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.
EVERYTHING? Including evolution?
Show us the Bible reference where God says he guides evolution, please (since you’re quoting scripture now).
You sure are annoyingly (dare I say perniciously) “disingenuous” for a Bible scholar on the order of an apostle.
Get a clue: Jesus was not speaking about the creation and he was not speaking a parable when He uttered the words, “in the days of Noah.”
You know endless atheistic evolution factoids, yet you don't know much about the Bible upon which you depend for your understanding of the Savior you claim, Jesus Christ.
Shame on you!
Get your priorities straight.
Your attitude and treatment of others will not bring anyone to Christ.
Are you?
I see Cedric is busy laying down pronouncements.
“Your attitude and treatment of others will not bring anyone to Christ.”
I am talking about all the people who read your post who do not post. You aren’t a very good example for them.
I will grant you that the longer someone is brainwashed in the state-sponsored Temple of Darwin cloning centers, the less likely they will come out the other side a creationist. By the same token, the longer a student spends in a creationist institution of higher learning, the greater that the student will come out the other side a creationist.
But you left out a key point, Allmendream. According to a study published in the Scientific American, 90% of the general population has a "distinct" belief in God. And yet, according to that same study, by the time science majors get their BS in science, that number falls to 40%. And if they make it all the way to the National Academy of Sciences, that number falls all the way down to 10%. How do you explain that, Allmendream?
By the same token, the science journal Nature conducted a study that pretty much says the same thing. Again, how do you explain this Allmendream?
I’ll take that as a, “No”.
So, what do you care, you hypocrite.
Perhaps it is because so many people have tried to use the Bible as a science book and when they find out they have been lied to they begin to wonder about everything else those people told them.
I don’t answer questions about my religious beliefs - so you have no factual basis for your conclusion or your insult.
Your non-answer was your answer.
Christians are also instructed to not lie and to not spread rumors. Guess you pick and chose which portions you are going to follow depending on the circumstances.
All of our knowledge of the physical world comes either directly or indirectly from sense perceptions which are inherently limited and faulty.
There is no deductive proof for anything we see or experience in this world. We can only argue inductively given all of the limited and faulty inputs we have collected to date. This is the old "black swan" problem: just because every swan a particular person might ever have seen has been white doesn't mean there might not be some black swan somewhere he has yet to see.
So science is not about getting at the truth. What science is about is developing useful theories that help us explain the past and predict the future. Useful theories tend to be ones that are as simple as possible and expressible as mathematical formulas or simple rules. This is not because the world is actually governed by mathematical formulas and simple rules, but because those are the most useful things for mere mortals to work with when explaining the past and predicting the future.
The theory of evolution is the best scientific theory because it is the most useful. It could be the case that the earth was created 6,000 years ago, or for that matter 6,000 milliseconds ago. Of what use would such a theory be about predicting the future or explaining the past? It would be of absolutely no scientific value whatsoever.
ID is only valuable in the negative sense: it causes evolutionists to sharpen their pencils on particular hard cases. ID is of no use in predicting the future or explaining the past except in identifying areas for future improvements on the theory of evolution to handle the hard cases.
If creationism is useful it is for other than scientific reasons. Maybe evolution does tend to kick humans off some special perch and give people the idea that anything goes cuz we're all just animals anyway. Maybe creationism creates a story about how special humans are and how we should behave properly. But just because some people misinterpret and misapply evolution to justify their own libertine or eugenic ideas doesn't make the evolutionary theories any less useful. Christian ideas have been misinterpreted and misapplied countless times to advance scandalous and savage ideas. As I said before, scientific theories are not right or wrong they are merely useful or useless.
We as humans do not get to know the truth. All we get to do is "see through a glass darkly". We can take a leap of faith and believe the Bible to be the complete inerrant word of God. We can also take a leap of faith and believe that the world that we perceive around us actually exists pretty much as we perceive it. But in no way can we prove this deductively to ourselves or anyone else.
Creationism by definition is scientifically useless. ID by definition is scientifically useless. The best creationists can do is attempt to show that evolutionary theory is also scientifically useless. This should be a relatively easy task given the difficulty of constructing experiments to prove evolutionary theory. It would be a far better use of their time for creationists to focus on the utility, or lack thereof, of evolutionary theory rather than on ad hominem attacks of those that espouse it.
==Are you anything other than a one trick pony GGG.
Touchy, touchy! You are the one that needs the atheists to push YOUR SIDE over the top. It is you who can’t even tolerate guided evolution (the next biggest percentage after biblical creationists), and place yourself squarely in the ATHEIST camp (unguided/naturalistic evolution).
==And you wonder why I bring up the Pope to you so often, and yet STILL you cannot wrap you mind around the concept.
The reason why you bring up the Pope so much is because you try to hide behind HIS coattails. I keep telling you the Pope carries zero weight with PROTESTANTS, and yet you keep trying to throw him in front of the spiritual arrows that are specifically meant for you. Not exactly a profile in courage if you asked me.
==Also, I believe that God guides EVERYTHING.
OK, since God guides EVERYTHING, then you must believe that He guides the very evolution you keep prattling on about. Please provide some specific examples of how God guides evolution.
Since you never seem to have anything important to add to virtually any conversation, I am ignoring you until you stop nitpicking from the shadows and start advancing your own position. Man-up, boy!
I answered you question and clearly stated my position. Your response to this was to be childish and hurl insults.
I think that you should first follow what your comment says before you expect others to.
Here’s another practitioner of revolutionary materialism (or in your mind, radical Islamist...LOL) that you left out of your ignorant quiz:
At the height of his power in the 1970s and 1980s, Abu Nidal, or “father of the struggle,” was widely regarded as the world’s most dangerous terrorist leader...Part of the **secular**, **left-wing**, Palestinian rejectionist front, so-called because they reject proposals for a peaceful settlement with Israel...”
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Terrorism/AbuNidal.html
Your illogical statements are not “spiritual arrows”, they are an inability to accept that one can be a Christian and not accept your interpretation on the age of the Earth and how life and humanity was created.
You respond to the charge of being a one trick pony by once again reiterating that the battle lines as you see it are “atheist camp” and you. Amazingly dense.
==The same way God guides dice rolls is the way God guides evolution.
So what you are saying is, everything is actually designed, but we just can’t perceive it?
Sure sounds secular to me. Holy war. Secular. Only to you.
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