"Intelligent Design" as idolatry?

[rhu]

In the current issue of Jewish Action magazine, Prof. Nathan Aviezer discusses "Intelligent Design" from an Orthodox Jewish standpoint. His conclusion?

There is a striking similarity between ID and the ideas that underlie idolatry.

It's a fascinating article. Among his points (my paraphrases):

• Science deals with how the universe works; religion deals with why.
• Jewish tradition teaches that even when God performs miracles, they are done in accordance with the laws of nature. Praying to God for an overt miracle is strictly forbidden as a pointless prayer. (One may, of course, pray for favorable outcomes within nature, such as praying that this season's rains be sufficient to grow one's crops.)
• "ID" presumes to answer quesions that science has not yet been able to answer by, as in the famous New Yorker cartoon, handwaving while saying "and then a miracle occurs." Prof. Aviezer compares this to explaining the weather by presuming that there are gods of the sea, the sun, etc. Saying "people are here because some supernatural being willed us into existance" is simply trading in ancient superstition for a superstition cloaked in monotheism.

Prof. Aviezer also explores the true motives of the ID proponents:

The existence of [a proof-of-God] agenda is supported by the fact that ID has been restricted to the subject of biological evolution. Why? There are surely physical phenomena that are even more enigmatic than evolution in the fields of physics (quantum reality), cosmology (dark matter and dark energy) and astronomy (gamma-ray bursts). Yet, in spite of the many current scientific enigmas, no one has suggested ID as their explanation.

I was delighted to find this article in a mainstream Orthodox publication, because it clearly lays out to members of the Orthodox Jewish community who are not scientists why ID is both bad science and bad religion. His comparison of ID to idolatry was one that I'd never seen before and which I found compelling.

Comments

[cellio]

Interesting perspective! I hadn't considered that before. He's got a good point. (Is this article publicly available somewhere? I've never heard of the publication.)

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

Jewish Action is the membership magazine of the Orthodox Union. I couldn't find the article on the OU website, or I would have linked to it.

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

Fascinating.

I think I mentioned this before, but I recommend you check out Finding Darwin's God by Kenneth Miller. Miller is a biologist and a devout Catholic, and he frequently testifies in favor of evolution being taught in science classes. His book is an explanation of how he sees evolution and religious belief as being compatible.

[sethg]

Well, the letters column in the next issue of Jewish Action should be a fun read....

There's an interesting political angle here, since some prominent rabbis in the charedi community to have elevated disbelief in Darwinian evolution to the level of dogma: a rabbi with impeccable black-hat credentials was put in cherem for daring to state that (a) the world is millions of years old and (b) Chazal relied on the scientific knowledge of their day, which was sometimes incorrect.

[rubrick.livejournal.com]

How does the "in accordance with the laws of nature" bit jibe with stuff like the burning bush or the parting of the Red Sea or the great flood or pillars of salt or....?

Come to think of it, doesn't a miracle imply a violation of the laws of nature (or at the very least statistics, which at a deep level probably amounts to the same thing) by definition? I have trouble conceiving of a miracle in which everything happens exactly as science would predict.

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

Well, at least one of those is easy. :-) The parting of the sea is described in Exodus as the result of a sustained wind -- forget the Charlton Heston moment. As for the great flood, there are those who view it as a parable and not necessarily to be taken literally.

There's a Talmudic discussion (which I can't find right now) that asserts that items such as the burning bush, the mouth of Bilam's donkey, etc. were created on the sixth day, moments before the Sabbath. The rabbis who wrote that section were clearly trying to reconcile miracles with science, and did so by saying that everything follows natural law, and the "exceptions" to natural law were written in just before natural law was finalized.

I think the author of the article in Jewish Action would agree with you that if miracles -- i.e., violations of natural law -- do occur, they are by definition outside of science's ability to treat systematically. But that does not contradict the idea that miracles deviate from the scientific norm by the least amount necessary.

A wind splitting the Red Sea at the most opportune moment? A miracle, but not prevented by the laws of physics.