In the early 1930s, Rabbi Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler set himself the task of
battling the cult of science <flush verbose babble>

Excerpted from: http://jewishmediaresources.com/article/915/%3Cbr%20/%3E

Darwinism – Science or Secular Religion?
by Jonathan Rosenblum

January 11, 2006


In the early 1930s, Rabbi Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler set himself the task of
battling the cult of science of his time. To his private students in
London – mostly teenagers from Orthodox homes who attended public school –
he first emphasized how circumscribed is the realm of science, and how
little it has to say concerning the ultimate purposes of life.

Excerpted from:http://jewishmediaresources.com/article/915/%3Cbr%20/%3E

Darwinism – Science or Secular Religion?

Excerpted from:
http://jewishmediaresources.com/article/915/%3Cbr%20/%3E

Darwinism – Science or Secular Religion?
by Jonathan Rosenblum

January 11, 2006


In the early 1930s, Rabbi Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler set
himself the task of battling the cult of science of his
time. To his private students in London – mostly teenagers
from Orthodox homes who attended public school – he first
emphasized how circumscribed is the realm of science, and
how little it has to say concerning the ultimate purposes of
life.

Instead of constructing such tests for their theory, Darwinists start by
assuming the truth of theory and then looking for corroboration, a
travesty of Popper’s definition of science. Studies of the fossil
record, for instance, that fail to buttress the theory are deemed
failures and never published. Gareth Nelson of the American Museum of
National History describes the process by which Darwinian "ancestors"
are picked: "We’ve got to have some ancestors. We’ll pick those. Why?
Because we know that they have to be there, and these are the best
candidates. That’s by and large how it has worked. I’m not exaggerating."

Excerpted from:
http://jewishmediaresources.com/article/915/%3Cbr%20/%3E

Darwinism - Science or Secular Religion?
by Jonathan Rosenblum

January 11, 2006

Colin Patterson was right that the Darwinian theory of life
developing through trillions of micromutations, sifted by
natural selection, is not scientific. A scientific theory,
as defined by Karl Popper, must be falsifiable. When
Einstein introduced his General Theory of Relativity, for
instance, he offered at the same time a series of bold
predictions based on the theory and by which it could be tested.

Excerpted from: http://jewishmediaresources.com/article/915/%3Cbr%20/%3E

Darwinism – Science or Secular Religion?
by Jonathan Rosenblum

January 11, 2006


In the early 1930s, Rabbi Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler set himself the task
of battling the cult of science of his time. To his private students in
London – mostly teenagers from Orthodox homes who attended public school
– he first emphasized how circumscribed is the realm of science, and how
little it has to say concerning the ultimate purposes of life.

Next Rabbi Dessler would show the inherent bias from which scientists
too suffer. As one of his closest talmidim from that period, Rabbi Aryeh
Carmell, puts it, "So successful did this method [of revealing the
hidden premises and bias] prove that one of his followers, if faced with
a conflict between a widely held contemporary view and a tenet of Torah,
instead of putting himself on the defensive and groping for apologetics,
will immediately endeavor to bring to light the bias, individual, social
and otherwise, which has given rise to the divergent viewpoint."

Rabbi Dessler emphasized how the slightest self-interest is sufficient
to prejudice the outcome of any decision-making process, and that this
applied no less to scientific judgments than any other. He demonstrated
the point by taking what might be a prototypical scientist for his example:

"Think of a person who, by the power of his intellect alone, wants to
re-examine some fundamental problem – such as was the world created for
a purpose. . . . Let us assume that the person possesses a keen
intellect, is well-educated and well-informed. However, so far as
character is concerned he is pretty average. He has never seriously
tackled his moral failings. . . . [Now let us say that] we are talking
about a very comprehensive problem . . . . On the solution will depend
whether he will be obliged to struggle constantly with his baser
desires, . . . or whether he will live with no restraints on his desires
apart from those he deigns to place on them. . . ." Can we seriously
believe, Rabbi Dessler asked, that he will arrive at a true conclusion
merely by the exercise of his intellectual powers?

Scientists themselves have admitted their own susceptibility to various
forms of bias. In his classic work, The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn describes scientists’ resistance to abandoning
a given paradigm until an acceptable alternative is proposed, no matter
how much countervailing evidence has accumulated. Scientists are
uncomfortable moving from a position of purported knowledge to one of
ignorance. Stephen Jay Gould, one of the leading neo-Darwinists,
discusses in The Structure of Evolutionary Theory the ways in which
social and career incentives cause scientists to fail to fully grasp the
import of the date they observe.

NOWHERE IS THE BIAS OF SCIENTISTS on more prominent display than with
respect to the ever roiling debates over Darwinian evolution. Supporters
of Darwin often find it convenient to obfuscate the extent to which they
view his theory of natural selection among random mutations as a full
refutation of all religious belief. But others are more candid. Richard
Dawkins, perhaps the best known present day defender of Darwin, famously
claims, "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled
atheist." George Gaylord Simpson, another leading Darwinist, states the
meaning of evolution: "Man is the result of a purposeless and natural
process that did not have him in mind."

Cornell University’s William Provine plays the role of the prototypical
scientist in Rabbi Dessler’s example, proclaiming, "a world strictly
organized in accordance with mechanistic principles . . . . implies that
there are no inherent moral or ethical laws. "

These scientists cannot claim that these views are merely the outgrowth
of the overwhelming empirical evidence in favor of Darwin’s theory of
natural selection. That theory rests not on empirical observation but on
a priori assumptions. In a 1981 lecture at the American Museum of
Natural History, Colin Patterson, the chief paleontologist at the
British Natural History Museum, observed that both creationism and
Darwinian observation are scientifically vacuous concepts, which are
held primarily on the basis of faith. Patterson related that he had
asked the members of an evolutionary morphology seminar at the
University of Chicago to tell him just one thing about evolution that
they knew to be true. The response was a long and embarrassed silence.

The scientific naturalism of the Darwinists – the belief that everything
can be explained by natural, material forces -- is ultimately founded on
rhetorical legerdemain that has nothing to do with science. First step:
exclude all non-natural causes as a priori inadmissible. Second step: If
Darwinian evolution were true, it would explain the observed taxonomic
similarities between different living things. Third step: Since no
alternative explanation currently exists to explain those phenomena,
Darwinism must be true. (This step, to which Darwinists inevitably have
recourse whenever the holes in the theory are pointed out, Philip
Johnson astutely notes in Darwin on Trial, is the equivalent of
preventing a criminal defendant from presenting an alibi until he can
produce the real criminal.) Fourth step: Since Darwinism is true, all
explanations based on non-natural causes are vanquished. Note how that
which was a priori excluded at the outset is now deemed to have been
somehow disproved.

Colin Patterson was right that the Darwinian theory of life developing
through trillions of micromutations, sifted by natural selection, is not
scientific. A scientific theory, as defined by Karl Popper, must be
falsifiable. When Einstein introduced his General Theory of Relativity,
for instance, he offered at the same time a series of bold predictions
based on the theory and by which it could be tested.

Instead of constructing such tests for their theory, Darwinists start by
assuming the truth of theory and then looking for corroboration, a
travesty of Popper’s definition of science. Studies of the fossil
record, for instance, that fail to buttress the theory are deemed
failures and never published. Gareth Nelson of the American Museum of
National History describes the process by which Darwinian "ancestors"
are picked: "We’ve got to have some ancestors. We’ll pick those. Why?
Because we know that they have to be there, and these are the best
candidates. That’s by and large how it has worked. I’m not exaggerating."