Six days of creation of the world. How to combine Shestodnev with the scientific picture of the world? mentor introduction

I The Creation of the World The world, considered in its external beauty and internal harmony, is a marvelous creation, amazing by the harmony of its parts and the wonderful variety of its forms. In all its immensity it moves correctly like majestic

My dear friend, in this collection you will find wonderful stories from books. Old Testament. These stories will tell you about God and man, about friendship and love, about good and evil. They can teach you a lot and can even help you become kind and happy yourself. Because God created man in order for man to be happy living with Him. How to live with God? How to learn to listen to God and obey Him? This is exactly what the stories of the Old and New Testaments tell about.

But, perhaps, you will ask me, what is a "covenant"? Let's think together.

Most of all, this word is similar to the words “cherished desire” or “testament”, right ?!

A cherished desire is our most secret dream, we hardly tell anyone about it, except for our mother or a very close friend. We keep our dream as a secret.

And the testament? It's the paper we write when we give something of value to our loved ones, right? So that they always remember us.

So the covenant is something very important and secret, which is passed on to us from generation to generation. A covenant is a testament of wisdom, it is a promise of peace, it is a command to future children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren.

The book of the Old and New Testaments describes the covenants that the Lord Himself gave to people, the secrets that He revealed to them in order to make their life happier, to give them strength, hope, to teach them faith and love.

The Old Testament is a covenant given by God to people before He sent His Son to earth, that is, before the coming of Christ, which is why it is called the Old, that is, the Old Testament.

And the New Testament has already been given since the time of the birth of Christ. Coming to earth, Christ changed a lot, because He gave people a new covenant.

By reading the books of the Old and New Testaments, we can learn these mysteries of God.

world creation

When we want to make something, we take a sheet of paper, glue, scissors, colored pencils, plasticine and anything else that can be useful for our craft. Right?

And God made the world out of nothing. By His single will and Word He created Heaven and earth.

God filled the sky with angels. After all, angels do not have a body and weight, and therefore it became very good for them in Heaven.
And the land was completely empty and featureless.

And God said: let there be light! And the light shone. And the light was very pleasing to God. He separated him from the darkness. He called the light day and the darkness night. Thus appeared the first day and night, evening and morning.

And that was the very first day of our world.

Second day

On the second day, the sky appeared above the earth, but not the Sky where the angels live, but another, with clouds and clouds! We still see this sky above our heads! God looked at the sky and was very pleased!

Thus passed the second day of our world.

The third day

On the third day, God separated the water and the land. And lakes, rivers, seas, oceans and small streams appeared on the earth. As well as mountains, plains, hills and fields. The earth has become very beautiful. But something was missing.

And God said, Let the earth bring forth vegetation, grass and trees. And so it happened.

Since then, grass began to grow on the ground. Every autumn the grass throws a seed into the ground, and in the spring it grows again from the seed. And fruits ripen on the trees, which also contain a seed, from which trees grow again and again!

And you and I, if we plant a seed and water it, we will be surprised how soon it will sprout with us!

If you have ever experienced the joy of planting and growing seeds, you will understand how God felt when he saw the whole earth suddenly turn green.
It was the third day of our world.

Fourth day

And on the fourth day God said: let there be lights! And the sun, moon and stars appeared in our sky. And they began to separate the day from the night.

During the day, the Sun rises into the sky, bringing light and joy with it. And at night the sun sets, it becomes dark and the moon and stars appear in the sky. The moon helps people keep track of days, months and years. And the stars show the way to the traveler in the night.

How wisely God arranged everything!

These were the creations of the fourth day of our world.

Fifth day

On the fifth day, God began to inhabit the earth. He created fish, large and small, as well as reptiles - that is, all those creatures that crawl on the earth and on the bottom of the sea. Maybe you remember one of them? Yes, these are snakes, crayfish, insects, lizards. And God blessed them, and he said to the fish: fill the waters in the seas!
He also looked at the sky and created feathered birds. Ravens and jackdaws, gulls, eagles and all, all other birds: large and small, beautiful and not very.

Both the sky and the sea were filled with living beings. And it was good, God decided.

Thus passed the fifth day.

Day six

On the sixth day God said: let the earth bring forth a living creature. And the earth, according to the Word of God, produced animals. That is, God created animals not from nothing, but from the earth! Almost like we sculpt toys from plasticine or clay. But our toys remain toys, no matter what we do with them, and with God His creations come to life and become animals.

Do you know why animals are called that? Because they can give birth to a living soul. For example, a cow immediately gives birth to a calf. The calf is already alive, he stands on his own legs and even butts a little. And birds, as you remember, lay eggs first. That is why animals are called animals like that, from the word “belly” or “life”.

And God saw, on the sixth day of our world, how good it became on earth! How happy it was.

And then He said: Let us make man in Our image, in Our likeness!

He said "Let's make" because God is a Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And therefore God says: let us make a man who is like us in everything.

Can you imagine, this means that you and I can become like God, if only we really want it and try to become like that.

And God also said: And let man be master over all the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.

And God created man: male and female. And blessed them. And he said that they are now the masters of the earth.
It was the happiest day of creation - the sixth day of our world.

Seventh day

And on the seventh day God finished His works which He did. And He blessed the seventh day as a day of rest.

So we, when we do something good, we want to stop a little, relax and look at what we have done.
Doesn't that sound like our week? Six days we work, study, create, and the seventh day - Sunday - we dedicate to God. Because God Himself sanctified this day.

(To be continued...)

The round table "Shestodnev and Its Context", which took place at the conference "Modern Biblical Studies and the Tradition of the Church", was supposed to help fulfill a very practical task: to formulate the relationship between faith and science for the document of the Inter-Council Presence on the topic "The Origin of the World and Man".

Textology versus scientism

The tone of the discussion was set by the report of Archpriest Leonid Griliches (Father Leonid did not take part in the dialogue, the text was read by hegumen Arseniy (Sokolov)), in which three approaches to the interpretation of the first chapter of the book of Genesis are distinguished: “vulgar literalism”, “semantic interpolation” and “immanent interpolation ". The first is a refusal to comprehend the text and leads to primitive creationism, which, in turn, puts a person in front of naive questions: what kind of water was the Spirit of God hovering over after the creation of Heaven and earth, if the water had not yet been created, how to combine the creation of heaven in the second day if Heaven and earth were created in the first verse of Scripture, and so on. The second position imposes on the text uncharacteristic (“scientific”) meanings in order to prove that the biblical narrative does not contradict modern ideas.

The third approach, which Father Leonid adheres to, proposes to consider the text of Six Days precisely as a text with specific laws of construction and thus strive for “reconstruction of the author’s intention, i.e. most authentic understanding.

The position, of course, is a win-win - in the end, in the catechism you can write that there are no contradictions between science and faith, and Six Days should be read in relation to the relationship between God and man, and not to a physics textbook - and leave creationist - evolutionist disputes for specialists ( scholars and theologians). But this is a departure from the problem: contradictions between the scientific and biblical picture of the world arise in very specific heads of very specific people, and so that these people do not slide into spiritual schizophrenia (σχίζω - I split, φρήν - mind), they need to be given an answer, and not at all banned "contradict".

Six days - a metaphor?

One can convince oneself as much as one likes that religion and science are talking about different things (biblical scholar Mikhail Georgievich Seleznev reminded us of this several times), but then we will inevitably face the need to understand the Bible metaphorically. If we read the line of Sergei Yesenin: “The quiet sun rolled down behind the blue of the mountain,” we, of course, understand that we are not talking about such astronomical phenomena as the rotation of the Earth, but about the poetic experiences of an autumn sunset observer. But we also understand that “wheel” is a metaphor, “quiet” is an epithet, and the verb “rolled down” in relation to the sun is not understood literally at all. Because, in fact, the Sun is a huge ball of gas, not at all quiet, and it is not it that moves across the sky, but the earth changes its position relative to it.

If we begin to read the Bible in this way, then we must honestly admit that the words "day", "earth", "heaven" and others should be understood metaphorically. Which gives rise to a number of other problems. They were clearly identified by Arkady Markovich Mahler, a member of the Biblical and Theological Commission: where is the guarantee that, having begun to allegorically interpret the Six Days, we will not come to an allegorical interpretation of the characters of the Old Testament (such examples already exist in other Christian denominations - for example, in modern Anglicanism)? And why should we confine ourselves to the revision of the Old Testament? What prevents allegorical understanding of the Resurrection of Christ? And in general, why do we need to interpret something allegorically in the Bible? (References to the Alexandrian school of theology are inappropriate - the fathers of this school, offering an allegorical interpretation, did not in the least deny the reality of all the events described in the Bible - the allegories only added meaning.)

Does science testify to faith?

“We must answer honestly the question: why should we change the literal understanding of Scripture? Have we decided to adjust the Scriptures to the changing scientific picture of the world? ”- asks A. M. Mahler (indeed, scientific concepts change over time), “or do we want to look adequate in the eyes of the scientific community?” A positive answer to at least one of the last two questions reveals the problems of our worldview: is it biblical, Christian, or not biblical and not Christian, in the end?

If we are pursuing a missionary goal, then the effect of the official church wording, such as, "The Church allows us to consider that there are not twenty-four hours in the day of creation," will be zero. No one, as Arkady Mahler rightly noted, turns to the Church because she has one or another position on the number of hours in a day. But not everything is so simple. The Church is not addressed in this way, but some scholars turn to God, seeing unexpected coincidences between the Six Days and scientific knowledge. One can consider this approach (generally coinciding with what Father Leonid Grillikhes called “semantic interpolation”) textually erroneous, but for specific people it “works”.

Physicist Vladimir Igorevich Shevchenko (Kurchatov Institute) admitted that semantic interpolation is just close to him. In his opinion, modern scientific ideas are exactly consistent with the Bible: both the Big Bang theory (by the way, which arose quite recently), and the idea of ​​the emergence of inorganic compounds before organic ones. The confrontation between science and religion in this case looks artificial (the length of the biblical “day” is particular against the background of the fact that, in general, Six Days fit into the scientific picture of the world). “In theory, when all this was discovered, it was supposed to confirm the correctness of the biblical picture, but it turned out just the opposite,” the scientist is perplexed. In his opinion, further ways of interaction between science and religion will lie in the field not of ontology, but of ethics (“Can we create life in a test tube?”), We already meet echoes of this near future today in discussions about the same surrogate motherhood.

V. I. Shevchenko was warmly supported by the vice-rector of the All-Church postgraduate and doctoral studies moderator round table Archpriest Vladimir Shmaly:

– Reductionist readings of man are a real threat! It is Christian theology and worldview that can become the last bastion for upholding human dignity.

The admissibility of "semantic interpolation" from the point of view of soteriology (we will not touch on the metaphysics and textology of the Holy Scriptures) clearly demonstrated the attitude of V. I. Shevchenko to the participation of the Creator of a vast and complex universe in the life of every person:

- On one resource, I saw a picture with a cluster of stars and the caption: “Do you really think that the Creator of this is concerned with what you eat and with whom you sleep?” The fact of the matter is that the Creator of all this just cares about what you eat and with whom you sleep!

Is the world the psychic of God?

Archpriest Kirill Kopeikin, Secretary of the Academic Council of the St. Petersburg Theological Academy and Seminary, in his report drew attention to the fact that there is a space for dialogue between modern science and faith, since today science touches ontology. And the beginning of the world ceases to be impersonal. Here patristic theology meets secular thought - philosophical and natural science.

It would be useful to give a detailed quote from the speech of Father Cyril:

The book of Genesis tells of the creation of the world out of nothing by the word of God. In the Creed, which we confess at every liturgy, we confess God as the Creator of the universe, literally the Poet of this world. Saint Maximus the Confessor, one of the greatest Byzantine theologians, said that the world is a seamless tunic of the Logos. St. Gregory Palamas calls the world the writing of the self-hypostatic word. Metropolitan Anthony of Surozh, in my opinion, one of the greatest theologians of the 20th century, emphasized that matter is not dead. If this were so, the sacrament would be violence against matter. And the sacrament, from the point of view of Bishop Anthony, is the discovery of what is hidden in matter, what it is called to.

John Searle, one of the greatest American philosophers of consciousness, also a living classic, says that on the one hand there is Cartesian dualism, on the other hand there is materialistic manism - both positions are false. It seems that they describe the entire area under consideration, but in fact this is not the case. If we discard both Cartesian dualism and materialistic manism, then we are left with the book of the Creator.

Where does the poem originate when the author creates the poem? I think we logically should have come to the unambiguous conclusion that the world is the psychic of the Creator. This conclusion may seem strange to us, even shocking, but it is noteworthy that in the 20th century, precisely in connection with new discoveries in physics, the problem of physical reality arose in general.

What, in fact, is behind what physicists discover when they study the universe? Silas Bean (University of Bonn) and Nick Bostrom (Oxford philosopher) believe that the world is a computer simulation. Trey Hogan (University of Chicago), suggests that the world is a hologram. Now he is building a device that should test this experimentally. Ted Lloyd (MIT) believes that the world is a quantum computer that computes itself. This is a metaphor that adds nothing, these views may seem naive, but behind them is the notion of physicists that reality can be created by something or Someone that is outside of this reality.

Man is bigger than the world

Alexander Ivanovich Kyrlezhev, a researcher at the All-Church Graduate and Doctoral School, critically assessed this attempt at interpolation:

– If we take the Six Days as a doctrinal theological text, everyone knows that there is a radical gap in this creation – this is the creation of man. Human creation takes place in a very special way. This is the creation of man in the world, parts of the world, but it is not the world. The soul of man more peace. It's something else. Therefore, if we talk about a person in terms of the mental, which is comparable to the physical and can be somewhere in the physical, we ignore the Six Days, the dogmas of creation, the idea of ​​​​Christian creation. Not to mention that there may be philosophical objections here. Can a person be reduced to some impersonal substance, accident, some energy, substance, and so on?

This is the whole problem in relation to, for example, artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is going on in the same place where the refrigerator and TV are going on. But a person is completely different. Not to mention the fact that the world as the psychic of the Creator is this image. He is turned to science, but this very attempt to find parallels between modern science and Christian theology is only one of the private philosophies, and the church position cannot grow here.

The world as a text, or can Pierre Bezukhov talk about the novel "War and Peace"

If we still perceive the world as a text written by God, then we must also see ourselves as the heroes of this text. Father Cyril drew attention to this: “We are part of this world, and yet, being inside the world, we claim that we can know it. This is approximately the same as if Pierre Bezukhov and Andrei Bolkonsky would argue in the structure of the novel “War and Peace” about the intention of Leo Tolstoy.”

It is not at all clear to what extent the claim of Pierre Bezukhov and Andrei Bolkonsky to understand the intention of Leo Tolstoy is justified. Can we know the Creator's plan for the world only through the study of the world? Doubtful. Through a dialogue with the Author (and comprehension of the Bible, as the word of God, this is a dialogue with its Author) is more likely, but only if we perceive God as the Author, and not the Hebrew sages and chroniclers who wrote the corresponding texts for several centuries.

In this sense, the misunderstanding of the third position (“immanent interpolation”) of Father Leonid by creationists is completely logical. The question does not come down to how many hours, centuries or revolutions around themselves or each other of certain celestial bodies the day of creation lasts (the question of time in general can or even should be raised and decided with the participation of specialists in the physical properties of time), but to the problem of the authorship of the sacred text.

"What is the author's intention?" - expressed bewilderment priest Michael, a rare representative of creationists (a physicist by education) in the hall: “Who is the author of the Bible? In order to reconstruct the author's intention, one must rise to his level. If the author is Moses, everything is clear. But John Chrysostom says that it is God who speaks in the words of Moses.

The Silence of the Creationists

Creationists are doubly on the losing side. First, they are opposed modern science- almost entirely. But you can still come to terms with this. Much worse than the other. Their views are simplified by opponents from the ecclesiastical side. Even in the report under discussion by Fr. Leonid, the position of "literalism" (not just described as "vulgar") is brought to the point of absurdity. For example, none of today's Orthodox creationists asks naive questions about the origin of the water over which the Spirit of God hovered, because there are already patristic answers to these naive questions. Because of this simplification, creationists (far from being a homogeneous mass, people of different levels of education and specialization, who differently perceive certain theological views of certain Church Fathers) lose the opportunity to take part not only in scientific discussions, but also in such interdisciplinary discussions. .

“They are not called, but they do not come, because they are afraid that they will not be given the floor,” said Arkady Mahler: “This is a one-sided game. We don't have a dialogue between creationists and evolutionists, we have a dialogue between two groups of evolutionists." That is (I will continue the thought of Arkady Markovich), in the end, in our country the theological dialogue has been replaced by a pseudo-scientific one. "Pseudo" - because its essence is not at all in natural scientific disagreements, but in exegetical ones.

Konstantin Mikhailovich Antonov, historian of Russian philosophy, believes that the problem is complex:

– When I met natural scientists, I observed that they were as disoriented about what they were doing as church people were about understanding the Six Days. Many creationists are professionals in the natural sciences. There is a certain common complexity - distrust of complex forms of rationality. As soon as we encounter it, we want to get away from it with skeptical reasoning.

The main outcome of the discussion turned out to be much less practical than planned: it turned out that different believers have their own relationship with both science and understanding of the biblical text. What to do with this conclusion is not yet very clear. Probably to discuss further.

Text by Maria Senchukova, photo by Evgeny Globenko