Posted on 02/23/2006 5:26:21 PM PST by gobucks
A sophisticated debate about Darwinian evolution is going on at the topmost levels of the Catholic Church. In the Jewish community, however, the discussion remains mostly primitive and ill informed. Surely this embarrassing state of affairs can be corrected, and I have a suggestion.
In a nutshell, the debate is over whether evolution was guided or not. Intelligent Design, or ID, asks if a purely material and unguided mechanism like Darwin’s can explain the course of life’s history, including things like the micro-machinery in every cell and the sudden infusion of genetic information in the Earth’s ancient seas 530 million years ago, the famous Cambrian explosion.
Pope Benedict XVI has spoken pointedly of the “intelligent plan” guiding the cosmos, a nod to Intelligent Design. Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schonborn, writing in The New York Times, went further in defining the ways that Darwinism conflicts with a religious worldview. Recently in the official Vatican newspaper, a professor of evolutionary biology fired back that ID “creates confusion between the scientific plane and those that are philosophical or religious.”
In the Jewish community, with a few notable exceptions, no comparable debate is going on. Too many Jews want to be on what they consider the prestige side of the controversy but neglect to look beyond the misleading headlines.
Orthodox Rabbi Eliyahu Stern of the Park East Synagogue in Manhattan has singled himself out as a harsh critic of those who challenge Darwin. We both write for Beliefnet, where Rabbi Stern dismissed Cardinal Schonborn and ID scientists as if they were all backwoods fundamentalists, with their “zeal to make the literal biblical story into a dogma for America.”
In reality, ID theorists would hardly deny that the forms which complex life takes have changed or evolved over hundreds of millions of years. Rather, ID points to positive evidence of a designer’s guiding hand in that long history. More than 475 scientists, at places like Yale, MIT, Rice and the Smithsonian Institution, have affirmed in a signed statement that they doubt the power of Darwin’s selection/mutation mechanism to produce the splendor of life all around us. The Discovery Institute, where I work and which has led the ID movement, compiled the list of Darwin doubters. This is far from biblical literalism.
So why should you care? Because Darwinism, if accepted, makes any meaningful Judaism intellectually untenable.
Many Darwinists know well what is at stake. Their leading biologist, Richard Dawkins of Oxford, forthrightly states that religious “faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.”
Darwin himself appreciated that there was no common ground between his materialistic view and the older understanding that an immaterial designer oversees all that exists. In “The Origin of Species,” Darwin’s working premise is that God has no role in the history of life.
By contrast, in the Friday-night kiddush, a Jew gives witness to the evidence of a transcendent designer, speaking of “all His work which God created to make.” By custom, we stand for this kiddush because it is considered a form of testimony, and in a Jewish court the witness stands. An honest Darwinist should not say kiddush.
In “The Descent of Man” (1871), Darwin spells out the moral implications of his theory, notably that unguided evolution produced the moral laws as much as it did the plants and animals. Such laws could have turned out differently, as the animals could have turned out differently had chance variations led life’s history down a different path.
So there is nothing absolute about our ideas of right and wrong. Wrote Darwin, “We may, therefore, reject the belief … that the abhorrence of incest is due to our possessing a special God-implanted conscience.” If ethics has no such secure foundation, there can be nothing sacred about doing the right thing.
ID may have implications about what is sacred, but is it science? Ask the arch-rationalist Maimonides, who fought a similar fight 800 years ago. Some philosophers claimed they could prove that the universe is eternal and thus had no beginning. Maimonides said this made nonsense of biblical faith, which presupposes a beginning and a designer. Rambam showed that the “proofs” of an eternal universe fell woefully short.
He was right. In 1965 the Bell lab scientists Penzias and Wilson showed how the detection of cosmic background radiation, left over from the Big Bang, proved the universe was finite and had a definite beginning.
In his “Guide of the Perplexed,” Maimonides wrote that combating the Darwinism equivalent of his day was the highest calling of a Jew: “The utmost power of one who adheres to the Torah and who has acquired knowledge of true reality consists … in his refuting the proofs of the philosophers bearing on the eternity of the world.”
Alas, our community remains as a perplexed as ever. What’s needed is more and better-informed debate, particularly among those who take Rambam’s directive to heart, casting illumination on a crucial issue. n
David Klinghoffer (www.davidklinghoffer.com) is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute in Seattle and the author most recently of “Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point in Western History” (Doubleday).
Well, good point. Very good point.
"I see fewer and fewer rational criticisms....."
We agree on at least one thing today. But I ask, just why is that? What has changed over the years here in Freepville? Where did all the rationalists, misguided or otherwise, go?
Wait just a sec. After several years of the rationalists making their case, maybe they have done their job TOO well. Maybe, once one drinks deeply enough from the well of rationalism, the very idea of spending time debating the 'irrational' becomes repugnant.
Thus, all you have left are those 'boring' people who appear to be beyond the grasp of what rationalism objectively provides...
So, for your side, it's actually a very, very good sign, wouldn't you agree?
"Ah. A Priest speaks [again]. And avoids the central claim, like so many other priests avoid it: that the promotion of philosophical Scientific Materialism is their cause, and the defense of those boundaries their passion. And the description of what 'science' is to be kept ever obscured. "
You are a very consistent guy.
The only goal I have in participating in these threads is to demonstrate to lurkers that FR is not inhabited entirely by people who know nothing about biology.
At time the level of debate is rather high. I learn things from some of the creationists (though not about biology).
It makes no sense though, to argue the validity of science based on the moral behavior of people. This is equivalent to arguing against guns because some people misuse them.
I'm a little curious why, in post #143, you quote yourself in such a way that it looks like you are quoting RWP.
I merely wish to point out that ideas and people ultimately cannot be separated. Without the bad idea, people would not be inclined to apply it. Not all ideas are all pure in and of themselves. There are some inherently bad ideas floating around out there, which, when joined to bad people, result in bad things. Ideas have their origin in the human mind, and the human mind is by nature impure.
How, or why, would you separate an idea from the people who hold it and act upon it? You may do so in theory, but not in practice.
But you are wrong about this, in every way possible. Religion, Christianity included, has been used to justify the worst kinds of evil. In fact, looking at history, it is obvious that evil people seek out the most high minded ideas as camouflage.
But regardless, the moral or immoral uses of historical knowledge have absolutely nothing to do with its correctness. The worst possible evil is corrupting knowledge.
Once an idea is perverted it is no longer the same idea. It is people who pervert ideas.
ping!
You are a liar.
The vast majority of Catholic iconographic images of Christ portray him as an olive-skinned man with dark brown hair and dark eyes.
It is incredibly rare to find a Catholic image of Christ portrayed as a blond.
Anyone visiting 10 Catholic churches selected at random would see how much of a liar you are.
Gadzooks! Now I remember why I avoid these threads like the plague : (
Thanks. You too.
It is really too bad that Jews have gotten so much mileage out of being victims of Biblical fundamentalism (which is not what victimized them during most of their history, if ever) that it has obscured their role as the originators and in many cases still the practitioners of Biblical fundamentalism.
Evolution isn't the only issue on which Orthodox Jews have been more silent than giraffes. They have refused to get involved in the argument over Biblical criticism, the origin of the Torah, the historicity of the Biblical events and personages, and any number of issues. Of course, they are far from alone here (the ancient liturigical churches and Black Protestants have been just as silent), but no where else is the silence more inappropriate and painful.
Critics of islam are loudly condemning it for believing in a Divinely-dictated, unchangeable holy book. Neither do they know that Judaism has an identical doctrine with regard to the Torah, and that it goes back much further in history. Critics of islam are saying that it refuses to reinterpret its holy book in light of new scientific knowledge, implying (and sometimes claiming outright) that "chr*stians and Jews" have long made peace with such compromises, in spite of the fact that there are Orthodox Jews who are just as uncompromising, even about the pre-Copernican view of the universe.
How many chr*stian and atheist evolutionists are aware that their Orthodox Jewish "allies" on this issue are non-fundamentalists only for the first five days of creation, automatically morphing into Jerry Falwell once Adam arrives on the scene? I'm sure Orthodox Jewish evolutionists keep this well under wraps, and so allow their allies to believe that they have mythologized Adam, Methuselah, the Flood, the Tower of Babel, and everything else that other evolutionists long since rejected. I suppose they'd be very embarrassed if their fellow evolutionists found out their dirty little secret. Hmmm. I think I'll tell it.
You know what? I just did! (But look for an essay on this topic at my web site sometime in the near future, G-d willing.
I'll say it again though: ID is merely Theistic evolution with direct interference rather than overarching providential control. It is based on the Genesis text being an allegory and I am not an ID-er. I'm sorry David Klinghoffer has decided to go that route, but at least he's speaking up about Darwinism.
You are moving back toward a reasonable view. You will reach your goal when you admit that the motive to power and greed is unrelated to ideology, and that people who wish to dominate or take advantage of others will assume the mantel of benevolent ideologies.
That is why Marxism adopted the words and arguments of the early Christians. To each according to need, and so forth. It is all about power and nothing about ideas.
Still a few blond J's around. Perhaps less than i had feared..
But i pointed out he probably has a long beard, like rabbis have. And probably had short hair, like men had.
The leadership of the Catholic church still did their best to create their God in their image, no offense to you.
People make images according to what they know. Norwegian Christians imaged Jesus like one of themselves - blond, etc.
But the Scandinavians weren't Christians until the 11th century, and the dominant image of Jesus in Europe was already being established at that time by Italian artists and it was reinforced even more strongly in the Renaissance. Hence the result that 90% + of Catholic devotional images in the West have been of a Mediterranean-looking Jesus who probably did not look radically different from the actual one.
But i pointed out he probably has a long beard, like rabbis have. And probably had short hair, like men had.
He was still a young man when he was crucified, so it is unlikely that he had a Menachem-Schnnerson-length beard by that time. And short hair was not a universal custom - other than avoiding cutting the hair on the corners of his head, there is no proof that Jesus had specific hair length.
The leadership of the Catholic church still did their best to create their God in their image, no offense to you.
If the leadership of the Catholic Church had really "created" Christ in their own image, then their Christ would have been an effete Roman nobleman or a petty Germanic warlord (the two backgrounds of most of the Western clergy between 250-1200 AD) who blessed clan warfare and revenge killing.
Yet Christ was consistently portrayed as a humble, peace-advocating Galilean carpenter throughout that period. Few cultures in history have ever adopted an ideal so alien to their own mores as Western Europeans did with Christ.
False premise. If you're a Darwinist, Adam and Eve as described in the Bible never existed, therefore these Africans could not have been Adam and Eve.
What is "To each according to need, and so forth" but an idea? It is how the idea is applied that ultimately determines its value. For Hitler it was morally proper procedure to weed out the weak in favor of his vision for the strong. Is that idea "bad" in and of itself? After all, that is the way of nature according to Darwin, natural selection and all that. Why buck the natural system if one has power, authority, and ideas to make life better for everyone?
That's what marxists have been saying for nearly two centuries. this time we'll get it right.
The way of nature is that empathy and social cooperation are built into our species (along with greed, aggression and other "negative" traits). What we do with human nature is not predetermined, nor is it part of science.
Science is descriptive.
Sounds good in theory. If it were possible to hermetically seal implications and applications of science from human motives, then the idea of an intelligent designer wouldn't be so touchy, would it? May I ask how it is that harm is bound to come from positing the idea of an intelligent designer as responsible for the presence of organized matter that performs specific functions?
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