Evolution of a Creationist

If there were a museum for intellectual oddities, Demetri Kuznetsov would be on permanent display.

Not that he should be ridiculed, but even he acknowledged to the crowd of 75 people who braved a rainstorm to hear him speak at the Placerita Canyon Baptist Church that a Soviet scientist who becomes a creationist is something of a curiosity. His wife, a chemist, can’t figure him out, he admitted.

“My wife is an unbeliever,” he said with a slight shrug, the only indication of discomfort in Kuznetsov, a very erect young man with a flowing mustache and faintly Asiatic features. “Her ideology is against this field.”

But if that is true of his wife, it would be even more so of him. The winner of the Lenin Prize in 1983 and the Soviet Council of Ministries Prize in 1986 for his work in biochemistry, evolution was for him the firm foundation upon which all his learning and all his success was built.

Yet here was the Soviet scientist, who did not see a Bible until he was 23, preaching in church, like a child raised by wolves suddenly and with no schooling developing the manners of an Eton graduate and holding dinner parties for woodland creatures.

For him to reject his training for a belief that God created the world in six days seems nothing less than astonishing.

But not to this crowd and not in this place. A visitor questioned the scientist about the process of thought that led him to not only reject evolution but to take the further step of embracing creationism, rather then becoming a mere skeptic. One spectator smilingly interjected: “It was the Holy Spirit.”

And with all his orthodox education, which held that there was no place in the socialist society for what Marxists regarded as biblical fairy-tales, Kuznetsov himself had trouble coming up with anything more definitive.

“It’s a miracle,” he said. “I have no explanation.”

He described his surprising conversion in bland, toneless terms that would hardly have kept a Jimmy Swaggart crowd awake. Standing stiffly behind a podium and occasionally touching his tie, as though to make certain it hadn’t taken it upon itself to unfurl wildly, Kuznetsov described his childhood in a typical Soviet intellectual family. His father was a military officer and his sister became an engineer.

Belief in God has been a hindrance to the ambitious Soviet citizen. In fact, the word for seminary in Russian means a school offering only a rudimentary kind of education, he said. But in Kuznetsov’s case religion wasn’t even an issue. The subject wasn’t brought up at home, and he never met a believer or saw a Bible until adulthood.

But as time went on, and as he accumulated his honors, he began to have misgivings about Charles Darwin’s ideas about life on Earth. The evolutionary theory, as expressed in Darwin’s tract, “On the Origin of Species,” suggests that animal and plant life on Earth evolved from simpler creatures that lived millions of years ago.

“I saw a few mistakes in this theory. I began to think about it more and more,” he said, in his deadpan way. Eventually, “I reversed myself and saw that evolution is not right. I became an anti-evolutionist.”

To many in the audience, this seemed old hat. They were aware of evolution’s shortcomings. One audience member asked about carbon dating, the process by which scientists determine the age of long-dead organic material. Many creationists, who believe the Earth is only a few thousand years old, think carbon dating is hocus-pocus.

Kuznetsov steered clear of the issue, saying he was no expert in this area.

He said he was more intrigued by the experiments of American scientists who used electric shocks to stimulate chemical processes that produced some amino acids, the building blocks of life. “Evolutionists can consider this is a way of showing evolution is real,” he said.

But for his part, the fact that man can make a sort of life in a test-tube means only that the scientist “is the creator. It’s not spontaneous. It’s impossible to imagine such complicated forms of life such as us formed only due to the spontaneous combination of atoms and cells.”

He equated it to exploding dynamite in a room full of typographical materials and expecting the debris to arrange itself in the form of a best-selling novel. Appreciating this improvement on the cliche about monkeys in a room with a typewriter, the crowd laughed.

Kuznetsov became a creationist because in his mind there was no other recourse after he lost his faith in evolution. Asked if he were aware of American scientists who believe both in God and evolution, his brow furrowed. “I understand they exist,” he said. “I don’t understand the mechanism.”

Recent political changes in the Soviet Union, he said, have inaugurated a new era in the way the Soviet Union treats religion. Since last year, one of the four national television channels features a one-hour sermon by a bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church on Sunday mornings, he said.

It is against the law to teach Sunday school, but the government is now tolerating violations, he said. Kuznetsov said believers are working to change the law to allow still more religious freedom.

A Bible society was recently founded to publish Bibles in Russia, and Kuznetsov said he dreams of founding a theological institute in the Soviet Union where creationism can be taught.

But, he said, he is not against teaching the theory of evolution “because it exists--but I don’t believe evolution exists.”