God-Human Development or Evolution (St. Justin Popovich)

 God-Human Development (Evolution)

By St. Justin Popovich

Letter to a Student (Nov. 19, 1968)

My most precious child in the Lord. You wish me to tell you what questions the “Theological Circle” concerns itself with. Here they are: can the scientific understanding of the evolution of the world be reconciled with the Orthodox feeling and consciousness founded on Divine Revelation? How did the Holy Fathers speak about this? Is there any need at all for such a reconciliation?

Briefly. New Testament anthropology is inseparable from Old Testament anthropology. The good news of the Old Testament is this: man is the image of God. The good news of the New Testament is this: the God-man is the image of man. The heavenly, divine, immortal, eternal, and unchangeable human element in man is the image of God: the God-likeness. This God-likeness of the human being has been disfigured by voluntary human sin, by his union with the devil through sin and its consequence — death. God therefore became man “in order to renew once again His own image, which had been corrupted by passions.” God therefore became man, and remained in the human world as the God-man, as the Church, in order to give man — the image of God — all the necessary means: the Holy Mysteries and the holy virtues, by which the disfigured yet God-like human being, within the God-Human Body of the Church, might grow into a perfect man, into the measure of the full stature of Christ (the fullness of Christ). This is God-human development (evolution) of man; this is God-human anthropology.

Science and Religion - Chapter 3 b (St. Luke of Simferopol)

Chapter 3 (a)

Chapter 3 (b) 

 

If we consider religion in its essence — that is, as an inner experience, as adoration of God and communion with Him — we must agree that science not only does not contradict religion, but, moreover, science leads to religion. If we do not limit ourselves to the painstaking collection of facts, like the learned specialist Wagner in Goethe's work, but, like Faust, give free rein to the entire human thirst for knowledge, which strives to comprehend the mysteries of existence and to possess these mysteries, then we will inevitably arrive at religion. And it is precisely science that proves its necessity. It poses the very same questions that religion answers. By the law of causality, science leads us to the First Cause of the world, and religion answers who is this creative First Cause not only of the world but also of man. It tells us that we descend from God (and not from apes). Science reveals the eternal Logos of being, which conditions this harmony. Science leads us to the need for some rational meaning in life, some higher purpose for life. Religion answers – it is GOD.

Science and Religion - Chapter 3 a (St. Luke of Simferopol)

Chapter 2

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).

Science and Religion - Chapter 2 (St. Luke of Simferopol)

Chapter 1

Chapter Two: What is Religion?

 

Broadly speaking, religion is the relationship to the Absolute, to That Which we call God. Since this relationship exists for everyone, even for an atheist, it is common to say that everyone has their own religion. However, when taken in this manner, in a broad sense, religion can be both correct and incorrect, true and false, moral and immoral – depending on what we understand as the absolute, highest, and ultimate value of the world and how we relate to it – what we believe in and how we believe, what we accept and what we reject. Positively and fundamentally speaking, religion is the communion with God (reunion). It is precisely about this religion that we must speak.

Science and Religion - Chapter 1 (St. Luke of Simferopol)

Science and Religion1 

By St. Luke, Archbishop of Simferopol and All Crimea

Preface

In our life journey, we encounter two types of people. Some deny religion in the name of science, while others are distrustful of science for the sake of religion. There are also those who have managed to find harmony between these two needs of the human spirit. Shouldn't such harmony be the norm that a person ought to strive for? After all, both needs are rooted in the depths of human nature. Is it not the crisis of the educated individual that their "mind is not in accord with the heart"? Is it not this one-sided "intellectualism" that has driven a wedge between the intelligentsia and the people in Russia? Furthermore, the very fact that atheism and anti-Christianity are being presented to the public under the banner of science, which supposedly long ago disproved religion, compels us to deeply reflect and thoroughly resolve the question: does science contradict religion?

Chapter One: What is Science?

Socrates taught that in order to draw correct conclusions we must be able to define concepts. Therefore, we will try to give precise definitions of both concepts under consideration – and then compare them. Science is a system of acquired knowledge about the phenomena of reality that we observe. Let us delve into each of these words. Science is a system, meaning it is not a random collection of knowledge, but a coherent, ordered combination. This is achieved through classification, which is the distribution of homogeneous data into groups and generalizations – that is, the establishment of those common formulas and laws to which nature conforms. Science encompasses the knowledge that has been attained, meaning not all knowledge, but only that which has thus far been achieved. Scientific activity is dynamic; it is a process of "creating truth through experience and reasoning." This process in science is something that is dynamic and becoming: it undergoes questions, searches, doubts, and hypotheses, which may later turn out to be false. Only knowledge, that is, genuine reflections of reality, constitutes the established, static content of science — knowledge that is proven, universally binding, widely recognized, and objective judgments that are substantiated both logically and empirically, through reasoning and experience. This is knowledge about phenomena, that is, manifestations of life and nature, but not about their essences (phenomena, not noumena), about the world as we see it, observe it, but not about the world as it exists in itself, in essence. Phenomena are those elements that are evident to our five senses (as it is commonly believed, although there are more), for our five-sensory logic, armed with the technical enhancements of our cognitive organs in the form of microscopes, telescopes, and other scientific instruments. Thus, the field of exact science is limited just as the organs of scientific cognition are limited in their capacity for understanding.

But man wants and must know what lies beyond science, what has not yet been achieved by it, and, by its very nature, lies outside its boundaries. For example, psychology is the science of mental phenomena. Yet we want to know more; we want to understand the soul, because all of life consists of encounters and interactions of human souls, and the soul is the person itself. It would be strange to assert that science knows or can know all of existence. "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy," says Hamlet in Shakespeare. Meanwhile, we also wish to comprehend this transcendental aspect; we seek to resolve the questions that so fill the soul of Heine's youth: "What is the mystery from ages past? And what is the essence of humanity? Where does one come from, where is one going? And who is there, above, beyond the stars?"2 Knowledge transcends science. It is attained through those higher abilities of the spirit that science does not possess. Primarily, this is intuition, that is, the immediate sense of truth, which anticipates, perceives, and prophetically foresees what lies beyond the reach of scientific methods of cognition. This intuition has increasingly captured the attention of philosophy in recent times. We live by it much more than we assume. It leads us into another, higher realm of the spirit – namely, into religion.

Notes:

1. Written in 1954. During the life of the Saint, the book was not published and was published for the first time only in 2000.

2. "The North Sea" by Heinrich Heine (1797–1856).

Chapter 2