Russian church wants creationism taught alongside evolution in Schools

15/6/2010

By:
The Underground Staff
Filed under Commentary and News, Featured

The Russian Orthodox Church called recently for creationism to be taught along with evolution in Russian schools, according to Reuters.

Senior Russian Orthodox Archbishop Hilarion said, “The time has come for the monopoly of Darwinism and the deceptive idea that science in general contradicts religion. These ideas should be left in the past,” Reuters reported.

Hilarion, who is in charge of the external relations department of the Orthodox Church, made the statement to Russian Foreign Ministry officials in Moscow during a lecture where he pushed for a dialogue to unite moderate secularists and Catholics against what he called the “fanatical secularism” of liberals, Reuters said.

Orthodox Christianity is the predominant religion in Russia, and is the church that President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin attend regularly, Reuters said.

Under the formerly atheist Soviet state, which ended in 1991, Darwin was used to prove the “falsehoods” of religion and is taught in all Russian schools, Reuters said.

Liberals in Russia expressed determination to fight against the inclusion of creationism in schools, and raised concern about the power of the Russian Orthodox Church, which may impinge upon the country’s secularist constitution, Reuters said.

Veteran dissident Lyudmila Alexeyeva promised that Russian liberals would do all it could to ensure that creationism continues to be excluded from school curriculums, Reuters said.

Alexeyeva said, “We overcame Communism as the state ideology and certain forces want to replace it with Orthodox Christianity,” and expressed concern that church pressure may lead to its being taught in some schools, Reuters reported.

Meanwhile similarities between the arguments for creationism that were raised by the Russian Orthodox Church and those of Christian fundamentalists in the United States have been noticed, The Huffington Post said.

The Huffington Post said that the fact that evolution is simply a theory is the same reasoning propounded in the United States by conservatives. They lamented the notion of creationists and proponents of intelligent design that evolution and religion are in direct conflict with one another.

An alternative view was posed by the Clergy Letter Project, in which 13,000 Christian, Rabbi and Unitarian Universalist clergy among others believe that evolution is not anti-God, The Huffington Post said.

Instead they say that the theory of evolution correlates completely with religious belief, and contend that only the evolutionary theory should be taught in schools, The Huffington Post says.

Protestant groups adhere to the creationist belief that the world was made in the literal way that was stated in the Bible, and that man was born with a purpose rather than simply came into being as an accident of nature.

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