The origin of Man and the design debate. III

Australopithecines and Retroactive Confessions of Ignorance 

Casey Luskin  

Editor’s note: We are delighted to present a series by geologist Casey Luskin asking, “Do Fossils Demonstrate Human Evolution?” This is the third post in the series, which is adapted from the recent book, The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith. Find the full series here. 

Many paleoanthropologists believe that the later hominins called australopithecines were upright-walking and ancestral to our genus Homo. Dig into the details, however, and ask basic questions like Who?, Where?, and When?, and there is much controversy. As one paper noted, “there is little consensus on which species of Australopithecus is the closest to Homo,”1 if any. Even the origin of genus Australopithecus itself is unclear.

Retroactive Confessions of Ignorance 

In 2006, National Geographic ran a story titled “Fossil Find Is Missing Link in Human Evolution, Scientists Say,”2 reporting the discovery of what the Associated Press called “the most complete chain of human evolution so far.”3 The fossils, belonging to species Australopithecus anamensis, were said to link Ardipithecus to its supposed australopithecine descendants. 

What exactly was found? According to the technical paper, the claims were based upon canine teeth of intermediate “masticatory robusticity.”4 If a few teeth of intermediate size and shape make “the most complete chain of human evolution so far,” then the evidence for human evolution must be indeed quite modest.

Besides learning to distrust media hype, there is another lesson here. Accompanying the praise of this “missing link” were retroactive confessions of ignorance. That’s where evolutionists acknowledge a severe gap in their model only after thinking they have found evidence to plug that gap. Thus, the technical paper reporting these teeth admitted, “Until recently, the origins of Australopithecus were obscured by a sparse fossil record” and noted, “The origin of Australopithecus, the genus widely interpreted as ancestral to Homo, is a central problem in human evolutionary studies.”5

Evolutionists who retroactively confess ignorance risk that the evidence that supposedly filled the gap may not prove very convincing. This seems to be the case here, where a couple of teeth were all that stood between an unsolved “central problem in human evolutionary studies” — the origin of australopithecines — and “the most complete chain of human evolution so far.” Moreover, we’re left with admissions that the origin of australopithecines is “obscured.” 

Australopithecines Are like Apes 

and curved fingers, relatively long arms, and funnel-shaped chest.”8 It further reported “good evidence” from Lucy’s hand-bones that her species “‘knuckle-walked,’ as chimps and gorillas do.”9 A New Scientist article adds that Lucy appears well-adapted for climbing, since “Everything about her skeleton, from fingertips to toes, suggests that Lucy and her sisters retain several traits that would be very suitable for climbing in trees.”10 Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin argue that A. afarensis and other australopithecines “almost certainly were not adapted to a striding gait and running, as humans are.”11 They recount paleontologist Peter Schmid’s striking surprise upon realizing Lucy’s nonhuman qualities: “What you see in Australopithecus is not what you’d want in an efficient bipedal running animal.”12

As for Lucy’s pelvis, many claim it indicates bipedal locomotion, but Johanson and his team reported it was “badly crushed” with “distortion” and “cracking” when first discovered.13 These problems led one paper to propose Lucy’s pelvis appears “different from other australopithecines and so close to the human condition” due to “error in the reconstruction…creating a very ‘human-like’ sacral plane.”14 Another paper concluded that a lack of clear fossil data prevents paleoanthropologists from making firm conclusions about Lucy’s mode of locomotion: “The available data at present are open to widely different interpretations.”15 

More Differences from Humans 

Other studies confirm australopithecine differences from humans, and similarities with apes. Their inner ear canals — responsible for balance and related to locomotion — are different from Homo but similar to great apes.16 Traits like their ape-like developmental patterns17 and ape-like ability for prehensile grasping by their toes18 led a Nature reviewer to say that “ecologically they [australopithecines] may still be considered as apes.”19 Another analysis in Nature found the australopithecine skeleton shows “a mosaic of features unique to themselves and features bearing some resemblances to those of the orangutan,” and concluded that “the possibility that any of the australopithecines is a direct part of human ancestry recedes.”20 A 2007 paper reported “[g]orilla-like anatomy on Australopithecus afarensis mandibles,” which was “unexpected,” and “cast[s] doubt on the role of Au. afarensis as a modern human ancestor.”21

Paleoanthropologist Leslie Aiello states that when it comes to locomotion, “[a]ustralopithecines are like apes, and the Homo group are like humans. Something major occurred when Homo evolved, and it wasn’t just in the brain.”22 The “something major” was the abrupt appearance of the human-like body plan — without direct evolutionary precursors in the fossil record. 

Notes 

1)Henry McHenry and Katherine Coffing, “Australopithecus to Homo: Transformations in Body and Mind,” Annual Review of Anthropology 29 (2000), 125-146.

2)John Roach, “Fossil Find Is Missing Link in Human Evolution, Scientists Say,” National Geographic News (April 13, 2006), https://web.archive.org/web/20060423155712/http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/04/0413_060413_evolution.html (accessed October 26, 2020).

3)Seth Borenstein, “Fossil Discovery Fills Gap in Human Evolution,” NBC News (April 12, 2006), https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna12286206 (accessed October 26, 2020). 

4)See Tim White et al., “Asa Issie, Aramis, and the Origin of Australopithecus,” Nature 440 (April 13, 2006), 883-889.

5)White et al., “Asa Issie, Aramis, and the Origin of Australopithecus.”

6)Bernard Wood, “Evolution of the Australopithecines,” The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution, eds. Steve Jones, Robert Martin, and David Pilbeam (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 231-240.

7)Wood, “Evolution of the Australopithecines.”

8)Mark Collard and Leslie Aiello, “From Forelimbs to Two Legs,” Nature 404 (March 23, 2000), 339-340.

9)Collard and Aiello, “From Forelimbs to Two Legs.” See also Brian Richmond and David Strait, “Evidence That Humans Evolved from a Knuckle-Walking Ancestor,” Nature 404 (March 23, 2000), 382-385.

10)Jeremy Cherfas, “Trees Have Made Man Upright,” New Scientist 97 (January 20, 1983), 172-177. 

11)Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human (New York: Anchor, 1993), 195.

12)Leakey and Lewin, Origins Reconsidered, 193-194.

13)Donald Johanson et al., “Morphology of the Pliocene Partial Hominid Skeleton (A.L. 288-1) From the Hadar Formation, Ethiopia,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 57 (1982), 403-451.

14)François Marchal, “A New Morphometric Analysis of the Hominid Pelvic Bone,” Journal of Human Evolution 38 (March 2000), 347-365.

15)M.M. Abitbol, “Lateral View of Australopithecus afarensis: Primitive Aspects of Bipedal Positional Behavior in the Earliest Hominids,” Journal of Human Evolution 28 (March 1995), 211-229 (internal citations removed).

16)Fred Spoor et al., “Implications of Early Hominid Labyrinthine Morphology for Evolution of Human Bipedal Locomotion,” Nature 369 (June 23, 1994), 645-648.

17)Timothy Bromage and M. Christopher Dean, “Re-Evaluation of the Age at Death of Immature Fossil Hominids,” Nature 317 (October 10, 1985), 525-527.

18)Ronald Clarke and Phillip Tobias, “Sterkfontein Member 2 Foot Bones of the Oldest South African Hominid,” Science 269 (July 28, 1995), 521-524.

19)Peter Andrews, “Ecological Apes and Ancestors,” Nature 376 (August 17, 1995), 555-556.

20)C.E. Oxnard, “The Place of the Australopithecines in Human Evolution: Grounds for Doubt?” Nature 258 (December 4, 1975), 389-395. 

21)Yoel Rak, Avishag Ginzburg, and Eli Geffen, “Gorilla-Like Anatomy on Australopithecus afarensis Mandibles Suggests Au. afarensis Link to Robust Australopiths,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104 (April 17, 2007), 6568-6572.

22)Leslie Aiello, quoted in Leakey and Lewin, Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human, 196. See also Bernard Wood and Mark Collard, “The Human Genus,” Science 284 (April 2, 1999), 65-71. 

 

Phillipians2:5,6 and the trinity.

 Phillipians2:5,6NASB"5Have this attitude [e]in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, 6who, as He already existed in the form of God, did not consider equality with God something to be [f]grasped," 

Some claim that this proves that the apostolic church had already accepted the trinity or at the very very least that Jesus was the God of the bible in some way. 

 

 Some questions I always have to ask about so called trinitarian proof texts are, why the coyness?  If Jesus is the only true God,why don't the bible writers simply say it in plain language ? After all there was (is)never any debate as to Godhood of the God and Father of Jesus . The scriptures are quite clear that the God of Jesus is the most high God.

John10:29NASB"My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all; ..." 

Note the God of Jesus is Greater than ALL (not many,not most) 

Acts3:13NASB"13The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of our fathers, has glorified His [d]servant Jesus,..." 

JEHOVAH is God and Lord of Jesus and the nation of Israel stated in so many words. 

Does it ever bother trinitarians that in contrast to such straightforward declarations re: the supremacy of the God and Father of Jesus , we always have to indulge in these farfetched contrivances in order to extract some vague similitude of their dogma from the Holy Scriptures.  So let us now prayerfully let the bible speak for itself re:phillipians2:5,6. We(Christians) are first urged to have the same attitude that Christ always has. What attitude is that? To consider ourselves equal to our God? If he is equal to God he is not bound by law to obey God. Thus his obedience would not be a matter of righteousness. He would remain righteous whether he cooperated with God or not.  Thus his cooperating with his God would be considered a favor with no legal merit accruing to him. And of course if he acquired no legal merit for himself he could impute none to us. Surely this is the opposite of the point the writer is trying to make. The word rendered existed in the passage is 'huparchon' some have attempted to suggest that this means that Christ has always existed in the (Morphe) form of JEHOVAH. According to strong's 'huparchon' means 

"From hupo and archomai; to begin under (quietly)" 

 Unsurprisingly then this word is NEVER used of JEHOVAH in either the Greek new testament or the Greek  old testament. 

It is however used of Man.

1Corinthians11:7NKJV"7For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, since he is (Huparchon)the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man." 

Thus the use of the word 'Huparchon' suggest the inverse of what some trinitarian apologists claim it does. 

Some have also desperately attempted to conscript the word 'morphe' rendered form in the NASB. Thus they claim that 'morphe' means that he possessed the very nature of the supreme being and thus was the supreme being or in some kind of mystical union with the supreme being. 

Strong's 3444" Perhaps from the base of meros (through the idea of adjustment of parts); shape; figuratively, nature -- form." 

Thus being in the 'morphe' of the God (not merely the Father) does not make one identical to the God,indeed it seems trite to point out that the God existed in the form of the God. 

   Isaiah44:13NASB" craftsman of wood extends a measuring line; he outlines it with a marker. He works it with carving knives and outlines it with a compass, and makes it like the form(Morphe) of a man, like the beauty of mankind, so that it may sit in a house. " 

  Obviously the prophet was not suggesting that this artesan's carvings possessed the very nature of a man. Surely if he possessed such capabilities he would claim Godhood for himself. 

Thus yet another farfetched attempt by Trinitarians to read their absurdity into the scriptures fails

Physics: better at describing than explaining reality?

 Can Physics Account for Our Whole Reality? 

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC 

If only we could reduce the world to an equation — preferably one that is solvable — many think we would understand life better.

University of Durham philosopher Nancy Cartwright takes issue with that, arguing that the universe is “beautifully dappled, and requires a dappled science to explain it.” She is the author, most recently, of A Philosopher Looks at Science (Cambridge University Press, 2022). And she says,

If physics is to have total dominion, she must not only help out with chemical bonding, signal transmission in neurons, the flow of petrol in a carburettor, and the like. She must be able in principle to entirely take over the disciplines that usually study these things, to explain and predict the rise in teenage pregnancies, the current level of inflation, the Protestant Reformation, and the fate of migrants crossing the channel. Plus, she must be able to get me off the hook for shouting at my daughter: after all, I was just obeying the laws of physics.

NANCY CARTWRIGHT, “PHYSICS CAN’T DEAL WITH REALITY’S COMPLEXITY” AT IAI. NEWS (OCTOBER 17, 2022) 

Now that She Mentions It 

Pop psychology has indeed featured many theories that tie together disparate phenomena like inflation, the Reformation, and shouting at loved ones. It’s comparatively easy to link very complex events to one another if we are allowed to choose any link we wish. Some might link Hurricane Ian with municipal elections in Vancouver and with high-starch diets in Texas. It takes creativity but many people have plenty of that. 

Physics sets itself a harder goal: showing the numbers (serious numbers, not pop stats) and a rigorous theory behind them. That necessarily means leaving out a great deal, assuming that what is omitted is subsumed in the theory. But is it? 

The idea of physics as queen of all that happens has powerful implications about just what the world we live in must be like. It must be a world made up entirely of the basic entities of physics — fundamental particles, curved space-time and the like — entities that have only the mathematical features that physics equations describe, features that often have no names of their own other than the names of the mathematical objects that are supposed to represent them, like the “quantum state vector” and the “metric tensor” of general relativity. The world has to be that way since these are the kinds of features that physics can rule.

NANCY CARTWRIGHT, “PHYSICS CAN’T DEAL WITH REALITY’S COMPLEXITY” AT IAI. NEWS (OCTOBER 17, 2022) 

The World We Live In 

Cartwright offers an alternative approach: 

Instead of supposing that physics must be queen of all we survey, I recommend we construct our image of what an ultimate science might be like on the basis of what current science is like when it is most successful, from putting people on the moon to devising and carrying out a plan for the complete evacuation of the Royal Marsden Hospital (which took just 28 minutes when called into play by a gigantic fire, 2 January 2008)… This is a world in which irritability, generosity and social exclusion can affect what happens just as gravity and electromagnetic repulsion can.

NANCY CARTWRIGHT, “PHYSICS CAN’T DEAL WITH REALITY’S COMPLEXITY” AT IAI. NEWS (OCTOBER 17, 2022) 

As she says, that’s the world we actually live in, a world of many tiny, intersecting worlds where causes can include anything from fundamental physics to social psychology.

Read the rest at Mind Matters News, published by Discovery Institute’s Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence. 

Ps. That's the problem with reductionist physicalism (and reductionist spiritualism) it presumes that describing =explaining and that explaining = explaining away.

Why Christendom remains Christ's archenemy.

 How the Russian Orthodox Church is Helping Drive Putin’s War in Ukraine 

BY GERALDINE FAGAN APRIL 15, 2022 7:00 AM EDT

Fagan is the author of Believing in Russia—Religious Policy after Communism 

To Vladimir Putin, Orthodox Christianity is a tool for asserting Moscow’s rights over sovereign Ukraine. In his February televised address announcing the recent invasion of Ukraine, he argued the inhabitants of that “ancient Russian land” were Orthodox from time immemorial, and now faced persecution from an illegitimate regime in Kyiv.

Led by Patriarch Kirill, the Russian Orthodox Church is one of the most tangible cultural bonds between Russia and Ukraine. The gilded domes of Kyiv’s Monastery of the Caves and St. Sophia Cathedral have beckoned pilgrims from across both lands for nigh on a thousand years. 

With religious rhetoric, Putin taps into a long tradition that imagines a Greater Russia extending across present-day Ukraine and Belarus, in a combined territory known as Holy Rus’. Nostalgic for empire, this sees the spiritual unity of the three nations as key to Russia’s earthly power as an exceptional civilization. Encouraged by Putin’s “special operation,” Russian Orthodox nationalists are excitedly recalling the prophecy of a twentieth-century saint from Chernihiv, now one of Ukraine’s beleaguered cities. “Just as the One Lord God is the indivisible Holy Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” this monk fortold, “so Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus together are Holy Rus’ and cannot be separated.”

Putin is not the first modern Moscow ruler to co-opt this idea in seeking to consolidate secular power. During the darkest hours of World War Two, Stalin reinstated the Russian Orthodox Church—having almost bled it dry—and replaced the communist Internationale with a new national anthem. Its lyrics asserted that the Soviet Union was “unbreakable, welded together forever by Great Rus’.”

Around 2007 the Kremlin further advanced the allied concept of Russky Mir, or the Russian World, initially a soft power project aimed at promoting Russian culture worldwide and likened by Patriarch Kirill to the British Commonwealth. Putin, however—unsettled by mass protests against his authoritarian regime in 2011-12 as well as those that toppled his vassal in Ukraine in 2013-14—has since twisted both Holy Rus’ and the Russian World to serve a more violent agenda.

Outsized emphasis now goes to Russia’s tradition of warrior saints. It was by remarkable coincidence, Putin told thousands of flag-waving supporters at a recent Moscow stadium rally, that the military operation in Ukraine commenced on the birthday of Saint Theodore Ushakov, an eighteenth-century Russian naval commander famed for never losing a single battle. “He once said, ‘This threat will serve to glorify Russia,’” Putin enthused. “That was the case then, is now, and ever shall be! 

Cast aside is an alternative Christian holy tradition of defiant passive resistance, exemplified by the first saints to be canonized in medieval Rus’, the Kyiv princes Boris and Gleb, who accepted martyrdom at the hands of their brother. “They gave up without a fight,” Putin once remarked in disgust. “This cannot be an example for us.” With the attack on Kyiv’s current ruler, even small acts of Christian pacifism by Russians are quashed. A remote village priest was fined hundreds of dollars for publicly refusing to support the war and thus “call black—white, evil—good.” A young woman was detained outside Moscow’s main Orthodox cathedral for holding up a simple sign bearing the biblical commandment, “Thou shallt not kill.”  

In this Putin can count on the backing of a body of jingoistic opinion now dominating the Church hierarchy. Flanked by medal-laden Defense Minister Shoigu at the 2020 consecration of a cavernous black and green military cathedral, Patriarch Kirill prayed that Russia’s armed forces would never suffer defeat. This March, on the very same spot where Pussy Riot made their infamous protest against cozy Church-Kremlin ties a decade ago, the Patriarch presented an icon to the head of Russia’s National Guard—the same unit now reportedly suffering heavy losses in Ukraine—in the hope that this would “inspire new recruits taking their oath.” 

Kirill is not an outlier in his support for the war, as no senior cleric inside Russia has expressed dissent. “Everything the president does is right,” one archbishop told local news agency Regnum in late March. “Speaking as a monarchist, I would personally place a crown upon Putin’s head if God granted the opportunity.” Similar fervor is found among respected Moscow parish priests. “Russian peacekeepers are conducting a special operation in order to hold Nuremberg trials against the whole of Europe,” one preached during a recent sermon, as he denied reports of civilian casualties. “What is the West able to produce? Only ISIS and ne

To Vladimir Putin, Orthodox Christianity is a tool for asserting Moscow’s rights over sovereign Ukraine. In his February televised address announcing the recent invasion of Ukraine, he argued the inhabitants of that “ancient Russian land” were Orthodox from time immemorial, and now faced persecution from an illegitimate regime in Kyiv.

Led by Patriarch Kirill, the Russian Orthodox Church is one of the most tangible cultural bonds between Russia and Ukraine. The gilded domes of Kyiv’s Monastery of the Caves and St. Sophia Cathedral have beckoned pilgrims from across both lands for nigh on a thousand years

With religious rhetoric, Putin taps into a long tradition that imagines a Greater Russia extending across present-day Ukraine and Belarus, in a combined territory known as Holy Rus’. Nostalgic for empire, this sees the spiritual unity of the three nations as key to Russia’s earthly power as an exceptional civilization. Encouraged by Putin’s “special operation,” Russian Orthodox nationalists are excitedly recalling the prophecy of a twentieth-century saint from Chernihiv, now one of Ukraine’s beleaguered cities. “Just as the One Lord God is the indivisible Holy Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” this monk fortold, “so Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus together are Holy Rus’ and cannot be separated.”

Putin is not the first modern Moscow ruler to co-opt this idea in seeking to consolidate secular power. During the darkest hours of World War Two, Stalin reinstated the Russian Orthodox Church—having almost bled it dry—and replaced the communist Internationale with a new national anthem. Its lyrics asserted that the Soviet Union was “unbreakable, welded together forever by Great Rus’.”

Around 2007 the Kremlin further advanced the allied concept of Russky Mir, or the Russian World, initially a soft power project aimed at promoting Russian culture worldwide and likened by Patriarch Kirill to the British Commonwealth. Putin, however—unsettled by mass protests against his authoritarian regime in 2011-12 as well as those that toppled his vassal in Ukraine in 2013-14—has since twisted both Holy Rus’ and the Russian World to serve a more violent agenda.

Outsized emphasis now goes to Russia’s tradition of warrior saints. It was by remarkable coincidence, Putin told thousands of flag-waving supporters at a recent Moscow stadium rally, that the military operation in Ukraine commenced on the birthday of Saint Theodore Ushakov, an eighteenth-century Russian naval commander famed for never losing a single battle. “He once said, ‘This threat will serve to glorify Russia,’” Putin enthused. “That was the case then, is now, and ever shall be!”

Cast aside is an alternative Christian holy tradition of defiant passive resistance, exemplified by the first saints to be canonized in medieval Rus’, the Kyiv princes Boris and Gleb, who accepted martyrdom at the hands of their brother. “They gave up without a fight,” Putin once remarked in disgust. “This cannot be an example for us.” With the attack on Kyiv’s current ruler, even small acts of Christian pacifism by Russians are quashed. A remote village priest was fined hundreds of dollars for publicly refusing to support the war and thus “call black—white, evil—good.” A young woman was detained outside Moscow’s main Orthodox cathedral for holding up a simple sign bearing the biblical commandment, “Thou shallt not kill"

In this Putin can count on the backing of a body of jingoistic opinion now dominating the Church hierarchy. Flanked by medal-laden Defense Minister Shoigu at the 2020 consecration of a cavernous black and green military cathedral, Patriarch Kirill prayed that Russia’s armed forces would never suffer defeat. This March, on the very same spot where Pussy Riot made their infamous protest against cozy Church-Kremlin ties a decade ago, the Patriarch presented an icon to the head of Russia’s National Guard—the same unit now reportedly suffering heavy losses in Ukraine—in the hope that this would “inspire new recruits taking their oath.”

Kirill is not an outlier in his support for the war, as no senior cleric inside Russia has expressed dissent. “Everything the president does is right,” one archbishop told local news agency Regnum in late March. “Speaking as a monarchist, I would personally place a crown upon Putin’s head if God granted the opportunity.” Similar fervor is found among respected Moscow parish priests. “Russian peacekeepers are conducting a special operation in order to hold Nuremberg trials against the whole of Europe,” one preached during a recent sermon, as he denied reports of civilian casualties. “What is the West able to produce? Only ISIS and neofascism.”

This priest concluded his sermon with the hope that Kazakhstan, Moldova, and Georgia would be reunited with Russia, in addition to Ukraine. But if Putin is looking to burnish his legacy as gatherer of historical Russian lands, there is a problem. The inhabitants of Ukraine are not interested in being “liberated” by his operation to “de-Nazify” their country. “The Russian World has arrived!” one woman shouted sarcastically as she filmed invading troops facing off against a crowd of angry locals just 20 miles from Ukraine’s eastern border with Russia. “We are not waiting for you, so get out of here!” Within hours of the first missile strikes on February 24, even the the Orthodox Church in Ukraine that is under the Patriarch of Moscow turned indignantly to Putin. “We ask that you stop this fratricidal war immediately,” 

Metropolitan Onuphry implored. “Such a war has justification before neither God nor man.” 

Putin’s is thus a spiritual, as well as military, misadventure. Similar to Stalin’s pivot at the lowest point in World War Two, his reliance upon the Orthodox Church over the last decade smacks of desperation. It hardly stems from personal commitment to the faith: while projected as a believer from the beginning of his presidency, for more than a decade Putin largely rebuffed the Church’s policy goals—such as mandatory classes on Orthodoxy in public schools—until his need for autocratic symbolism prevailed after his return to the presidency in 2011-12. Throughout his rule he has consistently spoken and behaved at odds with normative Orthodox Christian behavior, such as by claiming that choice of faith is unimportant since all religious categories are human invention, or when awkwardly greeting Patriarch Kirill with the gestures reserved for venerating a sacred relic or icon.

Bellicose rhetoric from Orthodox clerics does resonate with some devout Russians, but this is a narrow swath of the population. While a 2019 national poll found that over 60 percent of Russians older than 25 identify as Orthodox, those attentive to institutional Church life—such as by attending Easter worship services—amount to only a few percent. The same poll found a precipitous drop in those identifying as Orthodox among the 18-24 age group—just 23 percent. 

This contrasts starkly with Ukraine, where a quarter of the population attends Easter services and a majority of 18-24 year-olds define as believers. Swift and total alienation of millions of Ukrainian Orthodox is a colossal price for Patriarch Kirill to pay for loyalty to Putin, Ukraine being where a third of his parishes and monasteries are located. The Patriarch’s international standing is also shot, as Orthodox abroad not gagged by the Kremlin’s new ban on criticism of the Russian armed forces have condemned the war—including Kirill’s own bishops in Estonia and Lithuania—along with Pope Francis and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Instead of a Russian World, the Moscow Patriarch may soon find his authority stopping at the borders of the Russian Federation.

The Church’s dwindling reach thus means that Putin cannot use it to restore the age-old dream of an expanded Holy Rus’. Approaching 70, however, Russia’s president has no long-term ambition to consolidate Orthodox spirituality—only his personal grip on power for however many more years God grants him. 

Ps. My one problem with this article is the singling out of the Russian church. The fact is that while giving lip service to peace the churches of Christendom have given support(much of it active support) to both sides of this fratricidal stupidity.