An Apologetic Story-Reflection: “Oparin, Go Deeper!” #

By George Neminuschy

About fifteen years ago, I ended up in the hospital. It happens! Not the most pleasant thing, of course, but sometimes it proves to be instructive — in a spiritual sense, naturally. You come into what one might call a “state institution,” with your belongings, a spoon and a cup, and other essentials. You see stretchers and gurneys modestly tucked beside the pedal-operated trash bin, as if silently “inviting” you to become their next “passenger.” You wait your turn — for intake, for an injection, for a dressing, for surgery, for lunch…

Finally, you lie down naked on the hard operating table under blinding electric lights, in a room with cold white walls, and you begin to tremble slightly as the enveloping fear of death reveals itself. You think tensely: will the operation go well? What is the level of risk? What are the statistics on medical errors in this kind of procedure?

And then, perhaps, you’ll step outside for a walk in the hospital courtyard, carefully steering a hundred meters around a pack of dogs in heat and lifting your foot just in time to avoid stepping on a freshly flattened rat — crushed by the wheels of an ambulance. You pick a goal for your stroll through the hospital yard: “I wonder where the morgue is?” — and before long, you find it unerringly (there it is — a small building by the fence, and on the door, a sign: “Bodies Released at 10 AM”).

In short, it’s a rather fitting place to remind oneself once again, brethren, that we are but strangers and sojourners upon the earth…

So here I was, once again, in such an institution (not the morgue — the hospital). I sat in the admissions department, watching the grim faces of patients awaiting their turn… Past the sorrowful sick folks briskly strode young men and women — doctors and nurses, with independent and cold expressions on their faces. The inaccessible caste of medics — engineers and technologists of the human body! And the “bodies,” these poor and perishable things, disfigured by illness and sorrow — biomass and material for the scientific-industrial process — sat coughing, sighing, and rustling their plastic bags in the sorrowful “Admissions Department.”

Among them sat I. In that anxious expectation that always overtakes a person on the first day in the hospital, I occasionally looked with a kind of unconscious hope at the faces of the briskly passing professionals — the doctors and nurses: might I see a kind face, a believing face? But no. All cold faces. Understandably so — serious people, going about their business. Not like us, sitting here as though the morgue were weeping for us already!

But then… Amid this inhuman workshop, a spark of warmth suddenly flickered — or so it seemed to me. A doctor passed by, not tall, elderly, with a gray beard. A high forehead with a receding hairline… Sharp lines of wrinkles on his steep brow spoke of thoughtfulness. A warm gaze from intelligent eyes (a scholar, perhaps?) seemed ready to examine every patient carefully and kindly (lovingly?). An older face with a gray beard surely belonged to a wise and good man. Doctor Aybolit! Oh — I fancied — if only he were a believer! How pleasant it would be to see one of “our own” in a foreign land, in a “state institution”! Maybe he’s not just a believer — but one of ours!

I imagined the “believing doctor” walking into church and lighting a candle before the icon of the holy great martyr Panteleimon. But the doctor walked past me and vanished somewhere. Again, the queue. The sighs of the hospital clients. Again, the impassive and self-assured faces of the serious professionals in their white, blue, green, or pink uniforms.

Meanwhile, without much notice, my turn came for the intake office, and summoned by a brief flash of the lamp above the door, I quickly entered. Carefully, so as not to slam it, I closed the door behind me and turned — and there before me were the intelligent, serious eyes of that very same doctor! Imagine that! “One of ours” in this sorrowful establishment — and I end up right with him!

After a few routine questions and a brief examination of the author’s body, the doctor wrote something for a time, then set the paper aside and looked at me intently with his intelligent, discerning eyes.

“I want to ask you something,” the doctor began, and I understood that the routine part of our meeting was over. “I hope my question doesn’t seem strange: I had a hunch that you have something to do with religion? Forgive me — I took a close look at your face and, you know, I just had a feeling…” (He ran his hand expressively along the lower part of his own face, making it clear that my beard had been noticed — and properly appreciated.)

“Yes, I… I do,” I replied, somewhat surprised, though I had half-expected such a question. (I should note, parenthetically, that today, fifteen years later, I would, before answering a question about my relationship to ‘religion,’ ask the other person to clarify what exactly they meant by the word religion. After all, strictly speaking, all ‘religions’—before Christ—were just that: religions.) So here we were, about to have a fascinating conversation, and I was just about to discover that the doctor was ‘one of ours’…

…And the conversation did take place.

“If it were up to me,” the doctor raised his voice, “I would ban all religion under criminal penalty. There is no more dangerous poison, no deadlier venom, than the idea of God!”

What in the world?! My expectations collapsed. It was the exact opposite of what I had imagined. The doctor wasn’t just “not one of ours,” he was anti-ours! And not in the past—twenty or thirty years ago—but right now, in the early 21st century, when militant atheism is no longer the official state ideology, when hundreds of churches, synagogues, mosques, and datsans are opening… My jaw was slowly dropping, while the “kind doctor” kept showering me with an atheistic deluge of his negative emotions toward God. He launched into some kind of speech—I can’t recall the details now—about the soundness and truth of dialectical materialism, all while relentlessly condemning “the idea of God or a Supreme Intelligence,” and angrily denouncing “priests who enslave human reason and conscience.”

While I waited for him to finish, I tried to think of a line of defense. First, it seemed (and later proved) that the man was speaking from the heart, sincerely hating everything he had ever heard about anything “beyond human.” Second, since he wasn’t going to let up, in order to say anything meaningful in response, I would need to call him to a measure of restraint. Third… well, it just so happened that I had never been (and now, even more so, am not) inclined to argue, to “apologize,” or to “contend for the faith”… After all, it is written: “Take no thought how or what thing ye shall answer… for the Holy Ghost shall teach you in the same hour what ye ought to say.” And again: “No man can come to Me, except the Father… draw him.” My task is simply to bear witness to the Truth.

So I said: “Forgive me, I’m not quite sure how to respond to your remarks right now. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting a conversation like this. Just for the record, I am an Orthodox Christian. Please, go on.”

“Very well. You assert that there is a Creator, yet everything in the world can be explained without invoking the idea of a Supreme Mind. There is no God—mind itself arose as the result of gradual evolutionary changes over millions of years in dead matter, and the theory that supports this—called Darwinism in the broader sense—has been confirmed and continues to be confirmed by practical observation.”

“So, does that mean that life and reason came about by chance? That the world has always existed?”

“Undoubtedly, the world has always existed, and life and reason arose by chance. A long process of random change happened to result in the emergence of life, and then of reason. Now, the rational human being learns about the world and his place in it, transforms it, and perfects himself through knowledge and technology derived from that knowledge. All of this is a continuation of the same material evolution, which encompasses everything. Why? Because that is the most basic property of matter. You see, no faith is needed here. But you want to impose it—because you need it, obviously, to control people’s minds. And that, too, is well explained by materialist teaching. And you—personally—will not be able to refute my arguments. Just the other day, a clergyman came in here. I wiped the floor with him using the arguments of materialist philosophy. He couldn’t give me a single meaningful rebuttal. All of his so-called counterarguments amounted to empty talk about how ‘we know nothing.’”

Unbelievable! What a situation I’d found myself in! And poor priest! Still, that priest must have had his “arsenal” — the list of “proofs for the existence of God.” Why didn’t he use them? Or did he, and they failed? So now this doctor is reproaching the priest for saying, “we know nothing.”

“In what sense did you understand that?” I asked. “For example, I can’t say about myself that I know nothing.”

“In the sense,” the doctor said, “that our knowledge, in his view, is negligible and very often mistaken — in other words, not real knowledge at all. While he himself — and you, I might add! — have come here seeking help from that very ‘knowledge.’ After listening to his babble, I asked why I should believe him. He started talking about ‘salvation,’ and I didn’t throw him out only because moral duty — and a doctor’s duty — wouldn’t let me. Then I went on to dialectically justify the uselessness of faith, and he had nothing to say in return. As for this ‘salvation,’ I’ll tell you outright: I myself am neither ‘baptized’ nor ‘communed,’ nor have I advised my sons to do such things — and I don’t advise it. And for quite some time now I’ve been explaining to them everything concerning the relationship between faith and reason (by which, of course, I mean that faith is unnecessary and harmful if one lives by reason), so that they won’t get caught on your Church’s hook.”

“—” I wanted to say something in response, but didn’t. The rest of our dialogue proceeded in a milder tone. Now, fifteen years later, it seems to me that the doctor simply needed to get something off his chest.

“It’s not for me to judge that priest,” I shrugged. “Maybe he had his reasons for staying silent…”

“Oh, he had reasons, believe me!” the doctor replied with a condescending smile. But I paid no mind to his smile, much less to his condescension.

“But take note,” I quickly responded, “that even now I am ‘staying silent’ and continuing to listen to you. And again — let’s be clear: I don’t think I’m mistaken if I say that the purpose of this whole conversation, as you see it, is to bring me over to your ‘faith,’ isn’t that right? And the thing is — I don’t intend to ‘convert.’”

“To my ‘faith’?…” the doctor hesitated for a moment. “Come now. What kind of ‘faith’?”

“You believe in science, in man, in progress, in evolution — in matter, ultimately…”

The doctor fell into thought. I went on.

“I once had occasion to hold a book in my hands — the quintessence of dialectical materialism: the Philosophical Encyclopedic Dictionary, 1987 edition. In the article titled ‘Matter,’ after some Leninist definitions of matter as a category, there follows a philosophical conclusion that matter is the only thing that is unconditional, without beginning, infinite, and, as a whole, unchanging and eternal. But having begun so confidently, the Dictionary then falls silent. And it could have gone further and said much more. Just a few words from among the many: Unchanging. Infinite. Without beginning. Self-sufficient. All-encompassing. Penetrating all things, while nothing penetrates it. All things are filled with its presence, yet it infinitely transcends them, so that they are as nothing… And so on, and so on — all of it quotes from ancient sacred texts. See how interesting this is? The Philosophical Dictionary speaks in agreement with the ancient testimonies — but doesn’t finish the thought, as though yielding the floor to them! And here arises the final question — the question of faith: Who is my God? Or rather: Who is my God? And in that light, the Dictionary becomes entirely clear: being, in its own way, a rational and serious book, it cannot do without the Absolute, without the Infinite and Unconditional, without that One — precisely One — in whom all things are ultimately summed up. Church Tradition, through its texts, bears witness to the actual experience of the Infinite — and therefore speaks far more, incomparably more, and more truthfully. By the way, moral duty and a doctor’s duty, too, are best explained by the original high calling of man, bestowed upon him by the Creator — so high that it deserves a discussion of its own. If you’d like, we could…”

“Nonsense! Don’t fall for it, young man — nor for belief in a ‘Supreme Mind.’ Moral duty is well explained by evolutionary theory — as a superstructure emerging more clearly at higher levels of material organization, in the form of altruism, necessary for species survival. In general, young man, I’d recommend you read the works of Marx and Engels. There you’ll find the best and most irrefutable arguments for the uselessness of the idea of God.”

“Ah, what a pity! I won’t have enough time to read the works of Marx and Engels. Though, I’ve read a bit. I remember, back in university, I prepared a report on Engels’s article about how ‘labor made man out of the ape.’ I was an unbeliever then. I remember how pleased my professor — a Communist — was with me. But I’m quite sure you’ve conveyed the main idea and even the ‘pathos’ of those writings accurately.”

“You’re still young. Your mind is still fresh enough to receive the truth. You’ll find the time…”

“Truth?” I said. “More likely, a partial truth — valid in some positive intuition of historical processes as manifestations of universal patterns. If only they had sought those patterns more deeply! And Darwinism, on which the entire structure of Marxism must necessarily be founded, is already — even within scientific circles, circles fully committed to evolution — recognized as needing significant revision (and that’s putting it mildly), as you surely must know. But the main point is this (I ask you to hear me out and try to understand): once I’ve read and assimilated Marx and Engels, I will glorify God for His wise and unfathomable Providence, by which their writings — and they themselves — became possible. God’s Providence encompasses all things. His Wisdom is infinite and, from our limited point of view, often unexpected and paradoxical. By the inscrutable judgments of God, figures such as Marx and Engels appear upon the stage of history. Of course, the Most High knows why. The higher Divine purposes — as the phrase goes — are partially known at best; but we do know this for certain: ‘God will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth.’ And the ways that lead to this can be many — including those utterly unknown to us. Or, from the point of view of science: we think we know quite a lot, but with every new discovery we come to realize more and more how vanishingly small — and constantly shrinking! — the sum of our knowledge is, compared with the vastness of new mysteries that open before us. In the end, the ‘hidden mass’ of the unknown only increases — doesn’t it? Perhaps that’s what that priest was trying to say? But I say it too.”

“I maintain,” the doctor went on, “that faith becomes unnecessary once an explanation is found. God’s Providence is a redundant element in any system of knowledge and explanation — it becomes superfluous as science advances. Therefore, faith occupies the domain of ignorance.”

“Ignorance is not the domain of Orthodox faith in the True God,” I replied, “— note: in the True God, not just some vague ‘Supreme Intelligence,’ and certainly not that half-formed ‘deity’ called ‘matter.’ More precisely, the domain of Orthodox faith is everywhere and in all things. It has never rested on ignorance as its foundation. On the contrary — its foundation is the knowledge of God, the True, One, and Almighty, by Whose will all things take place — including, incidentally, the very development of the sciences you hold in such high regard.”

“All right,” said the doctor, “then explain to me how you interpret your hospital visit — your illness. Where, in all that, is room for a Higher Will?”

“I am absolutely certain,” I said, “that our meeting here was by Higher Will.”

“No, young man,” he replied, “it’s much simpler than that. You got sick, you came to the hospital, and by chance we happened to meet here. On the one hand — chance; on the other — cause and effect… I’ve even heard from old veterans, men who fought at the front, how they described their experiences. And I drew the conclusion that only chance and human heroism, the effort of human will — not God! — determine who lives and who dies, who wins and who loses. Everyone who came back from the war — whether they prayed before going into battle or not — returned for various reasons, all quite explainable, not because of some supposed ‘intercession.’ And many who didn’t return were believers. And their faith didn’t save them.”

(Now, fifteen years later, it seems to me that this man’s rejection of his former faith — perhaps a childhood faith — and the fact that he remained unbaptized, may have been caused by some personal tragedy, perhaps connected with that very war.)

“You speak that way. But you see,” I replied, “here’s the thing: your view of reality, of events, assumes the existence of only one plane, one dimension. ‘There is chance, there are causes and effects’… Yes! But behind ‘chance,’ behind causes and effects, there stands the all-encompassing and all-directing Providence, the infinite Wisdom which has arranged things in such a way that there is both ‘chance’ and cause and effect. Everyone can see randomness, everyone can detect causal relationships in the phenomena of the world — but not everyone knows of the One on whose will, in the final analysis, it depends whether a ‘chance’ will occur at all, or whether those causes and effects will follow. And I should note — so you don’t get the wrong impression — that this doesn’t violate human freedom. God created man free, and that adds another, new dimension, a new increase in the ‘volume,’ even in the ‘density’ and ‘mass’ of the mystery and the hiddenness of Truth, as it is revealed to us by God.

Now compare that grandeur to the weightless and ephemeral ‘geometric plane’ of the materialist worldview, in which there is no sight of God’s Providence. God wills that man exercise his freedom. And as a manifestation of that freedom, something is required that we call ‘heroism’ — the root and highest meaning of which is sacrifice, the offering of oneself for the sake of another. And this highest human act has its eternal Divine Archetype, its Meaning and its Fulfillment… You might remind me now that, from a philosophical point of view, there’s a contradiction between the omnipresence of the Absolute and human freedom. And you would be right. But philosophy only examines one layer of true reality: above the ‘plane’ of philosophy lies the volume of that which truly exists. And thus, the ‘Absolute’ (or the figure from the Philosophical Dictionary) is merely one of the ‘approximations,’ ‘models,’ or ‘concepts’ by which man has tried over the centuries to express in understandable terms the greatness of God. But His greatness infinitely surpasses any human concept. We simply know this — we know it by experience — and we cannot be persuaded otherwise (though, of course, one could always start persecutions or repressions — but you understand I mean something else). An Orthodox Christian knows the Almighty God — not a ‘concept,’ not an ‘idea,’ but Him Who created the world and mankind — you and me both.”

“You and I, young man,” the doctor replied, “were ‘created’ by our parents. Biological, chemical, and psychological processes. The probability of a woman’s egg cell being fertilized by a man’s sperm can be expressed numerically; for fish eggs, the number is different. But the law — the biological law — is the same for both…”

“Wonderful. And why would I argue with that?” (The doctor shrugged.) “One law is one law — yet another mystery! Though I understand — you’re placing these facts in the context of ‘the origin of species,’ by way of the transformation of relatively ‘primitive’ organisms into more complex and highly organized ones.”

“Exactly.”

“And do you know what illustration I saw in a book by a Christian creationist author?”¹ I said with a smile, trying to lighten our conversation with a bit of humor — and, in that guise, to offer the doctor another argument against Darwinism. “I hope you won’t immediately dismiss me when I mention that the author is a Christian. After all, if a person says something worthwhile, the persuasiveness of their arguments doesn’t depend on what denomination they belong to. So, the picture: a bald professor with glasses, holding test tubes and gazing into them with great anticipation and excitement. The test tubes — as cartoon logic would have it — are wired up with springs stretching from a mess of complex machines in the background. And from the professor’s mouth comes the line: ‘If only I can get organic matter in this experiment, I’ll prove that intelligence is not needed for life to arise!’ Incidentally, the cartoon was illustrating, I believe, the chapter on Oparin’s hypothesis.”²

The doctor smirked, but then his face clouded, and he shook his head.

“That’s just unserious. I expect scientifically grounded arguments from you, and I offer you the same — and instead of arguments, you give me a caricature.”

“You think so? But the point is well made, isn’t it? What can you say in reply?”

The doctor grew even more serious. He composed himself and fell silent in thought.

“Oparin goes deeper,” he finally said. “Oparin goes deeper…”

With those words, the doctor handed me my medical file.

“I won’t keep you any longer, young man. Here are your papers — take them to the supply block and hand in your belongings, then head to the surgical building, fourth floor, and give them to the nurse on duty — they’ll tell you which room to go to…”

Leaving the doctor’s office, I glanced at my watch — oh, horror! I had been with him for over an hour! Blushing, I could feel the bewildered and angry stares of the other patients still waiting in line for an appointment with the “kind doctor.”

That evening, walking through the hospital corridor (in the ward, the radio was constantly playing — brought in by a relative of one of my roommates and tuned to “Radio Chanson,” as if deliberately “synced” with the full arrival of autumn, whose nostalgic notes magnified the season into some sort of squared melancholia), I went over the details of my conversation with the doctor and wondered: did I serve the purpose for which Providence arranged this encounter? What would the fruit be? It was obvious that the doctor wasn’t going to run off to our church the next day to “be baptized with all his house.” But it was equally clear that I, unlike the clergyman before me, had not been “smeared across the wall” by the doctor’s materialist arguments. But — is that all? What does the doctor himself think after our talk? Did I fulfill the commandment rightly and fully: “Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15)?

And that creationist cartoon… It was clear that this “argument” (which, truth be told, I used only as a standby, without much heartfelt investment) didn’t match the intellectual level the conversation had originally taken — and the doctor had ended it, realizing as much.

So I walked through the most secluded part of the hospital — a corridor lined with posters showing full-color photographs of the various ulcers that afflict the mortal human body…

And suddenly — the empty corridor, the posters of human afflictions, the hospital park visible outside the window with its sparse benches and September leaves falling upon them, the rat crushed by the ambulance, the morgue with its posted corpse-release schedule, and the very conversation with the militant atheist doctor — all of it appeared to me as one unbroken Miracle.

Years later, the time came to understand this epiphany.

No, I was not the doctor’s “enlightener” — if the “door of faith” had not been opened to him from above, he most likely perceived my words “in defense of Orthodoxy” as nothing but baseless chatter. He — an unbeliever, a militant atheist in a white coat — had been my lesson.

Once, the prophet Jonah was astonished to discover that “Nineveh” too belonged to God (cf. Jonah 4:11).³ And I suddenly and clearly — like the brightness of day — understood that in this “confession” of unbelief there lay a Mystery again — yes, truly, Divine Mystery, God’s own Wisdom; and that the Gospel words, that “not a sparrow shall fall to the ground without your Father,” and that not even “a hair of your head shall perish,” must be remembered every moment of one’s life — and that we are to give thanks for everything, as it is written. For there is nothing that does not belong to the Almighty.

Back then, in my talk with the doctor, in response to his remark about the biological law “common to both fish and humans,” I replied with a cartoon disputing the Darwinian thesis that species arose from one another by chance. Now, I would respond differently. I would offer this reflection — though he would likely wave it off too, for to him it would almost certainly seem like “nonsense.” Nevertheless, here is the reflection.

Our biological kinship with lower forms of living beings in this, our known world — this world where death and division reign — can only appear to us as a kinship of descendants to ancestors, that is, as a “kinship from below.” But that “kinship from below” is, in reality, only a hint at a true kinship — or better, a unity — which is hidden and unknowable in this world: a unity from above. The true man — the one as conceived by God — is the head and principle of that unity. It is in Man — in the true Man — and in Him alone, that the cosmos is one and harmonious.

But in empirical conditions, in conditions of separation and death, we can only see with our “carnal eyes” a few traces or rudiments of this true unity. These “traces” are mistaken by unbelieving scientists — who have no experience of encountering the True and Boundless Reality — for complete and sufficient information about reality. Thus, they interpret them as evidence of “kinship from below” and, by the logic of unbelief, draw entirely sincere pro-Darwinian conclusions about “the origin of species by natural selection.”

And that very principle of altruism, which the doctor mentioned as the foundation for “moral duty” and which he described as “necessary for species survival, observable even at the lower levels of material organization,” — is not in fact some “sublimated” superstructure of spirit arising from matter, but rather, the reflected light of something invisible — and therefore true, and therefore incomparably more powerful — appearing within what is visible and feeble.

But that conversation with the atheist doctor did in fact fulfill its purpose. For the central theme of it — the current into which I tried to direct it — was precisely this: depth, the inexhaustible depth of Divine Truth, which can only begin to be contemplated once the delusion is overcome that raises the perishable and limited to the rank of the sole and genuine reality.

The doctor began the discussion with talk of “chance” and “Darwinism,” but by the end, he spoke of depth.

The “godless” doctor said, “Oparin goes deeper” — deeper than the caricatured chemist from a creationist textbook. And it is quite possible — indeed, very likely — that the doctor “did not take thought beforehand what he should speak.” Was this not a manifestation of the Presence of the One who, at that moment, spoke through his lips? For, “No man can come to Me, except the Father which hath sent Me draw him…”

Years after that conversation, I returned to something I had read before but had never really pondered: that academician A. I. Oparin emphasized that it was precisely a lawful and prolonged process that led to the qualitative leap — to the emergence of life on Earth — and not some happy accident or the transplantation of life from other planets.⁴

So then — not chance, but lawfulness. Life on Earth is lawful! What does that mean? That Earth is meant for life. Let’s generalize: life — more precisely, Man — is the content of a fundamental and universal law of the universe, around which, for which, and toward which, all cosmic processes exist and are directed.

But that is pure teleology, the very thing atheists and materialists cannot stand and have always fought against! And yet, there it is — articulated, albeit obliquely, in evolutionary language (because it has no other), but still proclaiming Divine truth — in the language of biology.

Which means that all the sciences — indeed, all that is human, even “all-too-human,” even atheism and materialism themselves (see, for example, the above-mentioned Philosophical Dictionary) — all, in their own way, by hints and parables, whisper to the ear of those who have ears to hear, testimonies of the mighty works of our God!

A Soviet scientist, in the early 20th century, in the form of yet another scientific theory, uttered the most ancient thought (did he realize it himself?): that the world came into being — and exists — for Man.

Let us compare:

“Man was made last not because he is least, but because he is highest: the whole creation was prepared for him, the king of all.”
— St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis, VIII

Thus, the measure by which “Oparin goes deeper” — the measure by which the depth of the thought in Academician Oparin’s theory surpasses the situation caricatured in the creationist cartoon — is the same measure as the presence, within Oparin’s thought — and within my doctor’s! — of the truth of the world’s origin, the truth witnessed to by the Tradition of the Church of God.

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