitive" or "advanced" relative to related organisms. Nature likewise confirms the non-evolutionary circular models put forward by eminent scientists — skilled in comparative anatomy — in the XIX century. 

Evolutionism is fundamentally at odds with the systemic methodology. Consider the human eye. It is a complex, finely ordered system. If you remove at least one element, the system will lose its properties and will not be able to perform its functions. The eye could not have arisen in the process of evolution. Evolutionists place a person, a bird, and a frog in a certain sequence on the axis of progress. However, the eyes of each of these species are different systems. They are distinguished not by the degree of perfection, but by a different system-constructive principle.

Evolutionists are free, without sufficient scientific justification, to introduce timelines of millions and billions of years. For their conceptual constructs, time is vital. It replaces the role of the Creator. This argument is not scientific. Time is a duration, and does not possess any creative power. This argument is psychological in nature. It is suggested to the reader that everything is possible in millions and billions of years: even a person can gradually form from a bacterium. 

Existing dating methods are extremely unreliable. A.V. Lalomov, Candidate of Geological and Mineralogical Sciences,  gives examples of the radiometric dating of objects whose age was known in advance. The results were paradoxical. Radiometric dating gave results suggesting that the shells of living mollusks were 2000 years old, that modern New Zealand lavas were 1-3.5 million years old, that the dacite in the lava dome of the San Helen volcano (1986 eruption) was 0.34–2.8 million years old, and that the Quaternary basalts of the Colorado Plateau were 117 – 2600 million years old. According to generally accepted practice, inconvenient data is discarded under a plausible excuse, or even without it. After obtaining the false results from the Quaternary lavas, the unsuitability of using the K-Ar method for dating olivine was substantiated. Other radioisotope methods are also not faultless, from both theoretical and practical points of view.

In conclusion, I will give the opinion of a modern scientist, doctor of physical and mathematical sciences, professor Gennady Anatolyevich Kalyabin:

The Age of Enlightenment (which should more accurately be called the period of spiritual dimming), the most brilliant representative of which is Voltaire, parasitizing at the heyday of natural sciences and the industrial use of scientific discoveries, put forward and spread among the upper layers of society the false idea of ​​the self-sufficiency of the human mind and experience for a full explanation of all natural phenomena. Many materialistic false theories have arisen: in physics - reductionism, that is, reduction of the behavior of complex systems to the properties of their simpler parts, in astronomy - the hypothesis of the emergence of the Solar system, in geology - completely arbitrary dating of strata in rocks, in biology - the concept of evolution (Lamarckism and Darwinism), in the sciences of man and society - socialism and Freudianism. These "theories", and in fact the myths of the 19th century, continue to be presented in an altered form as scientifically based". 

(Science as a Confirmation of the Biblical Doctrine of Creation, Samara, 2001, p.26-27)

Source: pravoslavie.ru (Russian)

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