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The Theist Holds the Intellectual High Ground
The Theist holds the Intellectual High-Ground
By Rabbi Moshe Averick
On 3/6/11 Rabbi Adam Jacobs, managing director of Aish Hatorah, NYC, and columnist for the religion section of the Huffington Post, wrote an article entitled, “A Reasonable Argument for God’s Existence.” It elicited an avalanche of both “Liked this” postings to Facebook (8000) and Comments (6500). Many of the comments were from non-believers who very strongly disagreed with its contents. Rabbi Jacobs mentioned that some of the ideas in the article had been drawn from my recently published book Nonsense of a High Order: The Confused and Illusory World of the Atheist. http://www.rabbimaverick.com/
Dr. Jerry Coyne, the well known atheistic/evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, on his own blog, took some potshots at both Rabbi Jacobs and myself, and in a post that was long on sarcasm and short on substance, ridiculed the idea that one could draw conclusions about the existence of God from the complete bafflement of scientists regarding a naturalistic origin of life.He also accused Rabbi Jacobs of misrepresenting a statement by the late Nobel Prize winning scientist, Francis Crick.
I personally was hoping that Professor Richard Dawkins, would also weigh in, but maybe he needed a break after lecturing at the Origins Conference at Arizona State University. Although Professor Dawkins was a member of the distinguished panel of scientists discussing the origin of life, the fact that everyone at the conference seemed to be clueless about how life began, probably squelched his enthusiasm to comment on the article. (See Dennis Overbye – New York Times, “A Romp Into Theories of the Cradle of Life”, 2/21/11) Dr. Coyne would have done well to attend the conference also, because there he could have heard Dr. Paul Davies, an expert on Origin of Life research, explain the implications of the disputed statement by Francis Crick in the same way as Rabbi Jacobs. It’s a dark day for non-believers when an orthodox rabbi understands Francis Crick more clearly than a University of Chicago biologist.
The objections to “A Reasonable Argument for God’s Existence” invariably fell into one of the following categories:
- Rabbi, this is just the old “Argument from Ignorance” or a “god-of-the gaps” argument
- Rabbi, you ignored the implications of Darwinian Evolution
- Rabbi, you ignored current Origin of Life research, particularly the RNA-World research
- Rabbi, you are “quote mining” (i.e. presenting statements by scientists out of context and misleading the readers)
- Rabbi, this is just the “Argument from Incredulity”
- Rabbi, you are “primitive, backward, superstitious and anti-science”
- Rabbi, who created the creator?
- Rabbi, we must have unwavering faith in Science and Scientists
In the spirit of reasoned discourse and seeking the truth, I present my response below to each of these objections.
“Rabbi, just because science does not know how life started does not mean that godidit” (The Argument from Ignorance, or god-of-the-gaps)
If the argument being presented was in fact: “We do not know how life started, ergo it was created by God”, this objection might very well be valid. However, this is not the argument being presented. The argument is as follows: All human beings from time immemorial have, based on reason and experience, operated under the principle that highly specified information (i.e. drawings on cave walls, inscriptions in stone, poetry, computer code, etc.), and functional complexity beyond a certain level (Bicycle, tape recorder, computers, etc.), are always the result of intelligent purpose and intervention. This principle is not based on what we don’t know; it is based on what we do know and experience about the sources of specified information and functional complexity. This is the reason why SETI scientists sit and wait for purposeful patterns of radio transmissions from outer space. If these scientists detected a radio transmission from the great spiral galaxy delineating in perfect Morse Code the exact chemical formula of the DNA of a fruit fly, there would only be one of two conclusions: A. We had made contact with ET, or B. Someone at NASA was playing a colossal joke on everyone. The one possibility that would not be considered – at least not by those with a reasonable grasp on reality – is that the transmission was the result of some naturalistic process guided solely by the laws of chemistry and physics that took place over a period of 300 million years, and which clothed the message in an “illusion of design and purpose.” (For those who are familiar with Dawkinspeak: Designoid transmissions)
Illya Prigogine, (Nobel Prize-Chemistry, 1977), once wrote that, “let us have no illusions…[we] are unable to grasp the extreme complexity of the simplest of organisms.” The DNA of a bacterium (the simplest type of living organism known to have existed) contains an encyclopedic amount of pure digitally encoded information that directs the highly sophisticated molecular machinery within the cell membrane. “The machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like…DNA characters are copied with an accuracy that rivals anything that modern engineers can do…DNA messages are pure digital code.” (Please forgive me for quoting the well known creationist and proponent of ID, Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden) The obvious conclusion – at least for those with a reasonable grasp on reality – is that both the code and the sophisticated molecular machinery are the result of intelligent purpose and intervention. In other words, just as the highly specified hypothetical message discussed above is itself the evidence of its intelligent source, the highly specified genetic information and the extraordinarily high level of functional complexity of the bacterium, are themselves the evidence of its Intelligent Designer.
There is nothing even approaching conclusive evidence that any life form “simpler” than a bacterium ever existed. To get a range on the enormous challenges involved in bridging the gaping chasm between non-life and life, consider the following: “The difference between a mixture of simple chemicals and a bacterium, is much more profound than the gulf between a bacterium and an elephant.” (Dr. Robert Shapiro, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry, NYU), and distinguished biologist, Dr. Lynn Margulis, “To go from bacterium to people is less of a step than to go from a mixture of amino acids to a bacterium.” If you wish to assert that this quantum leap was the result of some as yet unknown undirected naturalistic process, then demonstrate it conclusively using empirical evidence like any other scientific hypothesis. If you feel that Darwinian Evolution challenges these conclusions, please see the next section.
“Rabbi, aren’t you aware that Darwinian Evolution shows us that undirected processes can produce astounding functional complexity?” (In Dawkinspeak, extrapolating from the Darwinian Evolutionary process to understand Origin of Life is called “Consciousness Raising”, in fact, as we shall see below it would more accurately be described as “putting the cart before the horse.”)
Darwinian Evolution (the truth of which I will concede for arguments sake) is based on mutations that occur in the genetic material contained in the DNA of a self replicating organism. Since Darwinian Evolution is not operative or relevant until a DNA based self replicating system is in place, it obviously cannot explain the existence of the first self replicating bacterium that contains DNA. The very best that Darwinian Evolution can tell us is the following: Once you have in place a dazzlingly sophisticated piece of molecular machinery and an astoundingly sophisticated digitally encoded system of control and self replication (DNA); the interactions between this living system and its environment (natural selection) can produce an astounding variety of living systems. All forms of life are possible if – and only if – this piece of machinery is in place.
A paradigm-shifting insight emerges from all this. Contrary to popular belief, Darwinian Evolution is not a testimony to what can emerge from undirected processes as the skeptic would have us believe; it is a testimony to the unimaginably awesome potentials and capabilities contained in the genetic material of the first living bacterium. In other words, the process of Darwinian Evolution is not the cause of the first living bacterium; Darwinian Evolution is a process which is a result of the staggering functional complexity of the first living bacterium. Where did it come from? Professor Thomas Nagel, distinguished professor of law and philosophy at NYU (and who describes himself as “just as much an outsider to religion as Richard Dawkins”), puts it this way: “The entire apparatus of evolutionary explanation therefore depends on the prior existence of genetic material with these remarkable properties…we have explained the complexity of organic life in terms of something that is itself just as functionally complex as what we originally set out to explain. So the problem is just pushed back a step: how did such a thing come into existence.” The entire façade of scientific credibility for atheism is built on Darwinian Evolution. As it turns out, Darwinian Evolution is completely irrelevant to the question of the existence or non-existence of a creator. The issue that must be confronted is Origin of Life. If you assert that the answer to this question is provided by the prior existence of an RNA World, please see the next section.
“Rabbi, of course a DNA-based bacterium did not just pop out of the prebiotic soup, the functional complexity of the bacterium and its genetic material is the result of a step by step process starting from a less complex RNA World, and then transitioning to a more complex DNA World. (“It goes without saying that the emergence of this RNA and the transition to a DNA world implies an impressive number of stages, each more improbable than the previous one.” Dr. Francois Jacob, microbiologist and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Medicine – 1965)
In April of 2010, two of the worlds leading Origin of Life researchers, Dr. Gerald Joyce and Dr. Michael Robertson – in an article entitled “The Origins of the RNA World” – stated categorically that there is as yet no “realistic” scenario for the emergence of an RNA World and “the details of this process remain obscure and are not likely to be known in the near future.” They also candidly informed us that “this concept does not explain how life originated.”
Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at NYU, Dr. Robert Shapiro, agrees, but he is not so polite. At a lecture at the Harvard University Origins of Life Initiative he declared that “any abiotically prepared replicator before the start of life is a fantasy.” In an article for Scientific American entitled, “A Simpler Origin of Life”, he compared it to the notion of a gorilla sitting down at a keyboard containing the alphabets of every known language of mankind and typing out, in English, a “coherent recipe for the preparation of chile-con-carne.” Interestingly enough, Dr. Leslie Orgel, (a proponent of the RNA World theory) in a posthumously published article, declared that Shapiro’s “Metabolism First” origin of life theory was based on “if pigs could fly chemistry.” Because of my deep respect for scientists, I agree with both of them. If you think you know better than Dr.’s Joyce, Robertson, Orgel and Shapiro, then please present a conclusive empirical demonstration. If you think that my information is not up to date, then see the following article (2/28/11) by veteran Scientific American writer, John Horgan (non-believer), entitled: “Pssst, don’t tell the creationists, but scientists don’t have a clue how life began” (sorry guys, the secret’s out!)http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=pssst-dont-tell-the-creationists-bu-2011-02-28
Dr. Paul Davies (atheist, physicist) was a chosen to be a member of the distinguished panel of scientists at the recent ASU Origins Conference that took place in February, 2011. Here is an excerpt from his address:
“When I was a student in London in the Swinging sixties…the prevailing view at the time was summed up by Francis Crick who said that life seems almost a miracle, so many are the conditions necessary for it to get going. What he meant by this was that it’s entirely possible that life on earth was a bizarre freak event, an aberration unique in the entire universe. That really was the feeling in those days. Today you scarcely open a newspaper without reading that scientists think that the universe is teeming with life. What, you may wonder has changed, do we now know how life began so that we can confidently say, yes, it’s everywhere? Well, we don’t know how life began…We know the mechanism whereby life evolved; we don’t know the mechanism that turned non-life into life. It doesn’t mean that it was a miracle, but it means that we have many theories, many conjectures but we don’t know what happened…What we’d really like to know, was it very likely or was it very unlikely?”
If you feel I am “quote mining” please see the next section.
“Rabbi, you are using the old creationist trick of quote mining”
And I say that when you quote expert opinions in your atheistic articles, you are guilty of “quote mining.” Gee, it seems we are at an impasse. What I am trying to illustrate, of course, is that the accusation of “quote mining” is childish and trivial. Not only does it not contribute to an adult-level exchange of ideas, but it actually inhibits such an exchange. It is perfectly valid to claim that a citation has been taken out of context…As long as you can back it up with a reasoned argument. If you have nothing more to contribute than hurling unsubstantiated accusations of “quote mining” please go back to high school and shoot spitballs and do all the other things that immature adolescents do.
Important note: Many times atheists back up their “quote mining” accusations by stating that despite what a scientist might have written about the difficulties in discovering the Origin of Life, he/she still believes in a naturalistic/scientific solution. This is not a valid objection.
Example: Dr. Paul Davies writes in his book The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life: “The miracle of life is not that it is made out of nanotools, but that these tiny diverse parts are integrated in a highly organized way…with a fine tuning and complexity as yet unmatched by any human engineering…many investigators are uneasy about stating in public that the origin of life is a mystery, even though behind closed doors they freely admit that they are baffled…The problem of how and where life began is one of the great outstanding mysteries of science.” He then later states: “Just because scientists are still uncertain how life began, does not mean life cannot have had a natural origin.” His first statement is a description of the scientific facts and realities on the ground. Life is unimaginably complex and we have no clue how it came about through a naturalistic process. The second statement is declaring his own personal belief or faith, that science could still find an answer. The first statement is fact – the second statement is faith and/or conjecture. Just because a scientist personally denies the existence of a creator or believes (“I agree that conventional Origin of Life theory is flawed…I believe that better science will provide the needed answers.” – Dr. Robert Shapiro on the Panda’s Thumb website) that science will “triumph”, his personal beliefs have no weight at all in the objective courtroom of the intellect. Despite what many skeptics and non-believers seem to strongly feel in their gut, there is no guarantee at all that scientists will come up with a naturalistic solution to the origin of life. A feeling in one’s gut is “faith,” it is not Science. In fact, I make the following falsifiable prediction: I predict that just as one would never expect to find a naturalistic solution for a smiley face in the sand with the words “Good morning Professor Dawkins” written next to it, no one will ever find a plausible, empirically demonstrable naturalistic explanation for the origin of a bacterium.
“Rabbi, this is just another worn out presentation of the Argument from Incredulity”
If what you mean by this is the following: That by asking me to believe that something which exhibits the awe-inspiring level of functional complexity as a bacterium and its digitally encoded DNA, could emerge through an undirected process in a prebiotic swamp – without anything even remotely approaching conclusive evidence to back up such a claim – you are straining my credulity beyond the breaking point; you are absolutely correct. The incredibly heavy burden of proof is on you, not me. I do not have to prove that functional complexity and specified information are the results of intelligent purpose and intervention, that is a given. I also do not have to disprove the possibility of a naturalistic origin, the burden on you is to offer actual evidence that it happened. To paraphrase Bertrand Russell: I would not believe your claim that there is a china saucer in orbit between the Earth and Mars even though I could not disprove it and I don’t believe in your claim about the naturalistic origin of life without conclusive evidence.
“Rabbi, you are medieval, superstitious, and anti-science”
Many atheists seem to be under the impression that we are still living in the middle ages. Scientists like Galileo are being thrown in prison for heretical scientific claims (atheists keep reminding us about this 380-year old sin of the Catholic Church and we keep reminding them that scientists have given us the H-Bomb and Zyklon-B Gas.…a lot less than 380 years ago!), and superstitious pagans are running around screaming that thunder is the result of the gods bowling or Zeus hammering in a nail to hang up a picture in his living room at Mt. Olympus Towers. (As an orthodox rabbi, I remind the skeptics that we moved past that stage about 3000 years ago.) Our current discussion is not about particular religious scriptures, dogmas, or practices. It is also not about the biblical description of creation in the book of Genesis. That is a completely different topic and must be dealt with separately. It is also not about the veracity of the revelation at Mt. Sinai. (You don’t have to worry Dr. Coyne, I will not demand of you to stop eating your non-kosher pastrami sandwiches……yet!) The fact that primitive peoples may have had bizarre beliefs about reality has no bearing at all on the fundamental question of the origin of life. Talmudic sources record debates between Jewish Rabbinic Sages and Greek and Roman skeptics that took place over 2000 years ago. The issue under question then was exactly the same as it is now: How did life begin? And the Scientific answer is…
Dr. George Whitesides (Organic Chemist, Harvard University, highest Hirsch-index rating of any living chemist): How? I have no idea. Based on all the chemistry I know it seems astonishingly improbable
Dr. Chrisopher Mckay (Astrophysicist, NASA): The origin of life remains a scientific mystery…we do not know how life originated on earth
Dr. Werner Arber (Molecular Biologist, Nobel Prize-Medicine, 1978): Although a biologist, I must confess that I do not know how life came about…How such already quite complex structures may have come together remains a mystery to me.
Dr. Harold P. Klein (1921-2001), Astrobiologist, NASA): The simplest bacterium is so damn complicated from the point of view of a chemist that it is almost impossible to imagine how it happened.
Dr. Christian DeDuve (Cytologist, Biochemist, Nobel Prize-Medicine, 1974): How this momentous event happened is still highly conjectural, though no longer purely speculative. (If you find this statement a little unclear, perhaps the following will help: Wordnet Online Dictionary: Conjecture: (A) Noun – a hypothesis that has been formed by speculating…usually with little hard evidence.(Synonym – speculation) (B) Verb-to believe on uncertain or tentative grounds (synonym – speculate)
Professor Richard Dawkins (Biologist, High Priest of Atheism in the 21st Century): (A) Nobody knows how it happened. (Climbing Mt. Improbable)
(B) “I told you I don’t know…nor does anyone else.” (From the film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed)
Etc, Etc, Etc…It is critical to note that the daunting challenges scientists face in discovering a naturalistic origin of life is not due to their ignorance about the chemistry of the simplest living organisms, it is in fact exactly the opposite. The more scientists learn about the seemingly endless layers of complexity in the simplest living cells the more vexing the puzzle becomes.
“Ok Rabbi, so who created the creator?”
“Who created the creator?” presents us with the philosophical dilemma of the infinitely regressing series of creators. Ultimately, both Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens (and perhaps Jerry Coyne also), base their denial of a Creator on the assumption that there is no answer to this question and we are therefore stuck with a naturalistic beginning. In other words, even though they admit that everything I have said up until now might be perfectly sensible or at least worthy of consideration, this particular philosophical question leaves us with no choice but to accept, that despite the utter improbability of a natural emergence of life it happened at least once because here we are. In the final analysis, the atheist denial of God is based not on science, but on philosophy. In fact, there is a rather elementary and obvious solution to the dilemma of who created the creator. Professor Michael Yarus, a distinguished microbiologist from the U. of Colorado, poses this dilemma in his book, Life From An RNA World, and casually mentions this elementary answer: “So how then did the designer arise? Sometimes this gambit is declined by intelligent designers who explicitly acknowledge that they are thinking of the [One, transcendent, infinite] Judeo-Christian God.” Simply put, the philosophical dilemma of the infinitely regressing chain of creators is only applicable to a material being, not a transcendent being that exists in neither time nor space. A full presentation and elaboration on this idea is slightly beyond the scope of this essay. For a more comprehensive explanation see Chapter 5 in Nonsense of a High Order: The Confused and Illusory World of the Atheist, or the excerpt on the Aish.com website entitled “The Design Argument.”
“Rabbi, we must have unwavering faith in Science and Scientists”
From Dr. Jerry Coyne’s website – “Why Evolution is True” – “A rabbi proves God” (3/7/2011)
”Nope, we don’t yet understand how life originated on Earth, but we have good leads, and abiogenesis is a thriving field. And we may never understand how life originated on Earth, because the traces of early life have vanished. We know it happened at least once (and that all species descend from only one origin), but not how. I’m pretty confident that within, say, 50 years we’ll be able to create life in a laboratory under the conditions of primitive Earth, but that, too, won’t tell us exactly how it did happen—only that it could.”
In my official capacity as a rabbi, I give Dr. Jerry Coyne (yes, he’s Jewish) the traditional blessing that he should live until “a hundert und tzvantzik yohr”- until a hundred and twenty years. Be that as is may, I have no intention, based purely on Dr. Coyne’s proclamation, of sitting together with him in a nursing home when we are both well over a hundred years old drooling into our plastic cups, while waiting for “The Good News!” that the grandchildren of his students from the University of Chicago have finally discovered the Holy Grail of Atheism: A naturalistic origin of life. Dr. Coyne, you should live and be well. If in 50 years (and we’re both still around) you find the answer you’ve been looking for, I promise to do my best to appraise it with all the integrity and honesty I can muster. In the meantime, it is clear to me that it is the theist who has the overwhelmingly decisive intellectual advantage. May we all follow the truth wherever it leads us. I’m sure we can at least agree on that.
Moshe Averick 3/17/2011- RabbiMaverick@hotmail.com
Chicago, Ill.
About the Author
Rabbi Moshe Averick is an ordained Orthodox Rabbi who has taught theology, spirituality, and religious philosophy for nearly 30 years. Many of his students have gone on to become educators and rabbinic leaders in North America, England, and Israel. He is known for his singular ability to explain complex topics in clear, understandable language and - to borrow the description of one University of Chicago-trained philosopher of science – his “wicked” sense of humor.
After completing an advanced Rabbinics degree in Jerusalem in 1980, he ran extensive educational programs at UCLA and Northridge University on behalf of Yeshiva University of Los Angeles under the auspices of the renowned Simon Wiesenthal Center.
In Toronto, Ontario, he was among the founding faculty members of what is now one of North America’s largest Jewish adult education centers, Aish Hatorah of Toronto. His lectures in religious philosophy at the prestigious Shaalvim Rabbinical Seminary in Israel were enthusiastically received for 12 years before he moved back to Chicago in 2007.
Besides his extensive career as an educator, Rabbi Averick was a floor trader in the S&P pit at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and wrote and produced an album of spiritual acoustic rock, Feet on the Ground, which was described by Jerusalem Post music critic David Brinn as, ” superb, country-tinged acoustic rock…in the great tradition of such seminal artists as Tom Rush and John Prine…a real find in our own backyard!” He is the proud father and grandfather of eight children and six grandchildren.
Rabbi Averick recently completed a book entitled, Nonsense of a High Order: The Confused and Illusory World of the Atheist. He has lectured on the subject of atheism and belief in God at universities and colleges for both secular and religious student organizations. (See Rabbi Averick on Campus )
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