Well, against my better judgment, I enter in this podcast today the topic of evolution and Scripture. I say it’s against my better judgment because, for many people, it’s a hot-button issue, and instead of thinking or listening they simply react. Earlier in this year, there was a pop-culture debate, so-called, between a scientist and a fundamentalist Christian over evolution and creation. The Christian, who was a biblical literalist, holds to the idea of a “young creation,” that is, a universe that is roughly 6,000 or 7,000 years old—this—this being based on calculating from the biblical record. It is the most extreme form of biblical literalism, one in which the appearances of the universe, that is, the appearance that it is much older than 7,000 years, must themselves be understood as “effects” of how God created the world, the idea being God created a universe that only looks 14 billion years old.

There is a strong strain within some Orthodox circles that is deeply skeptical of evolutionary theories, and it’s certainly common in a good many periods of Orthodoxy and even in some places in the present, that you can find “dating” of the world from creation, and it’s 7,000-some-odd years or so old. Any account of the world that dismisses the existence of God, or seeks to disregard God as Creator, genuinely feels like an attack on the most basic tenets of the faith. So it’s not unusual to see sympathy for anti-evolutionist efforts, especially if those evolutionary efforts are aimed at undermining the notion of God as Creator.

There are deep theological flaws in all of this, both in a lot of the extreme forms of the anti-evolutionist Christian positions and in the ill-formed attempts by scientists to undermine the Christian Scriptures. So I offer a little tutorial today on creation, a theological reflection.

Classical Christianity, of which Orthodoxy is the primary and maybe even the last version existing— Classical Christianity holds that God created the universe from nothing. The universe had a beginning. It has not always existed. Its existence is not necessary. The Fathers are quite clear that all things that are not God himself are created. All things—space, time, matter, energy, all beings other than God—they are all created; they are all contingent.

The Bible account of creation portrays God speaking all things into existence with the words: “Let there be light!”

Now we begin to engage in theological reflection. What does it mean to say that God created? How did he create? How did God cause the universe? It is at these questions that theological reflection enters into silence. For the nature and work of God’s causation cannot be known. They are not objects or works within the universe that can be observed and studied. We can see the effects of causation, but not the causation itself. In the language of Orthodox theology, we may say that God causelessly causes. God’s causing of the universe is not like any other cause that we speak of in our normal world, because it is an uncreated cause. It’s not like the created world; we can’t compare it to these other things. We use the word “cause,” but it stands for something that we in fact cannot understand and cannot know. God causelessly causes.

It is the teaching of the Church that God cannot be known. He is utterly transcendent, beyond observation and all knowing. It is also the teaching of the Church that the God-who-cannot-be-known made himself known in the God-Man, Jesus Christ. What we know of God, we know through Christ. As John says in his gospel:

No one has seen God at any time. The only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has declared him.

But saying that Christ has made God known is not the same thing as saying that Christ has now brought the nature of God’s causation into the world of phenomena. The God who cannot be known remains hidden, except as he chooses to reveal himself in Christ. We are told, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” This renders the creative work of God opaque to his creation.  We can’t quite see it. We may see its effects but cannot pass beyond those effects to gaze at the cause, for the Christian teaching is that God himself is the Cause.

An early Soviet cosmonaut famously announced—and I’ve been told that this is a misinterpretation, but I’ve been told that he famously announced from orbit that he did not see God. Nor will any work or effort of science see God. It would be perfectly consistent for human science to study and research, theorize and “prove,” and do so without a necessity of mentioning God. Perhaps unique within the opaque universe is the simple fact of its beginning.

That the universe has a beginning is perhaps the greatest “discovery” of modern science. And this was achieved by fairly simple observation. Prior to the 1920s, it was generally accepted that the universe was static and had “always” existed. The universe was the definition of “what is.” But through the work of Edwin Hubble and other physicists, it was established that the universe is not static—it is moving—and it is moving in all directions— it’s expanding. The simple arithmetic of this movement is that the universe was moving from a single point, a beginning. And again by simple math, that single point can be calculated at roughly 14 billion years in the past.

This was deeply problematic for some, especially in the scientific world. Here was a straight, clear, observable bit of evidence of a beginning. And, as work has continued in physics, a beginning from nothing! We can observe the universe back to its beginning, and there even science has to enter into silence. There have been many efforts to posit models other than “universe from nothing,” but they remain—and will remain—within the realm of pure theory.

But Christians cannot point to a point of origin as evidence of the Cause, that is, God as Cause, only as evidence of an origin. At that point, we must stand shoulder to shoulder with those who do not believe and simply wonder. For it is in our wonder that we encounter Jesus to whom the Apostles bore witness that he is the Christ, the Son of the living God.

We meet the Cause within history itself and only know about the Cause because he himself has told us. We report the story of his resurrection, and his continual presence among us, but never in such a way that he becomes a mere cause, an inert effect with which we may convince those who do not see. God will not be argued.

There are many who want a God who will be argued, a God who will take his place on the playing field of human debate. God as a cause among the causes becomes useful for the human project, whatever we imagine it to be, but ultimately such a God is no God at all, just a little god surrounded by the many gods, not the One, but one of many.

For literalists, God is the cause of the Bible, and the Bible is the great effect by which all causes may be explained. But even here they err, making of the Bible what the Church never received. The Word became flesh, not paper. And the Word is to Scripture what he is to the universe. Even in the Scriptures he remains hidden, the Causeless Cause. Documents, stories, poems, legends, tales, histories, doctrinally-shaped accounts, letters, and apocalypse, all revealing their very human hands, and yet they are his word.

Christ says, “You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; but these are they that testify of me.” And they testify much like the Big Bang. We stand even at the edge of the Scriptures and wonder. Paul says, “The natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for their foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.”

And this is the true character of theology. We know the unknowable God. This both makes us shout from the rooftops and remain mute. For we proclaim the Causeless Cause, who has come among us. And because we know him, we see him and proclaim him. But you cannot see him until you know him. The universe and creation reads like a parable. Matthew tells us:

And the disciples came and said to him, “Why do you speak to them in parables?” He answered and said to them, “Because it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For whoever has, to him more will be given, and he will have abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him. Therefore I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.

Glory to God.