To my godchildren - Maria, Alexis and Michael, it is addressed and dedicated. And truly, ask the cattle, and he will teach you, the bird of the air, and he will tell you; or converse with the earth, and he will instruct you, and the fish of the sea will tell you. Who in all these things does not know that the hand of the Lord has created this? (Job 12:7-9) The world is governed by infinite Reason. The more I observe, the more I discover this Mind glowing behind the mystery of existence. I know that they will laugh at me, but I don't care much about it, it's easier to flay me than to take away my faith in God... I don't have to believe in Him, I see Him. J.A. Fabre. [1] Lector. You have probably come across this opinion about Orthodoxy: "Orthodoxy is good. Orthodoxy teaches people the lofty moral teaching of love for one's neighbor, love unto self-sacrifice; Orthodox teaching is a great treasury of worldly wisdom; The Orthodox faith allows people to endure the hardest hardships; our national culture is built on Orthodoxy; many heroic pages of Russian history are connected with Orthodoxy, etc., but this is a fairy tale. Yes, good, wise, even very useful, but... It's a fairy tale after all. And why? Simply because what Orthodoxy asserts does not correspond at all to what modern scientists say, does not correspond to the facts that science provides us." Audience. Of course, you have. You say, "The earth is flat," and scientists have proven that it is round. The earth rotates, everyone knows that. And what did the inquisitors do with Galileo? They almost burned him at the stake, and for what? For claiming that the Earth rotates. And where did you send Giordano Bruno? Isn't it the right place? Lecturer. Before speaking about the judgment of the Church on these questions, we must clarify exactly where we can hear her voice, revealing to us the Divine Revelation, which contains in itself the fullness of that which belongs to the truth" [2]. According to the Orthodox Holy Scriptures. According to tradition, we hear this voice (a voice containing pure truth without falsehood [3]) - in the Holy Scriptures. Scriptures, the decrees of the Holy Scriptures. Ecumenical Councils, the canons of St. Apostles, St. Councils and Holy Fathers, in the Church Statutes [4]. It must be said that in accordance with the dogma of the Seventh Ecumenical Council (by the way, with the same dogma that affirmed the veneration of icons), the concordant judgment of the Holy Fathers (the saints of God glorified by the Holy Orthodox Church) is the source from which we can also cognize the truths of Divine Revelation, and this source is not clouded by the admixture of false teachings. So let's see what the Holy Fathers wrote about the Earth. In the eighth century in the city of Damascus there lived a remarkable man, his name was John. He is known to us as a collector of the judgments of the Holy Fathers, who reflected these judgments in the well-known treatise "An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith." John himself led an ascetic life and was canonized; we call him "St. John of Damascus." The works of this Father are so highly perfect that the Holy Church calls him "the second Moses" (Arabic Life), and the Greek Life of the Monk quotes the saying of the Most Holy Theotokos herself about the perfection of his creations: "Those who thirst must come to this water. Should... to buy from John an irreproachable purity in teaching and in deeds." What is written about the Earth in the "Exact Exposition" of the Monk John? - "Some say that the earth is spherical, others that it is cone-shaped." Note that nothing is said here definitely, but only different opinions are given. As one of the private opinions in this book, the idea of the flat shape of the earth's surface is cited. Now about rotation. Let us again turn to the "Exact Exposition" of St. John and see what is said there on this subject. Of the sun, for example, the following is said: "The sun also produces changes through them a year; and also the days and the nights: the first - rising and being above the earth, the second - sinking under the earth." About the constellations of the zodiac: "The zodiac circle moves along an oblique line." Audience. That's it! This is what we meant. So, in your opinion, the Earth is standing, and everything else - and in particular the Sun, the constellations of the zodiac - is rotating. We know that. This is Ptolemy's geocentric system, which has long outlived itself and has been rejected by science. Lecturer. Let's be precise. In the quotes that I have given you, it does not say: the Earth is standing, but something is moving "around", it is only said that it is "moving". Nothing of the kind is said in other places of the book of the Monk John. I want to draw your attention to this point. Let's think about what we mean when we say "the sun sets" or "the sun rises"? - Of course, not what is really happening. And what happened? We designate by these and similar expressions only the images of our visual perception. "The sun is setting" and similar expressions - are they not used by those who certainly do not believe that the sun revolves around the earth? It is used to denote what they see. Astronomers use similar expressions - for example, they have the concept of "the passage of a star through a meridian", and it is unlikely that there are many among them who really believe that a star actually passes through something. Such expressions do not have to be taken literally. And consequently there is reason to think: in what sense did St. John use them – literally or only figuratively, to designate the images of our perception? At least in the pages of the "Exact Exposition" the monk uses the expression about the movement of celestial bodies precisely in the latter sense. [5] It seems that on the basis of the "Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith" there is no reason to believe that the Church professes the astronomical system of Ptolemy or Copernicus. At least, the question of what revolves around what is not raised there. Let scientists refute various astronomical systems on the basis of reliable facts, this is their business. It is necessary to know that in reality among the Orthodox in a particular historical time there may exist various private opinions, which do not always coincide with Divine Revelation and are not necessarily absolutely true. Such opinions can be mistaken by ignorant people for the judgments of the Church itself, for truths that have their source in Divine Revelation. The reproaches against the Orthodox Church about Giordano Bruno, Copernicus and Galileo do not apply to us at all, since the well-known events associated with these people took place on the initiative of the Catholics, they were accused by the Catholic Church. And these accusations were probably based on the dogmas and moral principles of Catholicism. So this reproach, it turns out, is not addressed to us at all. Audience. But what about the origin of the Earth and the Universe? After all, billions of years have passed, as scientists say, since the beginning of the solar system, and you have all the "six days of creation"? Who has seen it, this creation? And why are you talking about him so confidently? Lecturer. First, we need to answer your second question. The world that surrounds us is an amazing testimony to creation. On its own! Take, for example, wildlife. The perfection of its structure is simply amazing. Modern biologists can tell a lot about this and, probably, in the future they will tell a lot. Here, for example, is one fact: someone tried to assess the complexity of the structure of one of the living creatures we know well - a mosquito. And it turned out that the mosquito is incomparably more complex than the most modern supercomputer. What can we say about creatures many times more perfect than a mosquito, of which there are a great many, and the most diverse?! At the same time, some scientists continue to believe that all living things came into existence as a result of some random changes, random processes, etc. In life, nothing ever happens by chance; Computers do not spontaneously emerge from chaos. So a question similar to yours can be asked to scientists: "Why are you sure that the world is not created, if at present there is only one known way for the emergence of the most complex systems (computers, etc.) "Is it a rational creation?" Isn't your confidence based on believing something that never happens?" Yes, the world is indeed created, and what is surprising, it was created for man, as St. Tikhon of Zadonsk, one of the great ascetics and teachers of the Russian Orthodox Church, teaches. How could it be otherwise? How can we explain that in the lifeless ocean of space there is a planet Earth, where for some reason (again by chance?!) all the necessary conditions (and there are many of them) for human life are brought together? Or here's another example: there are a lot of herbs growing on Earth. Surprisingly, many of them have medicinal properties. What is plantain, yarrow, wormwood or burdock? - plants containing medicinal substances for various ailments and diseases - a whole pharmacy [6]. How did it happen, why not otherwise? After all, there are a great many chemical compounds, and not all of them are harmless, especially having a therapeutic effect. Try, for example, to approach a stall with household chemicals and find at least one substance with medicinal properties there. It seems that such an attempt is likely to end in failure, but you will find as many substances harmful to health as you want. It is not for nothing that the people have formed the opinion that "chemistry is poison". And another amazing feature of the world is its beauty, often incomparable with the beauty of works of art, incomparably higher. In order to learn only to copy this beauty, to create its likenesses, which are significantly worse than the original, a person must, as a rule, spend years on training and have a special gift, for which the blind world (that is, people who do not recognize the existence of God) glorifies the creator of these likenesses with lofty titles. The world does not want to see the perfection of the pattern from which copies are made, glorifying the creators of copies, refusing to recognize and glorify the One Who created the pattern, madly declaring that the pattern arose by chance. Again, this is "accidental"! Isn't too much given to chance? Well, now about creation and the days of creation. Yes, the world was created by God, and the earth, and the sky, and the solar system, and life in its innumerable forms, and man were created by God. This is clearly told in the first chapters of the book of Genesis - the first book of the Holy Bible (Holy Scripture). How long does it take? - in six days. However, it is still unclear what is meant by the word "day" in the Bible. The Book of Genesis is written in the original Hebrew language, and in the Hebrew text the word "day" corresponds to the word "yom", which in the Hebrew language can denote both "day" in the astronomical sense, and in general some indefinite period of time. Some believe that these "yomas" could last for millions of years. However, it seems that there is more evidence for the fact that this did not happen, more on that later. The animal and plant worlds, according to St. Basil the Great, were created in such a way that later the species of plants and animals did not undergo changes - I mean that there was no origin of some species from others (that is, the evolution of species). In this sense, some other judgments of the Holy Fathers on the origin of life are also anti-evolutionary [7]. In the same way, man did not arise and was not even created from any other creature, for example, from an ape, but was created at the end of creation "from dust", in the image and likeness of God. It should be noted that according to the teaching of the Holy Fathers, as we have seen above, during the days of creation, there was no evolution, that is, the origin of some species from others (due to the fact that it did not exist at all). At that time, there was no death in the world, because, as the Holy Fathers teach, it is the result, the consequence of the fall of the first people [8]. As a result, we can conclude that a great number of fossil remains of animals and plants found by paleontologists (and more than 200,000 species (!) of fossil organisms have already been found) accumulated in the earth's crust during the period of time following the fall of the forefathers. How long did this period last? - About 7.5 thousand years, according to both the Holy Fathers (St. Demetrius of Rostov and St. Isaac the Syrian) and the Church Ustav [9]. Audience. The Earth and the Solar System are many hundreds of millions of years old, and life on Earth is also many hundreds of millions of years old! Scientists talk about it, they have a lot of evidence. And life arose as a result of evolution, and man - from an ape. All this has long been proven by science. And you have everything the same - "from the dust"! Scientists have many facts that contradict your medieval ideas, which it is high time to submit to the historical archives. And in general - in the XX century they do not think and do not live like you do! Lecturer. Let's figure it out in order. Let's take a slow, let's take a look at what scientists say and what the facts say. How many years has the Earth, the solar system, fossils, etc., existed? Answering these questions using scientific methods is not an easy task. Time is not a videotape, it cannot be "rewound" back. The past has left its traces, let's see how scientists try to read the history of the Earth and the Solar System from these prints, to assess the duration of the periods of this history. Many of the common methods of temporary assessment are those built on the principle of uniformitarianism. Let's look at the graph (Fig. 1). Suppose that we observe a process or phenomenon or a state and see that over time (from t1 to t2) a certain parameter (y) changes. For example, as shown in the graph. Then, if we succeed in figuring out the nature of the function y = f (t), assuming that it does not change with time, we can try to find out when (y = 0) the observed phenomenon began, that is, to determine the value of t0, and the "age" (T = t2 - t0) of what we observe. This is the essence of this principle. Let us not forget that the assumption that the character of the function y = f (t) is an invariable condition. If this function turns out to be changing over time, then age cannot be determined (Fig. 2). On the basis of the principle of uniformitarianism, the first attempts were made to establish the age of the Earth by estimating the age of sedimentary rocks that were many meters thick. If we know at what rate sedimentary rocks are accumulating now, then we can calculate how long it would take for them to accumulate many meters or even kilometers of sediments, provided that the speed remained unchanged. This is how the figures for hundreds of millions of years were obtained! Alas, the evidence is too shaky, because it is not known whether the rate of sediment accumulation at the bottom of the seas, etc., remained unchanged. Moreover, the facts show that the accumulation of sedimentary deposits can occur at incomparably higher rates than usual, for example, during various kinds of disasters - primarily floods and tsunamis. According to many scientists, the existing geological data speak in favor of the fact that the sedimentary rocks that cover almost the entire surface of the Earth were most likely accumulated not due to gradual, "quiet" deposition, which we usually observe, but due to catastrophic phenomena that led to a very rapid accumulation of sediments. This is supported by the fact that in the thickness of sedimentary rocks we find a huge number of fossilized remains of living organisms. It is well known that during the "quiet" deposition of sediments in the sea or on land, no fossils are formed, if only because the remains of plants and animals are quickly eaten by other animals - the so-called scavengers, or are subject to putrefaction and erosion. So estimating the age of the Earth at millions of years by this method is inconclusive [10]. Another common method by which figures of hundreds of millions of years are "obtained" is radioactive. Physicists claim that some elements and their isotopes decompose into other elements as a result of radioactive decay, and these processes occur at certain rates. For example, radioactive uranium decomposes into a gas - helium and solid lead. According to some scientists, if you calculate the percentages of uranium and lead in volcanic rock, then you can, knowing the rate of decay, determine its age, that is, the time of its formation. This method is also based on the principle of uniformitarianism, and just as in the previous situation, here we cannot be sure that the nature of the function (the rate of decay) has remained unchanged over considerable periods of time. The rates of decay of radioactive elements have been observed for less than a century, and these rates have been extrapolated over millions of years, even billions. Isn't it too bold? This method suffers from several more drawbacks - namely, it is not clear how much of the originally radioactive element and the elements (element) that are the products of decay in the original rock, for example, how much uranium was originally in the volcanic rock and how much lead. It is also unclear how much radioactive element could have "escaped" from the rock or, conversely, "entered" it additionally throughout history. The same can be said about decay products. With regard to the uranium method (perhaps the most famous), there is one more special difficulty: the decay product is helium gas. They calculated how much of this gas should have accumulated in the atmosphere if the Earth had existed for hundreds of millions of years (and consequently, uranium decayed throughout this time interval, releasing helium into the atmosphere). Then they compared this number with the amount of helium that is actually available; it turned out to be about a million times (!) less than was assumed based on the idea of a multi-million history of the Earth (13, 17). It remains a mystery: how and where this huge amount of helium could have gone. In practice, for example, there are such cases of assessment using radioactive methods: the newly formed (1800) volcanic rock is estimated to be 160 million to three billion years old (!), the lower layers of solidified lava are estimated to be younger than the overlying ones, and so on (17, p. It should be noted that attempts at dating using several radioactive methods at once also sometimes lead to inconsistent results, i.e., different ages of the same rock, judging by different radioactive "clocks" (17, p. Radioactive methods also include another well-known method - radiocarbon. It is based on the fact that, according to scientists, carbon contained in the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide (CO2) as a result of cosmic radiation turns into a radioactive isotope (C14), which over time (the function y = f (t) is taken as known) gradually decays, turning into nitrogen. Knowing the ratio of the isotope 14 to ordinary carbon in the atmosphere (and the same, therefore, in plants that obtain carbon from the air by capturing carbon dioxide, and therefore again the same in the bodies of animals that feed on them, etc.), comparing it with the same ratio in the fossil remains of a plant or animal, we can try to determine the time that has elapsed since its death. This method does not give clear results when evaluating objects older than 8 thousand years (the opinion of Professor W. Libby, the inventor of this method, Nobel Prize winner (19)). In addition, it is necessary to point out that scientists consider it an established fact that the concentration of 14C in the Earth's atmosphere does not remain constant, but gradually increases, and this is probably due to a gradual decrease in the strength of the Earth's magnetic field. According to modern physics, the higher the intensity of the Earth's magnetic field, the less cosmic radiation enters its atmosphere, and, consequently, the less radioactive carbon should be formed (17). The strength of the Earth's magnetic field, according to physicists, decreases over time and very quickly, and if they are right, then there used to be much less radioactive carbon in the atmosphere. According to R. Brown, the older the remains, the greater the mistake of overestimating the age will be made by someone who estimates the age of, say, a piece of wood based on the currently known concentration of 14C in the atmosphere. (17, p.61). From this large, inflated figures can be obtained - which is what they get [11]. It should be noted that not all methods built on the principle of uniformitarianism give results that "testify" that the Earth and the Solar System have existed for hundreds of millions of years. Here are some of them, the results of which indicate something completely different: Sedimentary rocks are formed not only on Earth, but also, for example, on the Moon. The rate of deposition of cosmic dust on the surface of the Moon is known. On the Moon, there is actually a layer of dust corresponding to the accumulation of about 10 thousand years. A similar result was obtained in relation to the deposition of cosmic dust on the Earth's surface (13, 17, 19). The rate of decline (decrease) in the intensity of the Earth's magnetic field is such that, according to the ideas of modern physics, only about 10 thousand years ago the Earth should have been a so-called magnetic star (13, 17, 19). The rate of shrinking of the sun's diameter also indicates that the earth is much younger than conventional geologists think—about 20 million years ago, the sun and earth would have been in contact with surfaces, and one million years ago, because of the sun's proximity, life on earth would have been impossible. The rates of leaching of various chemical elements from the Earth's crust also show the age of the planet being much less than hundreds of millions of years, etc. (17, 19). Audience. And so it turns out that all the "clocks" go differently, and all these methods, so to speak, are worth each other? Lecturer. Yes, the "clock" does show different time intervals for the origin of the Earth, the solar system, life on Earth. As for the fact that all methods are worth each other, in a sense you are right; I have already pointed out the main defect that plagues the principle of uniformitarianism. Any dating method based on this principle is likely to inevitably contain this flaw. And yet, it is impossible not to point out what the totality of uniformitarian dating methods as a whole shows. Audience. What does it show? Lecturer. According to the list given by P. Taylor, the number of methods indicating the youth of the Earth and the Universe is about 5 times greater than the methods indicating their antiquity - that is, hundreds of millions of years known to you. There are 107 of the former, only 22 of the latter, and not all of them are indisputable [12] (17, pp. 18-20, 64-65). Summing up our conversation, I must say that today there is no doubt that no one has yet scientifically refuted the assertion that the time of the alternation of life and death on Earth does not exceed 7.5 thousand years. Well, if life and death on Earth exist together for only about 7.5 thousand years, as the Holy Fathers teach us, then there could be no evolution of animal and plant species (as it is imagined by materialist scientists). Audience. Why? Lecturer. Because evolution, according to evolutionists, takes a very long time. Both "gradual" evolution, which presupposes very numerous, small changes in organisms as a mechanism (Darwinism), and spasmodic evolution (saltation theory), from the point of view of modern probability theory [13], require many millions of years. But evolutionary theories and the facts associated with them are discussed later. Jean-Henri Fabre is a famous French naturalist, one of the founders of entomology - the science of insect life. ^ The Extensive Christian Catechism of St. Philaret, Metropolitan of Moscow. Moscow, 1995. ^ The Extensive Christian Catechism of St. Philaret, Metropolitan of Moscow. Moscow, 1995. ^Ibidem. ^ "It is also said that in the heavens there are twelve signs of the zodiac of the stars, which have a motion opposite to that of the sun, the moon, and the other five planets, and that the seven planets pass through these twelve constellations" (St. John of Damascus. "Exact Exposition", book. 2, part 7 - St. Petersburg, 1894). Here again St. John uses the word "speak" with caution, but he uses the concepts of "sign of the zodiac" and "constellation" in the same sense. "The zodiac circle moves along an oblique line and is divided into 12 parts, called the signs of the zodiac" (ibid.). "Each sign of the zodiac moon passes for two and a half days" (ibid.). "The Sun uses one month for the passage of each sign of the zodiac and passes through twelve constellations in the course of twelve months" (see: "Polnoe sobranie tvordeniy", 1913, vol. "The moon passes through 12 constellations every month, because it is located lower and passes them faster; for just as if you draw a circle inside another circle, the circle lying inside will be smaller, so the course of the moon lying below the sun is shorter and more rapid" (ibid.). The movement of the sun and moon through the signs of the zodiac is spoken of as impressions, and not in the sense of "reality" (just as modern astronomers speak of the passage of Mercury through the meridian, etc.). The circle of the moon, according to St. The circle of St. John is smaller in diameter than the circle of the sun and therefore cannot coincide with the zodiacal circle. ^ "Bitter wormwood - ... Preparations of the plant are used to stimulate appetite and as a means of promoting digestion (for gastritis with low acidity, etc.). It is part of choleretic and appetizing preparations and bitter tincture. The glycoside absintin regulates blood pressure, stimulates the function of the glands of the digestive tract... The plant is used in folk medicine and homeopathy (for low acidity, liver and gallbladder diseases). Burdock (burdock) - Preparations from the roots are a diuretic. An infusion of roots on almond or olive oil called "Burdock oil" is used to strengthen hair. In folk medicine, it is used internally for rheumatism and gout, externally for acne, furunculosis, eczema" (Gubanov I.A. et al. Wild Useful Plants of the USSR. - Moscow, 1976). ^ "It is most certain, then, that in every plant there is either a seed, or some seed power is hidden. And this means the word: "according to the kind". For the offspring of a reed does not produce an olive, but on the contrary, from the reed there is another reed, and from the sown seeds grows that which is akin to them. "As a ball thrown down an inclined plane rolls down and does not stop until it is on the plane, so living nature, moved by a single command, makes uniform transitions of creatures from birth to destruction, maintaining a uniform sequence of species until it reaches the end. From a horse is born a horse, from a lion a lion, from an eagle an eagle, and every animal preserved from generation to generation continues to the end of the universe. No time damages or destroys the properties of animals. On the contrary, their nature, as newly created, exists together with time" (St. Basil the Great, Six Days, Creations, Part I, 1900 edition). On the instantaneous origin of all plants of the Holy Scriptures. Basil the Great writes: "Let the earth bring forth greenery" (Gen. 2:10). I, II). And the earth, observing the laws of the Creator, beginning with a sprout, in a short moment of time brought about all kinds of growth and immediately brought them to perfection" (Six Days, Creations, Part I, p. 73, 1900 edition). St. Ephraim the Syrian spoke about the instantaneous origin of cereals: "Cereals, at the time of their creation, were the offspring of a single instant, but in appearance they seemed to be the offspring of the months"; on the origin of land animals (on the fourth day): "Thus, by God's command, the earth immediately brought forth reptiles, beasts of the field, beasts of prey, and cattle, as many of them were needed for the service (of Adam)" (Commentary on the Book of Genesis, ch. 1, Creations, vol. 6, Holy Trinity-Sergius Lavra, 1901). Finally, the thoughts of St. John Chrysostom: "As for animals and beasts, they were only once, according to the word of Almighty God, begotten by the earth, and are born again not from the earth, but by natural succession from one another. That is why the Creator said about animals: "Let the earth bring forth," that is, once and for all let the earth give birth to animals. "And it was so" (Gen. 1:24), says the Scriptures. "The word of Almighty God was fulfilled: the earth was adorned with plants and animals" (Creations, vol. 6, p. 755, 1900 edition). ^ "There were no noxious growths on it; the plants were not subject to decay or disease." "Before sin there was no death in the world. Death entered the world through sin (Rom. 5:12), quickly embraced, infected, and incurably damaged the world" (St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, The Word of Man, St. Petersburg, 1995). For this reason, as sin entered into the world by one man, and death through sin, and so death entered into all men, in whom all sinned (Rom. 5:12). Having said that the Lord Jesus justified us (the Apostle), he turns to the root of evil, to sin and death, and shows that both sin and death, entered the world through one man, Adam." "When thy body became corruptible, then also the creature became corruptible" (Bl. Theophylact of Bulgaria, Commentary on the Epistles of the Holy Apostle Paul (Rom. 5, 12 and 8, 20), Moscow, 1993). "As the creation was made corruptible when thy body became corruptible, so also when thy body is incorruptible, and the creature shall follow it and become according to it" (St. John Chrysostom, Discourses on the Epistle to the Romans, XIV, 5). "The creature that is now flowing was not originally created perishable; but afterwards it fell into corruption, obeying vanity, according to the Scriptures, not willingly, but unwillingly, for obeying it, in the hope of renewal of Adam, who was subjected to corruption (Rom. 8:20)" (St. Gregory of Sinai, Chapters on the Commandments, Ch. 11, Philokalia, Vol. 5, Holy Trinity-Sergius Lavra. 1993). "Adam was created with an incorruptible body, however material, and not spiritual, and was placed by the Creator God, as an immortal king over the incorruptible world" (St. Symeon the New Theologian, Homily 45; quoted from the book: Seraphim Rose, "The Orthodox View of Evolution" - St. Petersburg, 1997). ^ "You go out to fight with wrestlers strengthened by six thousand years of experience," writes St. Isaac the Syrian about the ascetic who wages an invisible battle with demons (Homily 30, quoted from the book: St. Ignatius Brianchaninov. The history of life and mankind on Earth within the framework of this period of time is analyzed in detail by St. Demetrius of Rostov in his "Chronicle". ^ For observations suggesting rapid accumulation of sedimentary rocks, see 12, 17, 21, 23. ^ The radiocarbon method is considered a "favorite" by evolutionists. For some reason, the above amendments are not always taken into account by them. While acknowledging the paleomagnetic method, which gives an age dating that corresponds to their ideas, some of them do not take into account the results of the application and the features of the methods that destroy their concepts (22). How some evolutionists are selective about ideas and even facts will be discussed later. ^ One of the well-known "strong" arguments in favor of the antiquity of the Universe is the results of measurements of distances to distant galaxies and the results of measurements of the speed of light, which "show" that light from these galaxies has been traveling for many billions of years, etc. However, according to measurements of the speed of light, it has been established that it is falling (18 and 19), and in the distant expanses of space, according to scientists, there are cases of objects moving faster than the speed of light (and this is a conclusion, made on the basis of astronomical observations, and not the fruit of science fiction). If this is true, then the light from distant stars could reach us in much shorter periods of time. Our physical constants are obtained "here" and "now", and we often extrapolate them to large time and space intervals, but we do not know how permissible this is. This is the "splendor and misery" of uniformitarian thinking. ^ The doctrine that presupposes the existence of random processes in the world, which is often used by materialists and contradicts the teaching of the Holy Scriptures. Church ("I believe in One God the Father, the Almighty"). A. Einstein could not admit the idea that "God plays dice", and therefore did not recognize the quantum mechanics of M. Planck, based on the idea of random phenomena and processes. ^

Conversation TwoIs the amoeba our ancestor?

I believe in God as a Person, and I can honestly say that I have not been an atheist for a single minute of my life. As a young student, I resolutely rejected the views of Darwin, Haeckel, and Huxley as helplessly obsolete. A. Einstein Listeners. Last time you promised to tell us about the theories of evolution. Lecturer. Yes, I really was going to tell you about it. First, let's remember what evolution is. The evolution of living organisms is the origin of some species of plants and animals from others, and, in the end, all from the simplest unicellular organisms. It should be noted that no one has ever seen her with her own eyes. Neither the centuries-old experience of observing wildlife, nor the thorough and purposeful research of biologists, nor the practice (also centuries-old) of artificial selection, including the use of mutagenic factors (20th century), have ever made it possible to observe the emergence of new species of animals and plants [1]. This, however, does not prevent the writing of mountains of literature devoted to the theory of evolution, and the existence of departments of the "theory of evolution" in universities, as, for example, until now in Moscow State University, in Moscow. Obviously, here we are dealing with a situation of a typical division of the "skin of an unkilled bear". As is known, evolutionists believe that all living things, with their diversity of species, with their most complex structure and functions, originated from elementary, simple, ultimately unicellular forms of life - either by a multitude of small, gradual (the so-called "gradual") changes (Lamarck, Darwin), or by a smaller number of macrochanges ("saltations"), spasmodically (De Vries, Goldschmitt). If this is the case, then the history of each species should remain in the sequence of sedimentary rock layers in the form of the remains of its fossil ancestors. There must be a sequence consisting of the remains of his ancestors, so to speak, a "ladder" of the evolution of a given species, from amoeba-like creatures to a modern organism (e.g., man). And if some rungs of the "ladder" fell out in the course of the formation of the Earth, it is as a result of some external causes, and not evolution itself; At least in history, such a sequence must necessarily have taken place for any species. The totality of all the "ladders" can, according to some evolutionists, be combined into a single "tree" (so often "flaunted" on the pages of biology textbooks), showing how all living things evolved from an amoeba-like creature; according to others, there were probably several such trees. In the layers of sedimentary rocks (the so-called "stratigraphic column"), according to evolutionists, the sequence of remains of organisms should be traced according to the principle "from bottom to top, from simple to complex", i.e. the higher (later, according to their ideas), the more complex forms of life we should encounter, but not vice versa. First, about the "stratigraphic column". As is known, according to the ideas of traditional geology, there are about 10 layers ("systems") of the stratigraphic column corresponding to ten geological periods, i.e. the periods of development (evolution) of flora and fauna on Earth (Cambrian, Permian, Devonian, etc.). Alas, the stratigraphic column in such a "beautiful" form exists only in the images of the imagination and in its products - in drawings, diagrams, etc. In fact, according to specific studies, "two-thirds of the Earth's surface has 5 or less out of 10 geological periods" (17, pp. 40 and 103). However, as both evolutionists and creation proponents (and there are many of them among scientists) point out, in most cases we can observe that as we go further down, we encounter more and more simply organized forms, and complex ones disappear. And the principle of "from the bottom up, from the simple to the complex" usually works. For many species of animals, evolutionists argue, it is possible to try to construct hypothetical evolutionary ladders on the basis of similarities in structure, morphology, and primarily bone remains. For example, they made an attempt to build such a ladder: mammals evolved from reptiles, reptiles from amphibians, amphibians from fish, fish from invertebrates, etc. Audience. And we know the facts that you tell us about - from simple to complex. Isn't this evidence of evolution? Lecturer. There are several opinions as to why the remains of living organisms lie in the layers of the geological column mainly according to the principle "from bottom to top, from the simple to the complex" (18, pp. 174-175; 19, 21, 23). And we should also take into account the fact that by the end of the 20th century, science already has data that show us that the real picture does not always correspond to what could be expected based on evolutionary ideas [2]. First, it should be said that the "ladders" of ancestors have not been "traced" for all classes of living organisms. They are simply absent for all classes of invertebrates without exception. According to well-known data, the remains of representatives of invertebrates (crustaceans, sponges, worms, etc.) can be traced back to the so-called Cambrian deposits, i.e. the most ancient, according to traditional geologists, of all those containing the remains of multicellular living organisms. In the Cambrian rocks, the remains of other, apparently extinct, classes of invertebrate animals with the most complex morphology are also found. What is remarkable? So far, no ancestor candidates have been found for the classes of animals listed above! All of them, so to speak, "appear suddenly". From where, from what did they evolve? Evolutionists can only shrug their shoulders or point to the remains of single-celled organisms lying below. There are no evolutionary "ladders" at all. This is the so-called "Cambrian explosion" - the Achilles' heel of the theory of evolution (6, 13, 26). Secondly, there are currently facts (although not numerous, but quite convincing) indicating the presence of remains of higher forms of life even in the Cambrian layers (17, 23) [3]. Thirdly, there are well-studied cases of anomalous occurrence of sedimentary rocks, when layers of "ancient" sediments for some reason, without a valid geological reason, turn out to be on top of the "young" ones, which, of course, calls into question the idea of the "stratigraphic column", and with it the idea of organic evolution (17, 19, 21, 23) [4]. Fourthly, if evolution was and really was a "tree" consisting of "ladders", then, according to modern evolutionary biologists, the closer the kinship between organisms (the closer the twigs of the "tree" are to each other), the more similar the features of their microorganization should be (meaning the structure of macromolecules), and not vice versa. Alas, the results sought by evolutionists are not obtained in this field (6). For example, the insulin (hormone) of a guinea pig is thought to differ from rat and human insulin by the same number of differences based on biochemical analysis methods (18). The cytochrome C of the rattlesnake has 22 differences from the cytochrome C of the turtle (also a reptile), and only 12 characters distinguish it from the cytochrome C of humans (!). Another example: of all the anthropoid apes, the orangutan is considered to be the closest to humans in terms of body structure, while in terms of protein structure (amino acid sequence) - chimpanzees; In this respect, the orangutan is in the last place in the list of anthropoid apes, on the same level as the gibbon (an ape, by no means anthropoid! (22)) (see 6). Evolutionary "ladders" and "trees" were compiled by evolutionists by comparing the macrostructure (morphology) of organisms. On the basis of the microstructure, it turns out, it is possible to build other "stairs" and "trees" that do not coincide with the classical ones. (At the same time, as we have already seen, a person can become a relative of a rattlesnake!) It is then incomprehensible why similarities of macrostructure should be given preference over similarities at the micro level in the construction of "ladders" and "trees," as is done by the proponents of evolution. After all, they themselves believe that macrostructural similarities are not at all a kind of universal criterion for clarifying questions about evolutionary connections; For example, with all the similarities in the structure of the skeletons of a shark, ichthyosaur and dolphin, these animals are not recognized by them as close relatives! In general, it should be noted that similarities between organisms (micro- or macro-level) do not yet say anything about their kinship, and this is not a reason for the construction of "ladders" and "trees". They can be explained by the commonality of the Creator's ideas and plans. For example, the striated muscle of a human and an ant are similar in structure. According to some modern authors, all living cells of all living organisms have, in principle, a common, single scheme of structure and functioning, which, of course, is also a mystery for the evolutionary theory (i.e., the question of why evolution bypassed the cellular level of the structure of living matter remains unanswered). Fifth, when comparing the same species, different "molecular clocks" can show different times. Audience. What's it? Lecturer. Some scientists believe that in the same complex biomolecules, so-called "random" changes in their structure (mutations) appear with a certain frequency (probability) in time. Therefore, as they suggested, when comparing the microstructures of similar molecules in different species, it is possible, knowing how different these biomolecules are, to try to assess when these species "diverged" from each other along different "branches" of the evolutionary "tree". (In much the same way as if we were comparing two people and trying to judge from the differences in facial features whether they are siblings or cousins or second cousins, etc.) These comparisons give contradictory results when analyzing the structure of different biomolecules in the same species. Some biomolecules may point to one date - the date of "divergence", others to an entirely different one. There is no unity of the picture (6). At least, the "molecular clock" does not provide indicators in favor of evolution [5]. Audience. But have intermediate forms between organisms been found? Between fish and amphibians, reptiles and birds? Doesn't this confirm the ideas of Charles Darwin? Lecturer. It seems that the time has come to talk about the theory of gradual or so-called "gradual" evolution [6]. By the end of the 20th century, the situation was not at all the same as it was in the middle of the 19th century, when Charles Darwin worked on several editions of his work "The Origin of Species". I cannot reproach Charles Darwin for dishonesty. In his time, he himself outlined the ways in which his theory would have to be confirmed or refuted in the future. Let us dwell on them and on some modern data that clearly contradict Darwin's theory of natural selection. In his work "The Origin of Species" he wrote that further paleontological research (and they were relatively few in number in his time) should reveal a significant number of intermediate links (forms) between species (and according to his theory, there should be a lot of them!), and this should either confirm or radically refute the very idea of gradual evolution through natural selection (!). At present, despite the huge size of paleontological collections (about 250 thousand species of fossil animals and plants!), intermediate links have practically not been found. Evolutionary "ladders" are actually rather evolutionary "ruins" replete with gaps and gaps, and there is no trace of gradual change (17, 23). For some reason, the intermediate forms did not leave us their remains! [7] Alas, this does not prevent neo-Darwinists from continuing to adhere to the concept of their ideological father [8]. Charles Darwin wrote that one of the signs of an evolutionary relationship between species is the presence of morphological similarity in their structure, provided that organs and systems similar in structure (the so-called "homologous organs") develop from similar embryonic formations in embryogenesis (that is, during the development of an organism from an embryo). If there is no such analogy, then there can be no question of any gradual evolution of one species from another. Evolutionists base themselves on approximately this scheme of reasoning when they "derive" what occurs, for example, reptiles from amphibians: the structure of the skeletons is identical (homologous), which means that reptiles evolved from amphibians. Alas, the homologies of organs often turn out to be purely external, having a completely different embryological history, and, according to the criterion of C. Darwin, they speak of the opposite, i.e. not of the presence of an evolutionary connection through gradual, gradual changes, but of its obvious absence. For example, the kidneys of fish and amphibians develop from the so-called "mesonephros"; In reptiles and mammals, the mesonephros degenerates (resolves) towards the end of embryo formation and plays no role in the formation of the kidneys, which develop from a completely different region (the "metanephros") that has nothing to do with the mesonephros (26). Alas, the buds of reptiles could not have developed with the help of gradual microchanges from the buds of amphibians, as Charles Darwin assumed about the formation of the characteristics of the varieties of Galapagos finches. In addition, at present, according to some scientists, it is also possible to point to a multitude of complex biological systems (structure, functioning, behavior) that could not have developed gradually from anything else, since the loss of at least one element from such systems inevitably leads to a complete failure, and as a consequence - to a pronounced disadaptation or death of the animal; For the development of such systems, it is logically impossible to invent a preceding stage of gradual formation, i.e., it is logically impossible to construct something from which "this" could have arisen by gradual formation (26). Audience. It is not entirely clear what is meant. Lecturer. I want to explain to you with the help of an example. Let's say you are thrown into the taiga, in a thirty-degree frost, to survive. At your disposal there is a good hut, with a stove and firewood. Audience. Yes, it's good with the hut! Lecturer. Of course, it's very bad without a hut, so most likely you won't survive. Now imagine that your hut is missing one of the parts (elements) - for example, a stove or a roof, or a door, or several walls, or even only one of the four. The absence of any of the elements deprives your hut of its utilitarian purpose or leads to the fact that your chances of survival in it deteriorate sharply (a hut without a door, without a ceiling or without a wall will never be heated, especially in a thirty-degree frost). Here is an example of such a system. Remove one of the elements, and it becomes unnecessary, and maybe even harmful in terms of survival. According to some biologists, there are a great many such systems in the world of living organisms. Remove one element, and the system loses its adaptive value. The question is: from what could such systems gradually evolve? - Only from a system with the same composition of elements; It turns out to be "marking time". Such a system could arise, as some scientists believe, only immediately, only completely and at once. A hut without a stove or without a door is death. B. Hobrink gives a witty example of such a system from the field of physiology and behavior of the bombardier beetle (19, p. 74). "One of the thousands of examples of such creatures is the crackling bombardier beetle (Brachymus crepitans), which is common in all parts of the world and lives near streams and reservoirs. When the bombardier beetle is attacked by an enemy, it directs small muzzles located near its anus in its direction. This is followed by a small volley. When a boiling poisonous liquid falls on an enemy, it causes painful burns to the enemy. When in contact with air, the released liquid forms a cloud of blue vapor. This smoke screen serves as a cover for the retreat of our beetle, and also performs the function of scaring, which usually forces the enemy to retreat. This beetle has two groups of glands that produce fluid, which is stored in special bags and, in case of danger, pours into a real "combustion chamber". This is immediately followed by an explosion, due to which fluid sprays out of the anus. All this resembles the mechanism of a rocket with liquid fuel. The liquid is a poisonous mixture: 10% hydroquinone and 28% hydrogen peroxide (in an experimental test tube, such a mixture explodes instantly). The beetle stores this mixture in bags along with a substance that prevents its explosion. When the mixture enters the "combustion chamber", the limiter is neutralized and an explosion occurs. Just try to imagine how such a system could have arisen through random mutations and natural selection. The beetle would have to develop not only the entire apparatus of the corresponding organs: glands, storage sacs, "combustion chambers" and tubules, but also provide the presence of four chemicals at once: hydroquinone, hydrogen peroxide, a limiter and a neutralizer. A complex chemical process is required to produce these substances. How could a beetle, by pure chance, produce all four substances at the same time and in the right amounts? And besides, it is necessary to mix them in the right place and at the right time, because otherwise he can pay with his life! If all this complex mechanism had been developed in the process of gradual evolution, it would have taken millions of generations of beetles! Moreover, intermediate stages of development could be critical for beetles. Just imagine that the beetle has developed all the necessary organs (which is a miracle in itself!), but has not yet prepared the necessary fluids. And when the enemy approaches, he points his muzzles at him, but... Nothing happens, as the weapons are not ready yet. "Ah!" - and there is no beetle. And so it goes on for many generations. Then, by some miracle, the beetle develops the ability to make two chemicals and mix them in storage bags. "Bang!" - an explosion follows - and there is no beetle. And again this continues for many generations, until finally the beetle produces a restricting substance. This is great! There are no more explosions, he points his muzzles at the offender, but nothing happens. The beetle has not yet developed a mechanism for neutralizing at the right time. So, again, "Am!" and there is no beetle. And again, many generations pass. And with all that, we have to assume that all those exploding and eating beetles were still producing offspring! Otherwise, their species would have become extinct." Similar examples can also be found in the work of M. Denton "The Crisis of the Theory of Evolution" and in the book of R. Juncker and Z. Scherer (23, 26). Interestingly, this problem seems to have been imagined by Charles Darwin himself. Here is what he wrote in his book "The Origin of Species": "The assumption that the eye, with all its unsurpassed adaptations... could have been formed as a result of natural selection, it seems, I sincerely admit, to be extremely absurd" (quoted from: 17, p. 32). There are some other observations that, according to some biologists (19, 26), do not fit into the Darwinian mechanism for the formation of the characteristics of animal and plant species. According to the Darwinian concept, all the characteristics of living organisms that we have "present" have an adaptive meaning, since they are "fixed", "selected" through the process of natural selection of the fittest individuals. There are many signs whose existence and appearance cannot, in the opinion of some authors, be explained in the way described above (19, 26). For example, the river eel, which lives in European reservoirs, swims to the Sargasso Sea, to the equator, for reproduction; then his children sail back to Europe to live and grow up there, and then to repeat the journey of their parents, etc. Why shouldn't the eel reproduce, like all ordinary fish? After all, the existing method of its reproduction is very disadvantageous in terms of survival, and if so, it could not have arisen as a result of natural selection of the most well-adapted individuals, according to M. Denton and B. Hobrink. J. K. Ickles (Nobel Prize winner in medicine, for his work in the field of neurophysiology) once proposed to his fellow materialists one seemingly strange dilemma - either to reject the universality of Darwinism, or to recognize the reality of the existence of the human soul! (28). Listeners. What is the reason for the need for such a choice? Lecturer. Iccles reasoned something like this. If human consciousness really affects the events of the material world (and materialists deny this, considering only neurons to be affected), then it exists as a physical factor (the same as, for example, the energy of an atom) that contributes to survival. If it does not affect the world in any way, as materialists believe, then it could not have arisen as a result of natural selection. Where did it come from? After all, according to Darwinism, everything that exists in living matter was formed as a result of natural selection, as a result of evolution from "zero"! Either to recognize Darwinism, but then to recognize the "physicality" of consciousness, or to admit that Darwinism does not explain all the phenomena of life, if we consider that human consciousness is an "epiphenomenon" [9], and so on. Audience. What about mutations? Now in almost every clinic or pharmacy you can see sanitary bulletins on the fight against mutant forms of microbes, etc.? Is this not an example of the formation of new forms through natural selection? Lecturer. Yes, indeed, these phenomena mentioned in the sanitary bulletins do take place, these are indisputable facts. But with mutations, their formative role is much more complicated than it sometimes seems. Audience. Explain. Lecturer. In nature, there are phenomena of individual variability of organisms - some forms of manifestation of this variability are inherited, are, as they say now, the property of the gene pool of a population or species. For example, the well-known variations in the appearance of Galapagos finches, and it was about them that Charles Darwin wrote. Remembered? Audience. No one argues with this, these are facts. So what's the matter? Lecturer. The fact is that it is not clear how these hereditary traits, which differ from the average norm, arose. Obviously, there are at least two (not one, as evolutionists believe) explanations for their origin. First, hypothetically, there may be actual mutations, i.e. some changes in the inherited genetic material, the appearance of which we can practically, realistically register, or register in principle, due to the fact that they are happening now, at a given time. Secondly, we are dealing with hereditary forms of individual variation which have existed, so to speak, "from time immemorial," perhaps even since the creation of the species (and this possibility cannot be theoretically discarded), of which, strictly speaking, we have no objective reason to assert that they are the result of mutation or mutations. Simply put, these are some variants of the norm that occur more often among individuals of the species (as, for example, blonds and brunettes among humans) or much rarer, or even very rarely. From the point of view of modern population genetics, this is possible - genes carrying such variations can exist in a population almost indefinitely, including in a latent form, and manifest themselves phenotypically very rarely. Audience. What does this have to do with the survival situation of bacteria when they are poisoned with penicillin? Lecturer. The fact is that it is practically impossible to prove post factum that the changes that are observed in bacteria resistant to certain forms of antibiotics are the result of mutations in the strict sense of the word, and not the result of the manifestation of variants of individual variability that may have existed in a given species of bacteria for a very long time, for example, since creation. The same applies to the example of the birch moth, which you are well aware of from your biology lessons at school. It is simply impossible to prove post factum that surviving butterflies are mutant. So these and similar examples do not prove anything in favor of the Darwinian mechanism of form-making. Here, as the well-known saying goes, the "good new" may turn out to be "the good old well forgotten." Audience. But they get mutants artificially, right? Lecturer. Indeed, the use of so-called mutagenic factors, such as radiation, has resulted in the emergence of a significant number of mutant organisms, although even in these cases the answer to the above question about variants is not always clear. But here's the interesting thing: according to many scientists, true mutations are always either fatal, or harmful to the organism or the species as a whole, or at least neutral [10]. If this is the case, then true mutations have nothing to contribute to speciation from the point of view of the theory of natural selection, since natural selection is supposed to choose the fittest, i.e., those who have advantages. Audience. We've heard that when environmental conditions change, neutral mutations can play a positive role for survival. As in the case of bacteria, for example, a penicillin resistance mutation turns out to be just such a mutation. So we get natural selection! Lecturer. First, in such cases, when the survival of individuals with special traits occurs in vivo [11], it is not clear whether we are dealing with mutations or with cases of manifestation of variants of the norm, as I have already said. It is not easy to simulate and control such situations in vitro [12]. At least for the time being, I am not aware of any successful attempts to rigorously ascertain the appearance of changes in genetic material (true mutations in our understanding) in vitro that would have positive consequences in terms of the survival of organisms. Audience. What if evolutionists are right, and all cases of bacterial survival, peppered moths, etc., are indeed true mutations? Lecturer. Then they will face another problem, and one that is difficult to solve from the point of view of materialism. Audience. Which? Lecturer. It will be necessary to materialistically explain why positive mutations appear only when there are environmental changes, as in the case of bacteria, peppered moths, and so on. Audience. Probably, evolutionists explain the absence of positive mutations in a standard environment by the fact that a species has already formed and is maximally adapted to a standard environment as a result of the processes of natural selection that formed it, and therefore there is nothing to expect positive mutations in a constant environment. Lecturer. Yes, that's exactly what they explain. Such an explanation, however, cannot be considered entirely satisfactory, since the process of speciation by natural selection cannot be recognized as a proven fact. All this, I think, should remind you of a school situation when a student, trying to prove a theorem, tries to do it using its consequences, as if the theorem had already been proved. But you know that for such "proofs" they do not give more than a deuce. In order to answer this question satisfactorily, it is necessary to show, from the point of view of the peculiarities of the structure and functions of each particular organism, the reason why it is no longer capable of improvement, why, being adapted to a constant environment, it cannot acquire hereditary changes in its structures and functions which would adapt it to a still greater degree. And such a "need" exists for many living organisms, since they are not 100% adapted, otherwise the "predator-prey" chains simply would not exist. The features of the manifestation of positive forms of individual variability that are revealed under changed environmental conditions are sometimes simply striking. For example, some flies have at least five inherited solutions to the problem of adaptation to the DDT venom [13]. Let's imagine for a moment that the Darwinists are right, i.e. that all such forms are the result of true mutations, and not variants of the norm, even very rare. But then it turns out that for some reason "nature does not have enough strength and imagination" to solve problems associated with a stable environment - positive forms of individual variability in a stable environment are not observed. There are some other surprising phenomena associated with those forms of individual variation that seem to be true mutations. Audience. What? Lecturer. For example, they consist in the fact that when using mutagenic factors, the range of phenotype changes obtained is strictly limited. No matter how hard breeders try, neither with the use of artificial mutagens, nor without them, they fail to get a cow with a "dimensionless" udder. Nature has its own limits of variability, beyond which it is impossible to go. And yet, experiments with the so-called artificial mutations show that despite a huge number of individuals with new heritable properties that appear with the purposeful use of mutagens, properties that turn out to be useful for human survival (for example, new varieties of wheat are now obtained), not a single individual has been obtained with properties useful for the survival of the species that carries mutant traits. What is the reason for this asymmetry? For example, neither man nor wheat is absolutely adapted. Is this not a confirmation of the opinion of St. Tikhon of Zadonsk and other Church Fathers that the world (and therefore both animals and plants) was created for man? It should also be added that, in the opinion of many scientists, micromutations, being suitable for explaining the formation of breeds, varieties, etc. (microevolution), are not suitable for explaining the phenomena of the emergence of families, classes, etc. (macroevolution) (17, 23). Audience. Couldn't scientists come up with anything to replace the theory of natural selection? Lecturer. For lovers of materialistic evolution, it seems, there is one more refuge left - this is Goldschmitt's theory of leaps (the so-called "saltations"), according to which new species in evolution are obtained as a result of the sudden emergence of an organism that has considerable (as according to C. Darwin), and great differences from its parents, so to speak, a macromutant, which has fundamentally new, fully functioning systems. He is a freak, but a freak well adapted! The situation looks something like this: a dinosaur once hatches a full-fledged bird from an egg. What could be more fantastic than this idea? After all, no one has ever seen anything like this! Involuntarily, a children's fairy tale about Ryaba the hen comes to mind: "The hen laid an egg, not an ordinary egg, a golden one." Such cases with golden testicles, according to supporters of the theory of saltation, consisted of the process of evolution. Miracles, and nothing more. The viability of such concepts is explained, according to M. Denton, by the difficulties of mathematical assessment of the probabilities of the evolutionary (in this case, saltation) process (26), although it is clear "by eye" that this is incredible [14]. At the micro level, the situation is simpler. According to many scientists, the accidental appearance of not only living organisms, but also the most complex macromolecules (and there are a great many of them, and the most diverse ones) of which they consist, is almost impossible. Attempts to calculate the degree of probability of random generation (i.e., spontaneous generation, without the participation of the Creator) of biomolecules, accepted with the help of modern mathematical methods, yield extremely insignificant figures. Practically - "zero" (17, 19, 21, 26). These results are obviously incompatible with either Darwinism or the theory of saltation. It is also impossible to explain the appearance of such a complex system as the cell in the process of evolution, since, according to modern biological ideas, it is practically impossible to imagine the "assembly" of a cell from its component parts as a result of random processes, since each element of this system functions and is viable only when included in the ready-made system of the cell as a whole. So the first stages of the supposed evolution (molecular and precellular) are equally puzzling to gradualists and saltationists alike. In general, evolutionism is much more fantasy than real science. This is probably primarily the case with Darwinism (since Darwinists are in the majority). And yet, Darwinism continues to be taught in schools as "the ultimate truth", and not only in Russia, but also abroad, for example, in the United States. Some of the American scientists, supporters of the idea of creation, threatened, I don't know, jokingly or seriously, to pass through the Senate a ban on the teaching of Darwinism in public schools, on the basis of a law banning religious sermons in the secondary schools of the US public education system, due to the fact that Darwinism is just a naked quasi-religious dogma that has nothing to do with science. Professor Alexei Akifiev: "Darwin was mistaken because he did not know genetics and did not believe in God?" - Novye Izvestia, February 17, 1999. ^ Hereinafter, materialistic evolutionary ideas are analyzed. As for the theistic theory of evolution, it is not our task to analyze it. However, in our opinion, this theory contradicts the teaching of the Holy Fathers (see Discourse 1). ^ "For example: the discovery of vertebrate bone in the Cambrian breed proved that vertebrate animals are as old as most invertebrates," says evolutionist and biology professor B. Stahl. /Barbara J. Stahl. Vertebrate History: Problems in Evolution (N.Y.: Dover Publication, 1985, p. 34; cited by 17, p. 106). Thus, it turns out that vertebrates were also participants in the "Cambrian explosion"! (The appearance of vertebrates, according to evolutionary theory, should not belong to the Cambrian, but to a much later time.) ^ Creation scientist R. Oakland shows an interesting slide in his lectures - a photograph of Mount Yunasco in Canada, consisting of sedimentary rocks. The upper part of this mountain belongs to the Cambrian period by traditional geologists (the remains of trilobites are found there - a marker fossil of Cambrian rocks). But under the thickness of the Cambrian deposits, we see a thin (only a few centimeters) horizontal layer of coal, crossing the mountain in the middle, like a thin layer of sponge cake (recall that traditional geology states that coal was formed many millions of years after the end of the Cambrian period). According to R. Auckland, any options for a possible "advance" of the upper part of the mountain are excluded. (R. Oakland, The Evidence of Creation, Lecture (videotape). Such biscuits are clearly not to the taste of traditional geologists, which is probably why we hear about them very rarely. ^ The last two objections are certainly applicable to Darwinism. With regard to the theory of the saltational origin of species, it is likely that the applicability of these objections depends on the particular mechanisms suggested by the theory. ^ The most famous and widespread at present is the Darwinian variant - the theory of natural selection. ^ It should be noted that the famous "school" examples of intermediate links between organisms - coelacanth (coelacanth, coelacanth, coelacanth), archaeopteryx, ancient horses - turned out to be inadequate (13, 17, 18, 19, 21, 23, 26). For example, a coelacanth caught alive, despite its really strange, paw-like fins, turned out to be a simple fish, and all other supposed signs intermediate between fish and amphibian are simply absent. So the coelacanth is not to blame for anything! ^ One of the most common "evasions" of neo-Darwinists is the population hypothesis of Eldredge and Gould (the hypothesis of the so-called "partial equilibrium"), which is as follows: these authors assumed that the evolution of species took place in geographically limited, small areas of the territory of the distribution of a species (it is under such conditions, according to geneticists, that mutations can quickly accumulate in small isolated groups). This is followed by the rapid dispersal of the new species over a wide area, with all intermediate forms (and their fossil remains) occupying only a very small area. The probability of finding such an area is very small, and the probability of finding members of a small population is also small, which is why paleontologists so rarely find intermediate forms. Regarding this theory, M. Denton writes: "Although the Eldredge and Gould model is quite reasonable for explaining gaps between species, it becomes doubtful when applied to explain broader gaps in taxonomy. The sinkholes separating the species, such as the dog/fox, the rat/mouse, etc., are more trivial, so to speak, than the sinkholes separating a primitive land mammal and a whale, or a primitive land reptile and an ichthyosaur. These relatively large gaps, in turn, are very trivial compared to those that separate the main phylogenetic branches, such as mollusks and arthropods. Such huge gaps simply could not be, unless we believe in miracles, bridged in geologically short periods by passing through one or two intermediate species that would occupy a geographically limited area. Undoubtedly, such transitions would necessarily have to consist of long sequences, with side lines, consisting of hundreds or perhaps thousands of transitional species. The assumption that all these hundreds, thousands, or even millions of species that filled the interval between widely separated types were unadapted animals occupying limited areas and having only a limited number of population members seems almost improbable. ^ The word "epiphenomenon" means: "a phenomenon that is on top." Many scientists consider human consciousness to be such a phenomenon. Recognizing that consciousness reflects the events of the world, they deny its impact on the world around us (28, 32). ^ "Most of the latter (spontaneous mutations. -Note. (about 80%) causes a more or less slight decrease in viability and fertility, and the rest (about 20%) simply have a directly lethal (deadly) effect." Mütizing A. Genetic research. - Moscow, 1963 (see also: 17, p. 88). ^ In vivo - in nature. ^ In vitro. "in glass", i.e. in the conditions of a biological experiment. ^ "The following differences have been revealed in resistant strains: a decrease in the permeability of integuments and tissues to DDT, rapid enzymatic decomposition of DDT in the body, the ability to deposit more DDT in altered fat, a reduced susceptibility of the nervous system, a change in the way of behavior due to which the possibilities of contact with the poison are reduced" (23, p. ^ If we take the position that asserts the existence of random processes, which, according to the teaching of the Orthodox Church, simply do not exist in nature. ^

Conversation ThreeWhat the Bones Tell Us

The day will come when they will laugh at the stupidity of our modern materialistic philosophy. The more I study nature, the more I stop in awe at the works of the Creator. L. Pasteur [1] He could not distinguish iambic from chorea,No matter how hard we fought, to distinguish. A.S. Pushkin Listeners. Let's talk about the origin of man. For a modern person, believing that we are created from dust is almost the same as believing in living and dead water or in Emelya the fool who rode on the stove. Lecturer. Today I wanted to start talking about this and try to figure out together with you what the science called evolutionary or physical anthropology tells us - the science that claims to reveal one of the greatest secrets of creation, its peak - Homo sapiens - Homo sapiens, as the adherents of this science call themselves and us. Audience. Yes, I wonder what you have to say about human evolution. We all believe that we are great-, great-grandchildren (and many times) great-grandchildren of monkeys. And it seems that there is every reason for this. Look, at first there were just monkeys, then there were smarter monkeys and more skillful and more human-like, then a little more, and so on, up to our historical ancestors. Pithecanthropus descended from monkeys, Neanderthals from pithecanthropus, and then modern humans. That's how we are taught. Lecturer. Okay, let's start the conversation. But, first of all, let's look at what data modern anthropologists rely on. These are the remains of ancient people, ape-like creatures, ancient apes, etc., these are fossil bones and, with the rarest exceptions, only bones. The second is the traces of human culture - tools, for example, the well-known stone chippers, objects of ancient art, etc., which are "associated" with bone remains [2]. Now let's look at what evolutionary anthropologists claim. There is a so-called stratigraphic column, i.e. in the past there was a change of very long periods of development of flora and fauna on Earth, which left a trace in the form of a "layer cake"; In each layer of the cake there are the remains of animals and plants typical for this era. This theory is not indisputable [3]. There are bone remains of ancient apes that lived a very long time ago (more than 2 million years ago), which lie in the "deep", "ancient" layers of the layer cake (stratigraphic column). As we move "from bottom to top" along the hypothetical column, we see how gradually these apes became more and more complex, approached in their structure to man - this is evidenced by their bones, and gradually became smarter - this is evidenced by the appearance of tools (which are "associated" with bone remains), then their complexity, the appearance of fires and, in the end, signs of art, cult, etc. And so gradually we come to the appearance of modern man (10, 14, 22). But the most important evidence is still considered to be the bones, and in this connection it should be noted that before we begin to try to reconstruct the history of human origin from the ape, it is necessary to answer three very important, fundamental questions: Is it possible to judge the similarity of species of living beings only on the basis of the similarity of bone remains (even whole skeletons). After all, a living organism is not only bones, but also the most complex soft tissues, and if we are also talking about a person, then the most important thing is the mind, because we are trying to understand how Homo sapiens originated. If there is no positive answer to this question, then any attempt to build an evolutionary ladder of man's descent from an ape on the basis of bone remains alone can be said in advance to be doubtful. Is it always possible to unambiguously distinguish a man, an ape, an ape-man from each other on the basis of only bone remains, that is, looking only at the bones, to say with one hundred percent certainty that these are human bones, and these are the bones of an ape, etc.? Does physical anthropology have clear and infallible methods for such an assessment? (More on this later.) Is it possible to unambiguously judge the state of its development as a whole and the state of the intellect of its bearers by the presence of primitive objects of culture (for example, primitive stone axes)? And also, does the presence of an "association" of cultural objects with bone remains always unequivocally tell us that we are dealing with the bones of the creatures that made and used them, or some others? Audience. With bones, probably, it is not so simple, we are taught in school that ichthyosaurs and dolphins are similar in the structure of the skeletons, but they are completely different in origin. Lecturer. Yes you are right. With the bones, the situation is much more serious. Here are two examples, one of which I have already mentioned in our previous conversations. The dice have already played, so to speak, in the twentieth century, one big cruel joke on evolutionists. The first example is the coelacanth. Fossil remains of this fish were found in abundance in the layers of the "pie" corresponding to the so-called "Devonian period". This fish was considered extinct for a long time and was classified as a "marker fossil" [4]. As you probably know well from biology and geography lessons, this fish had strange fins that were uncharacteristic of all fish - they resembled paws, hence the name - brush-finned fish. Proponents of evolution have suggested that this strange fish was the ancestor of representatives of the amphibian class (amphibians). The bone remains of this fish (and for a long time they were the only ones at the disposal of scientists) really had something similar to the skeleton of amphibians. But then there were sensational discoveries - several brush-finned fish were caught alive in the Indian Ocean - in 1938 and 1952. It turned out that the features of their skeletons had not changed for the supposed hundreds of millions of years. From the point of view of evolutionism, one would expect that the features of the structure of their internal organs should have something in common with amphibians. With careful examination of the internal organs of coelacanths, no similarities with amphibians were found! In the presence of external visible similarities of the skeleton with the skeletons of amphibians - everything else - as in all normal fish. In soft tissues, there is nothing in common with either a frog or a newt (from what was expected). The coelacanth turned out to be a simple, the most common fish, and not a "half-fish, half-amphibian" [5]. Thus, the bones led scientists down the wrong path. One more example. You probably remember that among the mammals of vertebrates there are two large "infraclasses" - placental and marsupials (the latter includes, in particular, kangaroos). Among the marsupials (which have a very different origin history compared to the placentals, from the point of view of the proponents of evolution) there is, or rather, most likely was, one predatory animal called the Tasmanian wolf. Representatives of this species, apparently, were completely exterminated by man in historical times, after the settlement of Australia and Oceania by settlers from Europe. However, biologists managed to study it quite well. The skeleton of this animal has one feature - it is practically indistinguishable from the skeleton of an ordinary dog, and only an experienced researcher can catch small differences [6]. Imagine that a paleontologist researcher, while excavating in "ancient" layers, came across the skeleton of a Tasmanian wolf. How would he assess it? - Very possibly, as the skeleton of a dog or its close relative (if he were not well aware of the problem of differences between the skeletons of a dog and a Tasmanian wolf). At the same time, this is the skeleton of a marsupial, fundamentally different from ordinary mammals. And according to evolutionary theory, the difference between a Tasmanian wolf and a dog is about the same as between a human and a kangaroo! Yes, relying only on bone remains, it is difficult to judge what the soft tissues of a deceased animal were, to determine to which species it belonged, to which animals it was close in the totality of its anatomical features. All this should not be forgotten when we are offered evolutionary ladders built only on the basis of the study of bone remains. As for soft tissues, the same applies to the peculiarities of the psyche. No one, as far as I know, has yet established a direct connection between the features of the structure of the skull and the level of intelligence. For example, if we take the volume of the skull (i.e., the brain), a favorite indicator of the "hominization" of evolutionary anthropologists (14), then perhaps its volume in an adult chimpanzee will be commensurate with the volume of the skull of a five-year-old human child - but the difference between them is enormous! Audience. But can you still distinguish a man from an ape by bones? Lecturer. Modern apes and modern humans are often possible. Although it must be said that anthropoid apes are really very similar to humans both in terms of skeletal features and in the features of physiology, anatomy and microstructures [7]. And it should be added that people of different races are very different in their skeletal structure [8]; and monkeys of different species and subspecies - too, both living and probably extinct long ago. Let us add to this that among people of a certain race, variability of skeletal parameters is a common phenomenon, and also - in humans, some ape features of the skeletal structure can sometimes be found [9]. Similarities in the structure of the bone remains of humans, apes and similar creatures constitute great difficulties in identifying their carriers, especially when researchers do not deal with complete skeletons, but only with their fragments, sometimes very scanty [10]. Anyone who tries to look at the history of evolutionary anthropology with an unbiased eye can easily be convinced of this. Let's look at a few historical examples. The skeleton of the first Neanderthal found from a cave in the Neanderthal Valley in Germany (it was with him that the whole epic of the search for ancestors began!) was mistaken by various experts either for the skeleton of a modern man suffering from bone diseases (R. Virchow), or for the skeleton of a primitive man (i.e. an intermediate link between man and ape) - this was considered for about 100 years (!); then again - for the skeleton of a modern man, but of a special race. At present, it is evaluated as the skeleton of a representative of the subtype of modern man - Homo sapiens neanderthalensis (22), and in no case as an intermediate link, which was an "axiom" for Soviet anthropology in the 50-70s (14). The lid of the Pithecanthropus skull was demonstrated by E. Dubois at international congresses three times, and each time there was no consensus (14). Some experts claimed that this fragment belonged to an ape, others to a man, and still others to an intermediate link. E. Dubois himself, the "author" of Pithecanthropus, at the end of his life nevertheless evaluated it as belonging to an ape (13, 14, 17). Another famous "transitional form" is the synanthropus. His skeletal remains have been evaluated as: the remains of an intermediate link between Pithecanthropus and Neanderthal man (14), the remains belonging to a typical Homo erectus (22), the remains of a Neanderthal who degenerated into a pygmy (16), the remains of an ape, to the meager fragments of the skull of which a human jaw was attached, found about 25 m from it (M. Bowden - 13, as well as 2 and 17). Not so long ago, one of the well-known anthropologists of the twentieth century, R. Leakey, published data on the discovery of 1972 - the skull "ER-1470", which, in the author's opinion, belonged to a man of the modern type, who lived simultaneously with the australopithecines - the most ancient "ancestors" of humans, according to the evolutionary scale - about 2 million years ago. This find was really a sensation. However, in a modern textbook on anthropology (22) we can also find such variants of its assessment - the skull of Homo erectus or even the skull of Homo habilis, i.e. the "ancestor" of erectus (see below what Homo erectus is). One of the most famous fakes of the twentieth century - the skull of an Eoanthropus (man from Piltdown), made up of a human skull and an ape (orangutan) jaw - remained unrecognized by the entire world anthropological professors for more than 30 years! (13, 17, 20) [11]. However, then a radiocarbon study led to the idea of the composite nature of this "creature". And only after that, with a thorough anatomical analysis, it was found out that the lower jaw belonged to an orangutan, and the teeth were filed. But no one noticed this before.

What would analytical chemistry be if it could not answer such questions unequivocally? What would philology be worth if it could not distinguish between "iambic and chorea"? Or mathematics, if, in arithmetic calculation, one mathematician said "100", another - "10", and a third - "50"? Before trying to answer the question "How did it happen?", it is necessary to be able to accurately answer the question "What is it?", to be able to accurately identify the subjects of your research. Audience. Perhaps it would be more honest to tell them in these situations simply: "We don't know?" Lecturer. I think you are right. A carefully thinking scientist would probably strictly and probably quite narrowly limit the range of finds about which, "hand on heart", he would say that he is "almost sure that these are human remains", and would also strictly limit the remains of monkeys. And about a lot of dubious forms, fragments, etc., I would honestly say: "I don't know what it is." Audience. But after all, they invented the ladder "australopithecus - pithecanthropus - Neanderthal - man"? Lecturer. Yes, they did, but the surprising thing is that they came up with not one, but many different ones (12). The ladder you mentioned was accepted by official Soviet science as early as the mid-1950s (14). When reading (14), there was an impression of the indisputable evidence, the "obviousness" of smooth transitions, and everything was "clear". The essence of the situation is that this staircase is not the only one of all the invented ones. The ladder that the students are studying now (22) looks like this (Fig. 3): Australopithecus afarenensis (Johanson's) (the old Australopithecines were sent "out of the state", to a dead-end branch, they turned out to have "nothing to do with it"), then Homo habilis, then the group of Homo erectus (Pithecanthropus, Sinanthropus, etc.), then immediately Homo sapiens. The ideas of smooth transitions from Pithecanthropus to Sinanthropus, from Sinanthropus to Neanderthals, and from Neanderthals to modern humans have been removed from the agenda as obsolete slogans in the Marxist party program (both textbooks (14 and 22) are written from a Marxist position) [12]. Now it turns out that we are directly descended from Pithecanthropus and similar creatures! Johanson's ladder, adopted by the authors of the new university textbook, is not the only one that exists, as they claim (22). There are quite a lot of remains, they can be evaluated in different ways. A specialist once joked that at present, on the basis of the available bone remains, it is possible to try to build an evolutionary ladder of transition not only from ape to man, but also vice versa - from man to ape! This statement is due to the fact that anthropologists are now well aware of the facts of the presence of "very human" bones in very "ancient" layers [13]. These findings and other facts, according to Professor of Biology and Geology W. Rush, testify to the fact that man lived in parallel with all his "ancestors" (13, 17, see also 21) [14]. Images (drawings, photographs) in books on evolutionary anthropology should not be treated with too much confidence. For example, the "skull" of the Sinanthropus (14, p. 229), according to M. Bowden, is to a large extent the product of the imagination of the restorer, who combined the fragments of the monkey skull, the bones of the facial part of the skull and the human jaw, which lay at a distance of about 25 m from the fragments of the skull, and the missing was the one who invented it (13). R. Leakey wrote about the arbitrariness of the restoration of the skull of the Afar australopithecus ("Lucy") (in fact, not much was found - the lower jaw and a few small fragments (22, p. 45, fig. 21)) (17). So how the samples for the images of the skulls of A. afarensis and Homo erectus in this diagram were obtained is still a question. Nor should we take too seriously the parallel rows of skulls of anthropoid creatures and the tools of labor that supposedly belong to these creatures and reflect their "progressive hominization." This interpretation of the facts is based on three a priori postulates: Tools that are "associated" with hominid remains are always "their" tools. The found tools always reflect the "ceiling" of the development of a given culture. The level of development of tools reflects the level of development of thinking abilities (and, consequently, "sapientization"). The first two postulates have not yet been proved. The third is simply incorrect (see pp. 82-85 of the current edition). The timeline on the left is probably the product of a biased (selective) attitude towards some dating methods (see Discourse 1). A. robustus - Paranthropus (Australopithecus). A. africanus - Australopithecus africanus. A. afarensis - Australopithecus afarensis. H. habilis is a handy man. H. erectus - Homo erectus. H. sapiens is a man of the modern type (sapient). Audience. But first they used primitive stone tools, then they made them more complicated, then the Bronze Age came? Lecturer. According to many authors, excavations have really shown that, as a rule, the "deeper" we dig in the column, the more primitive tools we find. However, I have already pointed out that in this case we sometimes find non-primitive objects (see footnote 1). In addition, it must be said that if we have found some tools together with someone's bones, then two statements are not at all obvious: these tools were made by those to whom the found bones belong [15]; These tools constitute the pinnacle of the technical culture of the beings who made them. Judge for yourself, because you and I sometimes use primitive tools; For example, the stake that we drive into the ground is very primitive, and it is not necessary to decorate it with carved ornaments every time. If some creatures used primitive "choppers" [16] for some purpose, it is not at all obvious that they did not use more advanced tools. By the way, even a chimpanzee does not scatter the necessary things randomly (22), and if we also found abandoned chippers in a pile of bones, then what is it? - There may be a defect, or a semi-finished product, or an unnecessary thing; Are these axes thrown to the ground, just as we throw a stake on the ground that we no longer need? In confirmation, I will point out the data that "choppers" can in principle be found together with real stone chippers, more advanced in manufacturing technique (22), and stone tools - together with products of the Bronze Age (16). So archaeological finds may not necessarily reflect, so to speak, the cultural ceiling of a given civilization, but the idea that a given find always reflects it has somehow entered the thinking style of modern evolutionary anthropologists (10, 14, 22). However, even if the tools and other objects of culture belong to those whose bones are found with them, and even if the tools and objects of culture reflect the maximum of its development, there remains one more unanswered question. Audience. What? Lecturer. Is the primitive level (perhaps even the most primitive) of civilization a reflection of the primitive level of thought? Audience. How could it be otherwise? Lecturer. Maybe this is shown by numerous facts. The fact is that modern savages are on average no more stupid than Europeans (22). The difference between computers and shuttles, on the one hand, and spears and flint tips, on the other, is enormous, but behind this abyss there is approximately the same intellectual level. So if someone once made "choppers", and another - Mousterian stone tools, this does not mean that the second was smarter, more "sapientized". The difference between "choppers" and Mousterian tools encountered with Neanderthals and modern Homo sapiens (22) is incomparably smaller than between shuttles and stone axes. A surprising discrepancy: the colossal difference in the cultural and technical level of life of savages and civilized people on the one hand, and their approximately the same level of intelligence on the other hand, was noticed in the 19th century by Wallace, a co-author of Charles Darwin on the theory of natural selection. He assessed this difference as clearly inconsistent with this theory. It would be good for modern evolutionists to learn such self-criticism from the evolutionists of the XIX century! Audience. In general, evolutionary anthropologists probably sometimes have a very difficult time? Lecturer. Of course, as well as to any person who has made it the goal of his life to prove a crazy idea. You can't envy them. There are a lot of problems here. For example, if you are dealing not with an obvious burial, but simply with some place where some bones were found, then a lot of questions immediately arise and it is difficult to answer them unequivocally. Audience. Well, what questions can there be? Lecturer. For example, these. Suppose that you began to dig up the earth in some ancient cave and found, say, the remains of a fireplace, a stone axe and several bones very similar to human or perhaps even monkey bones. The following questions must be answered: Do these bones belong to one creature or several? If several, then of the same species or representatives of different species? Did these creatures (or creatures) live here (i.e. slept, drank, ate...) or were they eaten here by predatory animals (e.g. lions) or even humans (cannibalism in the relationship between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens is considered an established fact (14))? Whose bones are these - monkeys, monkeys, ape-men, ape-man, man, several people, etc.? If there was only one creature, was it a typical member of the species, or a carrier of deviations from the norm [17] (which could be for very different reasons)? If human bones (e.g., a skull) are found, is it not the result of a later burial (some savages, for example, reverently revere only the skulls of their ancestors)? Does the tool that "associates" with the found remains belong to this creature or someone else, etc.? The situation with such finds often resembles that as if you and I took up digging in an old dump and found some bones and tools. Suppose, for example, that we find the skull of a bulldog, several canine (not necessarily even bulldog) vertebrae, and, say, the bony remains of a cat's paw lying together, and in addition to the bones there is an old rusty knife. How would we interpret all this? If you ask yourself an idea a priori, then it is sometimes very easy to "prove" it. For example, suppose we believe that cats evolved from dogs ("humans from apes"). Let's say we don't know that there are breeds of dull-faced dogs (bulldogs), and we only know sharp-faced dogs, for example, huskies and collies. If we start from the a priori idea of the evolutionary transformation of a dog into a cat - the "catification" of dogs ("sapientization" and "hominization" of monkeys), then we have a great temptation to assume that we have before us the remains of a "dog-cat" ("pithecanthropus", i.e. in translation "ape-man"), a typical intermediate link in our evolutionary ladder. Well, if we are influenced by another a priori idea that the tools found together with the bones are always made by the same creature whose bones we found (according to the principle: "only their tools always lie together with the bones of hominids"), then "undoubtedly" we have "indisputable evidence" of a highly developed intellect, well-developed manual (manual) skills and, apparently, a well-developed ability for sign communication (after all, it is very difficult to smelt iron and then make knives from it alone) in the representative of the "dog-cats" we have discovered, an intermediate link between a dog and a cat. Here is the proof of the origin of the cat from the dog! What more do you want? This is how Pithecanthropus and Co. are "created"! To a large extent, the chain of "great discoveries" of evolutionary anthropology consists of such "dump" finds. Undoubtedly, the Pithecanthropus E. Dubois and the Sinanthropes (14, 13, 17, 20) belong to them [18]. In spite of all the doubtfulness of the Pithecanthropus E. Dubois, the rest of the Javanese Pithecanthropus ("restored" on the basis of scanty fragments [19]), and the Synanthropes, they do not cease to occupy the first place in the list of creatures called Homo erectus (22), which are supposedly our immediate ancestors. In general, the history of physical anthropology resembles some kind of modern television series, fantastic and at the same time detective, with sequels and "without end" - there is an abundance of unambiguous interpretations of very ambiguous situations [20], and creatures "created" from one or more bones (for example, megantropus (14, p. 222) (or the same Javanese pithecanthropus), and a tendentious presentation of facts (as was the case with the pithecanthropus E. Dubois (13, p. 17) [21], and mysterious people who appear either in the form of "kingkongs" or in the form of ordinary people (almost like in the movie "Fantômas") [22], and images of fantasy miraculously transformed into real objects (for example, the "skull" of the Sinanthropus from the textbook of Prof. Roginsky (14, p. 229) [23], and even the "crimes of the century", as, for example, the "skull" of Eoanthropus (13, 20). The point is probably that many people really want not even to prove the "monkey idea" (evolutionary anthropologists simply do not do this, they do not question it), but simply to convince the public, relying on the authority of science (at the same time, it is not always considered necessary to obey the norms of scientific knowledge and even ethics) that in this matter everything is clear, obvious - man descended from an ape. Evolutionary anthropology is alive and well, and "develops", and defends doctoral theses, and is taught in school (in the form of elements, including the "monkey idea" - here "no-no! So that there are no doubts, comrades!"). So what is evolutionary anthropology - a science or a method of agitation? Louis Pasteur is the founder of modern microbiology - the science that studies the life of microorganisms (bacteria, etc.). ^ The concept of "associate" is not defined by anthropologists. What does it mean to "associate"? - the distance of 1 m, 1 km, just in the same layer of the geological column, etc., is not clear (10, 14, 22). ^ The theory of the stratigraphic column and the facts that contradict it were discussed in the previous part (see also 21). In this regard, it is necessary to mention the data available in the scientific literature on the inverted occurrence of stratigraphic column layers, which cannot be explained from the point of view of traditional uniformitarian geology, and on the finds of the remains of higher living organisms in the most ancient layers of the earth's crust (for example, on the finds of pollen of angiosperms in the Cambrian layers - Jadob K., etal., Nature, 172: 166-167, 1953). For reviews of these data, see W. R. Corliss, Unknown earth. A handbook of biological Enigmas. - Maryland, 1980; Junker R., Scherer Z. History of the origin and development of life. - Minsk, 1997. ^ On "marker" or leading fossils, see B. Hobrink (19). ^ The material is taken from the books of B. Hobrink and M. Denton (19, 26). Once again, I remind you that the similarity between organisms is not a reason to build evolutionary ladders and the "trees" that connect them. The wings of flying fish are very similar to the wings of swallows, but it seems that no one has ever thought of "evolutionarily" linking them. ^ Taken from the book by M. Denton (26). ^ However, while there are many similarities, there are many differences (see 17). One of the fathers of modern morphology and histology, R. Virchow, said that trying to lead the evolution of man from an ape is tantamount to trying to provide an evolutionary relationship between poodles and sheep (based on the presence of a common feature - curly hair). ^ This is easily verified by comparing, for example, the average European and the pygmy. ^ Dr. Cuozzo, for example, unexpectedly discovered that the long-considered typical of apes, the parallelism of rows of teeth, is rare, but still occurs among perfectly normal modern humans (13, 17). However, the appearance in some individuals of certain features characteristic of apes does not need to be evaluated as "evidence" of the descent of man from an ape. If we follow the logical scheme of such "proofs", then man turns out to be a descendant not only of ape-man, but also of six-toed creatures (six-toed is a common anomaly of the skeletal structure), as well as of another creature no less mythical than ape-man - the legendary Serpent-Gorynych (since people with two heads are also sometimes born) (20). ^ According to M. Bowden's analysis, all the found remains of candidates for intermediate links between man and ape are presented only in the form of fragments of skeletons (often very scanty). There are many monkey skeletons, and many human skeletons (including Neanderthal skeletons) have been found. But for some reason, the whole skeleton of an ape-man has not yet been found (2). ^ It should be noted that on the basis of the "skull" of Eoanthropus, evolutionists, according to G. Morris, defended about 500 (!) doctoral dissertations. ^ It must be said that the staircase of Prof. Roginsky (14) "fell apart", probably in particular due to the fact that very many scientists believe (and this is now even recognized by Marxists (22) that people of the modern type (Homo sapiens) lived at the same time or even before the Neanderthals. But the ladder of D. Johanson (Fig. 3), which students are studying now, is also not without a flaw - australopithecines, according to some scientists, are a special group, generally far from anthropoid apes. The famous "Lucy" by D. Johanson (A. afarensis) is just a monkey, since a similar creature that lived "later" (judging by the stratigraphic column) had typical ape, i.e. long (!) toes, very convenient for climbing trees and uncomfortable for walking on its hind legs (6). As for the group Homo erectus, it is probably a very motley group. Where there are too many dubious forms, both from the point of view of their assessment and from the point of view of factual reliability, for example, synanthropes (2, 13, 17, 20). In particular, there is such an evolutionary (!) point of view on this group - erectus, together with Neanderthals and modern humans - only subspecies (i.e. races) of a single species Homo sapiens; if this is so, then the differences between them are essentially no greater than between modern races of people (Jelinek 1986; cited in 22, p. 68). In this regard, it is interesting to mention the discovery of about 30 skeletons in Cow Swamp (Australia). Judging by the accompanying objects belonging to a fairly high culture, we can almost unmistakably conclude that typical burials were excavated, i.e. an ordinary human cemetery. But what is noteworthy is that some of the skulls of these people had characteristic features of Homo erectus, and radiocarbon dating of the remains showed an age of only 8 to 10 thousand years. (Thorne, A.B., Member P.G. Nature, v. 238, pp. 316-319, quoted by M. Bowden (2, p. 185)). ^ P. Taylor cites seven references to reports of such finds published in reputable scientific journals (and this is not counting reports published in other sources); There are six similar reports of finding objects testifying to high culture and found in very "ancient" layers of the earth's crust (17). For comparison, there are five reports of cases of finding the remains of classical Pithecanthropus on the island of Java (14). ^ The most impressive of these facts are, in our opinion, the facts of finding numerous footprints, unequivocally assessed by anthropologists as human, together with dinosaur paw prints, and the discovery of a female skeleton in a block of marble on the island of Guadeloupe, which is now stored in the British Museum (the corresponding photographs can be found in S. Golovin's book "Evolution of Myth", Moscow, 1999). Recall that according to modern evolutionary ideas, many tens of millions of years separate us from the Cretaceous period (during which dinosaurs supposedly lived and marble was formed). ^ The presence of "associations" of bones and tools for evolutionary anthropologists for some reason very often indicates that they were made by the very creatures whose bones are found in this association (14, 22, 10). This is probably how the form of Homo habilis - "handy man" - appeared. In general, in this way you can probably "create" a lot of forms. ^ "Choppers" are the most primitive stone tools known; they were made of pebbles (10, 22). ^ As, apparently, was the case with the first discovered skeleton of a Neanderthal, distorted by bone diseases, as R. Virchow believed. From this incident, the fashion for depicting Neanderthals in the form of "kingkongs" began. ^ The first finds of Pithecanthropus. None of the finds of the remains of ancient hominids caused such great controversy and attracted such attention as the find made by the Dutch anatomist and physician Eugene Dubois on the island of Java in 1891-1893. The femur was located 15 m from the cranial cover. All the bones turned out to be highly mineralized. The teeth of Pithecanthropus found together with the cranial lid are different in type: the molars apparently have features of similarity with the orang, the root is very similar to the modern human one" (14, pp. 215-216). ^ Javanese Pithecanthropus (14, p. 220) - four finds made after the discovery of E. Dubois on the island of Java. They are presented in the form of: 1) a fragment of the lower jaw, 2) a skull cover (even more "primitive" than the skull cover of the Pithecanthropus E. Dubois, according to Prof. Roginsky), 3) fragments of a juvenile skull (their number and size, and why all these fragments could be attributed to one creature of adolescence - Prof. Roginsky did not mention this), 4) fragments of the upper jaw and parts of the skull lid (the same questions). All this, however, did not prevent this group of skeletal remains from being unconditionally evaluated as "ancient human remains" (14). ^ A criminologist, trying to solve a crime, must work out all possible "versions" - this is his professional duty - and by no means limit himself to any one that he "likes". In the studies of evolutionary anthropologists, only one "version" is very often worked out - hominization. This was the case with the first finds of Neanderthals, and with the pithecanthropus E. Dubois, etc. ^ "Dubois also found nearby two quite human skulls at approximately the same level in strata which, according to some, are dated in the same way (the skulls from Vadiac). At the time when Du Bois was widely touting the Java Man as the "missing link," he didn't mention these skulls — for obvious reasons. If he had demonstrated these completely human skulls at the same time that he was exhibiting his "Java man", no one would have perceived the "Java man" as the "missing link". He kept them a secret for 30 years. Until 1920, he did not disclose this information to the scientific world" (17, p. 95). ^ I wonder what a student of Moscow State University needs to say on the exam in order to get a "5" in anthropology? - In a university textbook, on page 70, a Neanderthal man is depicted in the form of a "kingkong", and on page 274 we read: "A Neanderthal, shaved, washed and in modern clothes, would not attract special attention on the street of a modern city" (22). ^Cm. Caption to Fig. 3. ^

Conversation Four"Talking" Monkeys and the "Doubling" of Consciousness

It is precisely the true and exact naturalist who can never become a materialist and deny the soul, freedom, and God. M. Schleiden [1] Lecturer. Today I would like to continue talking about man, his nature and origin. You've probably heard that some scientists are trying to prove that a human being is just a very smart ape, while others are trying to prove that a human being is something very similar to a computer (biorobot, etc.)? Audience. Of course, you have. Lecturer. My job is to try to demonstrate to you that this is not the case. To begin with, let's continue the discussion of the "monkey problem". Despite the fact that the origin of man from an ape is very problematic from the point of view of "pure science", and the data in favor of such an origin are very scarce and ambiguous (which we discussed last time), some scientists still believe that we evolved from apes, relying not on the data of archaeology and paleontology, but on the data of modern psychology and ethology - sciences studying human and ape behavior (see 9), and you've probably heard something about it? Audience. Heard. Monkeys are said to be very intelligent. It is also said that a monkey can be taught to speak the language of the deaf and dumb. Lecturer. So let's talk about these observations and facts. So, "monkeys are very smart". Indeed, the behavior of monkeys has some important features, which are sometimes very clearly manifested in experiments. For example, some scientists claim that a monkey can "figure out" how to get a banana with a stick, although no one has ever taught it this, etc. However, experimental studies of animal behavior show, according to a number of scientists, that the ability to react adequately in new, unknown situations is not unique to monkeys, but is quite widespread in the world of animals and even birds (8), and anthropoid apes do not even occupy leading positions here. A similar "intelligence" is observed in many species of animals. So, based on this principle, it is possible to "deduce" the origin of man not only from an ape, but, say, from a dog or a dolphin. Audience. Monkeys have well-developed hands, and they can do a lot with them, their movements are very similar to our movements with our hands, doesn't this testify in favor of our origin from monkeys? In addition, they use tools with their hands. Lecturer. In fact, the chimpanzee, for example, uses external objects (e.g., sticks) as tools, and even stores them for future use (22). However, this is not a monopoly ability of anthropoid apes. Some birds also use tools, but it seems that none of the scientists has yet tried to build an evolutionary ladder of the origin of man from birds. As for movements, cats sometimes yawn almost as much as people, but what does this mean? Audience. And what about teaching monkeys to speak sign language, sign language - isn't that a confirmation that we're descended from them? Lecturer. This is worth talking about in detail, since one of the big "ducks" of psychology and biology of the XX century is associated with it. But first we must consider in the most thorough way, albeit briefly, what we know about man from Divine Revelation, from the Holy Tradition of the Orthodox Church. The first thing to be said is that man is made up of two parts, soul and body, which we shall probably touch upon in more detail later. Science calls man Homo sapiens, Homo sapiens. And this is true, because man is created in the image and likeness of God [3]. The property of rationality, according to Divine Revelation, is a monopoly property of man, that is, not a single living creature of the visible world possesses this property [4]. How does our mind work? This is a great mystery. And yet, the divinely revealed teaching gives us much for understanding the specifics of the human mind. St. John of Damascus wrote that a person is rational by virtue of the fact that he has the ability to speak - internal or external, but first of all internal: "And in turn, the rational part of the soul is divided both into the inner word and into the spoken one. The inner word is the movement of the soul, which takes place in that part which reasons without any exclamation; For this reason, often, and silently, we fully expound all speech in ourselves, and we also speak during dreams. That is why we are all rational (οοο)" (Exact Exposition, Book 2, Chapter XXI, St. Petersburg, 1894). A specific feature of our being is the incessant generation of thoughts clothed in some sign forms (not necessarily verbal, but also expressed, for example, in the form of gestures (in the case of deaf and dumb people), etc. [5] What are the sign forms of the inner speech of an adult is a mystery to others. What forms of the inner speech of an infant, especially at the pre-speech stage of development, is a great mystery [6]. when his rationality (in the understanding of St. John of Damascus) begins to manifest itself outwardly, and those around him begin to see how his consciousness constantly generates new thoughts, clothed in new verbal forms. This is expressed in the emergence of word-making, when the child creates new, "his" words, with his own special meanings and sounds (4), and phrasal speech, which in itself is an amazing phenomenon. The child begins to speak in short phrases of two, then three words, but the peculiarity of this speech is its amazing independence. At the same time, a child, as many authors state, has the ability to construct an almost unlimited number of new phrases, which makes him strikingly similar to an adult. His phrasal speech in the first stages is in no way limited to memorized word combinations, it has the property of "productivity" (31), that is, the number of phrases that a small person can build is limited only by the narrowness of his vocabulary, and what is very remarkable, new phrases have a surprising orderliness, that is, sentences are not built randomly, but in an orderly way, more or less corresponding to the grammatical norm (15, p. 31). These observations have led some psychologists to believe that the child has some intuitive mechanism, such as knowledge of the rules of grammar, with the help of which he constructs a potentially unlimited number of phrases. Knowing the rules for the construction of English phrases, we can compose as many of them as we want, the same is done by a child, as scientists assume, but he knows the rules intuitively, not even understanding what a rule is. According to some authors, these rules can be very different from the rules of the adult language norm. However, attempts to algorithmically describe how a child's speech is generated according to these rules have been unsuccessful (31). The child seems to speak the way he wants, not the way he wants to speak, scientific uncles with advanced degrees who try to imagine a small person as a small computer [7]. Now let's go back to the monkeys. For about 10 years in the United States, a group of scientists tried to teach chimpanzees (named Washaw) the speech signs of the deaf and dumb (13, 29). They managed to train the monkey in such a way that, for example, if it wanted strawberries, it built a short "phrase" with the help of gestural conventional signs of the alphabet of the deaf and dumb, such as "I want strawberries", etc. The monkey never learned to construct phrases on his own; the combinations of words produced by it are too disordered to be considered as sentences composed according to the rules, as is the case with all normally speaking people [8], including children who master the speech of adults (15, 31). Neither new thoughts nor new phrases arose in the ape, as it was to be expected, due to the human monopoly on thought processes, on reason [9]. If you think about it, the result obtained by these authors is not much different from ordinary training. In fact, it is not so difficult to teach a monkey to make certain delicate and complex movements with the fingers of the hands - after all, bears are also taught to ride a bicycle. And it is also not difficult to force them to perform certain actions in certain situations. Anyone who keeps a cat at home is probably familiar with the picture when the cat, not paying any attention to the bowl of porridge, begins to make heart-rending sounds, smelling a piece of fresh fish lying on the table, "demanding" it. Isn't that "phrase" "I want fish" like the "phrases" Washaw "said"? Probably, it is relatively easy to teach a cat to press in such situations, say, the white and red keys, which will mean "I want fish", etc. So there is no intelligence in the speech of the Washou monkey, and the results of the experiments do not show anything in favor of the closeness of a person and a chimpanzee in terms of speech-thinking activity. However, not everyone thinks so. For some reason, the above-mentioned "successes" (and in fact, "failures") in attempts to teach chimpanzees the language of the deaf and dumb are evaluated in the university textbook on anthropology as an achievement of science of the 20th century, and the portrait of the beauty who taught the monkey with a chimpanzee in her arms is placed on the title page of this book (22) - it is not clear why. Audience. Did you say that man is created in the image of God? Lecturer. Yes of course. Audience. Therefore, if God is one, as you assert, then the soul of man, created in the image of God, must be one, and in one body cannot two souls be formed from one? Lecturer. Of course it is. Audience. Then how do you explain those cases where the human brain was cut in two and two intelligent, conscious human personalities were obtained? Where, then, is your uniqueness? Lecturer. What you are talking about has a special history and needs careful consideration. American surgeons at one time performed several operations - dissection of the corpus callosum, connecting the cerebral hemispheres - on several persons who were seriously suffering from an incurable form of epilepsy, a disease accompanied by terrible seizures, in the hope of a therapeutic effect of such an operation. R. Sperry and his collaborators, after correction, studied the behavior of these patients under normal conditions and in a variety of experimental psychological situations (1, 11, 27). Indeed, as has been observed by many, the behavior of these patients sometimes resembled that of not one, but two unrelated people. Sometimes it came to the point that the right hand grabbed the left, in the event that the left did something "wrong" (11). R. Sperry evaluated these situations as a doubling of consciousness (1). Subsequently, based on the results of experiments with these patients, a new interdisciplinary direction in science was formed - research on the functional asymmetry of the human brain hemispheres, and R. Sperry eventually received the Nobel Prize in Medicine. However, what R. Sperry and others observed requires careful analysis. Because facts are one thing, and their interpretation is another. I mean that the philosophical positions of R. Sperry and his co-authors are clear, this is biological materialism, and it is from this position that they interpreted what they observed. Audience. So, after all, did you get one personality after the separation of the hemispheres or two? Lecturer. So let's try to answer this question from the position of Orthodoxy. It seems that R. Sperry really received the fact of the existence of two relatively isolated sources of intelligent behavior. How can this be interpreted? The presence of such a plurality of subjects in one body is not the first discovery of R. Sperry. In the psychiatric clinic, the syndrome of "multiple personality" and the phenomenon of "psychic automatism" (7) are well known, when, as a result of mental illness or under the influence of hypnosis, the presence of several (and not even necessarily two, but maybe more) subjects can be observed in one body [10]. The facts obtained by R. Sperry are somewhat analogous to these well-known phenomena in psychiatry. The only difference is what led to the "splitting" of the personality. Audience. So what do you think it means? Lecturer. This may mean something completely different from what R. Sperry and P. Janet assumed long before him. The presence of meaningful rational behavior "in a human body" can be conditioned not only by the rational soul of a given person, but also by a completely different reason: "What has been said before does not in the least contradict what happens to the possessed, when, possessed by unclean spirits, they say and do what they do not want, and are forced to pronounce words that they do not understand. It is known that not everyone is equally exposed to the influence of spirits. Some are so mastered by them that they are not at all aware of what they are doing or saying, while others are aware of them and then remember. Both are caused by the influx of an unclean spirit, and it is not so that it penetrates the very substance of the soul, and, as if merged with it and somehow clothed with it, pronounces words and speeches through the mouth of the sufferer. There is no way they can do this. It happens that the unclean spirit, dwelling in our members, through which the soul acts, and imposing on them an unbearable burden, closes the rational feelings of the soul by a terrible obscuration and stops their activity (through such suppression of the organs of this activity). Which, as we see, sometimes happens from wine, as well as from fever, from excessive cold, and other diseases that come from outside. In order that the devil, who had received power over his flesh, should not plot to do the same to the blessed Job, the Lord forbade him by a special command, saying: "Behold, I deliver him into your hands, only save his soul" (Job 2:6), that is, only do not make him mad by upsetting the seat of the soul, making an invasion of his mind and damaging the organ of reason, by means of which he (Job) must resist you" (St. Cassian the Roman, Struggle with Thoughts and Spirits of Evil - in the book: Philokalia, vol. 3. - Moscow, 1993). I would like to remind you that all the patients examined by R. Sperry, without exception, are patients with a severe form of epilepsy, and when it comes to this disease, we, the Orthodox, understand well what (or rather, who!) can "smell here." The case of demon possession described in the Holy Gospel (Mark 9:17-21) is an accurate description of the so-called "unfolded" epileptic seizure. Audience. Well, you won't convince us with that. Demons are only in your books, and even in horror films. Lecturer. This may not be convincing to you, however, many Orthodox Christians know from experience that these beings exist in reality, and not only in the imagination. For those who do not believe in their existence, there is another argument. If splitting the brain leads to a doubling of consciousness, then from the point of view of materialism this doubling is reversible, or not? Audience. Of course, irreversibly. Nerve cells do not regenerate. Lecturer. Yes, the corpus callosum, which connects the hemispheres, once cut, is not restored and does not reappear. But the psychological effects of the separation of the hemispheres for some reason disappear even under the most inexplicable circumstances from the point of view of biological materialism. According to one study that examined behavior toward split-brain patients, they disappear in hypnosis and continue to be absent in the post-hypnotic state (30). If this is so, then the "splitting effects of the psyche" obtained in patients with a "split brain" are the result of something else, and not only the separation of the hemispheres as a result of surgery, and this situation cannot be reduced to a simple scheme - "two hemispheres - two consciousnesses", as R. Sperry believed. It seems that when analyzing the data obtained from patients with a "split brain", it is necessary to remember that our body (brain) has a well-developed ability for very complex automatisms, the course of which, as Blessed Augustine believed, can occur independently of the activity of consciousness: "And what else is the soul, and the other - its bodily servants, or vessels, or organs, or if it is possible to call them in some other way, This is clearly seen from the fact that very often, under a strong strain of thought, it is distracted from everything, so that it does not know much that is before open and perfectly healthy eyes. But if the tension is still greater, then he suddenly stops while walking, no doubt, because his soul ceases to control the organs of movement with which his legs are occupied, and if the tension of thought is not strong enough to chain the walker to one place, but is such that he is not free to listen to the middle part of the brain, which serves as a messenger of the movement of the body, then he sometimes forgets, whence and whither he goes, and mechanically passes by the dacha to which he was going, although by the nature of his body he is healthy, but only distracted from it to another" (Blessed Augustine. "On the Book of Genesis", book. VII, ch. XX. - Creations. - Kiev, 1893). In connection with this approach to the analysis of human behavior, it is necessary to mention one of the interpretations of the situation with the "split brain", according to which the human consciousness controls the activity of the left hemisphere only, while the right hemisphere is only a container of automatisms (D. K. Ickles, Nobel Prize winner in medicine, see 32). Audience. But you won't deny that our psyche is connected to the brain, will you? For example, with brain lesions in different parts of it, different disorders of mental functions occur. In some cases, speech is impaired, in others - counting or the ability to recognize objects, etc.? Doesn't this mean that there is no trace of your "soul" at all? Lecturer. I really will not argue that different defects in the course of mental processes are observed in different brain lesions. These are well-known facts. Facts are very important for neuropathologists and, by the way, known long before the 20th century, and not just anywhere, but in the Orthodox Church (see Blessed Augustine. "On the Book of Genesis", book. VII, ch. XVII-XX). As for your second statement, I cannot agree with you in any way. The soul and the body are completely different things, which, under certain conditions, for example, after death, can exist independently of each other. However, as long as we are alive, they are connected, and they are connected very closely, even to such an extent that not only psychopharmacological drugs, alcohol, and similar substances have a strong influence on the state of the soul, but, as the Church teaches, even the nature of food, for example, what kind of fish we eat - sea or river, has an important, significant influence on its condition [11]. Moreover, such major physiological changes in the work of the brain as massive lesions of its individual areas very often cannot pass without a trace for the state of the soul and the many bodily automatisms that our body (brain) provides us with. It should also be noted that brain lesions sometimes lead to the strangest results - that is, not to the loss of a person's functions, but on the contrary, to the emergence of new mental abilities. For example, the world-famous Russian researcher of disorders of higher mental functions in local brain lesions, A.R. Luria, and his colleagues observed and studied in detail the case of the appearance of the ability to "see" objects hidden from view at long distances in a patient with lesions of the right hemisphere (a report to the author in a personal conversation with A.R. Luria's colleagues - E.G. Simernitskaya, N.K. Korsakova, L.I. Moscovičute). Such facts, as they say, do not fit into any materialistic framework. However, their ascertainment is not an achievement of the science of the 20th century - a similar case was described in the first centuries after the birth of Christ by Blessed Augustine (On the Book of Genesis, Book 12, Chapter XVII). So the cases of brain pathology do not prove anything to us in favor of materialism. Matthias Schleiden, together with Theodor Schwann, is considered the creator of the theory of the cellular structure of living matter. ^ "For as the soul of the word and the flesh are man, so God and man, one is Christ" - the symbol of St. Athanasius of Alexandria. ^ "By the word: in the image means the power of the mind and the power of freedom, in the word: in the likeness - likeness to God in virtue, as far as possible." - St. John of Damascus Exact Exposition, book. 2, ch. XII, p. 70. St. Petersburg, 1894. ^ "Question 27. What is freedom? Answer: Man's freedom is a voluntary, independent desire, proceeding from the mind or rational soul, to do good or evil. For rational creatures must have an autocratic nature, and act freely under the guidance of reason..." "Answer to question 30: ... However, these words should refer only to man. For the rest of the creatures (except for the Angels, who are in a firm and unchangeable state) are not subject to predestination, because they have no freedom: and therefore there can be no sin in them..." - Orthodox Confession of the Catholic Apostolic Church of the East. Moscow, 1900. From these two statements, one can easily conclude that only man is rational among the beings of the visible world. Science has not yet found any signs of the existence of other intelligent beings in the visible part of the Universe (in exact accordance with the Orthodox doctrine), which in itself should be a mystery for materialists who try to explain the appearance of reason by simple material causes. From the monopoly of man on the mind it follows, in particular, that all phenomena associated with the so-called "aliens", "UFOs", etc.

^ "Image of the Trinity-God - Trinity-Man. The three persons in the trinity-man are the three forces of his soul, by which his existence is manifested. Our thoughts and spiritual sensations manifest the existence of the mind, which, while manifesting itself with all obviousness, is at the same time completely invisible and incomprehensible. Our mind is the image of the Father; our word (we usually call an unspoken word a thought) is the image of the Son; the spirit is the image of the Holy Spirit. Just as in the Trinity-God the Three Persons inseparably and inseparably constitute one Divine Being, so in the Trinity-man the three Persons constitute one being, without mixing with each other, without merging into one person, without dividing into three beings. Our mind gave birth to thought, and does not cease to give birth to thought; Thought, having been born, does not cease to be born again, and at the same time remains born, hidden in the mind. The mind cannot exist without thought, and thought without the mind. The beginning of the one is necessarily the beginning of the other; The existence of the mind is necessarily the existence of thought. In the same way, our spirit proceeds from the mind and cooperates with thought. That is why every thought has its own spirit, every way of thinking has its own separate spirit, every book has its own spirit. Thought cannot exist without spirit; The existence of one is necessarily accompanied by the existence of the other. In the existence of both is the existence of mind. What is the spirit of man? - The totality of heartfelt feelings belonging to the verbal and immortal soul, alien to the souls of cattle and beasts. The heart of man differs from the heart of animals in its spirit. The hearts of animals have sensations that depend on blood and nerves, they do not have a sense of spirituality, this feature of the Divine image, the exclusive belonging of man. The moral strength of man is his spirit. Our mind, word and spirit, by the simultaneity of their origin and by their mutual relations, serve as the image of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, co-eternal, co-beginningal, equal in honor, of one nature" (St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, On the Image and Likeness of God in Man, Ascetic Experiments, vol. 2, Moscow, 1998, pp. 129-131). "A person cannot be without thoughts and feelings. Thoughts and feelings are a sign of a person's life. If they were to cease for any time, it would be at the same time the cessation of human life, of human existence" (St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, An Offering to Modern Monasticism, St. Petersburg, 1905). ^ "… Even then I knew how to suck, calmed down from bodily pleasure, cried from bodily inconveniences - as long as that was all. Then I began to laugh, first in my sleep, then in my wakefulness. This is how I was told about me, and I believe it, because I saw the same thing in other babies: I do not remember myself at that time. And so gradually I began to understand where I was; I wanted to explain my desires to those who would fulfill them, but I could not, because my desires were in me, and those around me were outside of me, and they could not enter my soul by any external sense. I floundered and shouted, expressing with the few signs I could and as much as I could, something similar to my desires - but these signs did not express my desires" (Blessed Augustine, Confessions, Book 1, Ch. 6. - Moscow, 1991). ^ In trying to explain how the first children's phrases are constructed, scientists have discovered, among other things, that the process of their construction is not reduced to simple imitation and cannot be described as a chain of conditioned reflexes, cannot be explained from the standpoint of the reflex theory; Thus, the mechanisms of this process can in no way be analogous to the supposed mechanisms by which animals are trained (for example, bears riding a bicycle, etc.) ^ "All races of men, even the scattered primitive inhabitants of the jungle, the bestial man-eaters who have lived for centuries on islands isolated from the rest of the world, have a complete and structured language. There do not seem to be primitive, amorphous, and imperfect languages such as one would probably assume should be observed in primitive civilizations. People who did not reach the invention of fabrics, living under roofs made of branches, having no idea about the need for solitude, purposefully engaged in debauchery and roasting their enemies for dinner,... talk to each other during their brutal festivals in a language no less grammatically perfect than Greek, and no less fluent (bluent) than French" (S. Langer, cited by 27). This problem is also discussed in N. Fraser's article "The Origin of Languages". Poisk, No 43 (545), 20.10.99. ^ Theoretically, a special mechanism is not excluded, so to speak, which determines the appearance of similarity in the speech of man and apes, when trying to teach them human speech, is the action of another rational principle from the outside. It seems that St. Anthony the Great would hardly have been surprised by a monkey who spoke the language of the deaf and dumb. He saw plenty of such demonic "tricks" in his life (see below for more on these mechanisms). ^ However, these observations are also not the first discovery of such phenomena (see the Gospel of Mark 5:1-13). ^ "Proud man! You dream so much and so high about your mind, and it is in complete and uninterrupted dependence on the stomach. The law of fasting, being outwardly a law for the belly, is in essence a law for the mind... He who does not observe moderation and proper discernment in food, cannot preserve either virginity or chastity, cannot restrain anger, gives himself over to laziness, despondency and sorrow, becomes a slave of vanity, a dwelling place of pride, which is introduced into a person by his carnal state, which is most of a luxurious and well-fed meal" (St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, On Fasting. - Ascetic Experiments, vol. 1. - St. Petersburg, 1905). ^

Conversation FiveThe Mystery of Man

Who called me by His powerFrom insignificance?A.S. Pushkin Lector. Today it is necessary to continue the conversation about man. Man and his life are studied by many sciences - first of all, psychology, and in the XX century man - his soul and body - is the subject of intensive study by physiologists. Surprisingly, despite the enormous expenditure of effort, time and financial resources, science, in fact, knows very little about man. The essence of human nature, for all its obvious specificity, eludes researchers like a sunbeam [1]. This reason lies in the fact that man is a special being in the universe, he, and only he, is created in the image and likeness of God (not even the Angels and Archangels), and his disposition is a special mystery of God, which is revealed by God as necessary, as necessary for man himself [2]. Man is a mystery closed from researchers, if only because his physiological processes are extremely complex, practically inaccessible for study in full. Audience. Explain what you mean. Lecturer. You probably know well from the biology course that the human nervous system consists of nerve cells - neurons, cells have short processes - dendrites and long - axons. According to scientists (based on the data obtained during observations), a kind of electrical signals are transmitted through these processes - nerve impulses, as a result of which, as they believe, the work of the brain occurs. For example, some of them claim that the neurons of the retina transmit impulses along axons to the brain, these impulses carry information about what is in front of the eyes, the brain processes it, due to this, as a result, recognition of objects is obtained, etc. Some scientists who view the human brain as a computer-like system argue the following: "To put it simply, the human brain is a natural computer made up of 10-100 billion neurons, each connected to about 10,000 others, all of which work together in parallel... In the system of neurons, the process of performing the complex functions of vision and speech consists of about 100 stages, while in an electronic computer this would require billions of steps" (17). It is very difficult to understand this complex system, and to have complete information about what is happening in it is almost unattainable. The creation of a device that simultaneously observes everything that happens in the human brain and provides us with a complete picture of what is happening there, or at least what is happening to nerve impulses, is simply impossible at present and is unlikely to ever be possible. But now I would like to draw your attention not to neurons, but to other phenomena and entities related to humans, which, as they say, are always at our fingertips. To begin with, I would like to conduct a simple psychological experiment, in which I invite all of you to participate. Audience. We agree. Come on. Lecturer. Look carefully at this image. What do you see here? Audience. "An Indian!" - "I saw an Eskimo!" - "Both of them!" Lecturer. Raise your hands to those who saw the Indian from the beginning. And now those who first saw the Eskimo... Some of you have seen one thing, and some of you have seen another. This is the usual result in the perception of such pictures, which have, so to speak, a double meaning. And now, is there any of you who did not see anything? Audience. No, no one. Lecturer. Now let's think together about what happened. Some of you saw one thing, and some saw another. For example, some can firmly say that they saw an Indian, and others - "I saw an Eskimo". This is the basic fact in our study. Some of the strict positivists (along with the strict solipsists) would probably try to challenge it by saying that your vocal apparatus simply produced motor reactions corresponding to the words, and that there was no vision at all. However, to no sensible lawyer is this fact that we have discovered can be doubted; in jurisprudence, the words of several witnesses are the truth, just as in Orthodox doctrine: in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word will be firm (2 Corinthians 13:1). So, let's look at the basic fact that you have witnessed. Let us consider, in particular, what is behind the words: "I saw the picture of an Indian." In such statements, there are, as it were, two semantic parts, behind which there are two entities that can be analyzed. Firstly, the researcher in this situation may be interested in the question why, say, one person saw one thing, and the other saw another (in our situation, an Indian and, accordingly, an Eskimo). There is a lot of research on the psychology of visual perception on this topic, and I don't want to delve into this topic now. I am interested in another semantic part: the statement "I saw the image of an Indian" contains other information - "I saw", and for some reason I could not see, for example, if the room was dark. So why did a person see and not see? Audience. Why? You yourself have just told me. From the retina of the eye, neurons transmitted impulses to the brain, and so on. Lecturer. That's exactly what "so on". In this "so on" lies the essence of the question and the mystery. And the point is not at all where impulses are actually transmitted and how they are arranged, their forms (patterns [3]) in time and space, and how the patterns of their consequences that arise in the tissues of the brain are arranged in space and time [4], although this is also a mystery (we talked about this at the beginning). The mystery lies in the fact that while some "patterns" of neuronal activity and their consequences are accompanied by the appearance of a conscious image ("Indian"), others are not accompanied by the appearance of a conscious image, do not lead to its appearance. The question is why some of these "patterns" lead to the appearance of an image in the mind, while others do not. Audience. Well, this is probably a practical question, scientists will find out over time. Lecturer. No, the difficulty here is more theoretical than practical. Audience. What is difficult here theoretically? There are computers, they also recognize objects, for example, "zebra" on consumer goods. In the same way, probably, the systems of nerve cells somehow recognize the "Indian". Lecturer. The fact is that the nervous system seems to provide the body with recognition of visual, auditory and other stimuli in a really amazing way and even an adequate reaction to them, but images of conscious perception may not arise in this case, this is completely unnecessary. It happens that a stimulus is recognized, but not recognized by human consciousness. So it turns out that there is recognition, but there is no awareness. Audience. How can this be? Lecturer. Here's how. Psychologists have described and studied several situations when, according to many researchers, this is so. The first phenomenon is the phenomenon of subthreshold perception, when a visual or other stimulus is not perceived by a person consciously ("Indian" is not visible), due to the fact that the characteristics of the stimulus do not reach the threshold of conscious perception, but the nervous system with such characteristics of the stimulus can recognize it and give an appropriate reaction, objectively registered by physiological methods or in some other way (5). The nervous system has recognized, and the human consciousness - its master - has no idea what it has learned! Another example, which may also be useful, is the well-known psychological situation of the so-called "cocktail party." Imagine that you are in a large room where there are a large number of people, divided into small groups of 2-3 people, and each group is talking about a different topic. You are in one of the groups. Your attention is riveted on the content of the conversation in your group, and you do not follow what is happening in the neighboring groups. But! At one point, it may switch to a conversation in a neighboring group if your name or surname is mentioned in this conversation. Recognition takes place against your will and consciousness. First there was a recognition of the word and its significance for you, and only after that and only by virtue of this significance did this word "penetrate" into your consciousness. According to D.C. Ickles, experiments with patients with "split brains" already known to you have shown, in particular, that under certain conditions a person who has undergone such an operation can only be aware of the emotional significance of the stimulus (for example, that he has been shown something indecent), and is not aware of what exactly was shown. According to D.C. Ickles, in these situations, the nervous system recognizes the stimulus automatically, while the human consciousness is satisfied only with the emotional experience of this stimulus (32). According to many physiologists, automatically, that is, without the control of will and consciousness, the human nervous system also regulates many different physiological functions and their parameters, for example, the lumen of the pupil, the accommodation of the lens of the eye, etc., which presupposes, of course, the recognition of what properties this or that stimulus has. So recognition and awareness of a stimulus are not identical to each other at all. Once again, it remains a mystery to physiologists why one pattern should lead to awareness and another should not. And this is a mystery, apparently unsolvable. It seems that the most that can be learned here is a statement of facts that such and such patterns evoke a conscious image, and such and such do not. The question of why one of the patterns that provide recognition leads to awareness, and the other does not, is very likely to remain unanswered at all. It is "not written" on neurons that their activity leads to the appearance of a conscious image. Even if a catalogue of the patterns that usually accompany the emergence of conscious images is ever created, there can never be a definite guarantee that some other form of neuronal activity (other patterns) cannot "suddenly" produce a conscious image, and vice versa - a pattern already known as generating awareness will not suddenly fail, will not lead to the absence of a conscious image, contrary to what is expected. Audience. It's strange, for example, we have such a device as a TV. Everything that happens in it is known to electronics specialists, but there are no questions about why the image on the screen appears or does not appear. Aren't the problems you mention simply due to the fact that we don't know enough about how the brain works, while we know almost everything about how television works? Lecturer. The position of a scientist trying to answer questions like whether you see an Indian or not is in some ways analogous to that of an engineer analyzing why an image appears on a television screen or not. Let's assume that both know "their" patterns that lead and, conversely, do not lead to the appearance of either an image in the mind or a picture on the screen; Accordingly, the first has neuronal and other brain patterns, the second has patterns of electrical phenomena occurring in the elements of the television apparatus. But here's the difference, given that both know, as we've assumed, what patterns give rise to images: the neurophysiologist can't directly observe what's going on in the mind of the person he's studying. An engineer, on the other hand, has the opportunity to look at the TV screen; assuming that both know which patterns lead to the appearance of images (in the mind or on the TV screen, respectively), then the engineer can tell us why (in his opinion) an image must necessarily appear on the screen under certain (so to speak, "good") patterns, and why not - under others, based on the laws of physics. A neurophysiologist cannot do this, even if he has a 100% guarantee of the presence of a conscious image (for example, if he studies only himself, that is, his brain patterns and his images of consciousness given to him in self-observation: there can be no doubt that "I see"), since there are no laws in physics that connect material and mental phenomena [5]. This is the secret. How a brain pattern can lead to the appearance of a conscious image in general (by virtue of which very special laws of nature go beyond the ordinary laws of nature and connect brain phenomena and phenomena of human mental life) and why this one, and not another, which also provides recognition, is a mystery that will very likely never be solved. Audience. So there is no way for physiologists to determine whether we really see something or not? Lecturer. Quite so. There are no ways for physiologists to objectively register the presence of conscious images in you or me, and it is unlikely that they can exist at all. Even if a person has a registered activity of nerve formations (pattern) typical of the situation of awareness, and the person even says "Indian", there is no guarantee that this did not happen automatically, without awareness [6]. A conscious image remains in the hands of physiologists like a sunbeam. Audience. If this is the case, then there is no physiological way to determine whether a person is alive or dead? Lecturer. With the exception of such obvious signs as, for example, the decomposition of the corpse, etc., I think not. The existing electrophysiological method of ascertaining the fact of death - registration of the absence of brain biocurrents on the electroencephalogram (the so-called "brain death"), strictly speaking, is conditional and sometimes does not give obvious results. I personally had to examine a patient who, after a severe craniocerebral injury, had this lack of biocurrents, he was a normal person. But whether he suffered death or not, I cannot answer this question, and it is unlikely that any of the physiologists will give a convincing answer to this question [7]. Man is a mystery. And his life is a mystery. His death is also a mystery [8]. Psychic phenomena, so obvious to each of us, are completely incapable of direct observation by other people, nor of study by traditional scientific methods. Neither thoughts, nor emotions, nor sensations can be directly seen by another person, nor registered by any devices, nor measured. For their research, psychologists try to resort to indirect methods - first of all, the self-report of the subjects is used, as in our experience. So modern psychology to a large extent literally rests on the "word of honor" of the subjects it studies. Psychologists also use indirect physiological methods based on correlation, coincidence in time of mental phenomena and physiological processes [10]. It is striking: the existence of psychic phenomena is a most obvious fact, and at the same time they are completely inaccessible to an outside observer, even armed with the most modern methods and techniques. Indeed, "someone else's soul is in the dark", you can't say anything [11]. What we have been discussing today is called the "psychophysiological problem" in philosophy, and many great thinkers (for example, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and at the end of the 20th century, K. Popper) thought intensively about it. Unfortunately, many of the physiologists and psychologists of the 20th century believe that if we now know a lot about neurons, then this problem has been solved. No! Science still cannot really answer the question of whether you see an Indian or not, if you do, then why, and in general, what this very vision is. Trying to pretend that there are no problems is usually a bad way of doing things that don't lead to a solution. The mystery of the nature of mental phenomena and their connection with bodily phenomena (neuronal, etc.) remains a mystery for science [12]. The Holy Church reveals to us much that is essential about this mystery. Man consists of two parts - soul and body - and each of them belongs to a special world. The body is that which belongs to the visible world. The soul is that which belongs to the world of spirits, the objects and beings of which are not subject to sensory perception under normal conditions (however, they can have a strong influence on events taking place in the material world). And only when, by the will or permission of God, a window to this world miraculously opens [13], a person begins to see what belongs to this world and in some special cases directly observes what is happening in the soul of another person, which, however, is exclusively a manifestation of a special Divine gift [14]. In connection with the psychophysiological problem, I think it is necessary to mention one more issue. You have probably heard this question from your younger brothers and sisters. Sometimes small children ask the question: "Where did I come from?" Older children, as a rule, are frightened by this question, believing that it means something related to gender issues, which need to be explained somehow urgently and, most importantly, safely. However, it seems that something else and much deeper in meaning may be meant here. Audience. What can be meant here? Lecturer. Let's try to answer this question, and then it will become clear what else a child can mean when asking such questions. Audience. But in order to answer such a question, it is probably necessary first to answer the question of what "I" means, and only then to answer the question of its origin? Lecturer. Certainly. So let's try to answer this question. A materialistic biologist would probably answer this question something like this: "You are your body, its brain, and so on. Potentially, in principle (and not in reality), you can make a complete description of what your body is made of, down to atoms, down to elementary particles [15], with a precise indication of all the elements, their properties, etc., and everything that happens in it. To this should be added a complete description of what happened to this system in time, from the moment of your conception, that is, what was done with all the elements, their interconnections, processes, etc. (up to the atomic level) with an indication of all the spatial and temporal coordinates of the elements of the system [16]. This will be the answer to the question of what you are and where you came from." A psychologist who stands on the position of dualism (that is, who recognizes the presence of two essences - the body and the soul) will probably say that to this global "super description" you need to add another "superdescription" - everything that is happening now and everything that has been happening in your soul from the beginning. And in this way a complete description of you as a human being composed of soul and body will be obtained. And in this way, in principle, we can get a complete description of each of you and what has happened to you (with your body and soul) throughout your life. But the question is, can such a "super description" answer the question of what is "you"? Audience. I don't understand, explain. Lecturer. Let's see - is it possible in principle that your double would live instead of you, who has a hundred percent resemblance to you not only in facial features, but also in all other features of anatomy, physiology and psyche? And not only "here and now", but also possessed all these similarities throughout the entire life you have already lived, who had exactly the same life as you have, with everyone else

I will repeat this thought once again - why couldn't another person live instead of you with the same features of body and soul, with the same events that took place in the soul and body as in your whole life, with exactly the same life and fate as you, but not you, but your exact copy, Wouldn't you be there at all? What determined that it was you who appeared in the world, and not your copy? "Where did I come from?" Where is the root, where is the reason for the birth of me? [17] The answer to this question is given by the Holy Church: "Thy (God's) hands have created me and created me," says an Orthodox priest on behalf of any person during the Sacrament of Holy Baptism. Yes, man is a great mystery, and this should not be forgotten [18]. Science tells us a lot about the world and about man, but a number of questions remain unanswered by scientists who adhere to the position of materialism. Let me remind you of them. Why is the world so complicated, and not otherwise? As a result of accidental causes, the materialists (Darwinists and Co.) answer. Why is the world so amazingly beautiful? As a result of accidental causes, materialists answer. Why is the earth so convenient for human habitation, in contrast to the great multitude of celestial bodies known to astronomers, like a single oasis in the desert? As a result of an accidental confluence of circumstances [19], the materialists answer. Why is it that only man, unlike other living beings on Earth, has intelligence and no signs of intelligence have been found in the material world outside the Earth? As a result of an accidental confluence of circumstances, the materialists answer [20]. Why do images appear in human consciousness? For unknown reasons, materialists answer. Why do I live, and not someone else instead of me? For some unknown reason, the materialists answer. Why are there no contradictions between Orthodox doctrine and the facts obtained by science? As a result of accidental coincidences, the materialists answer. If you look closely at these questions and look at them with an open mind, you will realize that the materialistic king is "naked." This king is also naked when he tries to explain by his own means the miracles that occur in the Orthodox Church. Audience. What? Lecturer. For example, the miracle of the descent of the Holy Fire on Holy Saturday in Jerusalem, on the eve of Easter - the bright Resurrection of Christ, when before the eyes of the entire civilized world (and this is filmed on TV and videotapes) there is a miraculous ignition of the Holy Fire through the prayer of the Orthodox Patriarch (and only the Orthodox, although there are plenty of representatives of other confessions standing nearby), which marks the triumph of Orthodoxy, its truth and superiority over atheism and false religions; fire that does not burn or burn, which is easy to verify both on the basis of many testimonies and from video films (12, 24, etc.). I would like to conclude the cycle of our talks with the divinely inspired words of the great teacher of the Russian Orthodox Church, St. Ignatius Brianchaninov: "Man! Understand your dignity. Look at the meadows and fields, at the vast rivers, at the boundless seas, at the high mountains, at the magnificent trees, at all the beasts and cattle of the earth, at all the beasts and fish that wander in the expanses of water, look at the stars, at the moon, at the sun, at the sky: all this is for you, everything is assigned to your service. In addition to the world we see, there is also a world that is not visible to the bodily eyes, incomparably more excellent than the visible. And the invisible world is for man. How the Lord honored His image! What a lofty destiny he had destined for him! The visible world is only the preparatory threshold of the monastery, incomparably more magnificent and vast. Here, as in the vestibule, the image of God must be adorned with its final features and colors, in order to obtain the most perfect resemblance to its most holy, all-perfect Original, in order to enter in the beauty and elegance of this likeness into that palace in which the Original is present incomprehensibly, as if limiting Its unlimitedness, for the manifestation of Itself to His beloved, rational creatures" (St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, On the Image and Likeness of God in Man. T. 2. - St. Petersburg, 1905). "Many inventions and discoveries in other fields of science would have shocked and puzzled Aristotle, but the most striking and unexpected results of psychological research... would make him raise his eyebrows only for a moment" (E. Tulving). "… The results of 100 years of memory research are somewhat discouraging. We have established reliable empirical generalizations, but most of them are so obvious that they are known even to a ten-year-old child" (W. Neisser) (3). ^ "Man is a mystery to himself. Is it possible that this mystery has been sealed definitively and there is no way to reveal it? Yes! Sin sealed it for man, his fall sealed it for him. Man is devoid of true self-conception and self-knowledge. As long as I remain in my fall, the mystery of man remains inexplicable to me: my perverted, blind mind is not sufficient to reveal it. I do not understand my soul, I do not understand my body; The notions which I think I have of them turn out to be, when not superficial and frivolous, very inadequate, and for the most part erroneous. Wandering in the darkness of self-deception and error are the wise men of the world, who have dreamed and pronounced arbitrary and vain teachings about man, substituting conjectures for truth; into the same abyss of self-deception and error the blind are dragged under the guidance of the blind. The mystery of man is opened to the degree accessible and necessary for us by the incarnate God, our Lord Jesus Christ, in Whom all the treasures of wisdom and understanding are hidden (Col. 2:3). The knowledge of man acquired through Divine revelation is still relative: relative to the limitation of our comprehension, relative to the essential need for knowledge. God grants us self-contemplation and self-knowledge, which are necessary for repentance, for salvation, or, what is the same thing, for our eternal bliss; but the main cause of the creation of man, the essential condition of his existence, his very essence are known to God alone" (St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, A Word about Man. - St. Petersburg, 1995, pp. 8-9). ^ The word "pattern" means "pattern" in English. ^ Presynaptic changes, postsynaptic, etc. ^ The ascertainment of the existence of such laws of nature would probably be tantamount to the recognition of the special physical status of psychic phenomena (such as electrical, magnetic, and others), the properties of which would thus turn out to be beyond the properties prescribed for other material phenomena by the laws of modern physics. A situation in which a person investigates "one-on-one" only what is accessible exclusively to his own observation is, from the point of view of "bad" positivist epistemology, a situation unsuitable for rigorous scientific investigation. Therefore, the situation when a person investigates on himself the physiological causes of the appearance of conscious images observed only by himself, is considered by positivists to be a situation, so to speak, "forbidden by the rules of the game." ^ It is believed that such reactions can occur automatically in the states of the so-called "epileptic trances", sleepwalking (sleepwalking), dreaming, etc. ^ Since the physiological methods of ascertaining death are conditional, it is difficult to understand how to treat the numerous experiences of people who have experienced the so-called "clinical death" based only on these methods, since relying only on the above-mentioned methods of ascertainment, it is impossible to exclude the possibility that that these experiments are by no means postmortem, but lifetime. It is possible that such experiments in many cases are the result of the vital abnormal functioning of the brain (the so-called "oneiroid states" described in psychiatry, as well as the conditions that arose in W. Penfield's patients during electrical stimulation of the cerebral cortex, are very similar to them), for example, as a result of a morbid state of the brain, or as a result of demonic influence (see The Life of the Holy Martyrs Timothy and Maura). ^ "Death is a great mystery. It is the birth of man from earthly temporal life into eternity. In the performance of the mortal sacrament, we lay aside our coarse shell - the body, and with a spiritual being, subtle, ethereal, we pass into another world, into the abode of beings homogeneous to the soul" (St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, A Word on Death. - Works, vol. 3. - St. Petersburg, 1886, p. 69). ^ Surprisingly, scientists can register the presence of countless different natural phenomena of the external world, measure a huge number of parameters and characteristics of these phenomena, but the statement that an image of an "Indian" has arisen in your mind, especially since the measurement of its parameters by sensors and measuring devices is an inaccessible thing for science. ^ The well-known lie detector is based on this principle, but it can only directly detect the physiological reactions that usually accompany certain emotional experiences. He cannot detect either the deliberate lie itself, or these emotional experiences themselves. ^ In principle, direct penetration into the world of thoughts of another person is inaccessible not only to the human mind, but also to the mind of a much more perfect one - the mind of the demon. "But how do unclean spirits know our thoughts? - They do not read them directly in their souls, but learn them from their discovery in external sensory signs, that is, from our words and actions. But they cannot penetrate into those thoughts that have not yet come out of the inner soul..." (St. Cassian the Roman, The Struggle with Thoughts and Spirits of Evil, p. 169. - Philokalia, vol. 3. - Moscow, 1993). ^ This conclusion was reached as a result of their research by the already mentioned D.K. Ickles and W. Penfield, one of the most famous specialists in the field of brain electrophysiology. "After years of trying to explain the mind solely on the basis of brain activity, I have come to the conclusion that it is much easier (and more logical) to accept the hypothesis that our being is made up of two basic elements" (soul and body). "Apparently, the mind acts independently of the brain, just as a programmer acts independently of his computer, although in some things it may depend on the work of the computer" Wilder Penbield. The mystery of the mind, pp. 70-80. Princeton, 1975 - op. cit. to 17, p. 83). ^ See: St. Ignatius Brianchaninov. A Discourse on the Sensual and Spiritual Vision of Spirits. - Ascetic Experiments, vol. 3. St. Petersburg, 1886. ^ See: St. Ignatius Brianchaninov. Letters about the ascetic life. Letter No 203 (324, 54). Paris - Moscow, 1996. ^ Such a complete description is the "blue" and pipe dream of physiologists. Note that just one simple sound signal (click), according to physiologists, activates (that is, fires, so to speak) about 10 million neurons (27). ^ This is another pipe dream, immeasurably more impossible than the first. ^ A few more questions can be asked that are similar to this basic question. Why was I born in this era, in this century, in this year, day and hour, and did it not happen sometime else? Why was I born in this country (Russia) and not in another? In this city, and not in another, with these parents, and not with others? ^ "Among the objects of the immense universe I see myself - a man. Who am I? From whence and for what purpose do I appear on earth? What is the purpose of my existence in general? What is the reason and purpose of my earthly life, this pilgrimage, short in comparison with eternity, long and tiring in relation to myself? I come into existence unconsciously, without any consent on my part; I am leaving this life against my will, at an uncertain, unforeseen hour. I appear and leave as a slave. More! I appear and leave as a creation. I live on earth, not knowing the future. I don't know what will happen to me in a day, in a few minutes. I constantly encounter the unexpected. I am constantly under the influence of circumstances and surroundings that enslave me. One habit, one life spent recklessly, reconciles with such a strange situation. It cannot hide from the observer. What happens to me when, having spent an urgent time on earth, I disappear from its face, disappear into the unknown, like all other people? The way of my departure from earthly life is terrible: it is called death" (St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, A Word about Man. - St. Petersburg, 1995). ^ It seems that with the help of the words "due to an accidental combination of circumstances" it is possible to avoid answering any question. ^ This means, of course, the materialists who answer questions honestly. ^

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