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).
Only if youre a creationist. The first humans where africans, the first humans where adam and eve, i conclude Adam and Eve where africans
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.
Oh great. Now "creationism" has been re-defined as "racism" and and creationists who believe that Adam and Eve were Africans don't count as "creationists." Does this have something to do with the current "leftwing" line about Africans being the "aryan" inventors of civilization? too bad Japan lost WWII, btw. How embarrassing that they allied with Nazi Germany.
I'm still waiting for Darwinists to say something about a religious origin story other than that of the Bible. Hmmm. What is this deafening silence I hear? When it comes to "indigenous pipples" suddenly the Darwinists have all disappeared to be replaced with militant pagan fundamentalists who insist their cultures are "revolutionary" and not in need of Marxist critique, and that ol' Karl would want them to preserve their traditional religious beliefs absolutely free of the slightest taint of Western science and rationalism.
The way the Darwinists and the "indigenous pipples" constantly disappear the moment the other appears reminds me of old time professional wrestling. The heels never got mad at each other despite the fact that each and every one claimed to be "the greatest of all time." They reserved their ire exclusively for modest babyfaces. Maybe someday someone in the Darwin/shamanist axis will break kayfabe?
Bingo, and as such must be removed from society. Now you're getting it.
You must have wax in your ears. Coyoteman has posted scores of other creation myths on crevo thread.
And here's a fine one now!
At the beginning of the world it was covered in darkness. A chief, a chieftainess and son lived at Kungalas. Although the child was greatly loved, he died without cause. The whole tribe mourned each day beside the boy's lifeless body. One morning instead of her dead son the chieftainess witnessed the rising of a boy out of her son's body which burned brightly. She was overjoyed to see her son come back to life. This glowing boy grew large until his father began to call him a giant. Giant boy ate most of the tribe's food, so his father sent him over the sea to find more to eat. Giant boy flew inland and took with him a stone, a raven blanket and a dried bladder full of berries. He dropped the stone in the ocean and rested upon it. Each time he dropped a stone and rested he created a new rocky island. Giant Boy scattered the berries across the land and created a forest filled with fruit. He scattered the salmon roe and trout roe into the rivers to create an abundance of fish. From this day Giant Boy never lacked food in the new world.
Well they have quite a few that they promote, ie Life came from Mars, or stardust, or something. It assembled itself. Then somehow it captured energy, but they dont know how, and presto! life began. Also a planet bearing life forms collided with the earth, or something...
Good post!
An honest discussion of what ID ought to be about without pretense or reference to "creationist science".
It diminishes curiosity about the actual history of life.
Mars? Yep, got that one too.
"The First Born of Barsoom," he explained, "are the race of black men of which I am a Dator, or, as the lesser Barsoomians would say, Prince. My race is the oldest on the planet. We trace our lineage, unbroken, direct to the Tree of Life which flourished in the centre of the Valley Dor twenty-three million years ago.From The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burrows"For countless ages the fruit of this tree underwent the gradual changes of evolution, passing by degrees from true plant life to a combination of plant and animal. In the first stages the fruit of the tree possessed only the power of independent muscular action, while the stem remained attached to the parent plant; later a brain developed in the fruit, so that hanging there by their long stems they thought and moved as individuals.
"Then, with the development of perceptions came a comparison of them; judgments were reached and compared, and thus reason and the power to reason were born upon Barsoom.
"Ages passed. Many forms of life came and went upon the Tree of Life, but still all were attached to the parent plant by stems of varying lengths. At length the fruit tree consisted in tiny plant men, such as we now see reproduced in such huge dimensions in the Valley Dor, but still hanging to the limbs and branches of the tree by the stems which grew from the tops of their heads.
"The buds from which the plant men blossomed resembled large nuts about a foot in diameter, divided by double partition walls into four sections. In one section grew the plant man, in another a sixteen-legged worm, in the third the progenitor of the white ape and in the fourth the primaeval black man of Barsoom.
"When the bud burst the plant man remained dangling at the end of his stem, but the three other sections fell to the ground, where the efforts of their imprisoned occupants to escape sent them hopping about in all directions.
"Thus as time went on, all Barsoom was covered with these imprisoned creatures. For countless ages they lived their long lives within their hard shells, hopping and skipping about the broad planet; falling into rivers, lakes, and seas, to be still further spread about the surface of the new world.
"Countless billions died before the first black man broke through his prison walls into the light of day. Prompted by curiosity, he broke open other shells and the peopling of Barsoom commenced.
"The pure strain of the blood of this first black man has remained untainted by admixture with other creatures in the race of which I am a member; but from the sixteen-legged worm, the first ape and renegade black man has sprung every other form of animal life upon Barsoom.
"The therns," and he smiled maliciously as he spoke, "are but the result of ages of evolution from the pure white ape of antiquity. They are a lower order still. There is but one race of true and immortal humans on Barsoom. It is the race of black men.
"The Tree of Life is dead, but before it died the plant men learned to detach themselves from it and roam the face of Barsoom with the other children of the First Parent.
"Now their bisexuality permits them to reproduce themselves after the manner of true plants, but otherwise they have progressed but little in all the ages of their existence. Their actions and movements are largely matters of instinct and not guided to any great extent by reason, since the brain of a plant man is but a trifle larger than the end of your smallest finger. They live upon vegetation and the blood of animals, and their brain is just large enough to direct their movements in the direction of food, and to translate the food sensations which are carried to it from their eyes and ears. They have no sense of self-preservation and so are entirely without fear in the face of danger. That is why they are such terrible antagonists in combat."
lol, I have that book, ist edition
null, here is your story
Ummmmm. I'm neither black man nor a white ape.
Well, okay, maybe a white ape...
I don't see how it follows that curiousity is diminished if one undertakes the study of science with intelligent design as an inductive standard. Should I understand that your basic argument against intelligent design is that it threatens curiosity, and is hence a bad idea?
no, I was thinking of the plants that bud, etc.
Believing in God didn't seem to slow down scientists before Darwin.
"Could I get a copy of that list of discoveries the Discovery Institute has made? Anybody?"
Discovery Institute: "We've discovered that we've not made any discoveries. So this counts as one discovery."
What the heck is an inductive standard?
The primary activity of science is finding regularities in nature. That is another way of saying natural causes.
If you care to define ID as a series of events having causes that are still in operation, and if you deleneate those causes so that they can be observed and studied, then you have a shot at being science.
You will be a step ahead of all the actual biologists and biochemists professing ID, who have not been able to specify anything about the ID hypothesis that could lead to research.
lol, then you should be good on the ole guitar
Banjo?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.