"And the light shineth in darkness, and darkness shall not encompass it"

(John 1:5)

The Orthodox Church worldview, based on the prophetic, apostolic and patristic tradition, has always had a clear attitude to the questions of the origin of the universe – heaven and earth, as well as life and man. The need to publish this edition is due to the fact that under the guise of Orthodox teaching, anti-Christian ideas of evolutionism began to be proposed more and more often and more persistently by various authors. These poisonous seeds have already penetrated into the system of Orthodox education and are sometimes perceived by people who are not experienced as "progressive" Christianity. In fact, "Christian evolutionism" is one of the varieties of renovationism, modernism in theology.

A number of the materials included in this collection were put on public display at the October 29-30 meeting at the Russian Orthodox University named after St. John. Up. John the Theologian at the conference "Teaching in Orthodox Schools of the Creation of the World, Life and Man", held by the Department of Religious Education and Catechization of the Moscow Patriarchate. On the part of the evolutionists present, the presented reports provoked a violent emotional reaction (however, completely unsupported by any theological or scientific arguments).

When our book was already in typeset, it became known about the publication of another publication propagandizing the ideas of "Christian" evolutionism, the book "That Command, and I Was Created" (Christian Life Foundation, Klin, 1999). This book has a wonderful Orthodox title, but not content. In it, the authors, ostensibly in order to defend science and reconcile it with the faith, on the one hand, undermine the authority of Orthodoxy, and on the other hand, directly attack Orthodox creationists. Here is the pathos of the book: "Recently, books of a completely creationist nature have begun to appear, written by Orthodox clergy (the last two words are deliberately highlighted in bold – Author), which, in addition to bewilderment, already causes serious concern, because knowingly false, anti-scientific ideas are supported in this case by the authority of the priesthood..." (pp. 4-5)

In fact, in our opinion, the zeal of the laity and the authority of the priesthood are called upon to defend precisely the patristic teaching on the Biblical Six Days, and not at all the newfangled mythological hypotheses of "scientific" evolutionism.

Our humble work, according to the authors, serves as a response to some untenable assertions of evolutionists-modernists.

First of all, evolutionists try to convince everyone that creationists are a product of late Protestantism, and therefore, they say, are alien to Orthodoxy. However, at the same time, they fail to cite a single patristic quotation to confirm their thought. In our collection, the reader will find many purely creationist statements of the ancient and late Church Fathers, testifying to the fact that, on the contrary, it is the ideology of evolutionism that is an innovation in Christianity that appeared in the era of the European Enlightenment. And associated with the revival of paganism. Protestants turned out to be close to the original creationism in Christianity only to the extent that they stand on a biblical foundation. (By the way, this is why, by the way, most of those sects in Protestantism that have adopted a liberal theology that rejects Scripture also adhere to evolutionism; the same is true of modernized Catholicism after the Second Vatican Council. In any case, the teachers of creationism for Orthodox Christians are not Lutherans and Baptists, but Christ's Apostles and Holy Fathers. In short, creationism, in our understanding, is identical with the Orthodox teaching on the universe.

Another unscrupulous attempt by "teleologists" to denigrate creationism is associated with the desire to declare it an anti-scientific and anti-cultural phenomenon. One deacon, who works as a researcher in the system of the Russian Academy of Sciences, allows himself to discredit the books of scientific authors – creationists: "Show any of them to one of the scientists engaged in natural science, and you will see for yourself how the eyes of the specialist will begin to crawl out of their sockets, and the hair standing on end will make the hairstyle much more lush without the help of any imported means" (p.118). But this is only an operetta prelude to real persecution: "But then creationists come and declare that all modern sciences are pseudosciences, that all natural science is false knowledge, that science is destroying Christianity and has almost destroyed it. Why? Because all modern science is largely built on the idea of evolution" (p.124). So, in a polemical frenzy, the authors blame a sore head on a healthy one. It seems that anti-Christian pseudoscientific mythology today wants to take revenge on the Church for the medieval Roman Inquisition. Our collection provides an answer to such sweeping and unfair accusations.

Church modernists impose a very strange interpretation of the Bible. They propose to see the evolution of matter where the Holy Scriptures clearly speak of the free action of the Living God. One of the authors of the book quoted writes: "For every reader of the Book of Genesis, however, it is obvious that these chapters are concerned precisely with becoming, changing, that is, with evolution (just the opposite is obvious to us!! — Author.) Cosmos (with a capital letter! – Author), including the organic world of the Earth, up to the appearance of man" (p.174). The book offered to the reader answers this question in a different way, not in the spirit of scientific criticism, when man is considered as a product of the evolution of the Cosmos (with a capital letter), but in accordance with the Tradition of the Universal Church.

We share the opinion of Hieromonk Seraphim (Rose):

"The six days of creation is not a natural process; they are what happened before all the world's natural processes began. They are the work of God; by definition, they are miraculous and do not fit into the natural laws that govern the world we see today."