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."

We have not ignored the assessment of the encountered attempt at conciliation, such as: "for theology, both the creationist and the evolutionary hypothesis are fundamentally admissible, provided that in both cases God is the Lawgiver and Organizer of all the universe" (pp. 89-90), or "the recognition of the existence of God does not exclude the evolutionary development of the world" (p. 116). In our book it has been shown in detail that the question of the Christian's attitude to evolution has an essentially dogmatic significance, and therefore allows us to raise the question not of relativism and compromise, but of the heresy of evolutionism. In spite of the fact that evolutionism is often concealed by sugary slogans about the reconciliation of science and religion, it is aggressive towards Orthodoxy, overthrows the very foundations of the saving faith of the Gospel, and has an overt or hidden spirit of antichrist.

This onslaught on the Church by the gray hordes of theologizing modernists can only be countered by the light of apostolic teaching. This arsenal was adopted by the authors of this collection in defense of the biblical Six Days from the encroachments of evolutionists, who ask the benevolent reader for his holy prayers.

Priest Oleg Petrenko

I believe in order to understand

I believe in order to understand

The last quarter of the outgoing century was marked by the appearance in fundamental science of a number of scientific discoveries and theoretical concepts that unequivocally indicate the impossibility of the emergence of the world around us and its inhabitants due to the action of random and blind forces. The most prominent examples of these are perhaps the anthropic principle and the inflationary theory of the expansion of the universe.