Excerpts of the Panel Discussion, 13 December 2005
“How Should a
Torah-Observant High School Biology Teacher Teach the Origin and
Diversity of Species?”
Questions from the
Audience to the Panelists
Panelists:
Professor William
Dembski, International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design,
author of Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small
Probabilities (Cambridge University Press)
Yaacov Hanoka, PhD, Physics, Evergreen Solar
Lee Spetner, PhD, Physics, currently involved in cancer research Redoxia,
author of Not by Chance!
Rabbi Professor Moshe Tendler, Biology, Yeshiva University
Professor Eliezer Zeiger, Biology, UCLA
The written papers of
the panelists will be published in B’OR HA’TORAH 17 (2007). Order from
https://www.shemayisrael.com/borhatorah/home/neworder/order.php?currency=dollar#standing
Send your question for the
consideration of the panelists
Ramaz High School Teacher
Do any of you teach in high school? Yeshivah high school? Christian high
school? No. This panel discussion on how should a Torah-observant
biology teacher teach the origin of species is a wonderful exercise in a
theoretical topic. I've learned so much. I am going to take all this
back with me. I teach in Ramah Yeshiva High School in Manhattan.
The realities of a yeshivah high school is that there is almost no such
thing as a Torah-observant biology teacher. What do I mean? In our
wonderful yeshivah high school—Ramah has a sterling reputation which is
well deserved—most of our biology teachers are not religious people.
They are not religious Jews or religious Christians. That is the
reality. That's a fact across America. Now I can't speak for Catholic
schools or Methodist or Baptist schools, but I would assume it's very
similar. Can we dictate to our biology teachers what to teach? Rabbi
Tendler, you are in a Jewish university, but you know that school boards
and school administrations are hampered by parents' ideas, on the one
hand. On the other hand, you have yeshivot where you cannot teach any
science. The recent Slifkin affair, of course, shows that either you
can't be critical at all of how biology is being taught in the old way,
or if you do teach it in any way at all beyond basics, you'll be fired.
So I would like to suggest that the place to teach your point of view is
in the religious studies departments of both yeshivas and Christian
schools. But in order to do that, you have to have an enlightened,
informed faculty. The way to address this, I would think, is to convince
our administrations of the need for this; and then to make sure that our
rebbes, our teachers, are enlightened and articulate enough to be able
to take on—I hate to use that word as I don't want to sound
confrontational—our secular colleagues who are teaching the opposite.
That's what I think the problem is here. In other words, while this is
beautiful, it's not happening in the trenches.
RABBI PROFESSOR MOSHE TENDLER
We need a long range plan for teaching teachers how to teach. We don't
have good yeshivah high school educational faculties today that have the
tools necessary to teach Torah in the age of science. They don't teach
halakhah correctly, because they aren't familiar enough with the
scientific, medical, technological background. You can't teach
hilkhos niddah, hilkhos Shabbos, hilkhos kashrus without the
background. A fundamental flaw has developed in Torah education as a
result of the rapid advance of science and technology. In order to
produce competent Torah teachers, the amount of time necessary to attain
proficiency in Torah studies is such that it precludes (except in
unusual cases) any real background and education in science and
technology. Can we close this gap with a heroic effort to teach the
teachers? Most likely we could, but not in the current climate. In the
current climate the modern Jewish schools would rather develop a
schizophrenic student who has his tsitsits out in the morning,
and his faith left out in the afternoon.
High School Teacher
Is this psychologically damaging to do this to the students?
RABBI PROFESSOR MOSHE TENDLER
Very damaging.
PROFSSOR ELIEZER ZEIGER:
This is our sixth Torah and science conference. Until this conference we
have never had the wisdom to present the problem in this way. We are
evolving. This is true evolution. How can we apply our wisdom and
knowledge in real life? It's a problem. First let's say that we are
ready. And second, let’s state the goals. What do we want to achieve?
Earlier this morning I held a little meeting with the panelists, and we
could have sat for six hours trying to reach a consensus. So this is
new. This is an evolutionary process. Please go on.
RABBI PROFESSOR MOSHE TENDLER
I think we can do something quickly to remove some of the certitude that
students have that the theory of evolution is absolutely correct.
Something can be introduced within the scientific realm to leave at
least a question in the student's mind that maybe not everything he
heard in the secular department is true.
DR. LEE SPETNER
How do we do this practically in the short term? I have taken it upon
myself to speak to the high school students. When I come to the United
States I manage to speak to the high school classes where my
grandchildren are attending—that's my “in”—and I give a lecture
explaining what the real story is. Maybe that will give them the ability
to integrate what they have been learning in the biology class with the
Torah perspective they learn in their limudai kodesh.
PROFESSOR WILLIAM DEMBSKI
It's common in industry today that as technology moves on that people
have to get some continuing education to bring them up to speed. It
seems to me that there is no reason that an administration, a vigorous
administration, couldn't say to biology teachers: Here's a workshop you
need to take and learn this material. I think if you're trained in a
given area there are expectations that you are going to teach curriculum
in that area. There's a lot of new stuff happening, and you must get up
to speed.
Question from the Floor A
I would appreciate it if the panel could clarify in some more detail the
difference between five thousand seven hundred and sixty six years as
the age of the earth versus the billions of years that the scientists
claim. This is one of the questions that I came here to hear, and I'm
sure that many high school students would really like an answer, and not
say it's something that can be passed over. It really can't. Thank you.
[Editor’s note: Please see Moshe Carmeli, “The First Six Days of the
Universe,” B’Or Ha’Torah 15 (2005) pp. 21-24. A leading physicist in
Relativity, Professor Carmeli formulated equations that show that the
time lengths of the first six days of Creation do not contradict the
biblical narrative.]
RABBI PROFESSOR MOSHE TENDLER
Students can be told that five thousand seven hundred and sixty six
years ago G-d spoke to Adam, who had a lady with him, Mrs. Eve. They had
children. These children begat, begat, begat, and there was a Flood, and
G-d gave us a Torah. That all began five thousand seven hundred and
sixty six years ago. What happened before that? Proverbs 25:2 says: "Kvod
Elokim haster davar ukvod m’lakhim hakor davar ." Freely
translated, this means that it does honor to kings to research their
actions, but it does honor to G-d to leave some things hidden.
DR. LEE SPETNER
It was none of our business for four thousand years, but now that the
subject has been opened for us by things like radioactive dating, the
modern sciences of geology and, in particular, cosmology and the Big
Bang, it has become our business and we have to address these issues.
PROFESSOR ELIEZER ZEIGER
There is a principle in Torah called nosay hapakhim. It's an
extremely important property of G-d to contain opposites. The principle
means that two things that are apparently contradictory are both true.
And some element of it may apply to the age of them universe. I believe
that we are on the right track. We have coherent, compelling answers
with a scientific component and a Torah component that probably would
not comply with conventional logic. But many of those type of issues are
on the verge of being answered that way.
Question from the Floor B
On the issue that you mentioned, Professor Zeiger—natural selection and
mutation, the Darwinian mechanism—I am happy to accept micro-evolution
and if there are proven cases of that. But I would like to refer you to
a paper brought to my attention by David Wolinksy. In The American
Naturalist Kingsolver and other researchers studied 63 different
papers on 62 different species between 1987 and very recently. I would
like to quote two very short lines from this paper. One says that, "Most
published selection studies were unreplicated and have sample sizes
below 135 individuals, resulting in low statistical power to detect
selection of the magnitude typically reported for natural selection."
And then in another line they go on to say how "most powerful studies
indicate that selection is weak or absent." So it's not clear to me that
natural selection is a major player even at the level of micro-evolution
and I think that this kind of study and many like it need to be examined
in very great detail before we say that there is natural selection in
thousands of cases, and you can prove it, and so on, because apparently
you can not. I don't speak to high school students, but I do speak to a
lot of college students, and I find that if you have the information at
your disposal, you can make a good case for the universe being less than
six thousand years, the causal inadequacy of Darwinian mechanism to
explain the wonderful complexity of the eye, of the bacterial flagellum,
and so on. And in fact when they look at these structures, like the
bacterial flagellum, like the eye, like blood clotting, they come away
amazed that people would even think that such a mechanism could be used
to explain it.
On the age of the universe, there are likewise pieces of information
that I believe are not well known which bring things like Big Bang
cosmology as being more speculation than concrete science. Far from
being the place to hang our hat on, Big Bang cosmology is so speculative
that I believe it's a mistake. I would like to refer to the Rashi on the
gemara in Hagigah, where it says that ten things
were created on Day One, the last two are midas ha’yom and
midas ha’lilah, the units of day and the units of night. Rashi says
that this means the twenty-four hours of Day One. The Rambam says the
same thing. He asks what about the time before the creation of the sun,
and he said that the day was still a regular day, because it was just
one revolution of the sphere. I have no less than ten Rishonim
and Hazals like this that all talk about the young
universe, six twenty-four hours. I think that people sense that it's a
fudge to tell them that it’s millions of years when our whole mesorah
indicates that we are talking about thousands of years.
DR. LEE SPETNER
Concerning natural selection, I think it's unfair to say that we don't
know how it works. We certainly do. There are all kinds of grades of
natural selection. In fact, there's a selection coefficient which is
well-defined. It's a number. The lower the selection coefficient, the
harder it is for the mutants to take over the population. The higher the
selection coefficient, the quicker the population converts and in fact
the classic examples of natural selection that are shown in the
laboratory are antibiotic resistance. The selection coefficients are
extremely high and in extremely short times an entire population of
bacteria converts from nonresistant bacteria to resistant. You take
bacteria that are completely susceptible to an antibiotic and you add
the antibiotic. Now in the petri dish you may have ten million bacteria.
The probability is very nearly one that somewhere the right mutation
will occur to make one of them at least resistant. And as soon as that
occurs, it's resistant, and if we keep the antibiotic there in the
culture, the others will die out. It will replicate, and pretty soon,
within a few generations, we have a new population, all resistant. This
works, it has been shown to work, you can't say that we don't know that
natural selection works. How well it works depends on that magnitude of
the selection coefficient.
RABBI PROFESSOR MOSHE TENDLER
The term "selection coefficient" means mutation rate. Various genes take
more easily, are more labile than others. If you want to see natural
selection, in the second week of February the students in my
microbiology laboratory will perform an evolutionary experiment, showing
resistance, nutritional competence, and other factors, which occur
because of the large numbers involved. In each petri plate there are
approximately thirty colonies, and each colony has five times ten to the
eighth cell, when you set them up properly. Five hundred million cells
per colony; times thirty. You get a mutation in almost every petri
plate.
Question from the Floor C
I am neither an educationalist nor an evolutionary biologist, but I
believe in simplicity, especially when we are talking about teaching, so
I am going to go back to Darwin. In the Origin of Species Darwin
wrote, "My theory would be proved wrong if there is no evidence of
intermediary species." That was 160 years ago when Darwin said that
paleontology is still young and if no evidence is found, then he will be
proved wrong. To this day, there has been no evidence found of
intermediary species. So, this is a very simple and powerful argument to
use with school kids and undergraduates.
It happens that very often there's a master or a prophet and disciples.
Disciples can do a lot of harm. They're basically the ones who create
extremists who misinterpret the thought of the originator. This happens
in all the religions, by the way. Now, the second thought I have is
there ought to be a consensus among the people who share our view of
evolution, or if you like, catastrophism, to encourage the production of
programs that should be seen on channels such as PBS and the Discovery
channel, because they reach a very large audience.
PROFESSOR WILLIAM DEMBSKI
Yes, there are gaps in the fossil record, but the evolutionist can point
to things that certainly look like intermediary species. An example that
I give in one of my writings is if you choose enough colors from a color
wheel at random, you may be able to get a progression from blue to green
just by randomly choosing colors. My point is when a transition isn't
found, it’s not that the evolution is biologically ignored. When they
find something that can tell a plausible story, they will point to that.
By looking at millions of fossils you are going to be able to draw some
evolutionary connections. So it's not that easy. I've heard
evolutionists tell a very good story and be very persuasive in
connecting, let's say, mammals, mammal-like reptiles, up to reptiles.
How the ear of the mammal has come about by bones in the reptilian jaw
migrating. What is the means of this migrating? What is the mechanism
for it? That's not filled in. My point is if you just say there are gaps
there, there's a very simple way of eliminating evolution and then you
expose your students to somebody like Kenneth Miller or, I remember
hearing in Cambridge in 1994, the president of Cornell University at the
time who was an evolutionary biologist, give a very persuasive talk, if
you didn't know what you were looking at. So I would just caution you on
that. These issues are not that simple. One of the things I like to do
in the conferences I organize is to have a chance to hear the other side
and be able to see what they are thinking. I think that would probably
ruin the spirit of an event like this. But it would give you a sense of
what we are dealing with. There are certainly many video tapes to watch
of people like Kenneth Miller in action. So I would just caution you on
that.
PROFESSOR ELIEZER ZEIGER
Is that good science?
PROFESSOR WILLIAM DEMBSKI
I don't think it's good science but there is more to science than simply
dispassionate laying out of evidence. There's a whole rhetorical
dimension.
DR. LEE SPETNER
Gaps or no gaps, even if we found that we have a continuous gradation in
all lines, that's not evidence that one was descended from the other.
This is a historical point, and you need historical evidence to validate
it. And there isn't any. So what we have is only circumstantial evidence
and like any circumstantial evidence, if you want to draw conclusions
from it, you have to have a theory. The theory has to lead from the
circumstantial evidence to your conclusion and the only theory we have
for evolution is random mutations and natural selection; and that just
doesn't work.
PROFESSOR WILLIAM DEMBSKI
There's a quote attributed to Einstein: "Make everything as simple as
possible, but not simpler." I think there's only a certain level of
simplicity below which you begin misrepresenting the truth of the
matter. I wasn't sure if you were going there, when you mentioned the
masters and the disciples who take the masters' thoughts and pervert
them, but Darwin, it seems to me, was a bad egg. I mean if you read his
book, The Descent of Man, which was published twelve years after
the Origin of Species, he lays out a view of man that is really
hostile to any idea we would have of man being created in the image of
G-d. The source of the religious impulse for him is fear of unknown
causal powers. He compares our belief in G-d as resulting from something
like witnessing a dog barking at a parasol that is blowing in the wind.
The dog doesn't realize that the wind was blowing the parasol. Fear of
the unknown is responsible for religious belief, according to Darwin.
The Eugenics program is historically present already in [Darwinism]. The
white race wants to exterminate the Negro race. He wrings his hands over
it because he was of a sensitive disposition, but there is a logic to
this theory. And that logic puts you on a logical train, and you will
end up where that logic will take you. And he saw it.
Question from the Floor D
I have a comment and a suggestion that I would like people to comment
on. In the Miller-Urey experiment, as Dr. Hanoka mentioned, there is a
“primordial soup” of carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen. But oxygen is
specifically left out. Oxygen is a very common element, it's required
for life, but if you put oxygen in that primordial soup, then if any one
of the beginning chemical or organic compounds were formed, they would
immediately become oxidized and burn up.
This basically ties in with Professor Dembski's design detection system.
I would like to know if people are looking for it. Not if there is
evidence that things are produced separately, but if you look at the
system of design of all of life and the whole tree structure as a design
project. If you gave it to an engineer—my background is electrical
engineering/computer science from MIT—to design all the software for
this huge array of physical robotics or all these little beings, the
designer would set out a series of subroutines and use common elements,
some here, some here, some here, and you would see a common element here
and here. Rabbi Tendler mentioned homologous organs similarities in
different components. So, is there some thing where the tree of life
effectively branched here and branched here, and then you see a common
element that's introduced here, as if all of a sudden a new species came
out, sort of like a new software version, at some point. Is there
something that is common on two totally separate branches of the tree of
life and if there is something like that, it could function as a smoking
gun. To enable us to say, listen, that could not have come from here and
here, they were developed simultaneously in both places. That would
effectively show that this was in effect a designed system. So I'd like
people to comment on that.
DR. LEE SPETNER
The answer to your question is yes, it's called convergent evolution. It
is invoked time and time and time again; when two different, very
separated forms or phyla or families or species exhibit the same
characteristic that is not in what is supposed to be the common
ancestor. I showed in my book [Not by Chance! Shattering the
Modern Theory of Evolution (Judaica Press, 1996, 1997, 1998] that
convergent evolution according to the Darwinian theory of random
mutations and natural selection is almost impossible.
RABBI PROFESSOR TENDLER
We're losing our focus. Experiments on cosmogony and biogeny are being
used to further a secular view of the world, an atheistic view of the
world. There was a joke making the rounds a few years ago, about the
scientists who finally decided to challenge G-d and say they could also
make man. So G-d invited them up, and they said, “G-d, You go first,
you're older.” He reached down, took a ball of earth, and fashioned it
into man, and said to the scientists, “Now let’s see what you can do.”
They reached down, got a ball of earth. Then G-d thundered, “Get your
own earth!”
Where do the carbon, hydrogen, oxygen molecules come from? Where did the
lightning strike come from? The lightning struck from a vacuum? It has
nothing to do with a theistic or atheistic view of the world. That's a
given. The issue right now is, can we leave G-d out of the picture or do
we have adequate scientific reason to include G-d in the picture. My
initial comment was that I believe that my father didn't lie to me. He
was present when G-d revealed His presence so many times throughout the
course of human history. This is sufficient for me to include Him in my
theorizing of how things happened in this world.
Question from the Floor D
Just one more comment. The experiments by Urey and Miller missed the
whole point. Even if they did form these few amino acids, that's not the
difficult part of making life. A computer engineer should know that it's
the information that's important, and where did that come from? There's
no way. The only source of that information is some random collisions;
and if you do some calculations you will see that there just hasn't been
time to make enough random collisions to get the kind of information
needed to create life.
PROFESSOR ELIEZER ZEIGER
I've always been bewildered by the fact that the conclusions of that
experiment are given as fact in all biology textbooks. Last year was the
fiftieth anniversary of that experiment, so there was an article in
Science celebrating the experiment. I thought that I was going to
find out what else has been done in that field. Nothing! In fifty years
there was not a single new contribution to science. End of story. What
else do you want?
PROFESSOR WILLIAM DEMBSKI
With regard to Miller-Urey, these primitive simulation experiments
continue. I think you're right that oxygen would gum up the works.
Oxygen is a big problem. So the newer simulation experiments are looking
at hypothermal vents, trying to simulate high temperature, high pressure
environments like the ocean; and I think they've been coming up with
some building blocks for life. But the problem is you're just getting
the building blocks. You've got to be able to put them together into
some kind of meaningful biological significance.
With regard to convergent evolution, I think that’s a huge problem for
evolutionary theory. Yet, the evolutionists figure out something for
just about anything you throw at them,. Now the big talk of evolution is
the constraints evolution is channeled into. You have an octopus and a
human, and they both develop camera eyes. They're a little different in
respect of wiring, but there is similar engineering going on.
An image for me, I hope it's not too inappropriate for this audience, is
a movie that came out in 1967 called A Guide for the Married Man,
with Walter Matthau. It explains the art of infidelity. What do you do
when you're caught with the other woman? He says, just deny, deny, deny.
There's a scene where Joey Bishop is caught in the act, and he just
denies, denies, denies, until his wife is finally confused and says,
“Can I fix you dinner?” I think that's the problem, you catch these
people, and they always figure some way out.
Question from Professor Isaac Elishakoff
Scientists very often, at least in this country, become like car
salesmen, selling the ideas that they have; and they do not want to
acknowledge any positive things from other theorists or any negative
things from their own theories. I suggested as an associate editor of
one of the journals on which I serve, that every article should contain
at least five positive points about what is done in the work described
and also five self-criticisms. Most editors-in-chief and other associate
editors said that this is not serving the purpose of the journal by
pinpointing negative points. So it seems to me that in order to be able
somehow to introduce ideas into the curriculum it is necessary to
recognize first the limitations of the evolutionary theory; and I would
suggest introducing a reader on the limitations of evolutionary theory.
I think that when a student will be able to read such a compendium from
the scientists who are raising questions, they will see that they may be
disagreeing with their own theories. That allows a gap or crack maybe to
introduce some other ideas; and by this means we will be able to get
students who are less "schizophrenic," in the terminology of Rabbi
Tendler. There would be a transition in teaching, then raising questions
that evolution does not answer. Then there are possibilities that there
is a place for something else. I did have a chance to publish such a
paper, not about evolution. It is called "On the Limitations of
Probabilistic Methods in Mechanics." It took about twelve years to make
a poll among 42 scientists, then to summarize the poll, and then to make
comments and have other people to comment. The paper was published. I
got much more responses than to any other paper that I ever wrote. So,
it seems to me that ideally non-evolutionary scientists could prepare a
reader containing criticisms, some questions of scientists about
evolution. I would like to ask you whether or not methodologically such
an approach would be advisable or not. Maybe Dr. Dembski could enlighten
us on that.
PROFESSOR WILLIAM DEMBSKI
I guess the problem with it is that often we are not our best critics.
When the Catholic Church examines whether an individual should be
canonized, it include a devils' advocate. I think it's always best to
have someone on the other side. I've edited books now and also organized
conferences in which we have had people on both sides. It seems to me
really that's the healthiest way to go. Not so much having a debate,
just sparring; but we give each person plenty of time to speak or to
write an essay and put his best foot forward. If you're asking should
you have somebody write a paper and then shoot it down, I think that
feels unnatural, because usually we are invested in the ideas we have.
So, if I were to write a paper on Intelligent Design and then have to
point out its weaknesses, it's best to have somebody who's committed to
the other side do this instead of myself. And I think there are
fair-minded people on the other side, but there are also a lot of
rhetorical charges, a lot of animosity.
PROFESSOR ELIEZER ZEIGER
I have a methodological comment. When there's a non-controversial issue
and a think tank is applied to solve it, then the process is one of the
most beautiful processes of human intelligence. There is a bunch of
people, each with his own expertise and his own biases, and they all
work together. It's really human intelligence at its best. But when
there's a tremendous emotional investment in the issue, as in the case
of evolution, people plainly don't listen. You can say anything you
want. I've had arguments with a particular colleague on evolution. I
don't have that any more, because I see the process of the conversation.
You get to a certain point and then, at that point, the blind closes.
Because the mere identity of the other person is at stake and has no
interest in jeopardizing his sense of reality, there is no more
argument. I have the feeling that many of the debates in this area are
of the same nature. It is not a dialogue, it's a war. And we have to be
aware of that, because that is not a good investment of time.
One of the strongest arguments that evolution people are using now for
macroevolution is cytochrome C. Cytochrome C is an enzyme. The amino
acid composition in many species is known. So the evolutionists can do
phylogeny. They can see how different amino acids have changed. And they
can come up with a transition. The lower organisms have the least
changes. Then, as you go up, there are more and more substitutions. So,
it looks like it’s true that macroevolution is working. I was toying
with the idea of spending some time trying to see how Torah would
explain it. But then I stopped, because it would be a waste of time.
People won't listen. We have many more productive ways to address the
issue.
Question from the Floor E
If we could get back to the educational issue, especially for high
school students. I'm hearing two different kinds of approaches here. I'm
a little bit concerned about it. I just finished reading Kenneth
Miller's Finding Darwin's G-d, and Dr. Dembski is figured in that
book. One of the things I learned from it, and he actually says this in
the book, is that for evolutionary biologists evolution is a fact. Now,
Miller himself is a believing person. He is a believer in G-d, but the
conclusions that he reaches about how he believes in G-d in addition to
evolution are conclusions that for me, certainly from a Jewish religious
perspective, are not acceptable. He does not really accept the idea of
an involved G-d and that there is direction to creation. He doesn't seem
to have a vested interest in evolutionary biology, but rather this is
something that he truly as a scientist believes, because he also
believes in G-d. I'm hearing two kinds of things. I heard the word
"sham" used. Is there any reason to believe that the scientists who
believe in evolution, in orthodox Darwinian evolution, don't really
believe in it? Do they have a reason to cover something up? I don't
think on an educational level, though, that it's a good idea to lead the
students in the direction of believing that there's some kind of
conspiracy here.
The other perspective is that there are true scientific debates here.
But these scientists say there is no debate. So, for a scientific layman
it is a little bit confusing. I read recently an interesting statistic.
Only seven percent of the scientists in the National Academy of Sciences
believe in G-d. And when you talk about the biologists, only 5.5 percent
of them in the National Academy of Sciences believe in G-d. I don't
think we should say that their lack of belief in G-d is the reason for
their pushing evolution, or is it?
RABBI PROFESSOR MOSHE TENDLER
So few people believe in G-d because they think that they themselves
are!
I grew up in research biology, where any hint of a personal bias is of
concern. You read a meter, it's almost 2. If it's two, you have a
successful experiment. If it's 1.9, you don't, but it looks almost like
2. This is scientific fraud, and there has been an avalanche of
fraudulent papers published in the very best peer-reviewed journals,
like Science, Nature, New England Journal of Medicine. These have
been perpetrated by people who did not purposefully decide to produce a
fraud. They were working on a project. It looked good. Then suddenly one
or two experiments came in that questioned the results. They came off
the curve. They really weren't done that well, so they were left out. In
the course of time, a fraudulent paper results.
Our issue now is that the theory of evolution has the respect of the
scientific community. It's the best explanation that they have that
excludes G-d from the picture. G-d wasn't introduced into the picture
because their parents didn't introduce G-d into the picture. So they now
have to work from a secular perspective. Every time you show me a gap,
you have to come up with an idea how to bridge that gap. In the course
of time, you end up with a fraudulent theory. It's not that the
evolutionists start off intending to tell a lie. They tell little lies
in order to keep the story going. That seems to be what's happened with
the theory of evolution. It could very well be that you can bridge those
gaps, as was suggested here, by bringing G-d into the picture. Anything
you don't know is because you haven’t studied yet how G-d made it
happen. Evolutionists have very little going for them on the mechanism
of evolution. A Divine mechanism could be introduced to explain this,
but they're not trained to do that. It comes from early training at home
and at school, at synagogue and at church, to be able to think and to
introduce G-d in your thoughts. But when you leave G-d out of your
thoughts, then indeed what you ask is begging the question. Indeed, you
end up with a fraudulent theory, not because they are liars, but because
they are committed to what they think is the truth, and without filling
in the gaps there is information that doesn't exist.
Question from the Floor F
Should a scientist be doing that? Should a scientist be introducing G-d
in the laboratory to explain something?
RABBI PROFESSOR MOSHE TENDLER
I would certainly think so. A good scientist would stop in the middle of
the day and davven minhah. Of course he should have the
thought in his mind that G-d is an active force in the world. If he
doesn't believe, then he can't put Him in. Then you end up with the
question, how do I bridge the gap? So I bridge the gap with a
supposition, with a hypothesis, with a possibility. And possibilities
usually end up being fraudulent.
DR. LEE SPETNER
In my latest research very often just a guiding principle helps to clear
the way for understanding how things work. I see a phenomenon and I
wonder, what's behind this phenomenon? And if I come up with some crazy
explanation, and then I think about it and I say, “No, that's not G-d's
style. It can't be that. It must be something else.” And sooner or later
I come to the right conclusion.
PROFESOR WILLIAM DEMBSKI
Just to speak to this question of a conspiracy. I certainly wasn't
trying to convey that. David Berlinski, in one of his articles, put it
very well. Unfortunately, I don't remember exactly how he put it. He
cites Freud's Future of an Illusion, which says that basically
those who are in the grip of an illusion never realize it. That is the
point. You are working within a world view, and some things are
acceptable within that world view, and other things are utterly outside
the pale. And for those things that are outside the pale you just don't
go there; you work out the logic of your world view. And if that applies
to science, the materialistic world view will only allow certain types
of scientific explanation, and that's as far as you are going to go. So,
Intelligent Design will not even be an option for them. I don't think
it's a conspiracy; it's not necessarily even dishonest.
Miller, I have some problems with him. I've debated him now a number of
times. In his chapter on Behe, I think there are some real problems
there because he says that Behe claims that there are no examples of the
evolution of irreducibly complex systems described in the literature.
What do you know? I did a PubMed search and there I get four glittering
examples. In these glittering examples, in three cases they're not even
of irreducibly complex systems, the systems that Behe was talking about.
When you actually look at the articles, you have perhaps a one-line
throwaway, "And evolution did this." You don't have any detailed
explanations of how these systems came about. So this is an argument by
irrelevant reference; and he is a master of that. So Miller, if there is
an honesty problem with some of these Darwinian problems, I would
attribute it to him. But I think there are some Darwinian biologists who
really believe this and think that the Darwinian explanation is the best
and do so honestly. But in that case we are just going to differ.
Scientific controversies have been around for a long time. Thomas Kuhn I
think gives a very good picture of what we are witnessing in his
Structure of Scientific Revolutions. How anomalies build up,
pressure is put on a paradigm; then some people jump ship, some people
try to work the old paradigm. And I think that's what we are seeing.
PROFESSOR ELIEZER ZEIGER
When I was a young scientist, I used to believe that science was pure,
and the doing of science was pure. I've learnt completely different. But
what is miraculous is that despite all the human emotions that are
present, science still works. That's the amazing thing. Given enough
time and enough research, the truth, as far as I can know, will come
out. Science is beautiful, but in terms of how humans behave, I was
shocked at the horror tactics that took place in Pennsylvania and the
back to back coverage on the background information that the New York
Times was doing. The more elaborate story was how much funding was
coming from religious sources. What does that have to do with anything?
So this human component is there, but this should not lead you to
believe that science is not pure.
DR. LEE SPETNER
I mentioned a book about the peppered moth [J. Hooper, Of Moths and
Men: The Untold Story of Science and the Peppered Moth, (New York:
Norton, 2002) ISBN 0-393-05121-8]. I recommend this because it is a case
study of people who sincerely believed in it even when the evidence
really didn't support it. Hooper called it a sham in the end; but the
scientists who did the work were sincere in their beliefs right up to
the end. Of course, Hooper’s book was attacked by evolutionists, but to
my mind the attacks were not to the point.
PROFESSOR ELIEZER ZEIGER
It's definitely not a conspiracy in the classical sense.
Professor Nathan Aviezer
When I hear the comments, I think there is considerable misunderstanding
about what evolutionary biologists believe. What I hear is that all the
evolutionary biologists agree with each other about all the details of
evolution and are in one camp. That is not true at all. Arguments are
still raging among evolutionary biology about even the most fundamental
questions in the discipline. One would think that one hundred and fifty
years after Darwin and fifty years after the neo-Darwinian thesis, the
evolutionary biologists would get their act together. But this is not
the case at all. They still argue about the most basic questions. I give
many examples in my book, Fossils and Faith, such as:
What is a species? This must seem like a very strange question. How can
evolutionary biologists not agree on what the term “species” means?
Isn't Darwin’s famous book about explaining the “Origin of Species”?
Nevertheless, Professor Peter Raven, a well-known evolutionary biologist
who publishes in the leading journals, writes: “One should turn away
from the biological species as a unit of fundamental evolutionary
significance. Species do not have an objective reality in nature” [in
Modern Aspects of Species, edited by K. Iwatsuki, 1986, pages
11-26].
In contrast to these views, Professor Walter Block of Columbia
University writes on pages 31-57 of the same volume: “Species do have an
objective reality. Species and speciation play a very important role in
macroevolutionary change.”
Are mutations random? One of the cornerstones of evolutionary biology is
the assumption that all mutations are random. In view of this
fundamental assumption, it came as quite a shock to evolutionary
biologists when, in 1988 Professor John Cairns of Harvard University
Medical School reported in the prestigious journal Nature [volume
335, pages 142-145], that “cells may have mechanisms for choosing which
mutations will occur.” This statement was a bombshell! The revolutionary
nature of these findings, termed “directed mutation,” can be gauged by
the fact that a full decade later, in September 1997 [page 9],
Scientific American characterized these findings as “sensational
experiments” leading to an “incendiary idea.”
Another subject of controversy is:
What factors control evolution? Anyone who doubts that evolutionary
biologists are still arguing about what factors control evolution is
invited to read Causes of Evolution [1999]. The editors wrote [on
page 1]: “We wanted to see what would happen if evolutionary biologists
were asked to identify what they believed to be the causal factors
controlling evolution. Two largely incompatible dichotomies have been
central to this question ever since Darwin—and they have never been
resolved.”
Final question. Has there been any evolutionary progress in the history
of the animal kingdom? This question must surely seem astonishing! Isn’t
the entire purpose of the theory of evolution to explain how progressive
biological change came about? Therefore, how could any evolutionary
biologist suggest that there hasn’t been any progressive change?
Nevertheless, no less an authority than Professor Stephen Jay Gould of
Harvard University writes, in the premier journal in the field,
Evolution [1997, volume 51, page 1015], “No progressive evolutionary
change has ever occurred.” In the same issue of Evolution,
Professor Richard Dawkins, an equally famous authority, writes the exact
opposite!
The point of all these examples is that no one should think that
evolutionary biologists have developed a well-established theoretical
framework, agreed upon by all, regarding evolution. In fact, one hundred
and fifty years after Darwin, leading authorities still disagree
vehemently about some of the most fundamental questions regarding
evolution.
PROFESSOR WILLIAM DEMBSKI
I would say they do agree on one thing, that they need to present a
united front, certainly for the sake of the textbooks. They fight it out
among themselves, but when they come to the public they wipe off the
blood, they kiss and make up.
DR. LEE SPETNER
They agree on the fundamental point that evolution has occurred. What
they sometimes don't agree on is exactly how this happened. And they say
that these mechanisms are subject to discussion and subject to debate.
But what they all agree on is that evolution did happen.
Dr. Alexander Poltorak
In the words of Professor Dembski, let me play the role of devil's
advocate just for a moment. The topic of this panel is how to teach
evolution in the schools. It was given a special angle, that is, how to
undermine the scientific evolution theory from the point of view of
science. This certainly is a valid point, but my problem is much
simpler. My problem is also a very literal reading of the topic of this
panel, how to teach evolution in Jewish schools. The problem is it's not
taught at all, and in some Jewish schools biology is not taught at all.
My daughter went to a fine school where there was a textbook of biology
and the chapter on evolution was torn out of the textbook. I guess this
is a moral flaw to some extent. I mean, we just don't have a consistent
position on that. There are certainly some elements of evolution that
can be used to justify certain ideological positions, on one hand, and
on the other, one can take it to another extreme to justify another
ideological position. And so we have to make very, very clear what is
the distinction between good science and what is not. Our panelists have
done a fantastic job in doing just that, but I think that it is
imperative to introduce honest teaching of evolution in Jewish schools.
Therefore, it is my heartfelt request to you, our distinguished
panelists, please write a textbook that could be a kosher textbook of
evolution or biology that could be taught in our Jewish schools, so that
our children do not remain ignorant of the most basic theories in
biology.
More generally speaking, our role as religious scientists is two-fold.
On the one hand, we are obligated to bring G-d into the high schools,
into colleges, into our laboratories and our work in the world at large.
And on the other hand, we need to bring science into religious schools
as well. I think this conference has done a wonderful job emphasizing
the first aspect, but does not emphasize the second aspect at all, and
therefore I feel compelled to bring this point across.
Another point I wanted to make is in respect to a random selection,
whether or not it is in fact a mechanism for evolution. Professor
Dembski mentioned that some of the people who espoused Intelligent
Design in the Christian community are considered to be apologetic when
they pursue the line of thought that random mutation is possible, but it
is a kind of a mechanism for the hand of G-d to manifest itself.
To me as a Jew randomness is not an offensive thought at all because in
Jewish theology, and Rabbi Tendler will correct me if I'm wrong, I think
randomness plays a very important role and it is typically understood as
a mechanism for hashgahah pratit, for Divine Providence to
manifest itself. Purim revolves around this central idea of randomness.
The name of the holiday of Purim comes from the word pur, which
means "lot." The whole idea that was discussed in Jewish literature and
Kabbalah and hasidic philosophy is that randomness played a most
important role in accepting a certain level of divinity and allowing
Divine Providence to manifest itself. Yom Kippur, the day like Purim,
also is centered around the concept of randomness, the lot that was
thrown by the high priest. On Hanukkah we play dreidel,
the little top that also signifies the concept of randomness. I am not
suggesting that random mutation is a mechanism of evolution because I am
not a biologist. I don't know. But if it happens to be that it is, to me
as a physicist, randomness is a perfectly normal mechanism of quantum
physics where most processes are random; and it doesn't upset my
intellectual sensibility; and if it happens to be that random mutation
plays some role in evolution, and I'm not suggesting that it does, it
wouldn't be offensive to me as a Jew. These are my two comments and one
question. The question is very, very simple. If we summarily reject the
idea of common ancestry of interspecies evolution—macroevolution—then
how do we explain such facts as Rabbi Tendler spoke about yesterday,
that we perform medical experiments on animals, on mice, with the hope
of deriving some knowledge that is applicable to human beings. We use
animal organs, pig organs, for example, for transplants to human beings,
hoping that they will survive. And how do we explain the profound
similarities in genetic code between human beings and apes, for example?
I think that 98% of genome is the same, and almost 90% is the same in a
human being and a worm. Yes, the DNA is the common mechanism here, but
there is so much information stacked in the genome; if there is no
specie evolution, I just don't know how to explain that.
RABBI MOSHE TENDLER
I won't comment on what you said before but it's very simple, An
architect has a learning curve, and it takes a while before he becomes a
good architect. When he does finally become a good architect, he is not
required to build the next house with the old knowledge. Little by
little, he builds the third house, the fourth house right. If G-d had a
plan of how you make an arm, a hand and that was a good plan, there
would be no reason why He shouldn't have given it to a whale, or to a
bat's wing. If that's how you define homology, that doesn't mean that
you have a developmental system in which one came from the other. The
idea of having homologous organs and so on was well known by Hazal.
The Talmud rules that when the pigs were suffering an intestinal
disease, the rabbis would order a fast day. The idea that they project
is that the intestinal tract of the pig is similar to that of the human
and therefore we fear that whatever disease is affecting the pigs, could
also affect us. Therefore there was a yom ta'anit, a
halakhic ruling that they had to pass for that. So the Talmud Sages were
quite familiar with homology. They never said, however, that we come
from the pigs.
DR. LEE SPETNER
I am actually amazed that you think that because organs are similar in
different families or phyla, that one descended from the other. I don't
think that follows at all.
PROFESSOR WILLIAM DEMBSKI
You raised the point of writing a textbook. I am the academic editor for
the textbook publisher of Of Pandas and People, the book which is
under discussion in the recent Dover case in Pennsylvania. It involves
the second edition which is under dispute. It wasn't that this book was
being taught, it was rather that students were read a one minute
statement telling them that they could learn about an alternative theory
to evolution if they went to the library and looked at this book. That
was enough to lead to the court case. I have been working on the third
edition of this book, and it’s been entirely rewritten. It's a much
bigger book, targeted at high school, entry high school, and college
level students, and it will be a simplified version. That will still be
a supplemental text. The problem is that it is published by a publisher
that is servicing a lot of the evangelical community but trying also to
break into the secular market and packaging the book in a way that there
is no overt religious connection. The problem is getting the money to
write the textbook. None of the big textbook publishers are going to
touch it at this point. I did an estimate of what it would take to make
a basic knowledge textbook for high school and college level, a textbook
of 800 to 1000 pages framed around intelligence of G-d or at least
critical of evolutionary theory. You're looking at maybe around 16.5
million dollars, which they just haven't got, and how do you come up
with the money? It's just not there. For all the talk in the New York
Times about how well funded these groups are, it's just not there
for that purpose. Perhaps there is a place for a partnership, but it's a
question of getting the funds together. It's difficult.
DR. LEE SPETNER
I don't think we should be writing our own textbook. I don't know about
the Christian community, but I know that for the Jewish high schools,
putting out our own textbook giving our own version of evolution would
prejudice our students’ chances of getting into university, because they
will be getting a “second-class education.” I think the solution is to
keep the textbooks, whatever they are, but give them a supplementary
pamphlet to point out all the problems with the molecules-to-man
evolution. And that's a much cheaper job.
PROFESSOR WILLIAM DEMBSKI
That's what we are doing, a supplemental text.
Question from the Floor G
The last and the previous gentlemen both used the term "randomness.” I
know this term already been thrown around quite a bit in this conference
and in other conferences I've attended like this. It seems to always
come down to the question not so much whether you’re a proponent of
evolution or whether you believe in G-d; it’s whether everything that's
happened in the universe is accidental, is random, or whether everything
has meaning, and that everything is intertwined and whether we have only
the appearance of randomness. For me, the bridge to this conflict
of scientists versus religionists or the Intelligent Design theorists,
is Chaos Theory. Chaos Theory is simply the bridge. It’s an established
branch of science. It’s forty years old. It’s been extensively proven in
many different fields now, where the basic premise is that there is
nothing such as true randomness; there is only the appearance of
randomness. And so that's my question to the panel. Are we all in
agreement that Chaos Theory should be taught in college science
settings, high school science settings and in religious settings?
PROFESSOR ELIEZER ZEIGER
In kabbalistic lore, the closest we come to randomness is in the concept
of tohu. The word tohu is in Genesis: the world was
tohu v vohu before creation. But tohu is random, non-ordered.
From a more existential point of view, tohu is all the raw energy
that every individual needs in order to act, while the tikkun,
that is the rectification, is the process of reacting to tohu. So
Jewish tradition, particularly Kabbalah, is fundamentally different than
Chaos Theory.
Question from the Floor G
Are you telling me as a kabbalist that you believe in things happening
randomly? I have never heard any other kabbalist make that statement.
PROFESSOR ELIEZER ZEIGER
I am talking about tohu. I am not talking about randomness.
PROFESSOR WILLIAM DEMBSKI
Could I just speak a little on this, because this is actually my whole
entré into this topic, as a probability theorist trying to
understand the nature of randomness. I started writing about this and
doing research at the time when Chaos Theory was so big. I think there
are two ways in which randomness is used, one is as in the sense of
patternlessness, which can be described mathematically in complexity
related terms. There are various ways of approaching this. Basically,
you look at something and you ask does it exhibit a certain degree of
patternlessness, or is it a complexity that is so big, and that's one
way of characterizing it. The other way of getting at randomness is to
think of it causally as the result of some process.
The written papers of the panelists
will be published in B’OR HA’TORAH 17 (2007).
Order now
