Posted on 04/07/2009 12:17:49 PM PDT by GodGunsGuts
Judaism in the Year of Darwin
David Klinghoffer BeliefNet April 5, 2009
Link to Original Article
Welcome to the year of Charles Darwin. In coming months, the secular world will be celebrating two anniversaries relating to the originator of evolutionary theory. February 12 marks what would have been his 200th birthday and November 24, the 150th year since the publication of his book On the Origin of Species.
The cultural and political battle over evolution in the United States will intensify. Yet I believe many Orthodox Jews feel that it somehow isn't "our fight." Darwin argued that a purposeless, unguided process--natural selection operating on random genetic variation--explains the whole history of life's development. But frum Jews have no doubt that life was purposefully designed by our Creator.
Though I'm a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, the think tank best known for advancing intelligent-design theory, I can appreciate this response. However, permit me to argue that the Darwin wars are very much our fight, as Jews, or should be.
Begin with the fact that Hitlerism was no less than an exercise in applied Darwinism. To whip up his fellow citizens in the service of a race war against the Jews, Hitler relied on the language of Darwinian biology.
In the coming year's celebrations, you can bet that the nastier parts of Darwin's writing will be safely ignored. As a young man, during his adventures as a naturalist aboard the Beagle exploring the coasts of South America, Darwin had his eyes opened to the good points associated, as he came to see it, with genocide.
In 1833 he made the acquaintance of General Juan Manual de Rosas, who was busy liquidating the Indian population of southern Argentina. "This war of extermination," Darwin wrote in a cheerful letter home, "although carried on with the most shocking barbarity, will certainly produce great benefits; it will at once throw open four or 500 miles in length of fine country for the produce of cattle." The "extermination" (a favorite word of Darwin in his writings) of failed races, whether animal or human, is a great theme in his books and a key feature in the advance of the evolutionary process as he conceived it.
In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin prophesied: "At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races."
Evolutionary theory was embraced and championed in Germany faster even than in England, Darwin's native country. Hitler felt its influence, as the important biographers of him agree. In Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, Alan Bullock writes: "The basis of Hitler's political beliefs was a crude Darwinism." Joachim C. Fest, in Hitler, describes how the Nazi tyrant "extract[ed] the elements of his world view" from various influences including "popular treatments of Darwinism."
The key chapter in Mein Kampf is Chapter 9, "Nation and Race," where he discusses the obligation to defend the Aryan race from the Jewish menace. His argument is couched from the start in Darwinian terms. He writes: "In the struggle for daily bread all those who are weak and sickly or less determined succumb, while the struggle of the males for the female grants the right of opportunity to propagate only to the healthiest. And struggle is always a mean for improving a species' health and power of resistance and, therefore, a cause of higher development." He praises "the iron logic of Nature" with its "right to victory of the best and stronger in this world."
But what if the strong (Aryans) choose not to dominate and exterminate the weak (Jews)? "Eternal Nature," he writes, "inexorably avenges the infringement of her commands." He means those iron laws of Nature, Darwin's laws.
Hitler calculated that an appeal to the Germans against the Jews would be most likely to succeed if framed in scientific-sounding evolutionary terms. Mein Kampf was hugely popular and influential, selling six million copies by 1940.
Nazi propaganda hardly sought to hide the Darwin connection. In a 1937 German propaganda film, Victims of the Past, the audience is shown a retarded person as the narrator intones, "In the last few decades, mankind has sinned terribly against the law of natural selection. We haven't just maintained life unworthy of life, we have even allowed it to multiply." Between 1939 and 1941, German physicians empowered by the state under the Action T4 plan murdered 70,273 children and adults who had been observed to suffer from debilitating mental or physical conditions.
It should not have been surprising that Hitler under Darwin's influence would follow up by seeking to destroy the Jews. Not because Darwin was an anti-Semite (he wasn't), but because his worldview is all about explaining life and its mysteries in purely natural, material terms, leaving no room for God. In Mein Kampf, when his use of Darwinist rhetoric is most pronounced, Hitler decries the Jews for their "effrontery": "Millions thoughtlessly parrot this Jewish nonsense and end up by really imagining that they themselves represent a kind of conqueror of Nature." In Darwinism, Nature sweeps all before her.
Judaism says just the opposite. Torah is marked by the call to defy Nature, to do the hard work of bending our personal natures to God's will. It is almost as if Hitler, following the logic of Darwinism, sensed that Torah and thus the Jews who uphold it must be his ultimate, eternal foes.
Today, the skinhead and Neo-Nazi subculture is full of Darwinian chatter. Whether on aggressively Hitlerian web sites like Stormfront.com or in the writings of the racist and anti-Semitic Louisiana politician David Duke, discussions of evolution as a proof of white supremacy are common.
Darwinian science has otherwise mostly lost its anti-Semitic edge, but its leading contemporary spokesman, Oxford University biologist Richard Dawkins, can't be matched for his hatred of the God of Israel and for his attack on the intelligent design of life. His latest bestselling book, The God Delusion, rails blasphemously at the Creator that he denies.
But it's not our fight, as Torah-believing Jews? Historically our rabbis have certainly indicated that it is. Long before Charles Darwin was born in 1809, similar debates were being fought in Europe over scientific challenges to the belief that God created and designed the world. In medieval Spain, the science of the day was carried on by Aristotelian philosophers who denied that the universe had a beginning. So there could be no Creator in any sense recognizable to a Torah Jew.
Rabbi Yehudah HaLevi, among other Jewish philosophers, knew it was necessary to directly address the challenge of this scientific doctrine. In the story he tells in the Kuzari, the religiously searching Khazar king stages a debate between a rabbi and an Aristotelian scientist-philosopher. (A Christian and a Muslim also participate briefly.) The philosopher denies that God intentionally created the world but instead argues that a series of natural causes explains the existence of everything. That is Darwinism in a nutshell. Yehudah HaLevi saw it as totally normal and desirable that a rabbi should engage in an extended and very well informed disputation over such issues.
Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch lived to see Darwin's influence spread rapidly across Europe after the Origin of Species appeared in 1859. In his Torah commentary, Rav Hirsch was scathing on the morally disastrous effects of Darwinian thought. Ideas, he knew, have consequences for the way we all live. Commenting on the idol Baal Peor, worshipped in the most grotesquely animalistic fashion, Hirsch wrote that it illustrates precisely "the kind of Darwinism that revels in the conception of man sinking to the level of beast and stripping itself of its divine nobility, learning to consider itself just a 'higher' class of animal" (Numbers 25:3).
Western culture has since become widely convinced that human beings, just like animals, lack moral choice and responsibility. Applied Darwinism results in the widespread, easily observable failure to distinguish between people and animals, a moral disease we may call animalism.
Both the elite and mass media are rife with it. So the rights of animals become a sacred cause, justifying even violence in their defense, while ascribing a unique dignity or worth to men and women is increasingly suspect. If human beings lack such a dignity unique to them and transcending whatever condition their body may be in at a given moment--fetus, child, or adult, sick or well, conscious or "vegetative"--then extinguishing a human life when it seems convenient to us becomes very easy to justify.
The social consequences range from animal-liberation terrorism to modern eugenics, right-to-die initiatives, euthanasia, abortion and more. In the state where I live, Washington, voters just this past November overwhelmingly approved an assisted-suicide law, the second in the nation (after Oregon). It permits doctors to help patients identified as "terminally ill" to take their own lives.
And this is not our fight? The Darwin-Hitler connection would be enough reason to acknowledge the evolution debate as one in which religious Jews have a profound stake. The moral and hashkafic aspects of the fight make it, without any doubt at all, ours, perhaps more than it is anyone else's.
No I do not.
Do you think that dinosaurs and humans lived contemporaneously?
Yes.
When Christ referenced “the days of Noah”, seemingly endorsing the Genesis account, was he being candid, “allegorical” or deceptive?
Jesus was directly tying the parable of creation to the concept of the sabbath, work six days and rest on the seventh. Of course a “day” to God is “as a thousand years, and a thousand years a day”.
==Yes, you may indeed be surprised to learn that the majority of scientists in the USA are people of faith.
Yah, right. See the following:
http://kspark.kaist.ac.kr/jesus/intelligence%20&%20religion.htm
==You might also be surprised to learn that young Earth creationisms is a minority position.
Unless Allmendream has already forgotten the Gallop polls I sent him to him earlier TODAY, he is deliberately misrepresenting the facts. He tried to claim that a 2008 Gallop poll demonstrates that young earth creationists are now in the minority (he didn’t provide a link, of course!). I tracked it down, and lo and behold, the poll said the exact opposite! See the following link for more:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2224556/posts?page=92#92
Most scientists in the USA are people of faith.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8916982/
44% is a majority GGG?
I know you don’t know anything about science or much of anything else.
Can we now add math to the growing list of things you have no idea about?
44% is not a majority.
==Is Qaddafi a secularist?
Thank God you don’t work for our intel. services! Once again:
Another question from you ignorant quiz: In 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 was bombed by: (a) A college-bound freshman (b) A cardiac surgeon on his way to Houston (c) A waitress (d) Middle Eastern Islamist males between the ages of 17 and 40.
My answer:
In 2003, Libya accepted responsibility for the attacks and agreed to pay victims’ families compensation.
http://terrorism.about.com/od/originshistory/p/PanAmBombing.htm
“I would like the people to vanquish the government, the armies, the police, the parties, and the parliaments,” he said in explanation of his notion of direct democracy in which people rule themselves without the mediation of traditional governmental institutions. “I am the prophet of the revolution and not the prophet of Allah,” Qadhafi declared in the same interview, “for what interests me in this century is that The Green Book become the bible of the modern world.”
“The **secular** basis of Qadhafi’s philosophy was emphasized further by the Libyan adoption of the Baath Party slogan of unity, freedom, and socialism.”
http://www.country-studies.com/libya/political-ideology.html
Griffin: As the Soviet connection with international terrorism became increasingly obvious, the KGB made a tactical decision to establish training centers in countries that, generally, are not regarded as Communist. In this way, the Soviets could disclaim responsibility.
An example is Libya, under the dictatorship of Muammar Quadafi. Quadafi’s army and air force are almost entirely supplied by the Soviet Union.
Altogether, there are 5,000 military personnel from the Eastern Communist Bloc and from Cuba.[6] Libya received $2.5 billion worth of arms from the Soviets between 1974 and 1981, an amount far in excess of its own internal needs. Most of these arms have moved through Libya and into the terrorist network.
The Provisional IRA in Ireland has been receiving weapons from Libya at the race of over $5 million per year. They received their first Russian helicopter and rocket launchers as early as 1972.
Quadafi has maintained three separate training camps which are staffed by personnel from the Soviet Union and East Germany. He has provided instructions, money, or weapons to practically every terrorist group in the world. He has been one of the primary financial sponsors of the PLO, and he openly has called for the death of any Arab leader who is friendly to the United States.
http://www.realityzone.com/noplacetohide1.html
As chief of Romanian foreign intelligence, I worked closely with Libya’s Muammar Khaddafi before I became, in 1978, the highest-ranking spy from the Soviet bloc to defect to America. I was Khaddafi’s handler as he was gearing up these same weapons programs. Moscow had decided in 1972 to use three leftist Arab governments — Libya, Iraq, and Syria — plus Arafat’s PLO, to wreak terror against our prime enemy, “American imperial-Zionism.” Yuri Andropov, then head of the KGB and soon to be the Soviet leader, assigned Libya to Romania because we already had close intelligence connections with Khaddafi, who, along with Kim Il Sung, had long been eager for chemical weapons, and to acquire Romanian technology for “dirty” suitcase-sized radioactive bombs. Moscow kept charge of Iraq for itself. Andropov told me then that Syria would be next, if our Libyan experiment proved successful; President Hafez Assad’s brother was already our well-paid agent.
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/pacepa200312290001.asp
That poll doesn’t speak to the age of the Earth - it speaks to the age of Man so why are you trying to mislead people into thinking it says something it doesn’t?
Exactly as I said about the Gallop poll, only 44% hold the view of a young Earth. 50% hold the view of an ancient Earth.
Once again the sources you cite do not support your contentions GGG.
Do you claim that 44% is a majority?
You obviously have no clue, Barney.
{Hint: It wasn't a parable (not that you know what that means either).}
Just how Islamic does the guy have to be? Qaddafi is not now and has never been anything other than a Muslim.
There is nothing inherently anti-Islamic about socialism. One can certainly be both. Qaddafi runs a system that is called “Islamic Socialism” and yet you think he is a secularist based upon nothing more than your need to distance Islam from the terrorism that it embraces.
Be sure to put the saber tooth cat out!
It would appear that we have studies that conflict with one another. I think I will stick with the studies carried out by scientists about scientists, rather than the pmsNBC article about a study that mixes together social scientists with the biological and natural scientists. Besides, I thought we already established that the more a scientist is brainwashed by the Temple of Darwinistic Materialism in the form of higher degrees, the more likely they are to be an atheist. Do you disagree with this statement?
I was quite satisfied with my answer.
The parable of creation was linked directly to the concept of the Sabbath.
Did Jesus not say he would teach using parable?
To you does a parable mean a lie because it is truth while not being factual?
==Exactly as I said about the Gallop poll, only 44% hold the view of a young Earth. 50% hold the view of an ancient Earth.
Oh, I get it. I just assumed you meant a contest between those who believe God guided evolution and those who believe biblical creation. You want to include the atheists too. Why does that not surprise me? But then again, you don’t even believe God guided evolution, so that puts you solidly in the atheist camp, the smallest minority of all. Ever wonder why you are always in the athesit camp, Allmendream???
No, the more educated someone is the LESS LIKELY they are to be a Creationist. Not being a creationists is, once again for the thinking impaired, not synonymous with being an atheist.
And do you claim that 44% is a majority? You seem to be avoiding answering that question.
Young Earth Creationism is NOT a majority position. 44% does not constitute a majority. 50% of people polled accepted the ancient age of the Earth. Obviously if more people believe in an old earth than a young earth then belief in a young earth CANNOT be a majority position.
Or are you using “creation science” mathematics when you claim that 44% is a majority?
When Jesus referred to the “days of Noah” it was not part of a parable.
I’m shocked that someone as smart as you always tell us you are doesn’t know that.
After all, we are discussing a statement by your Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ!
Are you anything other than a one trick pony GGG.
All you can do is try to claim that either someone believes exactly as you do or they are an atheist. And you wonder why I bring up the Pope to you so often, and yet STILL you cannot wrap you mind around the concept.
Also, I believe that God guides EVERYTHING. It is Creationists who attempt to limit God’s power to not including guiding things that are random or probabilistic. Are you unfamiliar with my typical riff on the Creationists boogeyman of “random” somehow meaning “not under God’s control”?
Prov 16:33 The dice are cast into the lap, but every result is from the Lord.
Do you deny that Jesus said he would teach using parable?
Does a parable have to be actually true in order to convey an essential truth?
If you concentrate on the minutiae of trying to scientifically determine the correctness of the parable, you miss out on the essential truth that it is attempting to convey to you.
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.