Ed. anyone want to respond?
Rabbi Adam Jacobs
Managing Director, Aish Center in Manhattan
In our recent dialogue I have noticed a consistent theme. It was frequently remarked that religious lines of argumentation lack reason. The contention seems to be that most, if not all, religious systems rely solely on wholly unsubstantiated faith to support their beliefs.
Is this contention in fact true? From a theistic perspective the reality seems quite inverted in that it would appear to require an unreasonable commitment to naturalism to maintain a denial of the transcendent.
Rabbi Moshe Averick has done yeoman’s work in deconstructing the popular arguments in favor of naturalistic explanations to the origin of life and has concurrently demonstrated the high degree of intellectual vigor of theistic reasoning. This post is a paraphrase of his analysis of the origin of life problem that confronts the naturalist camp within the scientific community. A full treatment is available in his indispensable book Nonsense of a High Order.
Rabbi Adam Jacobs is the Managing Director of the Aish Center in Manhattan. He was born and raised in New York and has lived in Boston and Jerusalem, where he received his rabbinic ordination. He completed his B.A. in music from Brandeis University and has a Masters of Jazz Performance from the New England Conservatory. He is a blogger for the Huffington Post’s religion section and has a penchant for writing and teaching about the uplifting, beautiful and unexpected aspects of the Jewish tradition. Rabbi Jacobs now lives in “the burbs” with his wife Penina and their five children.
One might suppose that in the six or so decades since the discovery of the DNA molecule by Watson and Crick during which researchers have been investigating the origin of life they might have come up with some pretty solid leads to explain it. The truth of the matter is that we see scientists coming up surprisingly empty-handed and that even within scientific circles, the few hypotheses they do have are shredded to ribbons by their colleagues within the scientific community.
So how is a non-religious scientist expected to contend with this dearth of hard evidence? Some seem to have recognized the dead ends within the maze and the subsequent outgrowth of a scientific version of a “faith” in light of the problem:
“One must conclude that … a scenario describing the genesis of life on Earth by chance and natural causes which can be accepted on the basis of fact and not faith has not yet been written.” (Dr. H.P. Yockey, physicist, information theorist and contributor to the Manhattan Project)
“The theory behind theory is that you come up with truly testable ideas. Otherwise it’s no different from faith. It might as well be a religion if there’s no evidence for it.” (Dr. J. Craig Venter, Biologist and one of the first people to sequence the human genome)
And there’s the rub: There just is no evidence for it. Not one of them has the foggiest notion about how to answer life’s most fundamental question: How did life arise on our planet? The non-believer is thus faced with two choices: to accept as an article of faith that science will eventually arrive at a reasonable, naturalistic conclusion to this intellectual black box or to choose to believe in the vanishingly small odds that the astonishing complexity, intelligence and mystery of life came about as a result of chance, which of course presents its own problems:
“Suppose you took scrabble sets, or any word game sets, blocks with letters containing every language on Earth and you heap them together, and then you took a scoop and you scooped into that heap, and you flung it out on the lawn there and the letters fell into a line which contained the words, ‘to be or not to be that is the question,’ that is roughly the odds of an RNA molecule appearing on the Earth.” (Dr. Robert Shapiro, Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Chemistry at New York University)
Ask yourself, do you believe in the RNA molecule? Do you accept Dr. Shapiro’s scrabble analogy as an actual possibility? Most people intuitively recognize that it’s not a reasonable position to hold. Everybody knows that too many good hands at the blackjack table will get you kicked out of Vegas and that arguing to casino security that your three hours of consecutive 21s are theoretically possible will not be accepted as a valid defense. Nonetheless, these odds are what many are suggesting we accept. The resulting cognitive dissonance seems to have a negative effect on some of those making the argument:
“It is this combative atmosphere which sometimes encourages scientists writing and speaking about the origin of life to become as dogmatic and bigoted as the creationist opponents they so despise.” (Dr. Andrew Scott, Chemist and science writer)
This inescapable conundrum is what has driven otherwise brilliant minds to concoct such exotic (and evidence-averse) theories as directed panspermia — the notion that life was seeded on Earth by space aliens — posited by Nobel Prize winning biologist Francis Crick and at times seconded by Richard Dawkins. The (unfalsifiable) multiverse theory is another example. At times these researchers, despite themselves, seem to grasp the sheer unlikelihood of the whole enterprise and start groping for the most unscientific of words to explain themselves:
“An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle.” (Francis Crick)
Amazingly, even Richard Dawkins has written that, “I could not imagine being an atheist at any time before 1859.” Why? Because in 1859 Darwin published his Origin of Species. But so what? This entire discussion is taking place outside of an evolutionary context. Evolution can only begin once we already have a dazzlingly complex, self-replicating, living cell with which to work. That — the origin of that first cell, not what happened thereafter — is the fundamental basis of disagreement between theist and atheist. I make that statement with a full awareness of the fact that scientists hypothesize the prior existence of “simple” self replicating molecules that led up to the emergence of the DNA based bacterium; but this just pushes the question back a step. There is no conclusive evidence that such molecules ever did, or could, spontaneously self-assemble on the prebiotic earth. Again, even Dawkins candidly admits regarding this notion that, “I don’t know how [it started], nor does anyone else.”
I posit to you that all the evidence points, in an obvious and inextricable way, to a supernatural explanation for the origin of life. If there are no known naturalistic explanations and the likelihood that “chance” played any role is wildly minute, then it is a perfectly reasonable position to take that a conscious super-intelligence (that some of us call God) was the architect of life on this planet. Everyone agrees to the appearance of design. It is illogical to assume its non-design in the absence of evide
Moses
nce to the contrary.
“Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to understanding the real struggle between Science and the Supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community of unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to naturalism … for we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door.” (Richard Lewontin, Geneticist)
I suggest the Rabbi read HaLevi’s “Khazari.”
1000 years ago, HaLevi answered this question
… since God is eternal and Torah is eternal, God did not “create” the Torah. Since the Torah is eternal and contains a story of the origin of life, then Judaism apparently claims that the origin s built into the fundamental laws of the Universe.
So God AND creation are just two more parts of an underlying reality. Science, of course, is man’s best effort to define that underlying reality.
From a logical standpoint this article is poorly reasoned. It depends heavily on analogies of highly questionable validity.
But now let’s take the use of analogy-based argument on its own terms for a moment. Let’s examine the Scrabble analogy. What are the chances of spelling out a particular sentence if you throw a bunch of letters onto the lawn? Infinitesmally small, if you’re talking about one toss; but suppose natural selection has billions of years to sort through possible combinations of natural elements by random “tosses of the dice,” then it would seem the chances of getting a combination that “works” — i.e., that creates a life form — must be very high if the physical laws of the universe permit such an outcome.
Beyond its dubious reliance on a potpourri of unsconnected analogies, similar to the mishmash of contrived metaphors one finds in a badly written novel, the article is mostly hortatory, in response to which one must observe that exhortation is not the same thing as reasoning.
And then, on top of that, we see the author playing the old game of trying to force his ideological opponents to prove a negative, i.e., if you can’t prove God doesn’t exist that’s proof that God does exist.
I don’t know if God exists. I sure hope so. I’ve thought a lot about this subject recently in relation to our troubled world. It seems obvious to me that what this world needs a lot more of is morality, and religion is a major source — perhaps the most important and effective soruce — of moral and ethical restraints on the animalistic impulses of human nature.
The problem is this: On the rational plane, if there is no source of creation other than spontaneous physics (as Hawking has recently argued), and therefore no entity that supervises our ethical behavior, then why should anyone behave ethically? In the absence of God, why shouldn’t we all act in our own selfish interest, and do so as ruthlessly and brutally as we can pull off?
That, in fact, is how our world largely behaves (especially at the government level) and the result isn’t a very satisfactory world for the people on the getting end of wars, genocides, economic exploitation, etc., is it?
So, it would seem that if God doesn’t exist, we would have to invent Him if we are to have any hope of ever living in a world that is anything better than a jungle ruled by the implacable laws of nature.
God doesn’t need to be invented if you believe.
It seems easier for some to not want to believe in God in order to justify and pursue their selfish interests, no matter who gets hurt.
It seems to me that this article relies on the same kind of argument Michael Behe used under the name “irreducible complexity”: argument by default. Michael Behe is a supporter of “intelligent design” much-touted by creationists since he is a molecular biologist (at Lehigh University, although apparently at odds with the rest of his department). His argument was strongly refuted by the scientific testimony at the Kitzmiller-Dover trial in 1995 , as affirmed in a rather scathing decision against the creationist defendants on the Dover, PA school board by the judge. (The judge, incidentally, was a conservative, church-going Bush appointee to the Federal bench, making the outcome of this case doubly embarrassing to the proponents of “intelligent design”).
To paraphrase Ricahrd Dawkins in his New York Times book review of one of Behe’s books at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/01/books/review/Dawkins-t.html, an argument by default goes like this: Theory A is a respected scientific theory backed by loads of evidence. Theory B is a contending theory but has no supporting evidence—instead, its proponents take it on faith. There arises a phenomenon that Theory A can’t explain (not yet, although with further research there’s a chance it might). So, this failure of Theory A to immediately explain the new occurrence is taken as the deciding piece of evidence in favor of Theory B. Of course, Dawkins (following Behe) was speaking of the Theory of Evolution as Theory A and the God of All Creation as Theory B whereas we are now talking about the first occurrence of life on Earth through a gradual chemical process as Theory A (with the same Theory B). But the argument looks the same to me: Life is too complex for its appearance to be explained by a “naturalistic” (i.e., scientifically discernible) process; therefore, it was created by an all-powerful deity (God). In the “irreducible complexity” argument, Behe stated (invidiously, demonstrating a lack of knowledge of contemporary evolutionary analysis) that the bacterial flagellum is too complex to have evolved incrementally. After all, it will not work if any one of its components is missing. Of course, evolutionary biologists have long since developed an understanding of how organisms and their parts do evolve, gradually, serving a variety of purposes along the way. Now, granted, the “naturalistic” occurrence of life is not as soundly grounded a theory as Evolution; there indeed seems to be no accepted, well-tested theory—not even a generally-agreed-upon hypothesis as far as I know. However, the notion of life gradually arising through something like an RNA stage followed by the evolution of DNA-based life does rest upon scientific theories that are universally accepted: chemistry, biochemistry, molecular biology, genetics, etc. So, I think that the body of existing scientific hypotheses about the first occurrence of life can be substituted for Theory A in an application of argument by default. The problem is that argument by default does not qualify as an inference rule.
Dr N ..
You go for the easy part. Here is one that is MUCH harder.
Who cares?
Who cares if something unknown and unknowable created the world, what does that have with anything that affects me today? This creator could be madman or an idiot. Seems better and more useful to do my best to find out who and how the universe was created then to believe in anything that might as reasonably be evil as benign.