Lev Navrozov
Friday, Dec. 27, 2002

Darwin applied the "principle" to the entire organic world, and saw it as a struggle for the survival of the fittest, owing to which it has evolved from the lowest unicellular organisms to the highest, and finally to man, since in the struggle for survival those fittest for survival survived, while those less fit or unfit for survival perished.

I am not going to ridicule this "theory of evolution," because Henri Bergson, a Nobel Prize–winning French thinker, did so at the beginning of the 20th century in his book "Creative Evolution."

To begin with, Darwin saw the history of the organic world upside down. Actually, the lower, more primitive and less developed the organism is, the fitter it is for survival, since it is less vulnerable. Spores need no oxygen, food or water, and can survive within a wide range of temperatures.

The fittest for survival are stones, which cannot die because they are already dead, inanimate matter. If fitness for survival were the goal of development (or evolution) of the organic world, the latter would finally have turned to stone as the least vulnerable mode of existence. Yet the development was upward – toward ever higher organized and hence ever more vulnerable organisms.

Many mammals are endangered species. No wonder! What if there is no food or water for them? Or the climate has become too cold or too hot? Take man, for example. Why, man is beset by thousands of diseases. Man is the sickliest creature on earth. Man has no hair and cannot live outside in a cold climate, as other mammals can.

I may be told that on the other hand man, in contrast to other mammals, has created for his survival agriculture, running water, medicine, oxygen masks and what not.

True, but many human beings die from heavy drinking or narcomania, go insane, commit suicide while in perfect health and living under ideal conditions, and last but not least, kill one another on a scale that is getting larger so fast that the question is whether man is not the most endangered species.

Darwin was living in the good old times when the British Empire was expanding by force of firearms and at its peak had territory exceeding 99 times that of England itself. The fittest-for-survival English dominated the "lower human races" and achieved a brilliant victory over the Chinese to force them to buy the English merchants' opium.

But the British Empire is no more, and England itself may be annihilated by China, while spores in England will survive.

Yet Darwin's upside-down vision of the history of the organic world has been growing in fame and prestige as the latest word of science. Nietzsche, who called Christianity the greatest evil in recorded history, retold Darwin's struggle for survival of the fittest as the war ("Kampf") for survival of the fittest, which Hitler absorbed with the understanding that the fittest for survival were the Germans, while the Jews should be helped to perish as unfit for survival.

The word "Kampf" (struggle-war) was a favorite word of Marx, and in the Soviet schools of my time Darwinism was one of the subjects, along with mathematics or physics.

But here is a miracle. Born about 2,000 years ago (authoritative scholarship puts Christ's birth at circa 4-6 B.C.), Christ was anti-Darwin about 18 centuries before Darwin. It is as though Christ had heard every sentence Darwin (Spencer, Nietzsche or Marx) uttered and said: "No, the opposite is true."

The Jewish Bible and the Christian Gospels were scientifically at the level of their times. In 1834, when Lev ("Leo") Tolstoy was 6, his brother, who already studied at school, criticized Moses and Christ from the scientific heights of his school knowledge of 1834. Hence the dilemma for a Christian in the past six or seven centuries: Shall a Christian pretend that science has not advanced since the day of Dante and see the universe as Dante saw it?

At the end of his life, Tolstoy denied the divinity of Christ and all the miracles described in the New Testament as later interpolations. Tolstoy considered himself, and not any Christian church, a true disciple of Christ and was excommunicated by the Orthodox Eastern Christian Church. He regarded Christ as a human being who was humanly born, humanly lived and humanly died, except that Christ was, according to Tolstoy, the greatest human being who has ever been born, lived and died.

Indeed, besides the miracles such as the transformation of water into wine, which Tolstoy denied, there are miracles of a different order in Christ's birth, life and death.

Miracle 1. There is nothing new or original about Darwin's view of life as a struggle for the survival of the fittest. Way back in Roman antiquity there was a proverb: "Man to man is a wolf." If wolves fighting for food could speak, their proverb would have been: "A wolf to a wolf is man." It was a miracle that even one person believed Christ preaching the opposite of this proverbial axiom, running in the blood of men and wolves.

Christ sounded impractical, unrealistic, otherworldly to many. But miraculously, there were a growing number of those who saw the wisdom of his all-forgiveness, his non-resistance to evil by evil, and his refusal to hate even his enemies.

These believers understood that Christ rose above human beings like a grownup person may rise above little children, their hatreds, quarrels and fights. The cause – such as the allegedly unfair sharing of their teddy bear – seems to them as important as the subjugation of Judaea seemed to the Roman Empire or the Opium War with China to the British Empire about 19 centuries later. But to Christ, those were children's quarrels over their teddy bear.

To love your enemies means to understand them, not to invent sweet, reassuring tales about them. Christ had no illusions that those who crucified him would not do so. He foresaw it all.

Miracle 2. That same Roman Empire that crucified Christ adopted the teaching of that once totally obscure Jewish vagabond, an executed heretic, from a tiny Jewish province of the Roman Empire – along with the Jewish Bible as part of its new Holy Bible! That same Roman Empire, dedicated to power and wealth and conducting its truly Darwinian wars to acquire them, adopted a teaching extolling the indifference to power and insisting that a wealthy man will never enter the Kingdom of God.

Miracle 3. The barbarian states on the site of the Roman Empire as well as Russia also adopted the teaching of a Jew, and the first Christians were called "Jews" by the pagans.

Such are the miracles, by no means less amazing than the transformation of water into wine.

What can be said about the human predicament today? Christianity has influenced the West and Russia, skin-deep as this influence often was or altogether suspended in the 20th century in several countries of Western Europe and in Russia. Now, China has never been a Christian country, and the Islamic conquests since the seventh century as well as the Islamic suicidal terrorism of the last 20 years are the opposite of Christ's teaching.

Such is the ugly truth the West should see as clearly as Christ saw his Calvary and meet it with understanding, courage and prayer, not with antics like the conquest of a small and technologically backward country to take its oil and divert public attention from the world predicament in anno Domini 2003.

My NewsMax.com columns have been accompanied by my proposal to publishers to send them by slow-mail the 130-page beginning of my book, "Out of Moscow and Into New York: A Life in the Geostrategically Lobotomized West in the Age of Terrorism and Post-Nuclear Superweapons."

Though the proposal was addressed to publishers, hundreds of readers sent me e-mails expressing their appreciation of my columns and requesting that I send them my book, or at least the beginning of it. I have decided to meet their wishes by posting on my Web site my book in weekly installments. Those interested, please let me know (navlev@cloud9.net) and you will be informed by e-mail as to the link to my Web site.