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.
==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.
That’s not what I said at all. You have demonstrated that for all practical purposes here on Earth, there are plenty of people who call themselves Christians who are in the atheist camp too.
Can you detect God guiding dice?
What makes you think you can detect God guiding evolution?
It’s common knowledge. Although I’m not surprised it’s news to you.
“there are plenty of people who call themselves Christians who are in the atheist camp too.”
Amazingly triple ply dense GGG. “call themselves Christians”. Yep. All of us who do not agree with you are your preposterous quackery are just calling ourselves Christian.
The Pope calls himself a Christian as well, but by your criteria he lacks faith in God, doesn’t believe in the Bible, and is only calling himself a Christian.
You are truly only a one trick pony, and not a very novel trick.
So what you’re saying is that biology appears to be designed, but it really isn’t, except that it is?
Look whose talking! All you do is go around trying to undermine the faith in biblical creationists because they believe God’s word. You are one strange costumer, let me tell you!
Actually, I am aware of his anti-Semitic sister who had control of his work after he went insane. At her hands there has been much distortion, and, of course, in many translations by scholars, there has been distortion, also, so that there is much contradictory information about his thinking.
I, myself, have not read his work since I do not read German, but I have read about his philosophy translated by others whom I trust, including Pope Benedict XVI and Allan Bloom.
I would love to gain more insight on him. I think he was the most interesting and profound of all the German philosophers from what I do know. So if you have any suggestions of books to read, I would appreciate it.
This is what the Pope said in his encyclical letter, Deus Caritas Est.
“According to Friedrich Nietzche, Christianity had poisoned eros, which for its part, while not completely succumbing, gradually degenerated into vice. Here the German philosopher was expressing a widely-held perception: doesn’t the Church, with all her commandments and prohibitions, turn to bitterness the most precious thing in life? Doesn’t she blow the whistle just when the joy which is the Creator’s gift offers us a happiness which is itself a certain foretaste of the Divine?” (The Pope’s encyclical is worth reading.)
This is from Allan Bloom’s book on page 194 (The Closing of the American Mind):
...From Nietzsche he (Max Weber)learned that religion, or the sacred, is the most important human phenomenon, and his further study of it was made from Nietzsche’s unorthodox perspective.
“God is dead,” Nietzsche proclaimed. But he did not say this on a note of triumph, in the style of earlier atheism—the tyrant has been overthrown and man is now free. Rather he said it in the anguished tones of the most powerful and delicate piety deprived of its proper object. Man, who loved and needed God, has lost his Father and Savior without possibility of resurrection. The joy of liberation one finds in Marx has turned into terror at man’s unprotectedness. .....Nietzsche replaces easygoing or self-satisfied atheism with agonized atheism, suffering its human consequences. Longing to believe, along with intransigent refusal to satisfy that longing, is, according to him, the profound response to our entire spiritual condition. Marx denied the existence of God but turned over all His functions to History, which is inevitably directed to a goal fulfilling of man and which takes the place of Providence. One might as well be a Christian if one is so naive. Prior to Nietzsche, all those who taught that man is a historical being presented his history as in one way or another progressive. After Nietzsche, a characteristic formula for describing our history is “the decline of the West.””
BTW, my son had a t-shirt that said “God is Dead.” Nietzsche and on the back it said, “Nietzsche is Dead.” God. I did laugh at that...
All I do is post to threads about my subject of expertise. Threads that you start and ping me to. The threads that you post from Creationists sources are dishonest, ill written, illogical, and if they contain any science at all, are wrong about it (including not knowing the difference between transcription and translation).
You are one strange customer.
And I do not make costumes. ;)
And what I am saying is that all things unfold according to God’s will. Can you detect God’s hand guiding dice rolls? Do you deny that God is in control of dice rolls? Is it OK with you if people describe dice rolls as “random”, or to you would that imply for some idiotic reason that God is not in control of dice rolls?
==Can you detect God’s hand guiding dice rolls? Do you deny that God is in control of dice rolls?
No, I cannot. But then again, it is quite clear that the dice had to be intelligently designed to produce what we call a random result.
And yet the “intelligent design” movement claims to be able to do exactly that, be able to scientifically determine the extent of God’s involvement in somethings creation; as if some things are MORE created by God than other things; a rather ludicrous theological proposition.
You are right, Creation/ID are perfectly capable of determining that the dice have been specially designed to produce what we call a random result.
The Evos on the other hand are forced to maintain that not only the dice produce what we call random results, but that the dice themselves were produced by random processes. Talk about ludicrous—theological or otherwise!
What foolishness. There is nothing inherent in acceptance of the theory of evolution that would make one deny that humans can design things by nonrandom or by random processes.
Thus ordered and functional structures with novel abilities can be created by utilization of random processes, an ability seen manifest in humanity, yet “cdesign proponentists” deny that God could have the power to do the same.
The point is, when Evos find biological machinery that is finely tuned to produce random results, they have to assume that the finely tuned machinery was produced by random processes, and not design...lest a divine foot get through their materialist door.
Or to put it in the words of Alex Williams, writing for the Journal of Creation (I’m pinging a few others as they have expressed an interest in this subject at one time or another):
Gregor Mendel showed experimentally that—for certain carefully chosen characters—inheritance was carried by paired factors (genes on homologous chromosomes) that dissociate during gamete formation (meiosis) and then recombine randomly (according to the laws of chance) during fertilization. It has ever since been widely assumed among biologists that random natural variation points back to the possibility of a random natural origin. Nothing could be further from the truth.
A random outcome is surprisingly difficult to obtain, and it is always constrained and not open-ended as evolutionists require for ‘goo-to-you-via-the-zoo’ evolution. The tossing of an unbiased coin can produce a random result but only between two possibilities—heads or tails. The tossing of an unbiased die can produce a random result, but only among its six possible faces. Even a computer cannot produce a truly random result because it does calculations and calculations always produce predictable results.17
Truly random outcomes are difficult to obtain because they crucially depend upon the stability of the system that produces them. If Mendel’s pea plants had not reliably produced seeds from independently segregating cell divisions every generation, and had not produced a sufficiently large amount of pollen to ensure independent fertilization events, he could never have discovered the random outcomes that showed him the laws of hybridization. Likewise, coin-tossing produces random outcomes only while the coin remains solidly round and flat, and the die only works if it remains rigid and unbroken. Any system that is capable of continually producing a chance outcome must have a stable core mechanism. Indeed, any system that varies continually in any manner, random or otherwise, without a core of stability will quickly encounter an error catastrophe—changes mount upon changes until the core functionality collapses.
The random variation we observe in biology provides a powerful case for intelligent design. It requires a wellengineered underlying mechanism of stability to protect itself from error catastrophe, and it is not infinitely plastic but constrained to the range of possible outcomes provided by the kinds of gene regulation combinations accessible to it.
Finely tuned anything produced by random processes defies credibility.
I still can't figure how they mock *Goddidit* with a straight face and then offer that *nothing* did it, for no reason, all by itself.
They don’t have to answer to “nothing.”
Those are constrained by the possible combinations of chemical bonds the the elements are capable of forming. ID proponents seem to constrain themselves to only considering life to have been intelligently designed. The idea that life is a subsequent consequence of an intelligently designed universe doesn't seem to be something they can fit into that theory.
It still comes down to an argument for intelligent design, but only as far as it remains consistent with biblical creationism.
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