Chapter Three: Sources of Prejudice
Where does the widespread opinion among students, and educated people in general, that science contradicts religion come from?
Its cause lies in superficial knowledge in both science and religion, which confirms the idea: "Knowledge leads to God, half-knowledge leads away from Him." Half-knowledge is the scourge of our time: it is precisely this that creates the prejudice just mentioned. First, we know little about philosophy, especially the branch of philosophy that specifically addresses this issue — that is, epistemology, or the theory of knowledge.
By credulously accepting as scientific the evidence presented in support of the proposition that God does not exist, we forget the propositions already clarified by Kant that theoretical reason is equally powerless to prove or disprove the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and free will. These objects and these questions are therefore called transcendental (beyond the bounds of science).
We can only know external facts with our minds, not things in themselves. The entire world, insofar as it is connected to space and time, is objectively unknowable, because time and space are merely subjective forms of our consciousness that we attribute to the world. Hence the saying, "The world is me." The psychology of knowledge further elucidates the subjectivity of our sensations, perceptions, and ideas. The color, temperature, and taste we perceive do not exist in and of themselves outside of our cognition (an admission to the contrary in psychology is called naive realism). We cannot even know matter as it is, because its specific properties — mass, density, and heaviness — are subjective.
In general, we do not perceive objects as they truly are; rather, we apprehend them according to our personal perspective from which we observe them. Moreover, we cannot comprehend with our scientific and cognitive abilities what lies beyond the things themselves, that is, their essence, and even more so, the First Cause, that is, God. For this reason alone, science cannot refute the existence of God, since this subject lies beyond its competence, just as does the entire realm of essences. Modern philosophers, such as Bergson and Lossky, already go beyond Kant, revealing the possibility of a rational proof of the existence of God. Indeed, significant strides in this direction have already been made by V. S. Solovyov.
Our second misconception is that we confuse science with the opinions of scientists. While these opinions sometimes truly contradict religion, over time they prove to contradict both nature and science, which reflects the intimate phenomena of nature. And the possibility of these contradictions arises from the fact that these opinions, reflecting not so much objective nature as the tastes of scientists, extend into a realm beyond science, where both faith and superstition find scope.
So-called "scientific" atheism does contradict religion, but it is merely an unproven and unprovable assumption on the part of some educated people. Atheists' attempt to prove the unprovable inevitably brings to mind Pushkin's verse: "The barbarian artist, with a sleepy brush, blackens the picture of genius, and senselessly traces his lawless design over it." The theory that the world was not created by God is not a scientifically proven truth, but a completely unscientific idea. So-called Darwinism, which recognizes that humans evolved from lower animal species and are not the product of a creative act by God, has proven to be merely an assumption, a hypothesis, already outdated even by science. This hypothesis is recognized as contradicting not only the Bible but also nature itself, which jealously strives to preserve the purity of each species and does not recognize the transition even from a sparrow to a swallow. There are no known cases of an ape becoming a human. Rather, the reverse order of degeneration occurs. Let's cite a curious thought expressed by Muhammad in the Quran: "For their sins, God turned some people into apes."
Especially characteristic in our time is the moral transformation of man into an ape. Giving himself over to base passions, such as drunkenness, a person is at first tipsy, becomes dull and stupid like a sheep, and everyone shears him as he pleases; and if he drinks more, he already thinks of himself as a lion, becomes arrogant and violent; and as he gets drunk more and more, he becomes like an ape – he jumps, grimaces, and commits various stupidities. Drunk to the point of unconsciousness, he turns into a pig and, like an animal, rolls in the mud. Do we not observe in the society around us this transformation of man into a sheep, into a pig and an ape? But not a single ape from the entire history of the earth had and does not have common human sense and thinking. Incidentally, it is worth noting that Darwin, who demonstrated the descent of man from apes, renounced his error and humbly repented before God.
Theorists, for whom their inclination is more valuable than the truth, even resorted to false evidence to somehow defend a hypothesis. When faced with facts contradicting it, they would say, "Too bad for the facts." When they could not find facts supporting a given theory, they either fabricated them or, as it is said, stretched them beyond reason. The story of the "three embryos," associated with Haeckel, is well-known. Seeking to justify his evolutionary theory, according to which humans, apes, and dogs develop from an identical embryo, he published in his Anthropogeny three negatives of these embryos, which, however, turned out to be products of a single negative, printed with different pressure and some retouching. The forgery was noticed by the renowned embryologist His (Haeckel also admitted it, justifying himself by claiming that he was confident in the correspondence between his hypothesis and reality) and subsequently provoked a vigorous protest from fifty scientists. Our Russian scientist Khvolson also took part in it, having written a pamphlet titled "Hegel, Haeckel, Kossuth and the Twelfth Commandment" (this commandment states: "Thou shalt never write about anything of which thou art ignorant"). Another "proof" concerns the bones found in 1891 by the scientist Dubois on the island of Java (part of a skull, three teeth, and a femur), which were claimed to belong to the missing link between humans and apes, the so-called "upright ape-man." Meanwhile, the renowned anatomist Virchow considered this completely unproven, even doubting that the bones found 16 meters apart belonged to a single organism. Virchow also debunked the infamous "Neanderthal skull" discovered in 1856 in the Neander Valley in Prussia, attributed to primitive humans, and in doing so affirmed the fact (indicated in the Bible) that "species are fixed," self-contained, and that efforts to defend Darwinism of this kind are akin to a drowning man grasping at a straw. Virchow stated: "The attempt to find a transition from animal to human led to complete failure." According to his observations, the anatomy of humans and apes is fundamentally different (limbs, spine, cranial cavity, etc.). Darwin himself considered his theory merely a hypothesis (see 'On the Origin of Species' and 'The Descent of Man'). In his works, Darwin points out the qualitative difference between apes and humans, namely that the capacity for development and articulate speech is unique to the latter.
Also curious are the words found in Darwin's notebook (1837), which reveal that he intended his theory merely to guide scientific research. Thus, Darwinism contradicts the Bible, though it is not science, but merely the opinion of scientists, contradicting scientifically established facts.
The Bible does not deny development within species; organisms, from the cell to the human being, represent a chain of development, but this development itself, that is, the transition from a lower form to a higher, did not occur in nature itself, but in the mind of God (just as, for example, a steamship evolved from a boat not by itself, but in human genius).
Development is subject to what has already been grafted. And these creative acts of grafting the highest degrees of creation and life belong to God. Science knows only the presence of these various degrees and types in nature; the method and nature of the creative acts that created them are inaccessible to it. It teaches about the forms of matter, not about the movements and purposes of the spirit, which is the domain of religion.
Another theory that hinders our belief in religious revelations is the one that attempts to investigate the elements of the surrounding world rather than the phenomena of the things we observe. This is materialism, which denies the existence of spirit and recognizes only the presence of matter (the opposite theory—spiritualism—acknowledges only the existence of spirit, while dualism recognizes two entities or substances—spiritual and material). This theory further demonstrates the incapacity of science to penetrate beyond phenomena into the realm of essences; it has still not reached a definition of what matter is precisely because neither experience nor reasoning apprehends its essence. Let us recall the main assumptions regarding it. The so-called atomic theory posits that the fundamental elements constituting matter are atoms. An atom is an indivisible particle of matter, and this alone must be accepted on faith, even blind faith, defying logic, for if an atom is material, then it has extension, and all extension is divisible. The substance supposedly filling the space between atoms was called ether and considered both weightless and ponderable, though its weight was defined differently. Thus, Thomson claimed that one cubic meter of ether weighs 0.0000000000001 grams. Another scientist (Gehry) calculated a figure a hundred million times greater. With the discovery of radium, radioactivity was recognized as a product of atomic decay. And now a new theory has been developed – the electron theory. An atom, by its structure, consists of thousands of electrons (and decays into corpuscles). These electrons, or electric charges, move within the atom as if in some kind of cosmic system. The structure of matter is presented as follows: one cubic centimeter contains 20 trillion molecules, one molecule contains two atoms, an atom contains several thousand electrons, and their mutual distances are so enormous compared to their sizes that they correspond to the mutual distances of the planets in the solar system (Oliver Lodge). Thus, we attempt to explain the visible cosmos with an imaginary cosmos, the active force of which — electricity — is essentially unknown to us, as even experts like Khvolson assert. According to one philosopher, replacing atomic theory with electron theory is like exchanging a coin for a smaller unit. Mechanical theory already tends to decompose matter into forces and movements, while energetics reduces everything to types of energy, and in place of atoms, recognizes immaterial centers of force. The very existence of matter as a substance has not been established (the empiriocritic Ernst Mach denies the objective existence of bodies: "It is not bodies that cause sensations, but the complex of sensations that forms bodies"). (Compare the witty proposition: "Matter is energy in a static state; energy is matter in a kinematic state"). Comparing these scientific studies and their phases, one must admit that it is almost more difficult to establish agreement between them than between science and religion. The reason is simple: they are not scientifically established facts, but the opinions of scientists. And opinions, as we see, can contradict not only religion but also each other and nature itself. The problem isn't that these opinions exist, for they represent hypotheses and projects, ascents and descents on the path to creating truth, but that we accept these temporary banknotes for hard cash, and often even counterfeit ones for real. What's surprising in this case is our gullibility, which, ironically, we exhibit in the realm of science, and our easy suggestibility: we are often unable to shake off the yoke of other people's opinions and the power of a special suggestion, which I would call the hypnosis of scientific terminology. Let us be presented with incomprehensible and incredible things, but if they speak with scholarly pathos, and even clothe it in Latin or Greek terms, we blindly believe them, fearing exposure to ignorance.
Haeckel rightly classifies the soul as a "universal enigma." But when he gives the magical definition: "The soul is the sum of brain functions," the entire universal enigma becomes clear, although essentially he provides only a translation of the Russian language into Latin.
As we have already said, the atom is an element accepted on faith. Incidentally, to explain life, Haeckel introduces the even more complex and wondrous concept of the "animate atom" — and yet there are those who blindly believe in the reality of such entities, unperceived by anyone. From all of the above, it follows, however, that the apparent temporary contradiction between science and religion is possible, since science is searching, moving, and therefore subject to error. It is in the process of becoming, while religion already possesses the truth, revealing things as they are. But it is now clear to us that this contradiction occurs between religion and the opinion of the scientist, whose truth, as a working hypothesis, is accepted only temporarily, just as scaffolding temporarily obscures a building under construction, which, as we have said, is inevitable in the process of human construction.
Our great ignorance further concerns religion. Knowledge of religion exists in two forms: first, one can know religion, that is, experience it, have in one's own experience that communion with the Absolute that constitutes the essence of religion. Essentially, only one who has this experience can judge religion and, consequently, thoroughly resolve the problem of its relationship to science. After all, only one with an ear for music or a taste for music can judge it, and for this purpose, knowledge of the history of music, music theory, or even an understanding of musical notation is entirely insufficient.
Unfortunately, many anti-religious writers lack this religious experience in the past (if we do not confuse it with the formal, ritual side of religion), and therefore their attacks on religion in its pure sense are unfounded.
But there's another kind of knowledge related to religion — knowledge of religion, of the teachings it professes, as a matter of faith and experience. This corresponds to knowledge of music theory, but we know almost nothing of this "theory" of our religion. We are almost unfamiliar with the Bible in the original and judge it by various books, by various interpretations...
Geology — the science of the composition and formation of the Earth's crust — teaches that the world was created over a vast period of time, not six days, as academic theology teaches. But let's look at what the Bible says. We call a day the period of time measured by the Earth's known motion around its axis relative to the Sun. In the Bible, however, day also refers to that first period of time when God said, "Let there be light" (Genesis 1:3), and before the sun, which was created on the fourth day, existed. Clearly, the word "day" here is used not in the usual sense of a 24-hour period, but in the sense of "period." This corresponds to the Hebrew word "yom," which means both day and period (the Russian word is "zon"). This is confirmed by the second chapter of the same book of Genesis, where the word “yom” denotes the entire time of creation, encompassing all six periods: “These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens” (Gen. 2:4).
God, who created the world, is eternal and lives outside of time. And there was no man then, whose consciousness is linked to the concept of time. And even in man, this consciousness is not eternal, for in the future new world, "time shall be no more" (Rev. 10:6). Objectively, outside of man, He does not exist now, and its measurement is relative. Moses, who is the author of the book of Genesis, says in his prayer (Psalm 89:5): "For in Your sight a thousand years are as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night."
Thus, if geology sometimes hinders us from acknowledging geological data, the Bible is in harmony with all the facts of nature, and therefore, with the science that uncovers these facts. A superficial reading of the Bible, like any half-knowledge, provokes further bewilderment. What could the light on the first day have been if the sun was created on the fourth day? The cause of this doubt, once again, is ignorance of both the Bible and science. For Herschel had already proven that initially there existed a luminous nebula, and the sun, created on the fourth day, constituted the center that gathered the dispersed light energy throughout space. In the expression: "And God made two great lights" (Gen. 1:16) – the word "made" means completed, brought to fulfillment the creation that was originally called into existence (the verb "to create" is used in the first verse). (In the original text, these two verbs are distinguished: - "to create" and "to make"). Even greater naivety is exhibited by those who dispute the Biblical antiquity of the world's existence, forgetting that the Bible specifies in years only the duration of human history, not the existence of the world or the very process of its creation. Moreover, in everyday life, it is one thing to make a fire, and quite another to make a lamp, fill it with combustible material, ignite it, and hang it up... However, this is merely a weak and not entirely accurate analogy. Above all, the Bible perplexes a thinking person with its accounts of miracles. The latter seem to violate the laws of nature.
If this can be said about the miracles of legends and their apocryphal gospels, it cannot at all be asserted regarding the miracles of the word of God. Healing the sick, raising the dead – these are not violations of the laws of nature, but their restoration. According to the law of sin and heredity, disease and death are natural consequences. But according to the original intention, when there was no sin yet, man was created for life ("Man" possesses "the brow of eternity"), and when the cause that brings about death (which is sin) is removed, the operation of divine creative power is restored. This power, in the days of creation, once "cast down from the depths of eternity with mighty creative words," and, in Darwin’s words, "breathed life into the primordial cell." The natural action of this power is not death (that would be unnatural), but life and resurrection. A stone falls downward due to gravity, but if this force of gravity is neutralized by a counter-push, the stone will fly upward.
The miracles of the Gospel are not unnatural, but supernatural, since in one way or another a supernatural force begins to act. And such a fact amazes us, seeming wondrous to us ("miracle" and "wondrous," as in "marvelous" — all from the same root), although that which is "a miracle on earth is natural in heaven" (like the phenomenon of radium — a miracle to a savage, but natural to a chemist). The laws of nature are not shackles with which God has bound His and human freedom, but rather forces which He commands. Without a miracle, life would never be marvelous, and it is for this that every living soul longs, striving from the kingdom of necessity into the kingdom of freedom. Science, studying the realm of necessity, the laws as "constantly recurring connections of phenomena," and forces accessible to its five-sense logic, does not recognize miracles, although it cannot deny them. Religion, on the other hand, connects us with the kingdom of freedom — not a formal and empty freedom, but a creative freedom — with the Kingdom of grace, that creative Power which created the world itself, that is to say, the miracle of which we are witnesses. This very Power also sustains the world just as miraculously (the preservation of the world does not logically or necessarily follow from the fact of its existence, just as the sustenance of an organism is not guaranteed merely by its birth — it can still perish from hunger). Therefore, regarding the question of miracles, there can be no fundamental contradiction between science and religion (there may only be a question about the reality or the fictional nature of a given miracle, but that is a matter of a different kind).
Furthermore, citing the greatness and infinite multitude of worlds, a thinking person is troubled by the Bible's assertion that the Earth is at the center of the universe, as a result of which man has become overly self-important, considering himself the center of existence. The Bible does not affirm anthropocentrism, that is, that man is at the center of the universe. "When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have ordained, what is man that You are mindful of him? And the son of man that You visit him?" asks the psalmist (Psalm 8:4-5).
The Bible does not teach geocentrism, that is, that the earth is at the center of the universe, and there is not even a basis for heliocentrism (the theory that science temporarily adhered to, teaching that the sun is at the center of the universe).
And what physical center is even possible, equidistant from all points of the infinite cosmic sphere? At one time, it was thought that the polar fixed star could be such a center, but it also turned out to be neither fixed nor central. The Bible teaches theocentrism, that the unchanging center of the universe is God (in Hebrew, "God" — based on Delitzsch's philological research — means the unmoving, eternal purpose of existence). "Of Him and through Him and to Him are all things" (Rom. 11:36). The Bible teaches not of a physical, but of a metaphysical center of the universe (for it contains a doctrine not of physical, transitory objects, but of the eternal and spiritual), which is Christ the Logos. "All things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made" (John 1:3).
The world is Christocentric, for the "Word" (Christ the Logos) "was God" (John 1:1). Didn't God incarnate on the small and insignificant planet Earth for the same reason He chose tiny Palestine on earth, and Bethlehem in Palestine, and a manger in Bethlehem because there was no room at the inn? Our earth, therefore, has become a cosmic Bethlehem, and if the light from the manger spread across the entire face of the earth, then it can also, by some incomprehensible projection, reach every point in the universe. The very habitability of other worlds is not denied in the Bible, nor is the biological principle by which, for God, in every place in the cosmos "there lives that which can live there." "God created the world."
This immeasurable cosmos (macrocosmos) is Christocentric, just like the small world (microcosmos) of your being. Only around Him can all of a person's spiritual energy be concentrated centripetally, and only from Him can all of His creative power radiate centrifugally. If this solar center is out of place, the balance of the human cosmos is disrupted — the soul experiences inner unrest, emptiness, and eclipse, just as Christ's crucifixion on Golgotha caused an eclipse and earthquake in nature (compare the idea of the psychologist James: conversion is an act of will, through which the highest value, present in the secondary layers of consciousness, becomes the center of the latter). Although the Bible is not a specialized book on physical nature or the external history of humanity, it is nevertheless accurate in these areas. (And how could we believe it in more important, spiritual, eternal and future matters, if it was mistaken in less important matters, accessible to human knowledge?).
If we compare the naive information about nature contained in the sacred books of Hinduism, Persianism and Mohammedanism (which, for example, did not withstand the revolution that Copernicus brought about in astronomy) with the knowledge of the biblical authors, then we must acknowledge their divine inspiration, along with the French physicist Bia (1774–1861), who said: “Either Moses had as profound a scientific experience as our age possesses, or he was inspired from above.”
In the Bible, we don't find the ancient notion that the sky is a solid vault to which the stars are attached. According to the Book of Genesis, the sky is an extended medium separating the waters above from the waters below. While the ancients taught that the earth rested on certain supports, the Bible says that God "hung the earth upon nothing" (Job 26:7).
Other scientific principles, which were known to the Bible long before they were discovered by science, are also remarkable. Such "prefigurations" include the words of the Prophet Isaiah: "Because of the greatness of his power and his mighty strength, nothing is lacking" (Isaiah 40:26), which were confirmed only later by the laws of conservation of matter (Lomonosov, Lavoisier) and the law of conservation of energy (R. Mayer, 1814–1876).
Wisdom speaks of itself in the Proverbs of Solomon: "When He had not yet created...the first particles of dust of the world... I was there" (Proverbs 8:26-27). Is this not a hint at the elements of matter? Gradual scientific discoveries increasingly justify the scientific accuracy of the biblical picture of nature and history.
Philology, which divides human languages into three main groups: Indo-European, Semitic, and Turanian, increasingly reveals common elements within them, leading to a single language of a single humanity (proto-language). The division of humanity into 70 main peoples, as given in chapter 10 of Genesis, is increasingly confirmed by ethnology (the study of tribes).
Geology and paleontology (the science of fossils) have brilliantly confirmed the order of creation as laid out in the Bible. "The sequence in which organically formed beings appear constitutes the exact sequence of the six days of creation, as presented to us in the book of Genesis" (physicist A. Fechner).
Archaeology, which discovered Nineveh and Babylon (Rawlinson), also found the remains of the Tower of Babel ("Ziggurat") and numerous ancient tablets outlining facts confirming the contents of the Bible.1 History has verified the fulfillment of Biblical prophecies, so astonishing that this research alone led doubters to believe in the divine inspiration of Scripture. Isaiah (eight centuries before the birth of Christ) spoke of Babylon during the period of its greatness: "It will never be inhabited... But wild beasts of the desert will dwell there, and the houses will be filled with owls; ostriches will also dwell there, and shaggy beasts will leap there. Jackals will howl in their palaces, and hyenas in the pleasure houses" (Isaiah 13:20-22).
And this came true. In the fourth century, the Persian kings made Babylon (after its destruction and devastation) a habitat for wild animals and occasionally held royal hunts there. (See 'Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopaedic Dictionary')
The Prophet Isaiah further says: "And I will make it a possession of hedgehogs and swamps" (Isaiah 14:23). And this came true... Babylon fell victim to a flood due to a shift in the lower reaches of the Euphrates, and currently much of it is underwater. The Russian traveler Frey, who was there in 1895, was struck by the multitude of hedgehogs in the swamps of Babylon, which reminded him of Isaiah's prophecy.
Many more facts could be cited that fully justify our assertion: namely, that genuine science and true religion, such as the religion of the Bible, do not contradict each other. Religion contradicts not science, but our knowledge (and applications) of nature. But between revelation and nature itself there is no contradiction, nor can there be, for God is the Creator of both.
The general cause of prejudice against religion lies primarily in ignorance, as Bacon asserts, and Christ Himself explains this with divine simplicity: "You err, not knowing the Scriptures nor the power of God" (Matthew 22:29). These words were spoken to the Sadducees, rationalists of their time who denied the resurrection of the dead and the existence of spirits (are not the Sadducees of our time the same, accepting only what they understand?). And both then and now, we are ignorant of precisely these two areas: the content of Holy Scripture and the power of God — that is, the reality spoken of in Scripture and revealed through religion as experience and recollection. It is to this aspect of religion that we will now turn.
Chapter 3 (b)
