By Daniel Levisohn, Assistant Editor, JTNews
Rabbi Jonathan Rosenblum is unequivocal. He says his fight isn’t with science. It’s with “the Darwinists.”
“Judaism is not anti-scientific,” the Jerusalem Post columnist told a small room of people at the Discovery Institute, the downtown Seattle-based foundation best known for propagating the theory of Intelligent Design, which attributes the origin and workings of life to an intelligent creator.
But, Rosenblum added, from the randomness of random selection to what he saw as a moral black hole at the heart of evolution, “it’s quite clear that neo-Darwinian theory cannot be reconciled with the Torah as we know it.”
It’s been two years since the Discovery Institute publicly led the fight against evolution on behalf of Intelligent Design, filling newspapers with the slogan “teach the controversy” to the ire of the scientific community.
The battle reached it climax in a courtroom in Dover, Pa. in December 2005, when Judge John E. Jones III ruled that the city’s school board had violated the First Amendment by ordering public school science classes to teach I.D. as an alternative to Darwinian theory. The school board, he concluded, was guilty of “breathtaking inanity” and I.D. was little more than religious dogma in secular costume.
In the aftermath, evolutionary theory cemented its position in science curricula and the hullabaloo over I.D. largely died out (call it survival of the fittest.) But proponents of I.D. continue their work, and the Discovery Institute remains the theory’s brain trust, hosting conferences and speakers, such as Rosenblum.
Except Rosenblum is something of an exception. Evolutionary theory has failed to attract a large number of Jewish detractors with the same fervor of religious Christians. Orthodox Jewish organizations like Yeshiva University comfortably teach evolution, typically with the support of Jewish texts.
Yet among the ultra-Orthodox, evolution has fierce critics and their voices may be growing louder as writers like Rosenblum continue to publish articles and books.
The title of Rosenblum’s talk, “Is Darwinism Kosher?” was a reference to an article of the same name that appeared in the Wall Street Journal in June 2007 about an increasingly vocal group of ultra-Orthodox Jews who see evolution as “subversive and dangerous” and the vast majority of other Jews who have accommodated it theologically.
Rosenblum acknowledges the Jewish community has never had much of a problem with Darwin.
For starters, he said, Jews are not Biblical literalists, he said. Over millennia, the tradition developed a complex oral law, eventually recorded into the Talmud, which was treated on par with the written words of the Torah. That means, for example, that although the book of Genesis says the world was created in six days, there is room for interpreting exactly what that means.
“The tradition has always encompassed non-literal reading of the text,” Rosenblum told the audience. “Everything in the Torah is true, but you have to know what it’s saying.”
This “allegorizing tendency,” said Rosenblum, is largely the legacy of Moses Maimonides, the 12th-century rabbinic scholar and physician who remains central to the practice of Judaism today. Maimonides argued that scientific inquiry could be reconciled with Torah by looking for the meaning behind specific pieces of scripture.
Other great Jewish thinkers, like Moses Mendelssohn, the 18th-century German-Jewish philosopher, cemented this tradition by emphasizing “the idea behind the commandment,” according to Rosenblum. But rabbinical authorities also worried that the consequences of such tactics put the Torah into a “subservient position.”
Rosenblum said he had no problem with the scientific method. At one point in his talk, he seemed to acknowledge a chain of evolutionary links between species. However, he said, the fact the Darwinian theory accounts for those changes based on random mutations with “no end in mind” is incompatible with a Jewish tradition that sees God as an active participant in human history and human beings as fundamentally elevated above the animal kingdom.
“This is where we part company,” he told the audience. Evolutionary theory would lead to a world without ethics, he said, because any action could be explained away as a mechanistic evolutionary instinct, neither good nor bad. Bestiality, he said, would be permissible.
He also painted a picture of scientists run amok, clinging to ideas that lack empirical merit, overwhelmed by bias and unable to admit mistakes. Throughout, he lambasted intellectuals like Peter Singer, a bioethics professor at Princeton University, Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University, as well as a growing number of scientists who have employed evolutionary theory to explain a wide-array of phenomena, from morality to a belief in God.
“In their eagerness to remove God they turned genes into the new gods,” he said.
Though Rosenblum provided no scientific evidence to suggest an intelligent creator, such as God, directed evolution or created the universe, he said the “the burden of proof” was on the scientific community to prove its theories.
“It is quite enough…that its conclusions are eminently deniable,” he said.
Scientists like Richard Dawkins have responded to such criticism by saying that when presented with a gap or flaw in their knowledge of the evolutionary process, subsequent research generally finds an explanation. In a recent article in the New York Times Book Review, Dawkins provided an example: an assertion by I.D. proponents that particular biological structures, such as bacterial flagellum, “needed all their parts to be in place before they would work, and therefore could not have evolved incrementally.” Subsequent research by biologist and textbook writer Kenneth R. Miller, Dawkins said, showed how, through what’s known as “functional intermediaries,” the flagella could indeed have emerged on their own.