Darwin As Monkey: historical, and rife with metaphorical implications, tooJewcy’s own Peter Bebergal has a nice long article over at Nextbook about the religious ramifications of Creationism, and anything that limits the Bible to literalism. His point, basically, is that besides the dangerous negative effect that creationism has on science and people’s understanding of the world, it also limits the Bible to a historical account of the world, instead of a story with limitless metaphorical possibilities and implications. Creationism disallows some of the deeper and more transcendent understandings of the Bible.

I have two problems with Bebergal’s critique. The first is that historical events can have metaphorical implications. If the Bible is a literal account of the world’s history, that doesn’t make any of its metaphors any less potent.  It might even lend them some credibility to them. If the world really was overrun by a huge flood, with only one family and a boatload of animals surviving, that would certainly serve to teach us a lesson or two about behavior, reward and punishment, and what it means to be a human entrusted with restarting a frightening venture. Having a generally literal understanding of the Bible doesn’t preclude us from adding commentary, or another level of meaning that can be relevant to our lives.

Second, the Bible is not all stories.  Much of it is a presentation of a legal system, which does certainly have metaphorical implications, but which is also clearly presented as a literal guidebook for life. Here are things we can and cannot eat. People we can and cannot marry. Here are rules for warfare, for farming, and domestic life. These things can be understood metaphorically, but for millennia Jews have understood them to be commandments, not just metaphors designed to get us thinking about the world around us and our place in it.

Understanding the story of creation as a metaphor concerning responsibility, partnership, and ecology is all well and good. But if you understand the commandment ‘Do not murder’ as anything other than what it seems to mean on its face, you’re being intentionally obtuse.

I don’t go in for Creationism or Intelligent Design. I love Judaism and Torah, and I believe in God but I’m embarrassed by the conduct of many religious people in the face of hard science. Like Bebergal I’m looking for something that can jive my religious convictions with Jewish text, but for me it needs to be more than a metaphor.

The Devil's in the details: David BerlinskiFile this in the Shit Where You Eat Department. My other digital stomping ground, Pajamas Media, has run a rather silly piece by one of the cleverer sophists of the Intelligent Design movement (do I mean to say 'moment'?), David Berlinski. A trained mathematician with a doctorate from Princeton and author of the just published The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions, Berlinski is a high-profile member of the Discovery Institute, a religious think tank that sets upon Darwin's theory the way lions used to set upon Christians, and whose primus inter pares David Klinghoffer has had multiple outpourings in these pages, most recently comparing evolutionism to Nazism.

Slate's inestimable David Engber recently profiled Berlinski in a series of pieces about the conspiracy-mongering paranoids of pseudoscience:

Berlinski's radical and often wrong-headed skepticism represents an ascendant style in the popular debate over American science: Like the recent crop of global-warming skeptics, AIDS denialists, and biotech activists, Berlinski uses doubt as a weapon against the academy—he's more concerned with what we don't know than what we do. He uses uncertainty to challenge the scientific consensus; he points to the evidence that isn't there and seeks out the things that can't be proved. In its extreme and ideological form, this contrarian approach to science can turn into a form of paranoia—a state of permanent suspicion and outrage. But Berlinski is hardly a victim of the style. He's merely its most methodical practitioner.

What distinguished Berlinski from the pack is that he is not a believer himself; only an enemy of what he sees as belief's arrogant opponents. As one of his book jackets says, his ambition is to "turn the scientific community's cherished skepticism back on itself." He doubts the Big Bang could account for the origins of the universe, and he is unimpressed with the fossil record as a document of man's development into the lowly, febrile creature you see in the mirror each morning. So Berlinski is more of a fellow traveler and jujitsu artist of Intelligent Design than a true keeper of the flame.

I should add that my friend and fellow Nabokovian Ron Rosenbaum, who is the kind of literary journalist I want to be when I grow up, has called Berlinski "that rara avis, a True Skeptic, one of the most provocative—and courageous—of contemporary writers and thinkers. To me, Mr. Berlinski is a genuine intellectual hero." Now Ron has met the man in the flesh and so may have glimpsed a gem-like flame I keep missing in my investigations of Berlinski's scholarship. I should also admit that I'm capable of little commentary on advanced calculus beyond the Barbie-like assertion that it's "hard," but I do know something about logic and the fashioning of an intellectual argument. I can also affirm that Steven Pinker, one of Berlinski's foils, is not a fraud, nor does he present his theses as "dogmatically established, beyond the purview of doubt." Pinker recognizes that science still has much more to learn than it has to teach, but, unlike Berlinski, he does not believe existing epistemological lacunae are sufficient explanations for the existence of the divine.

Insane moral equivalence seems to be a trademark characteristic of this latest Great Awakening of cranks and fantasists, and Berlinski provides a good example at Pajamas, likening atheist scientists to Soviet commissars:

The commissars having vacated the scene, it is the scientific community that has acquired their authority. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Stephen Weinberg, Vic Stenger, Sam Harris, and most recently the mathematician John Paulos, have had a look around: They haven’t seen a thing. No one could have seen less.

It is curious that so many scientists should have recently embraced atheism. The great physical scientists — Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Clerk Maxwell, Albert Einstein — were either men of religious commitment or religious sensibility.

This comes as a kind of evidence against interest throat-clearing before introducing a supposed snatch of "gotchas" in the new Ben Stein-produced documentary Expelled, which is to Intelligent Design what Michael Moore was to Saddam Hussein, and which makes much the same case as Berlinski does here -- that practitioners of junk science have been hounded like Zionist-Trotskyist-CIA-deviationists out of the workers' paradise of the scientific community. Did you know that if asked Richard Dawkins can't certify for 100% certain that there is not a prime mover in the universe? Q.E.D. there is one.

I'm not sure if Berlinski knows less about science or about Communism, but I certainly know more about the latter than he, so let's begin there.

It is of course untrue to say that the Soviet citizenry believed the Politburo to be "infallible;" it had been indoctrinated to believe that under Marxism-Leninism the Party itself was infallible and greater than any one man or collection of men. The Russian word for this was Partiinost, and it is why high-ranking Communists were routinely purged without any threat posed to the larger totalitarian system that produced and replaced them as interchangeably as cogs. One might make the case that Stalin was, in the popular imagination, an unerring supreme leader, but that historical observation comes at the expense of religion, not materialism. Indeed, many scholars of Russian political history have traced Stalin's personality cult back to the time of Golden Horde. The autocratic political imprint left by the Mongolian conquerors of infant Russia was then fused with Byzantine Caesaropapism, which is why the czars were not just secular heads of state, but godheads anointed and certified by the Eastern Orthodox Church. (As Peter the Great was given to remark when told Russia needed a holy Patriarch, Russia already had one -- himself.)

As for classical Marxism, apart from being so greatly at odds with the messianic or ecclesiastical tradition, it was, as the French philosopher Raymond Aron once put it, a "Christian heresy;" a political movement that foreordained Providence on earth, where class took the place of sin. An apter comparison for Berlinski to have made, then, would be between the Soviet commissars and the clerisy during the Inquisition, both in terms of the brutal methods of interrogation employed and the interrogators' core objectives. (Dr. Dawkins's very participation in a shambolic documentary like Expelled is proof of his willingness confront and challenge adversarial thinking, a willingness which the commissars and the priestly agents of Torquemada were not known for sharing.)

Communism, it must also be said, was not favorably disposed to the kind of science understood and practiced by the atheists Berlinski cites. One need only look at Lysenkoism or some of Stalin's sillier linguistic theories to see how vulgarized and ideologized science was in the former Soviet Union -- the Baconian method of inquiry and trial and error never had a fighting chance. Nor would anyone trained even at the elementary level in the philosophical underpinnings of that method fail to spot the problem with a question like this:

"[W]hat reason do we have to suppose that God might not exist?"

One can't prove a negative proposition, and the burden of providing evidence still falls to Berlinski and his contrarian cohort. Why should we suppose God does exist? Mention of the awe and mystery of the universe only begs the question.

As for Albert Einstein, he was once asked if he believed in the divine and replied, "I believe in Spinoza's god," which is as polite an admission of atheism as anyone has ever given. Unless of course believers wouldn't mind replacing "God" with the word "Nature" as the great Jewish sage was tellingly given to do -- after being excommunicated by a rather commissar-like Dutch rabbinate.

Related in Jewcy: Philosopher and biologist Sahotra Sarkar explains that "'Intelligent Design' Creationism is an Immoral Fraud."

[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.

Ben Stein: Schoolboy rebel Ben Stein has worn many hats throughout the course of his professional life. He has been a writer, a professor, a lawyer, a Hollywood consultant, and, famously, an actor and gameshow host. He even had a stint as a speechwriter for Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Now Stein is simultaneously taking on some new roles: Documentary filmmaker, self-proclaimed rebel of our generation, and…Intelligent Design proponent? Beginning April 18, he’s bringing his rebellious self to a theater near you with his new movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a documentary about the freedom of speech (or lack thereof) surrounding the Intelligent Design/Darwinism debate.

Stein lays the foundation for his quest in the opening to the film’s impending-doom-filled trailor:

Like most people, I also have questions. Very big questions, like how did we get here? Where are we going? Is there a meaning and purpose in life? Or are we, the universe, and everything in it, merely the result of pure dumb fate and chance? For most of my life, I believe the answers to these questions were fairly straightforward. Everything that exists was created by a loving God.

Fair enough. Respecting that very smart people, namely Darwinist scientists, believe otherwise, Stein remained untroubled by the matter, acknowledging that Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Inquiry entitles everyone to express his own opinion and to pursue his own research. But then the primordial soup hit the fan. Stein heard about Richard Sternberg, former managing editor of Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, a scientific journal affiliated with the Smithsonian Institute, who lost his job and suffered academic and professional persecution simply by allowing an article by Discovery Institute mastermind Stephen C. Meyer to be published. Stein regarded this event as a tragedy, with dangerous implications. <!--[endif]-->

“We believe in a free society,” Stein says. “This isn’t Nazi Germany.” He claims that we are living in a “Era of Darwin” in which people must learn to shut up and play along with the paradigm of evolution, or to face dire consequences. And, according to Stein, everyone is in on the conspiracy, including the media, the academy, and the court systems. The logical conclusion: Darwinists are afraid and are hiding something.

The Mouse Trap: Too complex to work without one of its parts His main argument is that in the time of Galileo, Intelligent Design theorists would have had no problem propagating and vocalizing their ideas. Too bad that in making such an argument, Stein completely overlooks the fact that Galileo was placed under house arrest, had his books banned, and was forced to discredit all of his research, simply for having the audacity to say that the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around.

Ultimately, Stein concludes that “Darwinism is not only improbable, it might actually be dangerous.” In a November 2007 interview with Bill O’Reilly, Stein says that he sees gaps in Darwinism that no one is attempting to fill except for Intelligent Design Theorists. Whether or not these theorists turn out to be right is irrelevant, he says—the simple fact that they attempt to provide a counterpoint is noble in itself.

Even if this is a fair argument, it is hard to pick out amid Stein’s use of Design-smattered terminology. In the interview, he refers to Darwin’s theory as a “relic” left over from 19^th century imperialism which states that humans evolved from monkeys (Darwin never said this, by the way) and that life started when some lightning hit a puddle of mud, a theory about which Stein says, “that has never struck me as convincing.” When he says that the cell’s perfectly moving thousands of parts can only be explained by the hand of a benevolent God, he sounds like Michael Behe in “Irreducible Complexity.” These little comments makes it seem like Stein has already made up his mind about which camp is emitting the most truth.

With the releasing of Expelled, Stein sets himself up to be the voice of the subjugated Intelligent Design theorist. And he’s expecting to change some opinions and to raise some controversy. He says:

I now realize that it was my duty to get the word out, to warn others before it’s too late. So I’m gonna begin by warning you. Feel free to watch this film if you must, and I hope you do. But you’ve got to know that doing so could land you in a heap of trouble. Some of you are gonna lose your friends for watching this film. Some of you may even lose your jobs. In fact, if you’re a scientist with any hope of a future, I suggest you leave right now…but if you do leave, will anyone be left to fight this battle? Anyone? Anyone?

Advanced screening reviews are, uh, mixed – according to the Expelled newsroom, Richard Dawkins gave it a thumbs down, but Rush Limbaugh thought it was great! But the question remains: Is it even possible to criticize the movie without being written off as narrow-minded? I guess we shall see, starting April 18.

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.

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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.

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