Vladimir Moss – Orthodox Christianity Author

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SCIENCE AND PSEUCO-SCIENCE

Written by Vladimir Moss

SCIENCE AND PSEUDO-SCIENCE

 

     Today’s age is, above all, the age of science. Science was (is) the god of the age, together with democracy and human rights. It has been carried out on a scale never attained before, by all the major powers, who have devoted increasingly vast sums to it, and with some startling results, of which putting a man on the moon was probably the most spectacular.

 

     But together with the advancement of true science, and in spite of it, we also see a deepening of what Dostoyevsky in The Devils called the religion of “half science”, or pseudo-science in the three main sphere of biology, physics and psychology. Several of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, such as Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich and C.S. Lewis, warned against a future dictatorship of science, of “scientism” that does not know the bounds of true science and for which “nothing is sacred”. Let us look more closely at the three pre-eminent sciences:-

 

1. Biology.

 

     In the first half of the twentieth century, the major scientific discoveries had been made in the physical sciences and mathematics. In the second half, it was the turn of the biological sciences. And the greatest single discovery in the history of biology was the discovery of DNA in 1953, leading to the greatest single project in the history of science – the mapping of the human genome, with tis seemingly endless opportunities for the manipulation of human nature.

 

     However, the most important consequence of the discovery of DNA. although this has not been recognized by most scientists to this day, the discovery of DNA has completely destroyed the theoretical basis of Darwinism. For it revealed an information-based mechanism for the transmission of the genome that could not possibly have come into existence by chance, but must have been created by an intelligent designer – in other words, God. Information is a concept that makes no sense without a mind possessing it. And the amount of information contained in just the simplest reproducible cell points to an infinite Mind…[1]

 

     Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, says that DNA is like computer code – only much more complex and sophisticated than any computer code created by man. Now computer code is always created by an intelligent designer – man. So the question arises: who created the code of DNA?

 

     As regards the complexity of DNA, Raymond G. Halvorson writes: “The human body contains some 100 million cells, with the DNA divided into forty-six chromosomes. The total length of the entire DNA in one cell is about three feet. The total DNA content in a human body is estimated to span the solar system. In terms of an analogy, human DNA is like a very large encyclopedia of forty-six volumes, with each one having 20,000 pages. Every one of the 100 million cells in a human body contains this entire library.

 

     “As scientists began to decode the human genome they found it to be approximately three billion DNA base pairs long. ‘One of the most extraordinary discoveries of the twentieth century,’ says Dr. Stephen Meyer, director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, Washington, ‘was that DNA actually stores information – the detailed instructions for assembling proteins – in the form a four-character digital code.’

 

     “David Coppedge, a systems administrator for the Cassini Mission to Saturn and Titan at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA, made the following observation: ‘Life on the molecular level is incredibly complex. A symphony of proteins, enzymes and DNA work in harmony to permit rapid and precisely controlled chemical reactions. At least 239 proteins are required for the simplest conceivable living cell. The change of getting even one of these proteins, even under ideal conditions, is less than one in 10-161 (10 followed by 161 zeros). To get the simplest reproducible cell is one in 10-40,000. Anything less likely than 1 in 10-50 is virtually impossible, anywhere in the whole universe.’…

 

     “Coppedge calculated the probability that the 200 trillion molecules arranged in perfect order within the walls of a cell would take trillions and trillions of years to generate spontaneously. That is well beyond the actual age of the earth. The immense complexity of a single cell precludes all possibility of life ever happening by chance…”[2]

 

     The discovery of DNA has revived the teleological understanding of the universe, the argument from design to the existence of a Designer. As Fr. Job Gumerov writes, “William Paley (1743-1805), in Natural Theology (1802) formulates it as follows:

 

     “’If you found a watch in an open field, then, based on the obvious complexity of its construction, you would come to the inevitable conclusion about the existence of a watchmaker.’ 

 

     “A modern scientist, a specialist in molecular biology, Michael Denton, states:

 

     “’Paley was not just right in saying that there is an analogy between a living organism and a machine; he turned out to be a visionary, realizing that the technical idea implemented in living systems far exceeds all human achievements.’

 

     “Each cell of the human body contains more information than in all thirty volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. According to the famous physicist, Nobel Prize laureate Fred Hoyle, the probability of a helical DNA molecule arising from a mixture of ready-made nucleotides and sugars, is as close to zero as the probability that a tornado in a garbage dump will spontaneously cause the emergence of a brand new car.

 

     “Scientists using the mathematical apparatus of probability theory have proved the impossibility of evolution. What is the probability of accidental nucleation of one living cell from non-living elements? Prominent scientist Marcel E. Golay [Marcel E. Golay, ‘Reflections of a Communications Engineer,’ Analytical Chemistry, Vol. 33, (June 1961), p. 23], on the basis of mathematical calculations, estimates the probability of random construction of particles in a self-generating system (even if we allow 30 billion years for it to take place) as 1:10 to 450 degrees. This degree of probability is equivalent to zero, according to professional mathematicians.”[3] 

 

     Darwinists have traditionally attempted to get round these problems by positing an almost infinite period of time in which evolution can take place. “Evolutionists,” continues Gumerov, “are free, without sufficient scientific justification, to introduce timelines of millions and billions of years. For their conceptual constructs, time is vital. It replaces the role of the Creator. This argument is not scientific. Time is a duration, and does not possess any creative power. This argument is psychological in nature. It is suggested to the reader that everything is possible in millions and billions of years... 

 

     “Existing dating methods are extremely unreliable. A.V. Lalomov, Candidate of Geological and Mineralogical Sciences,  gives examples of the radiometric dating of objects whose age was known in advance. The results were paradoxical. Radiometric dating gave results suggesting that the shells of living mollusks were 2000 years old, that modern New Zealand lavas were 1-3.5 million years old, that the dacite in the lava dome of the San Helen volcano (1986 eruption) was 0.34–2.8 million years old, and that the Quaternary basalts of the Colorado Plateau were 117 – 2600 million years old. According to generally accepted practice, inconvenient data is discarded under a plausible excuse, or even without it. After obtaining the false results from the Quaternary lavas, the unsuitability of using the K-Ar method for dating olivine was substantiated. Other radioisotope methods are also not faultless, from both theoretical and practical points of view.”

 

     Darwinism supposes that life is getting better and better, more and more complex, over time. But, as Gumerov explains, “Science not only does not know such a law, but affirms the exact opposite of this. The second law of thermodynamics proves the impossibility of evolution. This fundamental law was discovered in the first half of the 19th century. Its scientific development belongs to the French mathematician N.L.S. Karno (1824), German physicist R. Clausius (1850), and English physicist W. Thomson (Kelvin) (1851). The wordings given by these scientists are considered equivalent. The essence of the second law of thermodynamics is as follows: In a closed system, entropy can only increase or remain constant. In other words, any isolated system (and evolutionists do not recognize anything outside this physical universe) tends to degrade, because entropy gradually increases within it. 

 

     “This law is universal. It is used in biology, physics, chemistry, geology, and other sciences. All the changes we study occur in the direction of increasing entropy, i.e. degradation, deterioration, and decline. My dear friend, if you recognize evolutionism as a science, then you should forget about the laws of thermodynamics, because their statements stand in opposition to evolution. Moreover, the second law of thermodynamics proves that once there was a perfect order (in scientific terms - the optimal state of the system), and the current state of the world is the result of an increase in entropy, i.e. gradual degradation. Thus, the world in its present form must have a beginning. This is fully consistent with biblical teaching.”

     “An essential, falsifiable prediction of Darwinian theory, therefore, is that functional information must, on average, increase over time.

     “Interestingly, a prediction of intelligent design science is quite the opposite. Since information always degrades over time for any storage media and replication system, intelligent design science postulates that the digital information of life was initially downloaded into the genomes of life. It predicts that, on average, genetic information is steadily being corrupted by natural processes. The beauty of these two mutually incompatible predictions in science is that the falsification of one entails verification of the other. So which prediction does science falsify, and which does science verify?

     “Ask computer programmers what effect ongoing random changes in the code would have on the integrity of a program, and they will universally agree that it degrades the software. This is the first problem for neo-Darwinian theory. Mutations produce random changes in the digital information of life. It is generally agreed that the rate of deleterious mutations is much greater than the rate of beneficial mutations. My own work with 35 protein families suggests that the rate of destruction is, at a minimum, 8 times the rate of neutral or beneficial mutations.

     “Simply put, the digital information of life is being destroyed much faster than it can be repaired or improved. New functions may evolve, but the overall loss of functional information in other areas of the genome will, on average, be significantly greater. The net result is that the digital information of life is running down.

     “The second series of falsifying observations is indicated by actual organisms we have studied most closely. First, the digital information for the bacterial world is slowly eroding away due to a net deletional bias in mutations involving insertions and deletions. A second example is the fruit fly, one of the most studied life forms in evolutionary biology. It, too, shows an ongoing, genome-wide loss of DNA across the entire genus.

     “Finally, humans are not exempt. As biologist Michael Lynch points out in a paper in PNAS, ‘Rate, molecular spectrum, and consequences of human mutation’:

     “’Consideration of the long-term consequences of current human behaviour for deleterious-mutation accumulation leads to the conclusion that a substantial reduction in human fitness can be expected over the next few centuries in industrialized societies unless novel means of genetic intervention are developed.’

     “We continue to discover more examples of DNA loss, suggesting that the biological world is slowly running down. Microevolution is good at fine-tuning existing forms within their information limits and occasionally getting something right, but the steady accumulation of deleterious mutations on the larger scale suggests that mutation-driven evolution is actually destroying biological life, not creating it.

     “This is hardly a surprise, as every other area of science, except for evolutionary biology, grants that natural processes degrade information, regardless of the storage media and copying process. For neo-Darwinian macroevolution to work, it requires something that is in flat-out contradiction to the real world.”[4]

 

     As Gumerov writes: “Scientific studies have shown that damage to the genome is constantly monitored and corrected by a special mechanism, because the body has a large number of enzymes, each with its own functions. Their coordinated and sequential actions eliminate 99 to 99.9% of mutations, according to the estimates of the evolutionists themselves. But the most important thing is that, according to statistics, the vast majority of mutations - if they occur - lead not to improvement, but to degradation. It was experimentally found that most phenotype mutations so violate the structure and physiology of the body that they destroy it — they are lethal mutations. The rest, in one way or another, reduce the viability of the body. And only a negligible share, a tiny fraction of a percent, can perhaps increase the adaptive properties of the body to some extent.”

 

     New discoveries keep being made that are incompatible with Darwinism. Thus Eric Metaxas writes: “The Darwinian mechanism of mutation and natural selection explains everything about life, we’re told—except how it began. ‘Assume a self-replicating cell containing information in the form of genetic code,’ Darwinists are forced to say. Well, fine. But where did that little miracle come from?

     “A new discovery makes explaining even that first cell tougher still. Fossils unearthed by Australian scientists in Greenland may be the oldest traces of life ever discovered. A team from the University of Wollongong recently published their findings in the journal Nature, describing a series of structures called ‘stromatolites’ that emerged from receding ice.

     “’Stromatolites’ may sound like something your doctor would diagnose, but they’re actually biological rocks formed by colonies of microbes that live in shallow water. If you visit the Bahamas today, you can see living stromatolites.

     “What’s so special about them? Well, they appear in rocks most scientists date to 220 million years older than the oldest fossils, which pushes the supposed date for the origin of life back to 3.7 billion years ago.

     “This, admits the New York Times, ‘complicate[s] the story of evolution of early life from chemicals...’ No kidding! According to conventional geology, these microbe colonies existed on the heels of a period when Earth was undergoing heavy asteroid bombardment, making it virtually uninhabitable. This early date, adds The Times, ‘leaves comparatively little time for evolution to have occurred…’

     “That is an understatement. These life forms came into existence virtually overnight, writes David Klinghoffer at Evolution News and Views. ‘genetic code, proteins, photosynthesis, the works.’

     “This appearance of fully-developed life forms so early in the fossil record led Dr. Abigail Allwood of Caltech to remark that ‘life [must not be] a fussy, reluctant and unlikely thing.” Rather, “it will emerge whenever there’s an opportunity.’

     “Pardon me? If life occurs so spontaneously and predictably even under the harshest conditions, then it should be popping up all over the place! Yet scientists still cannot come close to producing even a single cell from raw chemicals in the lab.

     “Dr. Stephen Meyer explains in his book Signature in the Cell why this may be Darwinism’s Achilles heel. In order to begin evolution by natural selection, you need a self-replicating unit. But the cell and its DNA blueprint are too complicated by far to have arisen through chance chemical reactions. The odds of even a single protein forming by accident are astronomical. So Meyer and other Intelligent Design theorists conclude that Someone must have designed and created the structures necessary for life.”[5]

     With the discovery of DNA, in other words, Darwinism became a statistical impossibility. Unfortunately, however, the world continued as if nothing had happened. Darwinism remained, and remains at the time of writing, the corner-stone, not only of biological science, but of the whole modern world-view...

 

     At the same time, one of the (very few) encouraging signs about the world today is the stubborn resistance to this corner-stone of the modern world view even among highly educated people.

 

     Thus Yuval Noah Harari writes: "According to a 2012 Gallup survey only 15 percent of Americans think that Homo sapiens evolved through natural selection alone, free of all divine intervention; 32 percent maintain that humans may have evolved from earlier life forms in a process lasting millions of years, but God orchestrated the whole show; 46 percent believe that God created humans in their current form sometime during the last 10,000 years, just as the Bible says. The same survey found that among BA graduates, 46 percent believe in the biblical creation, whereas only 14 percent think that humans evolved without any divine supervision. Even among holders of MA and PhD degrees, 29 percent believe the Bible, whereas only 29 percent credit natural selection alone with the creation of our species."[6]

 

     The problem with Darwinism does not consist solely in its non-correspondence with the facts. As Fr. Seraphim Rose pointed out, it is not falsifiable, and therefore not science at all: it is in fact philosophy. More accurately, it is a religion – a modern, sophisticated form of paganism. Paganism believes in the spontaneous generation of higher life-forms, even gods and goddesses, out of lower forms, as if by magic. So does Darwinism.

 

      The unfalsifiability of Darwinism has been demonstrated by Tom Bethell, who writes: “Natural selection functions in the realm of philosophy, not science.” He quotes staunch Darwinian Richard Lewontin of Harvard: “For what good is a theory that is guaranteed by its internal logical structure to agree with all conceivable observations, irrespective of the real structure of the world? If scientists are going to use logically unbeatable theories about the world, they might as well give up natural science and take up religion. Yet is that not exactly the situation with Darwinism?”

 

     ”Bethell began his journey as a Darwin skeptic by pondering the circular reasoning inherent in selection theory. Is there any way of deciding what is ‘fit’ other than seeing what survives?” he asks in the Introduction (p. 11). ‘If not, maybe Darwin was arguing in a self-confirming circle: the survival of the survivors.’ Throughout his journey, as he documents in the book, he found leading Darwinists admitting to this core flaw in the logic of natural selection...”[7]

 

     Towards the end of the twentieth century the word “creationism” began to be dropped in favour of the less religious-sounding “intelligent design”.Those who teach intelligent design are as firmly opposed to evolution as the old-fashioned creationists, but it is not politically correct to say that you believe in a Creator God (you might lose your job). So you have to say that you believe in “intelligent design” instead – which comes to the same thing, for who could have intelligently designed the universe if not God?

 

     Jim Holt provides some examples of “intelligent design” thinking. “Michael Behe attacks Darwinism at the molecular level. If you peer inside a cell, Behe says, you see intricate little machines, made out of proteins, that carry on the functions necessary for life. They so precisely engineered that they exhibit what he calls ‘irreducible complexity’: alter a single part and the whole thing would grind to a halt. How could such machinery have evolved in piecemeal fashion through a series of adaptations, as Darwinism holds?

 

     “Alwin Plantinga makes a philosophical assault on Darwinism, claiming that it is self-undermining. Suppose the Darwinian theory of evolution were true – our mental machinery, having developed from that of lower animals, would be highly unreliable when it came to generating true theories. (Darwin himself once confessed to the same doubt: ‘Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind?’) In other words, if our belief in Darwinism were true, then none of our theoretical beliefs would be reliable – including our belief in Darwinism. But theism escapes this difficulty: if we are made in the image of God, he can be counted on to have supplied us with reliable cognitive faculties.

 

     “William Dembski bases his anti-Darwinian argument on what he calls ‘the law of conservation of information’. Our DNA contains a wealth of complex information, he observes. How did it get there? Natural causes can’t be responsible. Chance and necessity cannot create information. Therefore, the origin of genetic information ‘is best sought in intelligent causes’.”[8]

 

     These are powerful arguments, and the creationist or intelligent design movement shows no signs of decline. Many thousand of Ph.D. scientists now reject Darwinism, and to many the arguments of leading evolutionists such as Richard Dawkins are no longer convincing. We come back to the question: if DNA is a code, and all known codes are created by intelligent designers, who created the code of DNA?

 

2. Physics.

 

     Apart from the discovery of DNA in 1953, which radically undermined the Darwinist theory of evolution, the most significant development in twentieth-century science was the discovery, in the 1920s, that the galaxies are flying away from each other – that is, that the universe is expanding. This undermined the idea, accepted by almost all scientists, that the universe is in a ”steady state”, with no beginning. For if the galaxies are accelerating away from each other, then if we turn the clock backwards, according to the laws of physics, especially General Relativity, there must have been an initial starting point, a beginning in time from which all subsequent space and time evolved – the so-called “Big Bang”. But then the question arises: where did the Big Bang come from? Since space and time are now considered not to be independent of matter, the origin of being must be outside time and beyond any known laws of physics. But what is such a timeless and immaterial beginning if not God, Who is simply “He Who Is” (Exodus 3.14), “the Beginning of every beginning” (I Chronicles 29.12), “without Whom “nothing was made that was made” (John 1.3).

 

     In the 1920s there were still some major scientists who were bold enough to speak about God. They tended to be physicists rather than biologists. One of these was the British physicist Paul Dirac, who won the Nobel prize for physics and whom Einstein considered to be a genius. He said in 1971: “It could be that it is extremely difficult to start life. It might be that it is so difficult to start life that it has happened only once among all the planets... Let us consider, just as a conjecture, that the chance life starting when we have got suitable physical conditions is 10⁻¹⁰⁰. I don't have any logical reason for proposing this figure, I just want you to consider it as a possibility. Under those conditions ... it is almost certain that life would not have started. And I feel that under those conditions it will be necessary to assume the existence of a god to start off life. I would like, therefore, to set up this connexion between the existence of a god and the physical laws: if physical laws are such that to start off life involves an excessively small chance, so that it will not be reasonable to suppose that life would have started just by blind chance, then there must be a god, and such a god would probably be showing his influence in the quantum jumps which are taking place later on.” Of course, if the extreme improbability of the emergence of life is enough to make the existence of God probable, the existence of DNA makes it far more probable![9]^[ 

 

     Human thought, both scientific, commonsensical and religious, sees the history of the universe as going back to a first cause. For if there were no first cause, there would be nothing to set the causal nexus going. However, the first cause must be in some sense outside the causal nexus taken as a whole; and so it must itself be uncaused (and immaterial and non-spatiotemporal). Otherwise, if it were part of the causal nexus, it would itself require a causal explanation. This is recognized by all true religious thought, which calls God the Uncaused Cause and “Beginning of all beginnings”. But modern cosmological thought cannot accept this. If it accepts a first cause, it is only in the sense of the first of the causes, the big bang itself. It cannot accept that the big band itself must have a cause.

 

     Atheist scientists have tried hard to escape this inescapable conclusion that there is an Uncaused Cause – that is, God. The most famous such attempt was by Stephen Hawking, who argued that the universe owes its origin to a chance quantum fluctuation, which “exploded” into existence fourteen billion years. In a book on Hawking, David Wilkinson, a physicist and Methodist minister, writes that the universe arose by “a chance quantum fluctuation from a state of absolute nothing… Quantum theory deals with events which do not have deterministic causes. By applying quantum theory to the universe, Hawking is saying that the event that triggered the Big Bang did not have a cause. In this way, science is able not only to encompass the laws of evolution but also the initial conditions.”[10]

 

     However, there are huge problems with this idea. First, there is the meta-physical or meta-psychological fact, demonstrated by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason, that it is impossible to reason in the “phenomenal” world – that is the world of empirical experience, without the category of causality. Secondly, if in the beginning there was only a wave function, a spectrum of possibilities, then someone had to observe it if that wave function was to collapse and bring a single objective reality – our universe – into being. Who could that “someone” have been if not God? After all, did not the great Newton himself talk about space being God’s sensorium? Thirdly, the idea that the whole, vast, infinitely varied, infinitely complex and highly organized universe should come from a chance quantum fluctuation is unbelievable (and strictly undemonstrable). Still less believable, fourthly, is the idea that the quantum fluctuation itself should come out of nothing. This is positing nothing as the cause of everything, an obviously nonsensical proposition. For, as King Lear tells the Fool, “Nothing can be made of nothing” (King Lear IV, 4, 126).

 

      Wilkinson continues: “Many people find difficulty in imagining where the matter of the universe comes from to begin with. Surely, they say, there must be an amount of matter or a ‘primeval atom’ with which to go bang? As Einstein’s famous equation E=mc² implies that energy (E) is equivalent to mass (m) multiplied by the square of the speed of light (c), the question can be translated to where does the energy come from?

 

     “Now energy has the property that it can be either positive or negative. Two objects attracted by the force of gravity need energy to pull them apart, and therefore in that state we say that they have negative gravitational energy.

 

     “It turns out that the energy in matter in the universe is the same amount as the negative energy in the gravitational field of the universe. Thus the total energy of the universe is zero. In this way you can have something from nothing in terms of the matter in the universe. No problem here for the Big Bang…”[11]

 

     But this is simply attempting to solve the problem by sleight of hand. Positive energy is something, and negative energy is something. They are not numbers that cancel each other out as in the equation: 1-1=0. They are things, and the existence of things needs to be explained. And something cannot come out of nothing except through the creative energy of “Him Who is” (Exodus 3.14) supremely and in the first place, God.

 

     Actually, some of the most famous physicists of our time, while not endorsing the idea that God created the heavens and the earth, nevertheless admit that the concept of God is not entirely irrelevant here. Einstein famously said that God does not play with dice. And even Stephen Hawking wrote: “It is difficult to discuss the beginning of the Universe without mentioning the concept of God. My work on the origin of the Universe is on the borderline between science and religion, but I try to stay on the scientific side of the border. It is quite possible that God acts in ways that cannot be described by scientific laws. But in that case one would just have to go by personal belief.”[12]

 

     However, it is not “just” personal belief but common sense that dictates the conclusion that the Origin of space, time and matter acts in ways that cannot be described by the laws of space, time and matter and therefore cannot be known by science. The Lawgiver is not confined by His own laws; He created those laws, and so must be above and beyond them. All we can do is stand before the mystery in awe as Moses stood before the burning bush, admitting simply that He is “He Who Is”, absolute, ineffable, unknowable, indescribable Being.

 

     David Berlinski writes: “The universe, orthodox cosmologists believe, came into existence as the expression of an explosion – what is now called the Big Bang. The word explosion is a sign that words have failed us, as they so often do, for it suggests a humanly comprehensible event – a gigantic explosion or a stupendous eruption. But this is absurd. The Big Bang was not an event taking place at a time or in a place. Space and time were themselves created by the Big Bang, the measure along with the measured…

 

     “If the Big Bang expresses a new idea in physics, it suggests an old idea in thought: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. This unwelcome juxtaposition of physical and biblical ideas persuaded the astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, an ardent atheist, to dismiss the Big Bang after he had named it. In this he was not alone. Many physicists have found the idea that the universe had a beginning alarming. ‘So long as the universe had a beginning,’ Stephen Hawking has written ‘we could suppose it had a creator.’ God forbid!..

 

     “For more than a century, physicists had taken a manful pride in the fact that theirs was a discipline that celebrated the weird, the bizarre, the unexpected, the mind-bending, and the recondite. Here was a connection that any intellectual primitive could at once grasp: The universe had a beginning, thus something must have caused it to happen. Where would physics be, physicists asked themselves, if we had paid the slightest attention to the obvious?...

 

     “If both theory and evidence suggested that the universe had a beginning, it was natural for physicists to imagine that by tweaking the evidence and adjusting the theory, they could get rid of what they did not want [God]. Perhaps the true and the good universe – the one without a beginning – might be reached by skirting the Big Bang singularity, or bouncing off it in some way? But in the mid-1960s, Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking demonstrated that insofar as the backward contraction of the universe was controlled by the equations of general relativity almost all lines of conveyance came to an end.

 

     “The singularity was inescapable.

 

     “This conclusion encouraged the theologians but did little to ease physicists in their own minds, for while it strengthened the unwholesome conclusion that Big Bang cosmology had already established, it left a good deal else in a fog. In many ways, this was the worst of all possible worlds. Religious believers had emerged from their seminars well satisfied with what they could understand; the physicists themselves could understand nothing very well.

 

     “The fog that attended the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems (there is more than one) arose spontaneously whenever physicists tried to determine just what the singularity signified. At the singularity itself, a great many physical parameters zoom to infinity. Just what is one to make of infinite temperature? Or particles that are no distance from one another? The idea of a singularity, as the astronomer Joseph Silk observed, is ‘completely unacceptable as a physical description of the universe… An infinitely dense universe [is] where the laws of physics, and even space and time, break down.’”[13]

     “In his book The Grand Design… Hawking argues that ‘Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.’ Thus, for Hawking, ‘It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.’

     “[Stephen] Meyer points out, though, that Hawking’s statement betrays a kind of category error — a philosophical misunderstanding of what the laws of nature do. Meyer notes that ‘the laws of nature describe how matter and energy in different states or configurations interact with other material entities. They do not tell us where matter and energy (or space and time) came from in the first place.’”[14]

     The Big Bang theory posits a beginning state of the universe that is contrary to the laws of physics. In other words, it is physically impossible. This is an enormous problem for atheist physics, which assumes the law-governed nature of all things, while rejecting a Law-giver, but not for traditional religious thought, which recognizes a Law-giver as well as the law. For if God is the Cause of the entire spatio-temporal universe, then the causality joining God to the universe, as it were, must itself be beyond space and time and not subject to physical laws. For this is not the link between a material cause and a material effect, which expresses a physical law, but the link between the Creator and the whole of His physical creation, that is, all material causes and effects taken together as a single system. In fact, the “causality” that brought the heavens and the earth into being is not empirical causality at all, but more like the causality that every rational being experiences every time he exercises his free will, when he opens his mouth to speak, or his eyes to see. Thus “He spake, and they came to be; He commanded, and they were created” (Psalm 149.5).

 

     Berlinski argues that the fact that “causes in nature come to an end” shows that “the hypothesis of God’s existence and the facts of contemporary cosmology are consistent.”[15] However, in order for God’s existence and the supposed facts of contemporary cosmology to be consistent, more is required. Above all, the existence of a form of non-empirical causality, free will, must be admitted – both the free will of God in creating and continuing to uphold the universe, and the free will of men who choose to believe or not to believe in that fact. And surely any sane physicist would accept that he is free in this sense. Otherwise, if all their words and thoughts are just the determined or undetermined products of fate or chance, why should we believe them?

 

     Another attempt to get round the fact that the universe has a beginning in time and therefore a Creator Who is beyond time, is the so-called “multiverse” theory. This is the idea that all the possibilities in the original wave function actually exist in other universes.

 

     Frank Close, professor of physics at Oxford University, explains that the idea of the “multiverse” is, together with string theory, one of the “two leading theories that attempt to explain the most fundamental characteristics of the physical world”.[16] But Close readily admits that it has one or two problems…

 

     The first is that it is untestable, which makes it, strictly speaking, not science at all. “As there is no possibility of communication between us and other universes, there is no empirical way to test the multiverse theory. George Ellis makes the point explicitly: ‘In a general multiverse model, everything that can happen will happen somewhere, so any data whatever can be accommodated. Hence it cannot be disproved by an observational test at all.’ By implication, the multiverse concept lies outside science.’”[17]

 

     So one of the two main mega-theories of contemporary physical science is not science at all. (Close thinks that the situation is a little better with the other mega-theory, string theory, but only just!) Physics was meant to exclude the need for metaphysics, untestable philosophy. But it seems that metaphysics is making a come-back!

 

     And this is not the only problem. According to Close, the different universes of the “multiverse” can “implement different laws of physics”, with the consequence that “if such diverse regions of space exist, then the ‘universe’ as we’ve defined it is not the whole of reality… Ellis and his cosmologist colleague Joe Silk, a professor at the Université de Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, call this ‘a kaleidoscopic multiverse comprising a myriad of universes’. They, as proxy for many physicists, then pose the basic challenge: the suggestion that another universe need not have the same fundamental constants of nature as ours inspires the question of what determines the values in our universe. Of the variety of universes that could exist, the conditions for the narrow range of parameters for which intelligent life could exist are trifling. The odds that we exist are therefore so vanishingly small, that multiverse theory claims that there is a ‘landscape’ of universes ‘out there’ in which all possible values of these parameters exist. Thus one universe will exist somewhere with conditions just right for life, and we are the proof…”[18]

 

      This reveals what is perhaps the main motivation for multiverse theory in physics: to help out evolution theory in biology in what should be the very first and easiest step in the ladder of evolution: the origin of life. The problem is that, as the physicist Close readily admits, – most biologists are much less sincere, - “the odds that we exist are vanishingly small” because the odds on the existence of all of the ten major constants that make life on earth possible (for example, the distance of the earth from the sun) are also “vanishingly small”. So in order to help out their biological colleagues in their little difficulty (of course, this is only the beginning of the vast difficulties faced by Darwinist theory), the physicists are forced to resort to the fantastical theory that all possible universes exist somewhere in the “multiverse” – including our own fantastically unlikely universe with its life-bearing planet, the Earth.

 

      The Lord said that with God all things are possible. But He did not say that all possibilities will in fact become actual. In fact, He definitively excluded certain possibilities: for example, that falsehood should finally triumph over truth, or good over evil, or that the world will not be brought to an end by His Second Coming. God can do anything – except contradict His own all-holy will. It is His will that decrees which possibilities become reality, and which will never be fulfilled – in any universe.

 

     The concept of free will – Divine, human or angelic - is crucial here. For what is an act of will if not the elimination of a range of possibilities in favour of one reality?As I write these words, I am excluding all other verbal possibilities from being actualized. Thus freedom to will this as opposed to that is the freedom to create reality out of mere possibility. As I write these words I am not simply banishing the things I am not writing to some other universe in which they exist on equal terms with what I am writing: I am excluding the very possibility of their being written anywhere.

 

     If, on the other hand, I assert, as the multiverse theorists seem to be asserting, that I am writing an infinite number of other versions of this chapter in an infinite number of other universes, the very concept of “I”, of personal identity, seems to disappear. Physicists have become reconciled to the idea – enormously paradoxical though it is - that a sub-atomic particle can exist in two places at the same time. But this paradox is as nothing by comparison with the idea that there is an infinity of universes in which I write an infinite number of different versions of this chapter. Some of these alternative versions will be gibberish, or represent something completely different from what I actually believe. How, then, can they be said to be what I write? Will they not in fact be the products of completely different people? Indeed, if different universes comprise different possibilities that cannot communicate with each other, and which may obey completely different laws of nature, what basis is there for saying that the I who am writing this chapter in this universe am the same as any of the Is who are writing it in other universes?

 

     Let us remind ourselves of the first difficulty Close finds in multiverse theory: that there is no empirical evidence for the existence of any other universe than our own – that is, the one single concatenation of events in space and time that all human beings with the exception of some contemporary physicists consider to be reality and not mere possibility. Indeed, not only is there no empirical evidence for other universes: even theoretically there cannot be any such evidence. For if there were, it would show that those other universes were interacting with our own and therefore formed part of our reality. As for there being an infinity of other universes, this is even more out of the question. For as the German mathematician David Hilbert says: “Although infinity is needed to complete mathematics, it occurs nowhere in the physical universe.”[19]

 

     Scientists used to pride themselves on their hard-headedness, on their insistence on facts, facts that can be empirically seen, heard or touched. Now, however, they deal, not in facts, but in possibilities, infinite numbers of them, none of which is more real than any other. They have become other-worldly to the most extreme degree, indulging in fantasies about other universes no less real – or unreal - than our ours but with which we can have no communication and about which we can have no information whatsoever.

 

     The idea of multiple universes is an old one: we find it in Hinduism, and we find it in the dualistic religions of the Middle East.

 

     Just as the idea is old, so is its refutation. As early as the second century, the Holy Fathers rejected the idea put forward by the heretic Marcion that there are two universes, one ruled by a good God and the other by a bad one, each universe following different laws. C.S. Lewis discerns in all forms of the dualistic (and by inference, multiverse) error two major difficulties, one metaphysical and the other moral. The metaphysical difficulty consists in the fact that neither of the two worlds “can claim to be the Ultimate. More ultimate than either of them is the inexplicable fact of their being there together. Neither of them chose this tête-à-tête. Each of them therefore is conditioned – finds [itself] willy nilly in a situation; and either that situation itself, or some unknown force which produced that situation, is the real Ultimate. Dualism has not yet reached the ground of being. You cannot accept two conditioned and mutually independent beings as the self-grounded, self-comprehending Absolute.” In trying to understand the dualistic multiverse in pictorial terms, we cannot avoid “smuggling in the idea of a common space in which they can be together, and thus confessing that we are not yet dealing with the source of the universe but only with two members contained in it. Dualism is a truncated philosophy.”[20]

 

     The moral difficulty is similar. It consists in the fact that if one universe has one system of values, which we from our point of view would call good, and the other a completely different, or contradictory one, which we would call bad, there is no basis on which to judge between the two. “In what sense can one party [or universe] be said to be right and the other wrong? If evil has the same kind of reality as good, the same autonomy and completeness, our allegiance to good becomes the arbitrarily chosen loyalty of a partisan. A sound theory of value demands something very different…”[21]

 

     It does indeed. However, physicists do not generally concern themselves with moral questions, or the origins of morality; so one might argue that this consequence of their theory is irrelevant to physical truth. But this would be disingenuous; for physical, cosmological theories are so ambitious that they quite unashamedly claim to be “Theories of Everything” (TOEs). Everything is everything. You cannot claim to have a theory of everything if “everything” excludes life, consciousness, conscience, art and morality…

 

     The theologians say that God created the universe out of nothing; the physicists say that it “emerged” from nothing. The first explanation is more plausible than the second, for while we cannot know how God created everything out of nothing, the idea itself is nevertheless comprehensible - first because the idea of a Creator Who is incomprehensible to His creatures is in itself quite comprehensible (and logical), and secondly because God is at any rate something and not nothing. Besides, it provides plausible answers to the question “Why?” in the sense of “For what purpose?” We can say, for example, that God created the universe because his nature is love, and He wants creatures to exist in order to share in His love.

 

     The second explanation, however, not only provides no conceivable answer to the questions “How?” and “Why”. It is itself nonsensical. For out of nothing nothing can come… And so: “Quantum cosmology is a branch of mathematical metaphysics. It provides no cause for the emergence of the universe, and so does not answer the first cosmological question [how?], and it offers no reason for the existence of the universe, and so does not address the second [why?]. If the mystification induced by its modest mathematics were removed from the subject, what remains does not appear appreciably different in kind from various creation myths in which the origin of the universe is attributed to sexual congress between primordial deities.”[22]

 

      For modern cosmology appears to have veered off towards a sophisticated form of Hinduism, whose creation myth tells of a quasi-sexual explosion of multiple seeds of universes through the union of Brahma, “the germ of all being”, with his consort Saraswathi. For is not “the sea of indeterminate probability” or “wave function of the universe” a kind of modern version of “the germ of all being”, which explodes out of potential being into a multitude of actual universes after coming into contact with an observer? (But who could this observer be if not a God who is not Brahma?) It looks as if the physicists, who so pride themselves on their rationality, have regressed even further into the mists of magical, pre-scientific paganism.

 

     There is only one philosophy that truly embraces everything: Orthodox Christianity. One of the early Christian martyrs, St. Justin the philosopher, said: “Only Christianity is a reliable and useful philosophy. Only thus and for this reason can I be a philosopher.” Modern science has reverted to a way of thinking that recalls many non-Christian religions and heresies, but is essentially simply a stubborn refusal to accept the “many infallible proofs” (Acts 1.3) of the existence of the invisible God from His visible creation – for which unbelief, as St. Paul says, “there is no excuse” (Romans 1.20). It has fulfilled the prophecy of St. Nilus the Myrrh-Gusher (+1596) about the twentieth century: “[The Antichrist], the dishonourable one, will so complete science with vainglory that it will lose its way and lead people to unbelief in the existence of the God in three Persons.”

 

     St. Nilus points to vainglory as the motive of this pseudo-science (Dostoyevsky called it “half science” in The Devils) because leaving God out of every equation enables the scientists to demonstrate the brilliance of their own minds, to earn the plaudits of their colleagues and receive the glory of a world that craves the gold of wisdom but receives only the husks of “the profane and idle babblings and contradictions of what is falsely called science” (I Timothy 6.20). Therefore the way back to true knowledge and wisdom can only be through humility, through submitting to “the Power of God and the Wisdom of God”, the Lord Jesus Christ (I Corinthians 1.24), “in Whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2.3) - but Who enlightens only those who ask him in humility.So let the model for the scientists be the humility of Solomon, the wisest of men, who said: “I am Thy slave and the son of Thy handmaid, a man who is weak and short-lived, with little understanding of judgement and laws; for even if one is perfect among the sons of men, yet without the wisdom that comes from Thee he will be regarded as nothing... For a perishable body weighs down the soul, and this earthly tent burdens the thoughtful mind. We can hardly guess at what is on earth, and what is at hand we find with labour. But who has traced out what is in the heavens, and who has learned Thy counsel, unless Thou give him wisdom, and send Thy Holy Spirit from on high?” (Wisdom of Solomon 9.5-6, 15-17)

 

3. Psychology.

 

      The contemporary sciences, both physical and biological, appear to rule out the possibility of freewill; everything is chance and/or fate. Psychology is unique in denying the existence of its own object, the psyche or soul – and therefore, of course, freewill.

 

     In order to understand the origin of such a fundamental error, we have to distinguish three types of causality: empirical, human and Divine… Let us begin with empirical causality, which is the weakest, most insubstantial form of causality. For we never actually see an empirical causal bond. What we see is events of class A being regularly followed by events of class B. We then infer that there is something forcing this sequence of events, or making it happen; and this we call causality. But, as David Hume pointed out, we never actually see this force, this putative bond uniting A and B.[23]

 

     In fact, our only direct experience of causality is when we cause our own actions. Thus when I decide to open the door, I have a direct experience of myself making my hand go towards the door-knob and turning it. This experience of causality is quite different from watching events of class A “causing” events of class B in empirical nature. I do not see the exercise of my will being constantly followed by the opening of doors. I know by direct, irrefutable, non-sensory (what the philosophers call phenomenological) experience that the cause of that door opening was I. This is the second type of causality, human causality; and our knowledge of it, unlike our knowledge of any empirical causality, is both direct and certain. Moreover, I know that my decision to open the door was uncaused in the scientific, empirical sense. Even if a man were standing behind me with a gun and ordering me to open the door, this would not take away from the uncaused nature of my action. It might explain why I decided to open the door at that moment; but, as the philosophers have demonstrated, to give the reasons for an action is not the same as describing the causes of an event; to confuse reasons with causes is a “category mistake”. Only if the man with a gun took away my power of decision – that is, hypnotized me to open the door, or took hold of my hand and placed it on the door-knob and then turned my hand, would it be true to say that my action was caused. Or rather, then it would no longer be my action, for my action can only be the free result of my will: it would be the action of another person: he would be the cause (the uncaused cause) of the action.

 

     Both human and empirical causality are caused by God, Who brings all things, both rational and irrational, into being. Thus it is the Divine Causality which causes events of type A to be followed always (or almost always – the exception is what we perceive to be miracles) by events of type B: He is the Cause of all empirical causation. But Divine Causality is closer to human causality, in Whose image it was made, insofar as It, too, is (a) empirically uncaused, and (b) personal, whereas every empirical cause is (a) empirically caused (because God has caused it to be so), and (b) impersonal.

 

     We experience Divine Causality in moments of grace. It has this effect on human causality that it does not violate the latter’s free and uncaused nature; It informs it without compelling it. Thus when a saint speaks under the influence of God’s grace, he retains complete control over his own words while submitting to the influence of God’s Word. This is incomprehensible within the scientific world-view. But since the scientists cannot see even the empirical causes they postulate, why should this concern us?…

 

     One of the very few Orthodox thinkers who attempted really to come to grips with these issues was the Serbian Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich, who died in exile in America in 1956. A polymath with several degrees in Western universities, he was well qualified to challenge the underlying assumptions of western thought. One of his most important essays was on the nature of causality; in it he demonstrated that empirical causality as scientists understand it is insubstantial by comparison with the only true, personal causality, which belongs only to God, men and the angelic world:-

 

     “One of the fundamental points of doctrine in which our Orthodox Faith differs from all the philosophical systems as well as from some non-Orthodox denominations is the conception of causality, i.e., of causes. Those outside are prompt to call our faith mysticism, and our Church the Church of mystics. By the unorthodox theologians we have been often rebuked on that account, and by the atheists ridiculed. Our learned theologians neither denied nor confirmed our mysticism, for we never called ourselves mystics. So, we listened in wonderment and silence, expecting the outsiders to define clearly their meaning of our so-called mysticism. They defined it as a kind of oriental quietism, or a passive plunging into mere contemplation of the things divine. The atheists of our time, in Russia, Yugoslavia and everywhere do not call any religion by any other name but mysticism which for them means superstition. We listen to both sides, and we reject both definitions of our orthodox mysticism, which is neither quietism nor superstition.

 

     “It is true, however, that contemplative practice - not quietism though - is a recommendable part of our spiritual life, but it is not an all embracing rule. Among the great Saints we find not only the contemplative Fathers of the desert and seclusion, but also many warriors, benefactors, missionaries, sacred writers, sacred artists, and other persons of great activities and a sacrificial mode of Christian life. . . And what is our answer to the atheists who call our mystical Faith superstition? Least of all they have the right to call it superstition since, by denying God and the soul and all the higher intelligences, they are indeed bearers of a thoughtless and nefarious superstition which never existed in the history of mankind, at least not on such a scale and with such fanaticism. Now, while those who speak of our mysticism are unable to give a satisfactory explanation of this word, let us ourselves look to it and explain to them from our point of view how should they understand our so-called mysticism. Our religious mysticism is nothing misty, nothing nebulous, nothing obscure or mystified. It is our clear and perennial doctrine of causality. If we have to call this doctrine by an ism, we may call it personalism.

 

    “Every day and everywhere people talk of causes. They say: ‘This is caused by that, and that is caused by this.’ That is to say: the next preceding thing, or event, or fact, or accident is the cause of the next succeeding one.

 

     “This is indeed a superficial and short-sighted notion of causality. We don't wonder about this superficiality of some ignorant persons, especially of the busy people of great cities who have little time for deep and calm thinking. But we are astonished to find the same superficiality with the learned and philosophically minded, as the materialists, naturalists and even deists. And because we call their theory of causes naive and fatalistic, they call us mystics. We consider that all those persons, be they ignorant or learned, who believe in natural and physical causes as definite, are fatalists. Both naturalism and materialism are teaching a blind fatalism without a smallest door of escape or a smallest window for sunshine. We Orthodox Christians must resist this blind fatalism, as all Christians should do, and defend our intelligent doctrine of personal causality of and in the world.

 

     “This doctrine means that all causes are personal. Not only the first cause of the world is personal (as the deists think), but personal are all the causes of all things, of all facts, of all happenings and changes in all the world. When we say personal, we mean intelligent, conscious and intentional. Yes, we mean that some sort of personal beings are causing all, or better to say, are the causes of all. That is what personal means. I know that at this my first statement some non-Orthodox would remark: ‘That doctrine you are probably drawing from your copious Orthodox tradition, for which we do not care, and not from the Holy Scripture, which we take as the only infallible source of all truths.’ To this I answer: no, not at all; this doctrine is so evident in the Holy Scripture, from the first page to the last, that I have no need this time to quote our tradition at all.

 

     “On the first pages of the sacred Bible a personal God is specified as the First cause, or better to say the First Causer of the world visible and invisible. That God the Creator is personal, this is a professed and upheld dogma not only by all Christian denominations, but by some other religions too. We Christians, however, are privileged to know the inner being of God, i.e., God as Trinity in persons and Oneness in essence. We have learned to know this mystery through the momentous revelation in the New Testament. The dogma of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost means that God is trebly personal, yes supremely personal.

 

     “But not God alone is personal. Personal are also the angels, personal is Satan with his perverse hosts of demons, and finally personal are men. If you carefully read the Bible, without the prejudices of so-called ‘natural laws’ and the supposed ‘accidental causes’, you will find three causal factors, and all the three personal. They are: God, Satan and Man. They are, of course, not equal in personal attributes, and there is no parity among them. Satan has lost all his positive attributes of an angel of light, and has become the chief enemy of God and Man, but still he has remained a personal being, bent though to do evil. Man, since the original of sin, has darkened his glory and deformed God's image in himself; yet, he has remained a personal being, conscious, intelligent and purposefully active, wavering between God and Satan, with his free choice to be saved by the first or destroyed by the second.

 

     “God is activity itself. Not only does he interfere now and then with His wonders and miracles in the life of men and nations, but He is constantly and unceasingly active in supporting and vivifying His creation. ‘Being near to everyone of us’, (Acts 17.27) and ‘knowing even the thoughts of man’ (Psalm 94.11) He eagerly acts and reacts in human affairs: gives or withholds children, gives or withholds good harvest, approves or threatens, grants peace to the faithful and excites war against the devil worshippers. He commands all the elements of nature, fire and water, hail and storms, either to aid the oppressed righteous or to punish the godless. He calls the locust, caterpillars and worms ‘my great army’ (Joel 2.25), which He orders to devour the food of the sinners. He ‘is able to destroy both soul and body in hell’ (Matthew 10.28) He knows ‘the number of our hairs’, and ‘not a sparrow shall fall on the ground’ without His will and His knowledge. All this is testified by many instances in the Bible. And this is not all. There is no page in the Scripture which does not refer to God, yea a personal God, His will and His diverse activities. The whole Bible affirms that God is not only the First Causer of the world but also that He is all the time the personal All-ruler - Pantokrator - of the world, as we confirm in the first article of our Creed.

 

     “Another causal factor is Satan, God's adversary, with his hosts of fallen spirits. He is the personal causer of all evil. Ever since his fall as Lucifer from the glory of ‘an anointed cherub (Ezekiel 28, Isaiah 14) to the dark pit Hell’, he is unceasingly trying to infiltrate evil and corruption into every part of God's creation, specially into man. Envious of God and man, he is the hater of both. Christ called him ‘a murderer from the beginning’ (John 8.44) and also ‘a liar and the father of it [lies]’. He is a mighty ruler of evil and darkness, but still subordinate, unwillingly though, to the all-powerful God. Only with God's permission is he able to harm men and to cause illness, confusion, pain, discord, death and destruction. But the more a person or a people sin against God, the greater power Satan gets over that person or that people. At the Advent of our Lord Jesus Christ the whole world was lying in evil because of Satan's terrible grasp over the bedevilled mankind. The world then was teeming with evil spirits as never before. Therefore, Satan dared to offer Christ all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them as his own. A robber and liar!

 

     “The third causal factor in this world, according to the Bible, is man. With all his littleness and weaknesses man is the greatest prize for which Satan is relentlessly and desperately fighting, and for which God from the beginning was ready to die. Staggering between God and. Satan, man is supported by God and beguiled by Satan, vacillating hither and thither, groping for light, life and happiness in his short span of existence on this planet. Yet, with all his seeming insignificance in this mammoth universe, man is able to change it by his conduct. Confucius said: ‘The clouds give the rain or give it not according to men's conduct’. Much more valid is this observation in Christianity with its belief in a personal God, the Giver of rain.

 

     “By his faith and virtues, specially by his obedience to God, man regains the dominion over all the created nature which God in creating him entrusted to him. But by his apostasy and corruption he dethrones himself and comes under the dominion of physical nature and becomes its slave. Instead of commanding he is obeying the mute nature, and fighting it for his mere existence, as you see it still now happening in our own generation. And instead of having God as his only Master, he got two masters over himself, Satan and nature, both tyrannizing him... By his faith and virtue, man could have removed the mountains, tamed the wild beasts, defeated the aggressor, shut the heaven, stopped calamities, healed the sick, raised the dead. And by his sins and vices, specially by his apostasy from God, his only loving and powerful Friend, he could have caused the destruction of cities and civilizations, the earthquakes, floods, pestilence, eclipse of the sun, famine and all the innumerable evils, pleasing Satan and saddening God. Thus, following God man becomes god, and following the devil, he becomes devil. But be he with God or with God's adversary, man has been from the beginning and is now the focus point of this planet and one of the three most important causes of events and changes in the world. And thus, whatever happens on this world's stage, it happens either by God's benevolent will, or by Satan's evil will, or by man through his free choice between good and evil, right and wrong.

 

     “Now, when we mention only these three causal factors: God, Satan, and Man, you should not think of mere three persons, but of terrific forces behind each of them. Behind God - a numberless host of angels of light, so much so that each man and nation has its own angel guardian; behind Satan - a horrible locust swarm of evil spirits, so much so that a whole legion of them are used to torment one single man, that one of Gadara; behind Man, since Christ's emptying of Hades and His Resurrection, there are by now billions of human souls who, from the other world, from the Church Triumphant, by their intercession and love, are helping us, the many millions of Christ's faithful; they are still fighting against the Satanic forces for Christ and our own salvation. For our chief fight in this world is not against natural and physical adversities which is by comparison a small fight befitting animals rather than men, but as the visionary Paul says: ‘Against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world’ (Ephesians 6.12) i.e., the satanic forces of evil. And we Christians have been, and always shall be, victorious over these satanic forces through Jesus Christ our Saviour. Why through Him? Because love is a greater power than all other powers, visible and invisible. And Christ came to the earth and went down below to the very hellish nest of the satanic hosts to crush them in order to liberate and save men for sheer love of men. Therefore, He could at the end of His victorious mission say: ‘All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth’ (Matthew 28, 18) When He says ‘all power’, He means it literally, all power - in the first place the power over Satan and his satanic forces, then the power over sinners, sin and death. First of all over Satan, the causer of sin and death. ‘For this purpose the Son of God was manifested that He might destroy the works of the devil’ (I John 3.8) Therefore, we rejoice in our belief that our Lord Jesus Christ is the irresistible Lord. We are acknowledging this belief in every liturgy by stamping the sacred bread for the Holy Communion with the words IC -XC-NI-KA.

 

     “Read and reread the Gospel as much as you like, you will find in Christ's words not the slightest suggestion of natural and physical causes of anything or any event. Clear as the shining sun is Christ's revelation and teaching, that there are only three causal factors in this world: God, Man and Satan. His chief obedience was to His heavenly Father; His chief loving work was the healing of men's bodies and soul, and His chief dispute with the Pharisees was about His power of driving the evil spirits out of men and the forgiving of sins. As to nature and the so-called natural order and laws, He showed an unheard-of absolute dominion and power. He vigorously impressed His followers that they were ‘not of the world’, but, said He, ‘I have chosen you out of the world’ (John 15.19). Now, since the Christians are not of this world, they certainly cannot accept the theory of the men of this world about the impersonal, unintelligent and accidental causes of the process of things and events. Also in our liturgical book you find the same three personal causal factors as in the Gospel. The same in the Life of Saints too. The same in the conviction and consciousness of the masses of our Orthodox people.

 

     “Therefore, whoever speaks of impersonal causes of things, happenings and changes in this world, is limiting God's power, ignoring the powers of darkness, and despising the role and significance of man. The Scripture does not know, and does not mention any impersonal and blindly accidental cause of anything in the world. The Bible teaches us quite clearly, that the causes of all things, facts, events and changes, come from higher personal beings and personal intelligences. And we stick to this teaching of the Holy Book. Therefore we make no concessions to the secular, or scientific theories about impersonal, unintelligent, unintentional or accidental causality in the world. When I say we, I do not think only of the great Fathers of the Church, nor of the Doctors of Divinity, nor of the learned teachers of religion, but also of the masses of our Orthodox people all over the world. Our Orthodox people would not say: a wolf caused the death of somebody's sheep; nor: a falling stone caused the injury of a boy; nor: a tornado was the cause of the destruction of somebody's house; nor: good weather was the cause of an abundant crop. Our people look through the screen of the physical world into a spiritual sphere and there seek the true causes of those events. They always seek a personal cause, or causes. And though this is in accord with the Bible's teaching, some outsiders call us mystics, and our Faith mysticism or superstition. In fact, our mysticism is nothing else than a deeper insight into the spiritual realities, or intelligences, which are personally causing whatever there is or happens, using the natural things and elements only as their instruments, tools, channels, symbols, or signals.

 

     “All this leads us to the following conclusions. First of all, Christianity is a religion not so much of principles, rules and precepts, but primarily and above all of personal attachments, in the first place an affectionate attachment to the person of our Lord Jesus Christ, and through Him to other members of His Church, the living and the dead.

 

     “Secondly, our Orthodox doctrine of personal causality on the whole range of nature and world's history is beyond any doubt the biblical doctrine. It was wholly adopted and explained by the Fathers of the Church, and it is kept lucidly in the consciousness of the Orthodox people.

 

     “The benefits we draw from such personalism in the doctrine of causality are manifold. By it we stir our mind to pierce through the visible events into the realm of the invisible intelligences that caused and dominate the whole drama of the world. It sharpens more than anything else our thinking power, our own intelligence. By it we are constantly made aware of the presence of our Friend, Christ the Saviour, to whom we pray, and also of our arch-enemy, Satan, whom we have to fight and avoid. It helps us enormously towards educating and forming strong personal, or individual, characters. It inspires us with spirit of optimistic heroism in suffering, in self-sacrifice, and in the endurance of martyrdom for Christ's sake beyond description, as testified by our Church history.

 

     “All these and other benefits are not possessed by the follower of the doctrine of impersonal causality; not even the greatest of all benefits - the knowledge of the truth.”[24]

 

 

August 5/18, 2020.

Holy Martyr-King Oswald of Northumbria.

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