An Eastern Perspective on the Creation-Evolution Debate (2 of 2)
Theological Letters
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While the following is not technically a letter, it began as one. I was asked my thoughts on the Creation-Evolution Debate, and specifically what the Eastern Church Fathers might offer on this topic. My answer is that they offer quite a lot not found in the present discussion.
What I composed in place of a letter is a script for a video essay, which I plan to further expand into a refereed article and perhaps a short book down the road. Given that the following material was originally written to be read aloud, I have not included my usual footnotes — citations I will be sure to add before refereed publication. But for now, I trust that the theology to which I here refer can be traced to original sources with a survey of my other publications and other Googleable sources.
In part 1, I discuss the various meanings of death in the Eastern Church Fathers, along with the prospect that plant and animal death preceded the Fall of man, as did animal disease and predation. If you have yet to read Part 1, you may want to do so. Enjoy!
4. ON “DAYS”
Even granting all that we’ve said — that plants and animals are naturally mortal, that animal predation and disease may be no less natural, and that if corruption were found before man, this could be the work of demons — we still face a massive gap between the biblical narrative and the narrative of science: The one teaches the cosmos began 13.8 billion years ago, while the other suggests only 6,000 years have passed since the dawn of creation. Even if Christianity, as understood by the Eastern Fathers, could agree with science about the state of the biological world before man, the difference on the age of the earth remains an unbridgeable gap.
But do the Eastern Fathers of the Church require a Young Earth position? Once again, these Fathers open to us some surprising alternatives.
Before addressing the days of Genesis, let’s begin with the notably nuanced view of time that we find in the Christian East. Common in many Western Christians is the presumption that time is the realm of creatures and God exists “outside of time” — in what is called eternity. Eternity is imagined as a static “now” that has always been and always will be and sees all things at once — the unchanging, unshifting gaze of Heaven. There are historical reasons why so many in the West think like this. But our concern is not with this common assumption but with the alternative found in the Eastern Church Fathers.
In these Fathers, we find reference to both time (chronos) and eternity (aion). But the Eastern Fathers understand these as two different ways of experiencing reality. Time is a mode of existence native to organisms, while eternity is a mode of existence native to spirits. But neither time nor eternity is native to God. Instead, the Eastern Fathers speak about God as “pre-eternal” (proaionios). So what does this mean? What is time and eternity? And how can God be pre-eternal?
Let’s start with time. According to the Eastern Fathers, time is a creature — a position notably unique relative to the pagans, amongst whom Plato alone thought there was a start to time.
As for eternity, these Fathers see this mode of existence as an extension of God. Recall the analogy of iron and fire used to explain the way a creature communes with God, taking something divine into itself, akin to the way iron takes something of fire into itself. These communicable attributes are what these Fathers call divine “energies,” and eternity is thought to be one such energy. According to the Christian East, creatures can participate in the energy named “eternity.” Angels, for example, are said to be eternal. But these Fathers do not mean that angels have always existed. Nor do they mean that angels exist outside of time in a static now. Rather, angels participate in a uniquely spiritual mode of existence that moves differently from time and runs parallel to it.
God’s own time — what the Eastern Fathers refer to as aidiotes — transcends even the spiritual mode of existence called eternity. For though eternity is a divine energy, originating from God, he existed prior to such acts. Hence, he is the pre-eternal God.
Now, notice that I said about eternity that this spiritual mode of existence “moves differently.” Importantly, eternity is not static, on the Eastern view, but dynamic. Angels are active beings who did not exist and then came into being, who do one thing and then another, who move from one place to the next. The mode of movement is different from an organism, but it is movement nonetheless. Hence, the Eastern Fathers speak about successive ages in eternity, speaking about the sequence from one age to the next, or “from ages to ages” — a phrase that appears often in Eastern liturgy and hymnody — “age” (or aion) being the word translated “eternity.”
The importance of the point here is that the Eastern Church Fathers give reason to think that the “days” of Genesis are divine days or ages. The first, most obvious reason is that there is no sun until the third day of creation, as John of Damascus points out — a natural problem for reading the days of Genesis as solar days. This fact paired with another points toward these “days” being divine in nature, namely, the story of Genesis is a story about divine activity. Recall that eternity or ages are exactly that, God’s own spiritual mode of divine activity.
In the context of his observation about the absence of the sun, John of Damascus, a very important Eastern Father, makes the following analogy: As days are to time, so ages are to eternity. In other words, Genesis is describing God’s energetic act of making the world, which is described successively, one age after the next. Hence, the beginning and end or morning and evening of these days are the beginning and end of divine days, which we call ages.
The same point appears in Irenaeus, though approached from a different angle. Irenaeus observes that God says to Adam that the day he eats of the Tree he will die. So, Irenaeus asks, why does Adam not die within twenty-four hours? His answer appeals to the Psalmist, who says that, for God, a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as a day — notably the only Psalm attributed to Moses, who, according to tradition, authored Genesis. In other words, divine time is not like human time. And the warning to Adam, like the creation story itself, is not speaking from a human perspective about solar days but from the divine perspective about divine days. So, Irenaeus argues, Adam could live a thousand years and the warning would still prove true.
Now, one might object: Why speak to a creature about days in this fashion? Why warn that Adam will die on that day, if the day is an age that may last a millennium or more in creaturely terms? And the same could be said about Genesis more broadly. Why speak in what appears to be plain language, employing terms like “day one” and “morning” and “evening” if the intent is age? Why obscure the real meaning?
The question is a good one, and it highlights the theological importance the Eastern Fathers see in the chosen language of Scripture. The Christian East — especially those from Alexandria — see Scripture as doing this sort of thing often, using language that on the face of it seems plain but if pressed becomes confused and problematic. They believe these oddities are intentional, meant to lead the reader to ask questions that uncover the deeper meaning of the text — a deeper meaning that the text itself supplies, if scrutinized. So, in the case of Genesis, what is the deeper meaning of its talk of “days”?
We’ve already touched on a couple of textual clues that these days are not solar, namely, the absence of the sun until day three, the fact that the story is one of divine work, not human work, and that Adam does not die within the same solar day but lives for 930 years after his Fall. But a further textual clue highlights the theological importance of all this: Every day within the creation narrative contains a morning and an evening, a beginning and an end, except the seventh day. The Eastern Fathers of the Church see something significant here: The history to follow occurs within the seventh day of creation. In other words, the story to follow — the tale of human history — is still part of the creation myth.
This belief is what forms the basis for the doctrine of the Eighth Day of Creation within the Christian East. And this doctrine brings together a number of points already discussed.
Recall the Eastern Patristic understanding of the image-likeness distinction in Genesis. In this reading, the making of man is incomplete in the creation story. God creates man in his image and with the intent of man bearing his likeness. But because the likeness of God is something that man must cooperate in bringing about, the Fall leaves man incomplete — not yet fully human. The death that takes hold of Adam on the Seventh Day of Creation is a death we are all living out right now. All of this provides context for how the Eastern Church Fathers understand the Christian gospel.
For contrast, Western Christianity tends to speak about the Christian gospel in legal terms. God is a moral law giver and judge. Man’s predicament is that he is a moral law breaker, who will be condemned at the Final Judgment. The gospel is about absolution of guilt and the securing of a right standing before our divine judge.
The Christian East, by contrast, understands Christianity in more therapeutic terms. The human condition is that we are sick, living and dying like beasts when we were made for something more. The gospel is that our Maker saw our cancerous condition, and rather than leaving us to die, the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, took on flesh, becoming one of us — the Creator himself becoming a creature. The purpose of this union? To heal us, placing his own divine Life into our dying species, healing humanity from within. In a word, Christ came to complete the making of man, restoring the image of God and bringing about the divine likeness. John Behr has argued, by drawing on Ignatius of Antioch, that this is the very meaning of Christ’s final words on the cross, “It is finished.” What is finished is the creation of man. And in the Resurrected Christ, the cosmos saw, for the first time, man as he was made to be. And all of mankind is invited to participate in this restoration.
The importance of this narrative for our purposes is that, in Eastern Christian thought, the resurrection of Christ marks the dawn of the Eighth Day of Creation. This is the very reason the early Christians ceased to gather on the Sabbath and instead gathered on the Lord’s Day — Sunday. For Sunday marks the day of resurrection, the dawn of the New Creation. To quote Athanasius, “The Sabbath was the end of the first creation; the Lord’s day was the beginning of the second, in which he renewed and restored the old.”1 Returning to Irenaeus’ comments on Adam, Irenaeus tells us that Adam and Christ died on the same day. By this, he does not mean the same day of the week. Rather, he means the same day of creation — the Seventh Day. And Christ rose from the dead, ushering the Eighth Day of Creation. In other words, Irenaeus understands the Seventh Day of the creation myth to stretch from the sin of Adam to the Resurrection of Christ.
Now, it would be a mistake to presume that divine days can be measured by human time, as if the Psalmist is offering a formula: 1,000 solar years equals one divine day or that Irenaeus’ point about Adam means a divine day equals however many thousands of years stretch between Adam and Christ. The point, instead, is this. Based on the teachings of the Eastern Fathers about the Seventh and Eighth Days of Creation, we have good reason to reject the idea that Genesis is describing six solar days. To the contrary, six ages have passed between the dawn of creation and the creation of Adam. How much human time has passed over these ages is unclear. But should the answer prove to be millions or even billions of solar years, I see nothing problematic in the claim, given what we find in the Eastern Church Fathers.
5. THE RAMIFICATIONS
To be clear, none of what I’ve said is to claim that the Eastern Church Fathers teach that the earth is exceedingly old. Many (seem to) presume the earth is young. Several presume that animals were tame before the Fall. Some presume animals did not die before the Fall, despite their mortality, because so little time had passed before the sin of Adam. But such presumptions — as we saw in Irenaeus’ testimony about animal predation — were neither universal nor dogma amongst the early Christians.
In Eastern Christianity, these things are what are called theologoumenon, a word indicating a theological opinion. In other words, while the Eastern Church Fathers agree on the essentials of the Christian faith — things articulated and defended in the Seven Ecumenical Councils, for example — the Eastern Church acknowledges that there are areas outside these essentials that are grey, topics that the Eastern Fathers are not unanimous about, each offering a different opinion, all of which are acceptably Orthodox. When Irenaeus acknowledges that not all believe that animals were tame before the Fall, he acknowledges that this is a matter of opinion, not dogma.
What is dogma, however, are the doctrines on which all of the above points have been built: The understandings of death, the Fall of angels which precedes the Fall of man, the image-likeness distinction and the man-as-microcosm doctrine, immortality as a divine energy that comes only by communion with God, the ramifications for animal and plant mortality, the Incarnation as the unmaking and remaking of man, the successive ages of the cosmos, and the Resurrection of Christ as the dawn of the Eighth Day of Creation. Far from requiring Young Earth Creationism, such doctrines, as we have seen, open the door for the very possibilities that most Young Earth Creationists wish to dismiss.
I suppose I should add one further point of indispensable dogma. The Eastern Church Fathers are committed to providence. To the extent that the Creation-Evolution Debate asks whether the world is created, ordered, guided, and cared for by a divine Creator or whether it is the product of unguided processes, the Eastern Fathers are most certainly committed to the creationist position. When addressing scientific theories about the formation of the world, Basil of Caesarea comments that, whatever theory might capture one’s imagination, the thing that must always be remembered is that God is its Maker.
5. ON EVOLUTION
Speaking of scientific theories, a careful listener will notice that I have yet to say anything about the theory of evolution itself. To this point, I have only shown that certain necessary conditions for the theory are compatible with the teachings of the Eastern Church Fathers — namely, a vast span of time, animal and plant death, as well as predation and disease.
I expect that most will presume this means I’m an advocate of the theory. I am not. I, personally, do not believe in macro evolution. My reasons, however, are scientific and philosophical in nature. None are born from a conflict between the theory and Eastern Patristic theology.
Quite the contrary, as already seen, the necessary conditions for the theory can easily be defended from Eastern dogma. And I would add that there are aspects of Eastern Patristic Thought that fit quite nicely with evolution. Two doctrines come to mind.
The first is one we’ve already discussed — that man is a microcosm of all that God has made. The core conviction here is that all of organic life emerges from a common source — in Genesis, the earth; in pagan thought, the elements. The Eastern Fathers believe that the stuff of the plant and animal worlds is part of man, and these are joined with something celestial or spiritual in man, making him a small cosmos — a union of everything in creation.
The second doctrine is the Eastern Patristic view that the world is a single organism. As Athanasius puts it, God makes only one creature — the cosmos. The Eastern Fathers are clear, of course, that there is a difference between dogs and cats, flowers and trees, humans and angels. But every creature is part of the one creature that God has made, the world — like cells in a body.
When these two doctrines are combined, they sometimes give rise to a cosmic story that may sound familiar: Gregory of Nyssa, for example, describes the unfolding of the Chain of Being like the unfolding of a single cosmic organism, the elements organizing to create lower life-forms, and soon, life becomes increasingly complex, moving through plants, then animals, until arriving at man. Man’s body bears aspects of the vegetative and animal kingdoms whose unfolding gave rise to his body. But man bears something unique: The image of God, which cannot be found in the lower things of creation — his mind a special creation, gifted to him by his Maker whose image he bears.
For my part, I hear resonance with such a vision when listening to the scientists speak about the story of our world — about its emergence from a single point, its fine tuning that gives rise to both order and then life, first in lower forms and then evolving with increasing complexity until, in the final stages of its development, there emerges man. Viewed from a certain perspective, the scientific tale reads like a scientific translation of the story told by Gregory of Nyssa.
Having said this, I think there is a reason to question the theory from an Eastern perspective. To see why, let’s consider my philosophical reasons for opposing the theory.
The root of my opposition is this. I’m a realist. The term doesn’t refer to whether I’m pessimistic or optimistic. Rather, in philosophy, there is a question about why the mind thinks as it does. You and I and every other person looks at the world and sees structures — genera, species, commonalities. The question of realism is: Why does the mind do this? Does the mind think in these ways because that’s the way the world is? Or is the world more accurately chaotic matter in motion, and in our effort to organize our experience, we project on the world order that’s not really there?
If you say that the mind sees the world in this orderly way because the world is this way, then you’re a realist. If, however, you say such order is a mental fiction, just a series of names made up to organize our experience, then you’re a nominalist — from the Latin nomen, or name.
I myself am a committed realist. For my part, I don’t believe that reason or logic or math function without realism, all of these being based on the very sort of groups realism presumes to be real. And to this list, I would add science. I believe that scientific induction, too, requires realism.
The problem, however, is that macro evolution of the kind presumed by the theory of evolution is, in my assessment, incompatible with realism. Allow me to briefly explain.
Realists will often talk about two types of properties, essential and accidental. Essential properties are indispensable to the thing in question. Accidental properties are not. For example, essential to a square is that it has four sides, four right angles, and its sides are equal length. Without such properties, we don’t have a square. But how big the square is, where the square is located, or what color it is are all accidental — squares can be all sorts of sizes, colors, and places. Notice also that accidents have no bearing on the nature of the thing. If you draw a square in blue in a computer program and then change the color to green, the change has no bearing on the squareness.
The relevance to evolution is that the theory, put in these terms, claims that compounding changes in accidents bring about a change in essence. But the claim is incoherent. By definition, accidents have no effect on the essence of the thing.
A further problem is this. Let’s imagine a creature of a certain kind — call it a “homanidib.” This critter is tailless. But one homanidib suffers a mutation on its backside, a growth of extra tissue. This homanidib soon has offspring and passes along this growth. In some of his offspring, the growth is exaggerated, larger than in their forefather. From one generation to the next, the exaggeration increases, and eventually, the size and weight of this growth proves advantageous, helping with balance and agility, conducive to survival. In a word, the growth develops into a tail. As a result, tailed homanidibs outlive tailless homanidibs.
This simple story is meant to capture the essence of Darwinian macroevolution: Random mutation perpetuated by survival. But here emerges the problem from a realist perspective: Is the mutation a tail or not? The gradual nature of the narrative helps hide this question, introducing a growth, which is not a tail, and a long span of gradual change, so that we miss the sleight of hand when this growth becomes a tail.
The problem is that there is no middle between not-a-tail and tail. The distinction is binary: Either this added flesh is a tail or it is not. Despite the narrative painting a picture of gradual change, there still must be a punctuated shift: A tailless species birthed a tailed species. If true, then we have punctuated evolution — one species birthing another, like a chicken laying an egg from which a lizard emerges. Punctuated evolution was a theory circulated in the past, but it fell out of favor for gradual evolution. But if the realist is right, then the gradual change described in our homanidib story only hides the punctuated reality: At some point, a tailless species birthed a tailed species.
Now, I see two possible replies. The first objects that I’ve used a line-drawing fallacy: Because we can’t pinpoint when facial hair becomes a beard, there is no difference between the two. However, the classical realist has an answer, and it goes to the difference between potentiality and actuality, or the possible and the real. Unlike some ancient thinkers, who tended to draw a strict dichotomy between the real and nothing, most realists — drawing on Aristotle — use a threefold distinction between something, nothing, and potentially something. We might think of it this way. I have the potential to get stronger, a potential I could bring about by exercise. This potential strength is more than nothing, but it’s less than actual strength, representing an ontological middle.
This distinction is meant to explain transitions into being. A human fetus develops the way it does because the nature implanted in matter is human. If it develops normally, it will develop two arms, two legs, ten fingers, ten toes, and so on. The coding, so to speak, is already in matter: Matter is simply catching up to what’s implanted inside it. Applied to a tail — since this was our example — the transition from nub to tail is not a change from not-tail to tail. The nature driving the development is tailed. The stages of development are just the material unfolding of a tailed nature, making what is implicitly present explicit.
The reason this explanation is not available to the evolutionist is that his theory is meant to explain the development of the tail by random, unguided mutations. Hence, his story is not about the developmental stages of a tail. His story is about a growth that becomes a tail millions of years later. In short, he insists there is a change in nature: The tailless becomes tailed.
The second response is to deny realism. In this solution, we say that “tail” is just a name that we assign to certain appendages. In this explanation, there is no difference between a random growth and a tail. We simply assign the name “growth” to one and “tail” to another, but these distinctions are not real. In reality, there is no difference between a growth and a tail.
This reply would solve the need for punctuated evolution. But in the process, it also undermines all scientific induction on which the theory of evolution is based. Here’s how.
In formal logic, there is a distinction between four types of claims — A claims, E claims, I claims, and O claims. Two of these are absolute and two are more circumspect. A and E claims are absolute, declaring either that All p is q (A claim) or No p is q (E claim). I and O claims are more circumspect, declaring only that Some p is q (I claim) or Some p is not-q (O claim). These claims tell us something about valid and invalid induction. We can validly move from an all claim to a some claim. For example, if I know that all dogs are quadruped, then I can infer that some dogs are quadruped. But the opposite doesn’t work. If I look into the street and see that some cars are blue, I can’t infer that all cars are blue. Such an inference would be fallacious — and false.
But here’s the problem. Science only deals in samples. Scientists never study every member of a species. No examination of an element or cell or proton is ever a study of the whole. It is only ever a sample. Yet, science wishes to move from the sample to the whole, telling us truths that hold about every instance of this element or cell or proton.
I don’t say this to undermine scientific induction. I’m pro science and its induction. However, I am so because I’m a realist.
As a realist, what I believe scientific induction is really doing is examining members of a species in order to discern what traits are common and thus essential to the species. From this perspective, the inference is not inferring that some protons are this way, therefore all are. Rather, the inference is that this trait looks to be common and essential to the species. Therefore, we can expect that every member of the species has this property — just as every square has four sides.
Assuming I’m correct that valid scientific induction requires realism, the evolutionist faces a problem. If the theory of gradual, macro evolution requires that we reject realism, then the theory simultaneously undermines scientific induction. And in doing so, it undercuts the very evidence used in its defense. In a word, the theory becomes self-referentially incoherent.
In this light, let’s return to the first solution I offered: Perhaps the development of a tail is not a punctuated shift from tailless to tailed. Perhaps tailed is already part of the underlying nature, and the developmental process is merely the unfolding of a nature already coded in matter — akin to DNA driving forward the development of an organism by cell division.
Entertaining this explanation, let’s imagine a different picture of evolution. Let’s imagine, not that our world is unguided, chaotic matter, randomly mutating. Let’s imagine instead that our world is a single cosmic organism. And let’s imagine that the whole of the Chain of Being — of planets and stars, of plants and animals — is coded into matter from the start, like a fertilized embryo. And let’s also imagine that the developmental process over billions of years is the cosmic version of an embryo becoming an infant, then an adolescent, and then an adult. In this vision, the unfolding of the cosmos is not happenstance. The unfolding is the slow cell division of an organism until all that is implicit becomes explicit.
Such a vision is one that I, as a realist, could embrace. And such a vision is very much in keeping with the types of descriptions found in Gregory of Nyssa. But such a vision is not the theory of evolution as described today. The theory as described by most tends to reject realism for nominalism and in doing so, as I’ve argued, falls into self-referential incoherence.
Now, why is this relevant to an Eastern assessment of evolution? The answer is this. The Eastern Church Fathers are committed realists. I don’t simply mean we find this theological opinion. Rather, as I’ve argued at length in my publications and podcast, realism is integral to the confessional commitments of the Eastern Fathers about the Trinity, Christology, and even salvation. Therefore, if my assessment is correct, and the theory of evolution articulated by most today is incompatible with realism, then it is equally incompatible with the Eastern Fathers of the Church.
CONCLUSION
In summary, the Eastern Patristic tradition provides a framework that challenges the premises often assumed in the Creation-Evolution Debate. Their more nuanced view of death, their understanding of the image-likeness distinction, and their man-as-microcosm doctrine all open the door to the idea that both animal and plant death is natural or suitable before the Fall of man, even opening the possibility that animal predation and disease appeared before mankind. Paired with the doctrines of the Eighth Day of Creation and divine days being successive ages, we discover a host of possibilities utterly contrary to the presumptions of most Young Earth Creationists — possibilities that are perfectly compatible with the core commitments of evolution.
However, a fundamental incompatibility remains between the philosophical underpinnings of Eastern Patristic Thought and macroevolution. The Eastern tradition is deeply rooted in philosophical realism, which presents serious challenges to the theory of graduated macroevolution, as articulated by most evolutionists today. Thus, while the Eastern perspective is comfortable with a vast timeline and a developing “cosmic organism” from which emerges every form of life now populating our world, it maintains that the order and natures found within this timeline are the result of divine providence, not random mutation, and thus the manifest order we now observe in our world is part of the original “coding,” as it were, that gave rise to our world from the first.
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Athanasius, On Sabbath and Circumcision, 3.