It was from an obsessive Darwin-defender that I learned of the Anti-Defamation League's attack on the theatrical documentary Expelled, for "misappropriat[ing] the Holocaust." This guy is constantly emailing me. He warned that the ADL had just "issued a terse press release today condemning the equation of ‘Darwinism' with Nazism in Expelled. How can you call yourself a religious Jew and still believe in such Fundamentalist Protestant Christian nonsense like Intelligent Design?"

I thanked my email correspondent for a good laugh. The idea that, having defended Expelled's thesis concerning Hitler's intellectual debt to Charles Darwin, I would now feel chastised and repentant because of a statement from the ADL, an organization for which I have not a feather's weight of respect! This was rich stuff.

Just to be clear, however: Expelled doesn't equate Darwinism and Hitler. That basic point was also missed by Professor Sahotra Sarkar, who published a confused attack piece on me here on Jewcy. Sarkar attributed to me the view, "If you believe in the theory of evolution, you are an anti-Semite" -- something that, obviously, I would have to be a fool to write or believe.

Dealing primarily with the academic suppression of Darwin-doubting scientists on campuses around the country, Expelled only spends about 10 minutes on the Hitler-Darwin connection. But it draws upon a solid, mainstream body of scholarship by the chief Hitler biographers and others.

Undeterred, the ADL wailed that "Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people and Darwin and evolutionary theory cannot explain Hitler's genocidal madness."

Much the same view has been propounded elsewhere. Once again here at Jewcy, Jay Michaelson seemed to argue that all science is by definition value-neutral: "Last I checked, Hitler also made use of automobiles. Indeed, he based a lot of ideas on militarism and machines; does that mean technology is morally wrong? Should you turn off your computer right now?"

No, Jay, there are obvious differences between Darwinian theory and auto and computer technology. Most important, the latter make no claims to answering ultimate questions, like how life originated, from which ethical corollaries are naturally drawn.

Auto and computer technology are also proved reliable every day by our experience. But no one has ever reported seeing a species originate in the manner described in Darwin's Origin of Species - not now, not in the fossil record, not ever.

More interesting than these observations is the hypocrisy of the ADL's outburst: "Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan."

It's funny how when the subject of conversation is Darwinism, then Hitler needed no one particular inspiration. But when the conversation shifts from Darwinism to - oh, I don't know - Christianity? Ah, then suddenly the genealogy of Nazism becomes eminently traceable.

One of the ADL's main fundraising technique has long been to scare Jews by demonizing Christianity. The group accordingly isn't shy about tracing the genealogy of the Holocaust back to the New Testament. In an essay on the 40^th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, for example, Rabbi Gary Bretton-Granatoor, director of interfaith affairs wrote:

"The anti-Judaism that begins in the New Testament was transformed through the admixture of political, economic and sociological prejudice into the anti-Semitism of modernity. This reached its ugly and inhuman nadir during World War II with Hitler's Final Solution for the Jewish people."

Blaming the earliest Christian writings for setting off a chain of influences resulting in the Holocaust evokes little outrage in the liberal Jewish community. Visitors to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, for instance, are greeted by a film, Anti-Semitism, purporting to uncover the "religious root of this phenomenon, the pervasive anti-Jewish teachings that evolved from overly literal readings and misreadings of New Testament texts."

Yet when Hitler successfully sold his ideology of hate to the German people in his bestselling tract Mein Kampf, he phrased his argument not in Christian terms but in biological, Darwinian ones.

Ignoring Hitler's evolutionary rhetoric, of course, some commentators brandish a famous quote from the same book -- "by defending myself against the Jews, I am fighting for the work of the Lord." They don't realize that Hitler was referring not to the God of the Bible but to Nature and her iron laws, as his preceding sentence clearly indicates.

In a curious irony, the modern paperback edition of Mein Kampf, available in any Barnes & Noble, includes an Introduction by - guess who? None other than the ADL's national director, Abraham Foxman. Did he, I wonder, even read the book?

[Ed note: The documentary Expelled, starring Ben Stein, premiers today. It purports to show that views on the origins of life and species that dissent from orthodox evolutionary theory have been systematically, well, expelled from the academy. Sahotra Sarkar, Professor of Philosophy and Integrative Biology at the University of Texas, finds the film unpersuasive. His piece is presented as a counterpoint to Discovery Institute Fellow David Klinghoffer's interpretation of the lessons of Expelled, available through the link at right.]

If you can’t argue for your position on intellectual grounds, try politics. If you can’t succeed with legitimate political argument, resort to ad hominem attacks. That’s what the Intelligent Design (ID) movement has been reduced to, especially in Expelled. ID creationists have produced no credible argument against the theory of evolution, let alone positive evidence for design, a point to which I’ll return. Politically their fortunes have been devastated ever since the 2005 Dover, Pennsylvania court decision in which a George W. Bush-appointed Church-going judge found ID to be religious dogma that cannot legally be introduced in public school science classes. So now we are presented with a new line of attack: because natural selection was invoked by the Nazis in support of genocide, the theory of evolution must be false. To this, David Klinghoffer adds a new twist: if you believe in the theory of evolution, you are an anti-Semite.

We Have Moral Faculties *Because* We Evolved Them That evolutionary theory, especially natural selection, has been abused by various groups for nefarious political ends is old and well-worn history. In the United States it inspired Social Darwinism in the late nineteenth century which was used to justify the greed of the robber barons and the appalling conditions in which the poor were forced to live. In many regions of the world it was used to promote eugenics, including the involuntary sterilization of the “unfit.” In the United States, such sterilization continued until 1981. And, yes, natural selection was invoked by the Nazis.

What this history tells us is that science does not occur in a socio-political vacuum. The results of science may be abused, just as they may be used to benefit society. Biology is particularly prone to such use and abuse because its domain includes humans. Scientists should recognize their moral responsibility to guard against the misuse of their work. By and large, biologists have acted responsibly in this respect. In the 1930s, the great British evolutionary biologist, J.B.S. Haldane exposed the fallacies of eugenics and anti-Semitism in his brilliantly argued Heredity and Politics. In the 1980s, Not in Our Genes, by Dick Lewontin, Steve Rose, and Leon Kamin, played the same role after illegitimate political claims began to be reintroduced in the name of behavioral genetics and sociobiology. When the Human Genome Project was initiated in the early 1990s, biologists took care to ensure that adequate resources were deployed to address its ethical, legal, and social implications.

Returning to the theory of evolution, there is no “inner logic” of natural selection that leads to any moral or political implication. It is value-neutral. We have evolved a mind and, with it, culture as well as moral capacities and what we think of as free will. Some biologists think that this was all due to natural selection. Others suspect that a variety of natural mechanisms were involved in mental evolution. This is one of the exciting unresolved issues in evolutionary biology, and the subject of ongoing research. Biology may constrain our physical and mental capacities but, in normal individuals (those whom the courts would consider as “legally competent”), biology has never been shown to determine moral choices. We are responsible for our actions. For instance, if we choose to use our religious or political dogmas to harm science education for children, we must bear the moral responsibility that entails.

Note, moreover, there was antisemitism before Darwin and it persists today in many religious fundamentalist circles which are entirely hostile to the idea of evolution. The theory of evolution is thus obviously not the source of antisemitism. Given the long history of Christian antisemitism, is particularly odd that apologists for Christianity, as most ID creationists are, should try to use disgust with antisemitism for their own rhetorical and political purposes. Note, also, that what inspired Hitler in Mein Kampf as much as biology was the example of the United States. By Klinghoffer’s logic, we should also reject much of our own heritage simply because it inspired Hitler.

The evidence for evolution is overwhelming and available from a wide variety of sources including the National Center for Science Education. ID creationism has presented no viable alternative. Its main argument has been that complex life forms could not have evolved. In response, biologists such as Jerry Coyne, Richard Lenski, Ken Miller, H. Allen Orr, and many others have routinely pointed out the variety of mundane mechanisms by which complex systems can emerge through natural selection. I have recently summarized these arguments in Doubting Darwin? Creationist Designs on Evolution. In fact, what has surprised most of us is how rapidly complexity can evolve: For instance, it took less than seventy years for bacteria to evolve resistance to some pesticides even though it required concerted changes in several different enzymes.

Worse, ID creationists have never laid out what their theory is supposed to be, besides vague mystical invocations of “design.” We have never been given an exact definition of design, or the laws it is supposed to obey. These creationists have not even been able to generate a research program. This is one of the reasons why the Templeton Foundation stopped funding the Discovery Institute.

Let us return one last time to the logic of Expelled (and Klinghoffer). Let us suppose for the sake of argument that the theory of evolution really led to some undesirable political consequence, which, as we have seen, is simply not true. From this assumption, it is supposed to follow that evolutionary theory is false and we should replace it with ID. Let us see where this takes us. From the usual rules of chemistry many nations, including the United States, have designed chemical weapons. From this, should we conclude that chemistry is false and we should replace it with Intelligent Alchemy? From the principles of molecular genetics, many of these same nations have designed biological weapons. Should we declare molecular genetics false and replace it with Intelligent Pangenesis? From quantum mechanics came the nuclear bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Therefore, quantum mechanics is false and should be replaced by Intelligent Ether Theory?

[Ed note: The documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, starring Ben Stein, premiers today. The film purports to show that views on the origins of life and species that dissent from orthodox evolutionary theory have been systematically, well, expelled from the academy. Previous Jewcy coverage of Expelled is here. David Klinghoffer, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, presents one view of the lessons to be drawn from the film below. Sahotra Sarkar, Professor of Philosophy and Integrative Biology at the University of Texas, presents a counterargument through the link to the right.]

Hitler understood something about Judaism that even many Jews today don’t grasp.

I mention this because you’re soon going to be hearing a lot about a new movie, Expelled, which understands something about Hitler that, in turn, many Jews and non-Jews don’t or don’t want to understand.

Starring comic actor Ben Stein, Expelled is a snarky theatrical documentary about the suppression of American scientists who dissent from Darwinist evolutionary orthodoxy. Controversial stuff. What’s really turning critics apoplectic, though, is the case made in the film that Darwinism inspired the Nazis.

Which, in fact, it did. In Mein Kampf, Hitler used Darwinian language to make hisIs it time to reconsider Darwin? case for racial war against the Jews. He rallied the millions of Germans who bought his bestselling book with an appeal to biology, which, as he argued, revealed certain iron laws of Nature – principally the struggle for supremacy pitting the superior races against the inferior.

Defy Nature, he wrote, and then “whole work of higher breeding, over perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, might be ruined with one blow.” The major Hitler biographers – Toland, Fest, Kershaw, Bullock -- all agree on Hitler’s debt to Darwinism.

A gentle soul, Darwin himself never advocated genocide. But in The Descent of Man, he predicted that the logic of natural selection made inevitable something like what Hitler attempted against the Jews:

“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.”

What you would not readily foresee from reading Darwin’s writings is that the race requiring extermination would turn out to be us Jews. But Hitler perceived an inner logic in Darwinism that even Charles Darwin didn’t.

In the same chapter of Mein Kampf where the Darwinist flavor is most pronounced – Chapter XI, “Nation and Race” – Hitler comments that while his philosophical outlook is based on respecting Nature’s laws, the Jews with their “effrontery” say the opposite: that “Man’s role is to overcome Nature!”

Hitler notes with disgust that, “Millions thoughtlessly parrot this Jewish nonsense and end up by really imagining that they themselves represent a kind of conqueror of Nature.”

There is, in other words, a Darwinian case for seeing the Jews as the ultimate Enemy. Darwin’s portrait of reality in his books is one where Nature determines all. In The Descent of Man, he explains that even our morality is a product of natural selection just like everything else about us.

The Jews, Hitler wrote, defy nature and call others to do so. This is the characteristic “Jewish nonsense.”

Which bring us to Hitler’s insight into Judaism. He had put his finger on a profound theme in rabbinic literature. The greatest sages of the Jewish past – from the the Maharal of Prague to Moshe Chaim Luzzatto to Samson Raphael Hirsch – taught that overcoming Nature is indeed the Jewish mission.

Practically, this means overcoming our own nature, bending it God’s will. As the Maharal (1525-1609) and others explained, the symbol of this unique Jewish mission is circumcision, a most unnatural thing to do.

We perform the bris specifically on the eighth day of an infant’s life. That’s because in the system of Jewish number symbolism, seven signifies the natural order of the world, which in the Bible’s narrative was created in seven days. The transcendence of this natural order is represented by seven plus one, or eight.

The bris on the male organ became, then, a most logical symbol of Jews and Judaism. A remarkable rabbinic image in the ancient midrashic work Tanchuma tells how the archetypal enemy of the Jews in Scripture, the wickedly nihilistic tribe of Amalek, abused the bodies of slain Jewish males. They would “cut off the circumcised organs and fling them upward,” a sign of contempt for Heaven. (See Rashi’s note on Deuteronomy 25:18.)

Comparing the Nazis with Amalek is common in modern Jewish thought, but some Nazis too saw themselves that way. When Julius Streicher was hung, his last words were to cry out bitterly, “Purim Festival 1946!” It was a reference to the Jewish holiday commemorating the events recounted in the book of Esther.

In the story, a minister in the Persian royal court, Haman, descendant of the Amalekite king Agag, seeks to exterminate the Jews but is executed himself in the end, by hanging. As historian Robert Conot writes in Justice at Nuremberg, this demonstrates Streicher’s “fascination with and knowledge of Judaism.”

Indeed. We could say the same of Hitler.

Via Perry de Havilland via Instapundit, here is video of Ron Paul responding to a question about the questions on evolution that have come up in the Republican primary debates.

Paul avers that evolution is "a theory," and "as a theory," he doesn't accept it. I've stood up for Paul before --- I thought the charge that he's a friend to neo-Nazis was scurrilous --- but this is indefensible.

As a backdrop, let's recall that Paul is a medical doctor, and therefore ought to have more than a passing acquaintance with biology, and also ought to know something about the scientific understanding of concepts like theory and proof. Yet here he stands, trading in the most deceitful of all creationist canards, namely that evolution is just "a theory," a theory he doesn't accept, and a theory for which "no one has proof on either side."

Quickly: "Theory" in science refers to an extensive model for predicting data that either is or is not confirmed by evidence, and which is "proven" by meeting a certain threshhold of confirmation. The theory of evolution has been confirmed by mountains of evidence, hence it is a proven, and inductively valid fact.

But there is, of course, the colloquial usage of "theory," on which the term is roughly equivalent to "conjecture," and the colloquial understanding of "proof," which is restricted to deductive proofs. Try saying "general relativity is just a theory" out loud. It doesn't quite go down like honey, does it? Furthermore, think what it would mean for theory of evolution --- or general relativity, or the germ theory of disease --- to be proven or even provable in such a way that it could never admit of disconfirmation. In that case, it wouldn't be a scientific theory.

Either Ron Paul really believes this stuff, or he's bullshitting to win votes. Paul is fairly strenuously sincere --- which, in this case, as in others, isn't always an admirable trait --- so he's probably not being deliberately dishonest. But either way, he doesn't have the judgment to be president. Oh well, scratch another off the list. (Okay, okay, the gold standard insanity and the inconsistencies on free trade and immigration aren't encouraging either.)

Yesterday Jewcy published an exchange on the topic of evolution between author Neal Pollak and Discovery Institute senior fellow David Klinghoffer. Jason Rosenhouse, a professor at James Madison University and host of Seed Magazine's Evolution Blog, sends us this response.

I do not know what you do for a living, but I suspect you are pretty good at it. You probably trained for years to learn the basic elements of your craft, and then honed those skills through more years of on-the-job experience. Now imagine that someone without that training and experience presumes to discourse on your profession. Worse, they make assertions and arguments that are obvious nonsense to anyone versed in the subject. Not an altogether uncommon experience for you, I suspect, but one that is no less annoying for that.

Now suppose that after ignoring your best attempts to explain things, your interlocutor goes running off to the press. It is alleged that your entire profession is corrupt and shot through with religious and political agendas. Then he goes running to the local school board to pressure them into teaching his view of things despite its complete lack of acceptance among knowledgeable people. Then he gives public presentations, announcing he is going to blow the lid off the scandal in your profession.

Are you there? Are you really picturing it? That, you see, is what scientists contend with in confronting proponents of intelligent design (ID). For more than a century every branch of the life sciences has reported that all of the considerable available evidence points to the conclusions that modern species are related through common descent, and that natural selection is an especially important mechanism guiding that descent. Scientists applying evolutionary thinking to their work have been met with a nearly unbroken string of successes in solving the practical problems they face in the field and the lab. Pretenders like ID, on the other hand, have led to precisely nothing.

That is why ID folks spend very little time arguing with scientists, preferring instead to take their case directly to a public unlikely to be familiar with the minutiae of genetics or biochemistry. Tell a roomful of mathematicians that some back of the envelope probability calculations are enough to refute evolution, and they will rightly laugh in your face. But I know from sad experience that such arguments are rhetorically effective. Tell a physicist or an engineer that Darwin runs afoul of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and watch how quickly you are sent to a remedial course. Tell a gathering of paleontologists that there are no transitional forms, and the most polite among them will simply refer you to an elementary textbook. Yet ID folks routinely parrot these bogus arguments, and many others besides.

Continue reading...

Evolution: The big question.

In this week's Jewcy feature, How to Raise an Ideological Warrior, Neal Pollack worries that opponents of evolutionary theory will corrupt his son's education. If Neal's nightmare comes to pass, it'll be in large part due to the efforts of The Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank that promotes the theory of Intelligent Design (ID). ID holds that the diversity of life on earth is "best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection," and it includes among its backers President Bush, parents and school board members across America, and a growing list of dissident academics.

We've asked David Klinghoffer, a Jewcy contributor and senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, to tell us "What would the Discovery Institute like to teach Jewish-American children about Intelligent Design?" Here is David's answer:

No thoughtful, feeling person would find it palatable to live a life without meaning. For many Americans, meaning is obtained primarily through religious faith. For others, through family, career, or politics. For lots of people in the Jewish community, but not only there, life’s meaning is supplied by fear.

Some fear the so-called Islamofascist threat. Many liberal Jews, however, are terrified by the scientific critique of Darwinian evolutionary theory.

My stake in the matter? I work at the Discovery Institute here in Seattle, which almost single-handedly put the issue Darwin v. Design before the public. For the record, I’m a fellow in DI’s program on Religion, Liberty & Public Life, which is not focused on evolutionary or other scientific questions. What exactly would the Discovery Institute like to teach Jewish-American children about intelligent design?

Paranoia has been running high. The Anti-Defamation League calls ID a “challenge to religious freedom in America.” The group warns that, “Many who believe in intelligent design want to teach this idea as science — either alongside the scientific theory of evolution or in place of it.”

Outside the more fevered precincts of the Jewish community, a few of the Republican presidential candidates would not oppose teaching both sides of the Darwin controversy to public school students. Hillary Clinton affirmed her own faith: “I believe in evolution, and I am shocked at some of the things that people in public life have been saying….I am grateful that I have the ability to look at dinosaur bones and draw my own conclusions.”

Like The Shroud of Turin, but for Atheists: When Hillary Clinton looks at dinosaur bones, her faith in evolution is reaffirmed Setting aside the question of how Senator Clinton could draw a scientific conclusion from gazing at dinosaur bones, one notes her implication that Republicans sympathetic to ID pose a “shocking” threat to her freedom to “draw her own conclusions” about life’s origins.

There are so many misunderstandings here.

ID theory represents an inference from scientific facts, facts agreed to by all scientists, like the nanotechnology in the living cell and the information-rich software of DNA. This is not Bible-based creationism. No Darwin critic that I know differs from established scientific conclusions about the age of the earth or of the universe since the moment of the Big Bang. The issue dividing Darwin advocates and Design theorists is a question of the interpretation of universally accepted data for the purpose of describing events in the distant past.

Continue reading...

When I was a kid, the theory of evolution was an accepted fact.

Given my role as a parenting pundit and grumpy crank, I knew I’d eventually begin delivering statements that start with “when I was a kid…” Still, I never thought I’d be wistful about a time when we all agreed that humans came from monkeys.

But times have changed. Back then, evolution was as accepted as the Earth’s rotation on its axis. The Scopes Monkey trial was 60 years in the rear-view. Hard Darwinian science had trumped the skeptics and the nincompoops. I doubted evolution no more than I doubted that my heart pumped blood through my body.

No room for argument: One rationalist's response to a newspaper article seriously debating evolution My son, on the other hand, came down the birth canal into a brave new world, where school boards debate spurious intelligent design curricula, where 66 percent of Americans surveyed by USA Today believe that God created the world in seven days, and where the President of the United States thinks evolution is just one theory. This summer saw the opening of Kentucky’s Creation Museum, a $27 million high-tech “educational” institution determined to teach our children that there were dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark. Now the Scopes Monkey Trial is 90 years in the rear-view, and in some parts of America, it’s like Clarence Darrow never existed.

There’s little chance that Elijah, being raised by secular liberals in Southern California, will learn to believe that people walked with dinosaurs. But such questions weren't even possible when I was in school. Powerful people and institutions are attempting to chip away at rational science. A parent can no longer assume that his children won't encounter anti-evolutionary propaganda. While I’m skeptical about religion, I’m not opposed to faith and spirituality. Elijah goes to a Jewish preschool, after all. But the other side preaches a dangerous ideology. When faith gets in the way of facts, I get angry.

Doesn’t my obstinacy challenge my desire to have my son think for himself? Am I being as ideologically rigid as people who preach intelligent design? Perhaps. But I think the question is a little bit off. I’m not worried about my son becoming a Wall Streeter or, worse, a Republican. The generation gap of Family Ties no longer exists. People who ask me about what I’ll do when my son turns into Alex P. Keaton—a character I revered as a kid—are stuck in an old way of thinking.

This isn’t about an ideological struggle between democratic socialism and unfettered free-market economics. And though I’d argue that there’s a deep sexist component to religious fundamentalism, it’s not really about race or gender issues either. It’s about keeping alive the spirit of discovery, and also preserving essential notions of truth and freedom of thought.

A Creation Museum exhibit of Noah making a sacrifice to God: How can anyone doubt such a convincing diorama? I don’t want Elijah to be a jerk about his beliefs, but he should be intolerant toward faith-based reasoning simply because it’s wrong. So I’ve made it a point to provide him with early counter-tools: a bunch of books about dinosaurs, a comic book about the beginnings of life, and the HD-DVD collection of Planet Earth from the BBC. These range from awe-inspiring to irritating. For instance, our planet itself narrates the comic book, which is just a little too Whole Earth Catalog for me. Still, it’s useful. I deploy these tools much as a gentle, patient creationist father would talk to his son about how God created the world in seven days.

“You can see here in this book,” I say, “that there was a great rain on Earth that lasted millions of years.”

“And then there were bacteria,” he says.

“Right.”

“And they turned into jellyfish which turned into lizards and fish and insects and then they grew legs and went onto land and some of them became dinosaurs and some of them became mammals and then there were monkeys or primates and they became people! Is that right?”

Indoctrination at work. At four years old, Elijah not only knows some basic scientific truths about the world, but he also thinks evolution is cool. It would only be more awesome to him if it somehow involved light sabers.

New Yorker contributor George Packer, who unlike myself isn’t prone to hyperbole, wrote about a recent visit to the Creation Museum that he felt like “a dissident surrounded by the lies of a totalitarian state.” This frightened me. I’m trying to teach my son to question authority, even if he starts with me. He needs to recognize “the lies of a totalitarian state” when those lies are being widely propagated to a willing, paid public. If he doesn’t feel like a dissident in the face of such propaganda, then I haven’t done my job.

* * *

We asked David Klinghoffer of the anti-evolution Discovery Institute "What does DI want to teach Jewish-American children about Intelligent Design?"

* UPDATE: Jason Rosenhouse, host of Evolution Blog, weighs in with The Chutzpah of Intelligent Design.

* UPDATE: Computer scientist and civil liberties advocate Jeffrey Shallit of the University of Waterloo blogs this exchange, here.

Want to blog this exchange between an urban hipster parent and the Discovery Institute? Submit a blog post to Jewcy here.

ALSO IN JEWCY:

On Faithhacker, Tamar Fox reported on politicians in Georgia and Texas who tried to discredit evolution by claiming it was dreamed up by the Pharisees. Laurel Snyder looked at why Orthodox Jews, unlike many equally observant Christians, have made peace with evolution. As part of his year living according to the rules of the Bible, A.J. Jacobs visited Kentucky’s Creation Museum.

On the Daily Shvitz, Josh Strawn reported on an NYC businessman who is suing a Seed writer for $15 million for calling him a “crackpot” in two reviews of his book challenging the theory of evolution, and Francois Blumenfeld-Kouchner panned the Darwin exhibit at Chicago’s Field Museum.

There is at least one thing I like about the creationist worldview.

Before I get to that, let me back up. In my year of exploring the Bible and biblical literalism, I made a pilgrimage to the just-opened Creation Museum in Kentucky. For those who missed the recent spate of news stories, the Creation Museum is the $25 million museum founded by the evangelical Christian group Answers in Genesis, and devoted to proving the earth is 6,000 years young.

It’s a fascinating place. You can see a scale model of Noah’s Ark. You can watch animatronic dinosaurs playing next to animatronic cave people (they lived at the same time, in the creationist scenario). There’s a screening room with sprinklers to simulate the Flood.

There’s also a bookstore that includes such titles as Noah’s Ark: A Feasibility Study, which spends 300 pages outlining the brilliant engineering that made the famous boat possible. There are chapters on the ventilation system, on-board exercise for the animals and the myth of explosive manure gases.

The book is beautifully argued – and I don’t believe a syllable of it. Which I know is counter to my quest. I went down to the museum with an open mind, but while down there, I realized my mind wouldn’t open that far. I could understand being open to the existence of God and the beauty of rituals and the benefits of prayer. But the existence of a brontosaurus on the ark? And an earth that’s barely older than Gene Hackman? I have to go with 99 percent of scientists on this one.

That said, I did spend some time trying to imagine what it would be like to be a creationist. I tried a little method acting and put myself in the mind of someone who believes the earth was formed 6000 years ago. I couldn’t 100 percent believe, but for a few minutes, I almost believed it.

And it was an amazing experience. Most notably, I felt more connected. Consider this: If everyone on earth is descended from two identifiable people – Adam and Eve – then the “family of man” isn’t just a vague cliche. It’s true. The guy who sells me bananas at the deli on 81st street – he’s my cousin. Sure, you can have the same notion if you accept the reality that humans have evolved over several millennia. But it’s not nearly as concrete. The creationist mindset made me feel closer to my fellow humans. It made me want to invite strangers over to dinner.

I’ll never convert to creationism, but I have tried to keep that palpable sense of ‘we’re-all-related’ that came with it.

The best thing that could happen to evangelical Christianity -- not to mention orthodox Judaism or, deo volente, radical Islam -- would be the arrival of an ironical and winning antagonist of evolution. Listening to the faithful grow ever more insecure, make a complete hash of science, and furiously try to Brillo away the color and brilliance of 300 years of Enlightenment thinking, has got me wishing that some charismatic rabbi, the one from Northern Exposure, say, will infilitrate the op-ed pages and cable news channels to argue from wit as much from design.

Instead, what we get are photos of serene beachscapes, turning foliage, righteous white noise read as wisdom, and essays like this one from Sen. Sam Brownback:

It does not strike me as anti-science or anti-reason to question the philosophical presuppositions behind theories offered by scientists who, in excluding the possibility of design or purpose, venture far beyond their realm of empirical science.

A theory developed according to the scientific method has no philosophical presupposition; philosophy follows from the aggregration of determined fact. Steven Pinker may say that evolutionary psychology is actually an uplifting explanation for human behavior, but he'd be a bad scientist if it were not uplifting and for that reason alone he discounted it as an explanation.

Faith seeks to purify reason so that we might be able to see more clearly, not less. Faith supplements the scientific method by providing an understanding of values, meaning and purpose. More than that, faith — not science — can help us understand the breadth of human suffering or the depth of human love. Faith and science should go together, not be driven apart.

Reason says that human beings are conceived through sexual intercourse and birthed after about a 9-month gestation period in the womb of a post-pubescent female. Faith says a winged apparition descended from the sky and implanted a human fetus inside the virgin womb of a bronze age Jewess. Here's what the word "supplement" means:

1 a : something that completes or makes an addition b : DIETARY SUPPLEMENT
2 : a part added to or issued as a continuation of a book or periodical to correct errors or make additions
3 : an angle or arc that when added to a given angle or arc equals 180°

I need a vitamin supplement after this graph:

While no stone should be left unturned in seeking to discover the nature of man’s origins, we can say with conviction that we know with certainty at least part of the outcome. Man was not an accident and reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order.

The number one film at the box office this weekend is likely to be about how man is repeatedly an accident, brought on by alcohol, low inhibitions and even lower feminine standards. And Brownback has enough physiological attributes in common with a Silverback gorilla that even the most fanciful definition of "likeness" cannot disqualify them.

This could be a photo of a maintenance worker at the Museum of Natural History, touching up the scenery of a Utahraptor exhibit. Actually, it's a still-life from the soon-to-open Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky -- sort of a Universal Studios for the willfully ignornant and purblind adherents of Genesis.

Age of Earth? 6,000 years.

Grand Canyon origin? Noah's flood

Greatest danger outside the Garden of Eden? Dinosaurs.

Institutional stupidity furnished with vivid detail and animatronics? $27 million.

Ortho-Evolution: It just took six REALLY long days...This article in the Chicago Tribune has got me thinking... about religion and books.  Religion and science. Religion and secular ideas...

Those wearied by the current feuding between partisans of science and devotees of religion can take heart from an exhibit at the Loyola University Museum of Art. It shows there is a happy ending for some stories—or at least, for some chapters of some stories.

The exhibit showcases books that were once on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the Roman Catholic Church's list of works forbidden to the faithful lest they lead readers down the road of heresy.

The story touches (among other things) on the relationship between the printed word and the development of religion, on Luther (I'll be talking about him more later) and how the spread of printed matter forced Christianity to open up, mutate, etc. 

And that's interesting, but it's not what I'm thinking about today.  What I'm thinking about is Judaism and science.... evolution in particular.

And about how interesting it is that a religion with such a literal tradition, a belief in the Torah as the word of God, has found ways (even within that literal tradition) to embrace scientific discoveries and theories that refute the simplest interpretations of the Torah. 

Because, perhaps, we have such a tradition of dialogue, debate as philosophical process, verbal combat as a tool to moving forward.    We aren't historically afraid of complicated solutions to hard questions.

Of course, we aren't talkiing here about Reform or Conservative Jews. They all buy the evolution bit, and they have for nearly a century.  But I want to take a minute to talk about how Orthodox Judaism has developed a comfort with evolution, despite the presence of important Haredi Rabbis who have fought evolution tooth and nail.

The vast majority of classical Rabbis hold that God created the world close to 6,000 years ago, and created Adam and Eve from clay. This view is based on a chronology developed in a midrash, Seder Olam, which was based on a literal reading of the book of Genesis. It is attributed to the Tanna Yose ben Halafta, and covers history from the creation of the universe to the construction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Today, this chronology is not as widely accepted in Orthodox Judaism as it was in the past. Orthodox Jews are split on the matter of a literal approach to Genesis, but most of them do not hold that a literal approach is necessary.

I think it's important that we all, as Jews, remember that we have our own fundametalist views.  That we have a tradition as obstinate (in ways) as Christianity. That we too have banned books and feared secular discoveries...  I think often we sit in our coccoon of humanist tendancy and pat our Jewish selves on the back for being "advanced" and "sane" as a religion.

But I also think it's good to know the facts. To read up on how we HAVE stretched our Jewish brains for thousands of years to accomodate hard ideas.  To be proud that the in-fighting we've undergone on how to exchange ideas with the non-Jewish world has never splintered us completely.

Further reading:

The Official Position: From the Rabbinical Council of America
Intelligent Design From Cross Currents (I enjoyed this a lot... got me thinking about chance and purpose)
Ari Kahn on Evolution in the Torah From Aish
The future of Jewish Evolutionary Theories From Shamash

An overlooked enigma of political life is why there are distinct ideological groupings at all. We take the liberal/conservative divide for granted, rarely pausing to contemplate how mysterious it actually is. The Hebrew Bible solves the mystery. The solution can be found in the unexpected context of the Torah's seemingly primitive and bizarre laws of ritual contamination. The relevant material is laid out in dense detail mainly in Leviticus, a.k.a. the stuff most Jews skip over in shul (as Christians do in church). If you don’t see the mystery, consider the following: Doesn’t it seem equally if not more plausible to imagine a scenario where people’s opinions on the top-20 hot-button political issues formed no patterns at all? For example, there seems to be nothing that links Al Gore–style worrying about climate change with favoring state-sanctioned gay unions. Yet somehow, to us, ...

The Anti-Defamation League is demanding an apology from Representative Ben Bridges for perpetuating "repugnant images of Jews" in a memo for proclaiming that the Big Bang Theory has its roots in Kabbalah. Bridge's memo specifically calls for all to visit this anti-evolution site and espouses that evolution is a byproduct of Judaism.

"Indisputable evidence — long hidden but now available to everyone — demonstrates conclusively that so-called 'secular evolution science' is the Big Bang, 15-billion-year, alternate 'creation scenario' of the Pharisee Religion," the memo said. "This scenario is derived concept-for-concept from Rabbinic writings in the mystic 'holy book' Kabbala dating back at least two millennia."

Bridges has long opposed the teaching of evolution in Georgia classrooms and has introduced legislation requiring only that "scientific fact" be taught in school.