Department of Religious Studies, Florida International University
Professor Nathan Katz, Professor and Chair

The Shul of Bal Harbour and The Aleph Institute of Miami, Florida Rabbi
Sholom D. Lipskar

B’Or Ha’Torah Journal of Science, Art & Modern Life in the Light
of the Torah Professor Herman Branover, Editor-in-Chief; Ilana Attia,
Managing Editor

The Sixth Miami International Conference on Torah & Science Excerpts of
the Panel Discussion, 13 December 2005

“How Should a Torah-Observant High School Biology Teacher Teach the
Origin and Diversity of Species?”

Questions from the Audience to the Panelists

Panelists:

Professor William Dembski, International Society for Complexity,
Information, and Design, author of Design Inference: Eliminating
Chance through Small Probabilities (Cambridge University Press)
Yaacov Hanoka, PhD, Physics, Evergreen Solar Lee Spetner, PhD, Physics,
currently involved in cancer research Redoxia, author of Not by Chance!
Rabbi Professor Moshe Tendler, Biology, Yeshiva University Professor
Eliezer Zeiger, Biology, UCLA

The written papers of the panelists will be published in B’OR HA’TORAH
17 (2007). Order from

https://www.shemayisrael.com/borhatorah/home/neworder/order.php?currency=dollar#standing

Send your question for the consideration of the panelists

Ramaz High School Teacher

Do any of you teach in high school? Yeshivah high school? Christian
high school? No. This panel discussion on how should a Torah-observant
biology teacher teach the origin of species is a wonderful exercise in
a theoretical topic. I've learned so much. I am going to take all this
back with me. I teach in Ramah Yeshiva High School in Manhattan.

The realities of a yeshivah high school is that there is almost no
such thing as a Torah-observant biology teacher. What do I mean? In
our wonderful yeshivah high school—Ramah has a sterling reputation
which is well deserved—most of our biology teachers are not religious
people. They are not religious Jews or religious Christians.  That is the
reality. That's a fact across America. Now I can't speak for Catholic
schools or Methodist or Baptist schools, but I would assume it's very
similar. Can we dictate to our biology teachers what to teach? Rabbi
Tendler, you are in a Jewish university, but you know that school
boards and school administrations are hampered by parents' ideas, on
the one hand. On the other hand, you have yeshivot where you cannot
teach any science. The recent Slifkin affair, of course, shows that
either you can't be critical at all of how biology is being taught in
the old way,  or if you do teach it in any way at all beyond basics,
you'll be fired. So I would like to suggest that the place to teach your
point of view is in the religious studies departments of both yeshivas
and Christian schools. But in order to do that, you have to have an
enlightened, informed faculty. The way to address this, I would think,
is to convince our administrations of the need for this; and then to
make sure that our rebbes, our teachers, are enlightened and articulate
enough to be able to take on—I hate to use that word as I don't want
to sound confrontational—our secular colleagues who are teaching
the opposite. That's what I think the problem is here. In other words,
while this is beautiful, it's not happening in the trenches.

RABBI PROFESSOR MOSHE TENDLER

We need a long range plan for teaching teachers how to teach. We don't
have good yeshivah high school educational faculties today that have
the tools necessary to teach Torah in the age of science. They don't
teach halakhah correctly, because they aren't familiar enough with the
scientific, medical, technological background. You can't teach hilkhos
niddah, hilkhos Shabbos, hilkhos kashrus without the background. A
fundamental flaw has developed in Torah education as a result of the rapid
advance of science and technology. In order to produce competent Torah
teachers, the amount of time necessary to attain proficiency in Torah
studies is such that it precludes (except in unusual cases) any real
background and education in science and technology. Can we close this
gap with a heroic effort to teach the teachers? Most likely we could,
but not in the current climate. In the current climate the modern Jewish
schools would rather develop a schizophrenic student who has his tsitsits
out in the morning, and his faith left out in the afternoon.

High School Teacher

Is this psychologically damaging to do this to the students?

RABBI PROFESSOR MOSHE TENDLER

Very damaging.

PROFSSOR ELIEZER ZEIGER:

This is our sixth Torah and science conference. Until this conference
we have never had the wisdom to present the problem in this way. We
are evolving. This is true evolution. How can we apply our wisdom
and knowledge in real life? It's a problem. First let's say that we
are ready. And second, let’s state the goals. What do we want to
achieve? Earlier this morning I held a little meeting with the panelists,
and we could have sat for six hours trying to reach a consensus. So this
is new. This is an evolutionary process. Please go on.

RABBI PROFESSOR MOSHE TENDLER

I think we can do something quickly to remove some of the certitude
that students have that the theory of evolution is absolutely
correct. Something can be introduced within the scientific realm to leave
at least a question in the student's mind that maybe not everything he
heard in the secular department is true.

DR. LEE SPETNER

How do we do this practically in the short term? I have taken it upon
myself to speak to the high school students. When I come to the United
States I manage to speak to the high school classes where my grandchildren
are attending—that's my “in”—and I give a lecture explaining what
the real story is. Maybe that will give them the ability to integrate what
they have been learning in the biology class with the Torah perspective
they learn in their limudai kodesh.

PROFESSOR WILLIAM DEMBSKI

It's common in industry today that as technology moves on that people have
to get some continuing education to bring them up to speed. It seems to me
that there is no reason that an administration, a vigorous administration,
couldn't say to biology teachers: Here's a workshop you need to take and
learn this material. I think if you're trained in a given area there are
expectations that you are going to teach curriculum in that area. There's
a lot of new stuff happening, and you must get up to speed.

Question from the Floor A

I would appreciate it if the panel could clarify in some more detail the
difference between five thousand seven hundred and sixty six years as
the age of the earth versus the billions of years that the scientists
claim. This is one of the questions that I came here to hear, and I'm
sure that many high school students would really like an answer, and not
say it's something that can be passed over. It really can't. Thank you.

[Editor’s note: Please see Moshe Carmeli, “The First Six Days of the
Universe,” B’Or Ha’Torah 15 (2005) pp. 21-24. A leading physicist
in Relativity, Professor Carmeli formulated equations that show that
the time lengths of the first six days of Creation do not contradict
the biblical narrative.]

RABBI PROFESSOR MOSHE TENDLER

Students can be told that five thousand seven hundred and sixty six
years ago G-d spoke to Adam, who had a lady with him, Mrs. Eve. They
had children. These children begat, begat, begat, and there was a Flood,
and G-d gave us a Torah. That all began five thousand seven hundred and
sixty six years ago. What happened before that? Proverbs 25:2 says: "Kvod
Elokim haster davar ukvod m’lakhim hakor davar ." Freely translated,
this means that it does honor to kings to research their actions, but
it does honor to G-d to leave some things hidden.

DR. LEE SPETNER

It was none of our business for four thousand years, but now that the
subject has been opened for us by things like radioactive dating, the
modern sciences of geology and, in particular, cosmology and the Big Bang,
it has become our business and we have to address these issues.

PROFESSOR ELIEZER ZEIGER

There is a principle in Torah called nosay hapakhim. It's an extremely
important property of G-d  to contain opposites. The principle means
that two things that are apparently contradictory are both true. And
some element of it may apply to the age of them universe. I believe
that we are on the right track. We have coherent, compelling answers
with a scientific component and a Torah component that probably would
not comply with conventional logic. But many of those type of issues
are on the verge of being answered that way.

Question from the Floor B

On the issue that you mentioned, Professor Zeiger—natural selection and
mutation, the Darwinian mechanism—I am happy to accept micro-evolution
and if there are proven cases of that. But I would like to refer you
to a paper brought to my attention by David Wolinksy. In The American
Naturalist Kingsolver and other researchers studied 63 different papers
on 62 different species between 1987 and very recently. I would like
to quote two very short lines from this paper. One says that, "Most
published selection studies were unreplicated and have sample sizes below
135 individuals, resulting in low statistical power to detect selection
of the magnitude typically reported for natural selection." And then
in another line they go on to say how "most powerful studies indicate
that selection is weak or absent." So it's not clear to me that natural
selection is a major player even at the level of micro-evolution and I
think that this kind of study and many like it need to be examined in very
great detail before we say that there is natural selection in thousands
of cases, and you can prove it, and so on, because apparently you can
not. I don't speak to high school students, but I do speak to a lot of
college students, and I find that if you have the information at your
disposal, you can make a good case for the universe being less than six
thousand years, the causal inadequacy of Darwinian mechanism to explain
the wonderful complexity of the eye, of the bacterial flagellum, and so
on. And in fact when they look at these structures, like the bacterial
flagellum, like the eye, like blood clotting, they come away amazed that
people would even think that such a mechanism could be used to explain it.

On the age of the universe, there are likewise pieces of information that
I believe are not well known which bring things like Big Bang cosmology
as being more speculation than concrete science. Far from being the
place to hang our hat on, Big Bang cosmology is so speculative that I
believe it's a mistake. I would like to refer to the Rashi on the gemara
in Hagigah, where it says that ten things were created on Day One, the
last two are midas ha’yom and midas ha’lilah, the units of day and
the units of night. Rashi says that this means the twenty-four hours of
Day One. The Rambam says the same thing. He asks what about the time
before the creation of the sun, and he said that the day was still a
regular day, because it was just one revolution of the sphere. I have
no less than ten Rishonim and Hazals like this that all talk about the
young universe, six twenty-four hours. I think that people sense that
it's a fudge to tell them that it’s millions of years when our whole
mesorah indicates that we are talking about thousands of years.

DR. LEE SPETNER

Concerning natural selection, I think it's unfair to say that we don't
know how it works. We certainly do. There are all kinds of grades of
natural selection. In fact, there's a selection coefficient which is
well-defined. It's a number. The lower the selection coefficient, the
harder it is for the mutants to take over the population. The higher the
selection coefficient, the quicker the population converts and in fact
the classic examples of natural selection that are shown in the laboratory
are antibiotic resistance. The selection coefficients are extremely high
and in extremely short times an entire population of bacteria converts
from nonresistant bacteria to resistant. You take bacteria that are
completely susceptible to an antibiotic and you add the antibiotic. Now
in the petri dish you may have ten million bacteria. The probability is
very nearly one that somewhere the right mutation will occur to make one
of them at least resistant. And as soon as that occurs, it's resistant,
and if we keep the antibiotic there in the culture, the others will die
out. It will replicate, and pretty soon, within a few generations, we have
a new population, all resistant. This works, it has been shown to work,
you can't say that we don't know that natural selection works. How well
it works depends on that magnitude of the selection coefficient.

RABBI PROFESSOR MOSHE TENDLER

The term "selection coefficient" means mutation rate. Various genes take
more easily, are more labile than others. If you want to see natural
selection, in the second week of February the students in my microbiology
laboratory will perform an evolutionary experiment, showing resistance,
nutritional competence, and other factors, which occur because of the
large numbers involved. In each petri plate there are approximately
thirty colonies, and each colony has five times ten to the eighth cell,
when you set them up properly. Five hundred million cells per colony;
times thirty. You get a mutation in almost every petri plate.

Question from the Floor C

I am neither an educationalist nor an evolutionary biologist, but I
believe in simplicity, especially when we are talking about teaching, so
I am going to go back to Darwin. In the Origin of Species Darwin wrote,
"My theory would be proved wrong if there is no evidence of intermediary
species." That was 160 years ago when Darwin said that paleontology is
still young and if no evidence is found, then he will be proved wrong. To
this day, there has been no evidence found of intermediary species. So,
this is a very simple and powerful argument to use with school kids
and undergraduates.

It happens that very often there's a master or a prophet and
disciples. Disciples can do a lot of harm. They're basically the ones who
create extremists who misinterpret the thought of the originator. This
happens in all the religions, by the way. Now, the second thought I have
is there ought to be a consensus among the people who share our view of
evolution, or if you like, catastrophism, to encourage the production of
programs that should be seen on channels such as PBS and the Discovery
channel, because they reach a very large audience.

PROFESSOR WILLIAM DEMBSKI

Yes, there are gaps in the fossil record, but the evolutionist can point
to things that certainly look like intermediary species. An example
that I give in one of my writings is if you choose enough colors from
a color wheel at random, you may be able to get a progression from blue
to green just by randomly choosing colors. My point is when a transition
isn't found, it’s not that the evolution is biologically ignored. When
they find something that can tell a plausible story, they will point
to that. By looking at millions of fossils you are going to be able to
draw some evolutionary connections. So it's not that easy. I've heard
evolutionists tell a very good story and be very persuasive in connecting,
let's say, mammals, mammal-like reptiles, up to reptiles. How the ear of
the mammal has come about by bones in the reptilian jaw migrating. What
is the means of this migrating? What is the mechanism for it? That's
not filled in. My point is if you just say there are gaps there,
there's a very simple way of eliminating evolution and then you expose
your students to somebody like Kenneth Miller or, I remember hearing
in Cambridge in 1994, the president of Cornell University at the time
who was an evolutionary biologist, give a very persuasive talk, if you
didn't know what you were looking at. So I would just caution you on
that. These issues are not that simple. One of the things I like to do in
the conferences I organize is to have a chance to hear the other side and
be able to see what they are thinking. I think that would probably ruin
the spirit of an event like this. But it would give you a sense of what
we are dealing with.  There are certainly many video tapes to watch of
people like Kenneth Miller in action. So I would just caution you on that.

PROFESSOR ELIEZER ZEIGER

Is that good science?

PROFESSOR WILLIAM DEMBSKI

I don't think it's good science but there is more to science than
simply dispassionate laying out of evidence. There's a whole rhetorical
dimension.

DR. LEE SPETNER

Gaps or no gaps, even if we found that we have a continuous gradation in
all lines, that's not evidence that one was descended from the other. This
is a historical point, and you need historical evidence to validate
it. And there isn't any. So what we have is only circumstantial evidence
and like any circumstantial evidence, if you want to draw conclusions
from it, you have to have a theory. The theory has to lead from the
circumstantial evidence to your conclusion and the only theory we have
for evolution is random mutations and natural selection; and that just
doesn't work.

PROFESSOR WILLIAM DEMBSKI

There's a quote attributed to Einstein: "Make everything as simple
as possible, but not simpler." I think there's only a certain level
of simplicity below which you begin misrepresenting the truth of the
matter. I wasn't sure if you were going there, when you mentioned the
masters and the disciples who take the masters' thoughts and pervert them,
but Darwin, it seems to me, was a bad egg. I mean if you read his book,
The Descent of Man, which was published twelve years after the Origin
of Species, he lays out a view of man that is really hostile to any
idea we would have of man being created in the image of G-d. The source
of the religious impulse for him is fear of unknown causal powers. He
compares our belief in G-d as resulting from something like witnessing
a dog barking at a parasol that is blowing in the wind. The dog doesn't
realize that the wind was blowing the parasol. Fear of the unknown is
responsible for religious belief, according to Darwin. The Eugenics
program is historically present already in [Darwinism]. The white
race wants to exterminate the Negro race. He wrings his hands over it
because he was of a sensitive disposition, but there is a logic to this
theory. And that logic puts you on a logical train, and you will end up
where that logic will take you. And he saw it.

Question from the Floor D

I have a comment and a suggestion that I would like people to comment
on. In the Miller-Urey experiment, as Dr. Hanoka mentioned, there is a
“primordial soup” of carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen. But oxygen is
specifically left out. Oxygen is a very common element, it's required
for life, but if you put oxygen in that primordial soup, then if any one
of the beginning chemical or organic compounds were formed, they would
immediately become oxidized and burn up.

This basically ties in with Professor Dembski's design detection
system. I would like to know if people are looking for it. Not if there
is evidence that things are produced separately, but if you look at the
system of design of all of life and the whole tree structure as a design
project. If you gave it to an engineer—my background is electrical
engineering/computer science from MIT—to design all the software for
this huge array of physical robotics or all these little beings, the
designer would set out a series of subroutines and use common elements,
some here, some here, some here, and you would see a common element
here and here. Rabbi Tendler mentioned homologous organs similarities
in different components. So, is there some thing where the tree of life
effectively branched here and branched here, and then you see a common
element that's introduced here, as if all of a sudden a new species
came out, sort of like a new software version, at some point. Is there
something that is common on two totally separate branches of the tree of
life and if there is something like that, it could function as a smoking
gun. To enable us to say, listen, that could not have come from here
and here, they were developed simultaneously in both places. That would
effectively show that this was in effect a designed system. So I'd like
people to comment on that.

DR. LEE SPETNER

The answer to your question is yes, it's called convergent evolution. It
is invoked time and time and time again; when two different, very
separated forms or phyla or families or species exhibit the same
characteristic that is not in what is supposed to be the common
ancestor. I showed in my book [Not by Chance! Shattering the Modern
Theory of Evolution (Judaica Press, 1996, 1997, 1998] that convergent
evolution according to the Darwinian theory of random mutations and
natural selection is almost impossible.

RABBI PROFESSOR TENDLER

We're losing our focus. Experiments on cosmogony and biogeny are being
used to further a secular view of the world, an atheistic view of the
world. There was a joke making the rounds a few years ago, about the
scientists who finally decided to challenge G-d and say they could also
make man. So G-d invited them up, and they said, “G-d, You go first,
you're older.” He reached down, took a ball of earth, and fashioned
it into man, and said to the scientists, “Now let’s see what you
can do.” They reached down, got a ball of earth. Then G-d thundered,
“Get your own earth!”

Where do the carbon, hydrogen, oxygen molecules come from? Where did the
lightning strike come from? The lightning struck from a vacuum? It has
nothing to do with a theistic or atheistic view of the world. That's a
given. The issue right now is, can we leave G-d out of the picture or
do we have adequate scientific reason to include G-d in the picture. My
initial comment was that I believe that my father didn't lie to me. He
was present when G-d revealed His presence so many times throughout the
course of human history. This is sufficient for me to include Him in my
theorizing of how things happened in this world.

Question from the Floor D

Just one more comment. The experiments by Urey and Miller missed the
whole point. Even if they did form these few amino acids, that's not the
difficult part of making life. A computer engineer should know that it's
the information that's important, and where did that come from? There's
no way. The only source of that information is some random collisions;
and if you do some calculations you will see that there just hasn't been
time to make enough random collisions to get the kind of information
needed to create life.

PROFESSOR ELIEZER ZEIGER

I've always been bewildered by the fact that the conclusions of that
experiment are given as fact in all biology textbooks. Last year was
the fiftieth anniversary of that experiment, so there was an article in
Science celebrating the experiment. I thought that I was going to find
out what else has been done in that field. Nothing! In fifty years there
was not a single new contribution to science. End of story. What else
do you want?

PROFESSOR WILLIAM DEMBSKI

With regard to Miller-Urey, these primitive simulation experiments
continue. I think you're right that oxygen would gum up the works. Oxygen
is a big problem. So the newer simulation experiments are looking at
hypothermal vents, trying to simulate high temperature, high pressure
environments like the ocean; and I think they've been coming up with
some building blocks for life. But the problem is you're just getting
the building blocks. You've got to be able to put them together into
some kind of meaningful biological significance.

With regard to convergent evolution, I think that’s a huge problem for
evolutionary theory. Yet, the evolutionists figure out something for
just about anything you throw at them,. Now the big talk of evolution
is the constraints evolution is channeled into. You have an octopus and
a human, and they both develop camera eyes. They're a little different
in respect of wiring, but there is similar engineering going on.

An image for me, I hope it's not too inappropriate for this audience,
is a movie that came out in 1967 called A Guide for the Married Man,
with Walter Matthau. It explains the art of infidelity. What do you
do when you're caught with the other woman? He says, just deny, deny,
deny. There's a scene where Joey Bishop is caught in the act, and he
just denies, denies, denies, until his wife is finally confused and says,
“Can I fix you dinner?” I think that's the problem, you catch these
people, and they always figure some way out.

Question from Professor Isaac Elishakoff

Scientists very often, at least in this country, become like car salesmen,
selling the ideas that they have; and they do not want to acknowledge
any positive things from other theorists or any negative things from
their own theories. I suggested as an associate editor of one of the
journals on which I serve, that every article should contain at least
five positive points about what is done in the work described and also
five self-criticisms. Most editors-in-chief and other associate editors
said that this is not serving the purpose of the journal by pinpointing
negative points. So it seems to me that in order to be able somehow
to introduce ideas into the curriculum it is necessary to recognize
first the limitations of the evolutionary theory; and I would suggest
introducing a reader on the limitations of evolutionary theory. I think
that when a student will be able to read such a compendium from the
scientists who are raising questions, they will see that they may be
disagreeing with their own theories. That allows a gap or crack maybe
to introduce some other ideas; and by this means we will be able to
get students who are less "schizophrenic," in the terminology of Rabbi
Tendler. There would be a transition in teaching, then raising questions
that evolution does not answer. Then there are possibilities that there is
a place for something else. I did have a chance to publish such a paper,
not about evolution. It is called "On the Limitations of Probabilistic
Methods in Mechanics." It took about twelve years to make a poll among
42 scientists, then to summarize the poll, and then to make comments
and have other people to comment. The paper was published. I got much
more responses than to any other paper that I ever wrote. So, it seems
to me that ideally non-evolutionary scientists could prepare a reader
containing criticisms, some questions of scientists about evolution. I
would like to ask you whether or not methodologically such an approach
would be advisable or not. Maybe Dr. Dembski could enlighten us on that.

PROFESSOR WILLIAM DEMBSKI

I guess the problem with it is that often we are not our best
critics. When the Catholic Church examines whether an individual should
be canonized, it include a devils' advocate. I think it's always best to
have someone on the other side. I've edited books now and also organized
conferences in which we have had people on both sides. It seems to me
really that's the healthiest way to go. Not so much having a debate,
just sparring; but we give each person plenty of time to speak or to
write an essay and put his best foot forward. If you're asking should you
have somebody write a paper and then shoot it down, I think that feels
unnatural, because usually we are invested in the ideas we have. So,
if I were to write a paper on Intelligent Design and then have to point
out its weaknesses, it's best to have somebody who's committed to the
other side do this instead of myself. And I think there are fair-minded
people on the other side, but there are also a lot of rhetorical charges,
a lot of animosity.

PROFESSOR ELIEZER ZEIGER

I have a methodological comment. When there's a non-controversial
issue and a think tank is applied to solve it, then the process is
one of the most beautiful processes of human intelligence. There is
a bunch of people, each with his own expertise and his own biases,
and they all work together. It's really human intelligence at its
best. But when there's a tremendous emotional investment in the issue,
as in the case of evolution, people plainly don't listen. You can say
anything you want. I've had arguments with a particular colleague on
evolution. I don't have that any more, because I see the process of
the conversation. You get to a certain point and then, at that point,
the blind closes. Because the mere identity of the other person is at
stake and has no interest in jeopardizing his sense of reality, there is
no more argument. I have the feeling that many of the debates in this
area are of the same nature. It is not a dialogue, it's a war. And we
have to be aware of that, because that is not a good investment of time.

One of the strongest arguments that evolution people are using now for
macroevolution is cytochrome C. Cytochrome C is an enzyme. The amino
acid composition in many species is known. So the evolutionists can
do phylogeny. They can see how different amino acids have changed. And
they can come up with a transition. The lower organisms have the least
changes. Then, as you go up, there are more and more substitutions. So,
it looks like it’s true that macroevolution is working. I was toying
with the idea of spending some time trying to see how Torah would explain
it. But then I stopped, because it would be a waste of time. People
won't listen. We have many more productive ways to address the issue.

Question from the Floor E

If we could get back to the educational issue, especially for high school
students. I'm hearing two different kinds of approaches here. I'm a
little bit concerned about it. I just finished reading Kenneth Miller's
Finding Darwin's G-d, and Dr. Dembski is figured in that book. One of the
things I learned from it, and he actually says this in the book, is that
for evolutionary biologists evolution is a fact. Now, Miller himself is
a believing person. He is a believer in G-d, but the conclusions that
he reaches about how he believes in G-d in addition to evolution are
conclusions that for me, certainly from a Jewish religious perspective,
are not acceptable. He does not really accept the idea of an involved
G-d and that there is direction to creation. He doesn't seem to have a
vested interest in evolutionary biology, but rather this is something
that he truly as a scientist believes, because he also believes in
G-d. I'm hearing two kinds of things. I heard the word "sham" used. Is
there any reason to believe that the scientists who believe in evolution,
in orthodox Darwinian evolution, don't really believe in it? Do they have
a reason to cover something up? I don't think on an educational level,
though, that it's a good idea to lead the students in the direction of
believing that there's some kind of conspiracy here.

The other perspective is that there are true scientific debates here. But
these scientists say there is no debate. So, for a scientific layman it is
a little bit confusing. I read recently an interesting statistic. Only
seven percent of the scientists in the National Academy of Sciences
believe in G-d. And when you talk about the biologists, only 5.5 percent
of them in the National Academy of Sciences believe in G-d. I don't
think we should say that their lack of belief in G-d is the reason for
their pushing evolution, or is it?

RABBI PROFESSOR MOSHE TENDLER

So few people believe in G-d because they think that they themselves are!

I grew up in research biology, where any hint of a personal bias is
of concern. You read a meter, it's almost 2. If it's two, you have
a successful experiment. If it's 1.9, you don't, but it looks almost
like 2. This is scientific fraud, and there has been an avalanche of
fraudulent papers published in the very best peer-reviewed journals,
like Science, Nature, New England Journal of Medicine. These have been
perpetrated by people who did not purposefully decide to produce a
fraud. They were working on a project. It looked good. Then suddenly
one or two experiments came in that questioned the results. They came
off the curve. They really weren't done that well, so they were left
out. In the course of time, a fraudulent paper results.

Our issue now is that the theory of evolution has the respect of the
scientific community. It's the best explanation that they have that
excludes G-d from the picture. G-d wasn't introduced into the picture
because their parents didn't introduce G-d into the picture. So they
now have to work from a secular perspective. Every time you show me a
gap, you have to come up with an idea how to bridge that gap. In the
course of time, you end up with a fraudulent theory. It's not that the
evolutionists start off intending to tell a lie. They tell little lies
in order to keep the story going. That seems to be what's happened with
the theory of evolution. It could very well be that you can bridge those
gaps, as was suggested here, by bringing G-d into the picture. Anything
you don't know is because you haven’t studied yet how G-d made it
happen. Evolutionists have very little going for them on the mechanism
of evolution. A Divine mechanism could be introduced to explain this,
but they're not trained to do that. It comes from early training at
home and at school, at synagogue and at church, to be able to think and
to introduce G-d in your thoughts. But when you leave G-d out of your
thoughts, then indeed what you ask is begging the question. Indeed,
you end up with a fraudulent theory, not because they are liars, but
because they are committed to what they think is the truth, and without
filling in the gaps there is information that doesn't exist.

Question from the Floor F

Should a scientist be doing that? Should a scientist be introducing G-d
in the laboratory to explain something?

RABBI PROFESSOR MOSHE TENDLER

I would certainly think so. A good scientist would stop in the middle of
the day and davven minhah. Of course he should have the thought in his
mind that G-d is an active force in the world. If he doesn't believe,
then he can't put Him in. Then you end up with the question, how do I
bridge the gap? So I bridge the gap with a supposition, with a hypothesis,
with a possibility. And possibilities usually end up being fraudulent.

DR. LEE SPETNER

In my latest research very often just a guiding principle helps to
clear the way for understanding how things work. I see a phenomenon
and I wonder, what's behind this phenomenon? And if I come up with some
crazy explanation, and then I think about it and I say, “No, that's
not G-d's style. It can't be that. It must be something else.” And
sooner or later I come to the right conclusion.

PROFESOR WILLIAM DEMBSKI

Just to speak to this question of a conspiracy. I certainly wasn't
trying to convey that. David Berlinski, in one of his articles, put it
very well. Unfortunately, I don't remember exactly how he put it. He
cites Freud's Future of an Illusion, which says that basically those who
are in the grip of an illusion never realize it. That is the point. You
are working within a world view, and some things are acceptable within
that world view, and other things are utterly outside the pale. And
for those things that are outside the pale you just don't go there;
you work out the logic of your world view. And if that applies to
science, the materialistic world view will only allow certain types of
scientific explanation, and that's as far as you are going to go. So,
Intelligent Design will not even be an option for them. I don't think
it's a conspiracy; it's not necessarily even dishonest.

Miller, I have some problems with him. I've debated him now a number
of times. In his chapter on Behe, I think there are some real problems
there because he says that Behe claims that there are no examples of the
evolution of irreducibly complex systems described in the literature. What
do you know? I did a PubMed search and there I get four glittering
examples. In these glittering examples, in three cases they're not even of
irreducibly complex systems, the systems that Behe was talking about. When
you actually look at the articles, you have perhaps a one-line throwaway,
"And evolution did this." You don't have any detailed explanations of how
these systems came about. So this is an argument by irrelevant reference;
and he is a master of that. So Miller, if there is an honesty problem
with some of these Darwinian problems, I would attribute it to him. But
I think there are some Darwinian biologists who really believe this and
think that the Darwinian explanation is the best and do so honestly. But
in that case we are just going to differ. Scientific controversies have
been around for a long time. Thomas Kuhn I think gives a very good picture
of what we are witnessing in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions. How
anomalies build up, pressure is put on a paradigm; then some people jump
ship, some people try to work the old paradigm. And I think that's what
we are seeing.

PROFESSOR ELIEZER ZEIGER

When I was a young scientist, I used to believe that science was pure,
and the doing of science was pure. I've learnt completely different. But
what is miraculous is that despite all the human emotions that are
present, science still works. That's the amazing thing. Given enough
time and enough research, the truth, as far as I can know, will come
out. Science is beautiful, but in terms of how humans behave, I was
shocked at the horror tactics that took place in Pennsylvania and the
back to back coverage on the background information that the New York
Times was doing. The more elaborate story was how much funding was coming
from religious sources. What does that have to do with anything? So this
human component is there, but this should not lead you to believe that
science is not pure.

DR. LEE SPETNER

I mentioned a book about the peppered moth [J. Hooper, Of Moths and Men:
The Untold Story of Science and the Peppered Moth, (New York: Norton,
2002) ISBN 0-393-05121-8]. I recommend this because it is a case study of
people who sincerely believed in it even when the evidence really didn't
support it. Hooper called it a sham in the end; but the scientists who
did the work were sincere in their beliefs right up to the end. Of course,
Hooper’s book was attacked by evolutionists, but to my mind the attacks
were not to the point.

PROFESSOR ELIEZER ZEIGER

It's definitely not a conspiracy in the classical sense.

Professor Nathan Aviezer

When I hear the comments, I think there is considerable misunderstanding
about what evolutionary biologists believe. What I hear is that all the
evolutionary biologists agree with each other about all the details of
evolution and are in one camp. That is not true at all. Arguments are
still raging among evolutionary biology about even the most fundamental
questions in the discipline. One would think that one hundred and fifty
years after Darwin and fifty years after the neo-Darwinian thesis,
the evolutionary biologists would get their act together. But this is
not the case at all. They still argue about the most basic questions. I
give many examples in my book, Fossils and Faith, such as:

What is a species? This must seem like a very strange question. How
can evolutionary biologists not agree on what the term “species”
means? Isn't Darwin’s famous book about explaining the “Origin
of Species”? Nevertheless, Professor Peter Raven, a well-known
evolutionary biologist who publishes in the leading journals, writes:
“One  should turn away from the biological species as a unit of
fundamental evolutionary significance. Species do not have an objective
reality in nature” [in Modern Aspects of Species, edited by K. Iwatsuki,
1986, pages 11-26].

In contrast to these views, Professor Walter Block of Columbia
University writes on pages 31-57 of the same volume: “Species do have
an objective reality. Species and speciation play a very important role
in macroevolutionary change.”

Are mutations random? One of the cornerstones of evolutionary biology is
the assumption that all mutations are random. In view of this fundamental
assumption, it came as quite a shock to evolutionary biologists when,
in 1988 Professor John Cairns of Harvard University Medical School
reported in the prestigious journal Nature [volume 335, pages 142-145],
that “cells may have mechanisms for choosing which mutations will
occur.” This statement was a bombshell! The revolutionary nature of
these findings, termed “directed mutation,” can be gauged by the
fact that a full decade later, in September 1997 [page 9], Scientific
American characterized these findings as “sensational experiments”
leading to an “incendiary idea.”

Another subject of controversy is:

What factors control evolution? Anyone who doubts that evolutionary
biologists are still arguing about what factors control evolution is
invited to read Causes of Evolution [1999]. The editors wrote [on page
1]: “We wanted to see what would happen if evolutionary biologists were
asked to identify what they believed to be the causal factors controlling
evolution. Two largely incompatible dichotomies have been central to
this question ever since Darwin—and they have never been resolved.”

Final question. Has there been any evolutionary progress in the history of
the animal kingdom? This question must surely seem astonishing! Isn’t
the entire purpose of the theory of evolution to explain how
progressive biological change came about? Therefore, how could any
evolutionary biologist suggest that there hasn’t been any progressive
change? Nevertheless, no less an authority than Professor Stephen Jay
Gould of Harvard University writes, in the premier journal in the field,
Evolution [1997, volume 51, page 1015], “No progressive evolutionary
change has ever occurred.” In the same issue of Evolution, Professor
Richard Dawkins, an equally famous authority, writes the exact opposite!

The point of all these examples is that no one should think that
evolutionary biologists have developed a well-established theoretical
framework, agreed upon by all, regarding evolution. In fact, one hundred
and fifty years after Darwin, leading authorities still disagree
vehemently about some of the most fundamental questions regarding
evolution.

PROFESSOR WILLIAM DEMBSKI

I would say they do agree on one thing, that they need to present a united
front, certainly for the sake of the textbooks. They fight it out among
themselves, but when they come to the public they wipe off the blood,
they kiss and make up.

DR. LEE SPETNER

They agree on the fundamental point that evolution has occurred. What
they sometimes don't agree on is exactly how this happened. And they
say that these mechanisms are subject to discussion and subject to
debate. But what they all agree on is that evolution did happen.

Dr. Alexander Poltorak

In the words of Professor Dembski, let me play the role of devil's
advocate just for a moment. The topic of this panel is how to teach
evolution in the schools. It was given a special angle, that is, how
to undermine the scientific evolution theory from the point of view
of science. This certainly is a valid point, but my problem is much
simpler. My problem is also a very literal reading of the topic of this
panel, how to teach evolution in Jewish schools. The problem is it's
not taught at all, and in some Jewish schools biology is not taught at
all. My daughter went to a fine school where there was a textbook of
biology and the chapter on evolution was torn out of the textbook. I
guess this is a moral flaw to some extent. I mean, we just don't have
a consistent position on that. There are certainly some elements of
evolution that can be used to justify certain ideological positions,
on one hand, and on the other, one can take it to another extreme to
justify another ideological position. And so we have to make very, very
clear what is the distinction between good science and what is not. Our
panelists have done a fantastic job in doing just that, but I think that
it is imperative to introduce honest teaching of evolution in Jewish
schools. Therefore, it is my heartfelt request to you, our distinguished
panelists, please write a textbook that could be a kosher textbook of
evolution or biology that could be taught in our Jewish schools, so that
our children do not remain ignorant of the most basic theories in biology.

More generally speaking, our role as religious scientists is two-fold. On
the one hand, we are obligated to bring G-d into the high schools, into
colleges, into our laboratories and our work in the world at large. And
on the other hand, we need to bring science into religious schools as
well. I think this conference has done a wonderful job emphasizing
the first aspect, but does not emphasize the second aspect at all,
and therefore I feel compelled to bring this point across.

Another point I wanted to make is in respect to a random selection,
whether or not it is in fact a mechanism for evolution. Professor Dembski
mentioned that some of the people who espoused Intelligent Design in
the Christian community are considered to be apologetic when they pursue
the line of thought that random mutation is possible, but it is a kind
of a mechanism for the hand of G-d to manifest itself.

To me as a Jew randomness is not an offensive thought at all because in
Jewish theology, and Rabbi Tendler will correct me if I'm wrong, I think
randomness plays a very important role and it is typically understood
as a mechanism for hashgahah pratit, for Divine Providence to manifest
itself. Purim revolves around this central idea of randomness. The name
of the holiday of Purim comes from the word pur, which means "lot." The
whole idea that was discussed in Jewish literature and Kabbalah and
hasidic philosophy is that randomness played a most important role in
accepting a certain level of divinity and allowing Divine Providence
to manifest itself. Yom Kippur, the day like Purim, also is centered
around the concept of randomness, the lot that was thrown by the high
priest. On Hanukkah we play dreidel, the little top that also signifies
the concept of randomness. I am not suggesting that random mutation is a
mechanism of evolution because I am not a biologist. I don't know. But
if it happens to be that it is, to me as a physicist, randomness is
a perfectly normal mechanism of quantum physics where most processes
are random; and it doesn't upset my intellectual sensibility; and if
it happens to be that random mutation plays some role in evolution,
and I'm not suggesting that it does, it wouldn't be offensive to me
as a Jew. These are my two comments and one question. The question is
very, very simple. If we summarily reject the idea of common ancestry
of interspecies evolution—macroevolution—then how do we explain
such facts as Rabbi Tendler spoke about yesterday, that we perform
medical experiments on animals, on mice, with the hope of deriving some
knowledge that is applicable to human beings. We use animal organs,
pig organs, for example, for transplants to human beings, hoping that
they will survive. And how do we explain the profound similarities in
genetic code between human beings and apes, for example? I think that
98% of genome is the same, and almost 90% is the same in a human being
and a worm. Yes, the DNA is the common mechanism here, but there is so
much information stacked in the genome; if there is no specie evolution,
I just don't know how to explain that.

RABBI MOSHE TENDLER

I won't comment on what you said before but it's very simple, An
architect has a learning curve, and it takes a while before he becomes
a good architect. When he does finally become a good architect, he is
not required to build the next house with the old knowledge. Little by
little, he builds the third house, the fourth house right. If G-d had
a plan of how you make an arm, a hand and that was a good plan, there
would be no reason why He shouldn't have given it to a whale, or to a
bat's wing. If that's how you define homology, that doesn't mean that
you have a developmental system in which one came from the other. The
idea of having homologous organs and so on was well known by Hazal. The
Talmud rules that when the pigs were suffering an intestinal disease,
the rabbis would order a fast day. The idea that they project is that
the intestinal tract of the pig is similar to that of the human and
therefore we fear that whatever disease is affecting the pigs, could
also affect us. Therefore there was a yom ta'anit, a halakhic ruling
that they had to pass for that. So the Talmud Sages were quite familiar
with homology. They never said, however, that we come from the pigs.

DR. LEE SPETNER

I am actually amazed that you think that because organs are similar in
different families or phyla, that one descended from the other. I don't
think that follows at all.

PROFESSOR WILLIAM DEMBSKI

You raised the point of writing a textbook. I am the academic editor
for the textbook publisher of Of Pandas and People, the book which is
under discussion in the recent Dover case in Pennsylvania. It involves
the second edition which is under dispute. It wasn't that this book
was being taught, it was rather that students were read a one minute
statement telling them that they could learn about an alternative theory
to evolution if they went to the library and looked at this book. That
was enough to lead to the court case. I have been working on the third
edition of this book, and it’s been entirely rewritten. It's a much
bigger book, targeted at high school, entry high school, and college
level students, and it will be a simplified version. That will still be a
supplemental text. The problem is that it is published by a publisher that
is servicing a lot of the evangelical community but trying also to break
into the secular market and packaging the book in a way that there is
no overt religious connection. The problem is getting the money to write
the textbook. None of the big textbook publishers are going to touch it
at this point. I did an estimate of what it would take to make a basic
knowledge textbook for high school and college level, a textbook of 800
to 1000 pages framed around intelligence of G-d or at least critical of
evolutionary theory. You're looking at maybe around 16.5 million dollars,
which they just haven't got, and how do you come up with the money? It's
just not there. For all the talk in the New York Times about how well
funded these groups are, it's just not there for that purpose. Perhaps
there is a place for a partnership, but it's a question of getting the
funds together. It's difficult.

DR. LEE SPETNER

I don't think we should be writing our own textbook. I don't know about
the Christian community, but I know that for the Jewish high schools,
putting out our own textbook giving our own version of evolution
would prejudice our students’ chances of getting into university,
because they will be getting a “second-class education.” I think
the solution is to keep the textbooks, whatever they are, but give
them a supplementary pamphlet to point out all the problems with the
molecules-to-man evolution. And that's a much cheaper job.

PROFESSOR WILLIAM DEMBSKI

That's what we are doing, a supplemental text.

Question from the Floor G

The last and the previous gentlemen both used the term "randomness.” I
know this term already been thrown around quite a bit in this conference
and in other conferences I've attended like this. It seems to always
come down to the question not so much whether you’re a proponent of
evolution or whether you believe in G-d; it’s whether everything that's
happened in the universe is accidental, is random, or whether everything
has meaning, and that everything is intertwined and whether we have only
the appearance of randomness. For me, the bridge to this conflict of
scientists versus religionists or the Intelligent Design theorists, is
Chaos Theory. Chaos Theory is simply the bridge. It’s an established
branch of science. It’s forty years old. It’s been extensively
proven in many different fields now, where the basic premise is that
there is nothing such as true randomness; there is only the appearance
of randomness. And so that's my question to the panel. Are we all in
agreement that Chaos Theory should be taught in college science settings,
high school science settings and in religious settings?

PROFESSOR ELIEZER ZEIGER

In kabbalistic lore, the closest we come to randomness is in the concept
of tohu. The word tohu is in Genesis: the world was tohu v vohu before
creation. But tohu is random, non-ordered. From a more existential
point of view, tohu is all the raw energy that every individual needs
in order to act, while the tikkun, that is the rectification, is the
process of reacting to tohu. So Jewish tradition, particularly Kabbalah,
is fundamentally different than Chaos Theory.

Question from the Floor G

Are you telling me as a kabbalist that you believe in things happening
randomly? I have never heard any other kabbalist make that statement.

PROFESSOR ELIEZER ZEIGER

I am talking about tohu. I am not talking about randomness.

PROFESSOR WILLIAM DEMBSKI

Could I just speak a little on this, because this is actually my whole
entré into this topic, as a probability theorist trying to understand
the nature of randomness. I started writing about this and doing research
at the time when Chaos Theory was so big. I think there are two ways
in which randomness is used, one is as in the sense of patternlessness,
which can be described mathematically in complexity related terms. There
are various ways of approaching this. Basically, you look at something
and you ask does it exhibit a certain degree of patternlessness, or is
it a complexity that is so big, and that's one way of characterizing
it. The other way of getting at randomness is to think of it causally
as the result of some process.

The written papers of the panelists will be published in B’OR HA’TORAH
17 (2007). Order now



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