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.

Like everything else in this world, inanimate matter is an unceasing manifesto of the will of the Creator. At a certain stage of the development of means of observation, it becomes impossible not to notice this. However, despite the emergence of many convincing evidences in favor of the divine origin of the world, it must be recognized that the scientific worldview still rests on the foundation of atheism, one of the main postulates of which has always been the concept of gradual evolutionary development.

Evolutionary theory was born in biology. According to the principle it proclaimed, it did not stand still, but rather quickly and purposefully changed from Lamarckism, which deviated from the truth, to Darwinism, complete in its godlessness.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the ideology of evolutionism spread from the field of the animal world to inanimate matter, very soon taking over the entire "Universe". In the bosom of the emerging secular worldview, the new ideology quickly found its application in the hypothesis of the Big Bang, a scientific scenario for the development of the Universe determined only by physical laws, and the theory of the evolution of stars.

The idea of evolution derives its plausibility from the reality around us. Since fundamentally new phenomena do not arise anywhere today, it is concluded that they are born imperceptibly to the eye, gradually over many hundreds of millions of years according to the laws of nature, and creation is fundamentally impossible, because the usual chain of causes and effects is broken. Thus, the idea of evolutionary development is a definite answer to the question of the origin of everything that surrounds us.

The Holy Scriptures, answering this question, testify to creation, which means the emergence from non-existence of a fundamentally new essence by virtue of the First Cause, called God. Moreover, this First Cause can only exist outside the essence arising into existence, since it is impossible to speak of any internal cause of a new creation if it does not yet exist.

There is also a concept that tries to find a compromise between creationism and evolutionism, which is called teleological evolution. According to it, the order by virtue of which the development of life takes place from the lower forms of life to the higher is created by the Will of God. That is, the evolutionary process was initiated by the Creator for the formation and development of the world around us[1].

In their desire to reconcile modern scientific theories with Scripture at all costs, supporters of teleological evolution allow for the possibility of allegorical interpretation of biblical texts. Many of them even sincerely believe that it is completely indifferent to the religious consciousness whether the gradual evolution that took place due to "happy accidents and the selection that took place" or whether it was "some kind of leaps, jumps from one species to another due to reasons unknown to us" [2].