Creation and Evolution: How Science Refuses Evolution
by Rabbi Dovid Eidensohn
I believe, and I think I know, that the world was created by HaShem less than six thousand years ago. The great grandson of Rashi, Rabbeinu Tam, tells us that the Torah is based upon rational understanding and prophecy. These two foundations of the Torah both contribute to believing in the Creation, as opposed to a creation without HaShem as evolutionists understand it. The Torah tells us that G-d created the world. The Talmud, in the name of Yeshiva of Elijah the Project, tells us that this world will last six thousand years. If so, prophecy has spoken. What about the rational foundation of Judaism? Does it support Creation? We could say that such a wonder as Creation speaks about a Creator. Some would call this Intelligent Design. Intelligent Design does make more sense than unintelligent design, or accident. After we found out about genes, we can no longer assume that life is an accident, nor can be accept any sporadic and unstable natural process to explain it. But we are not going this route here, and will advance another idea to support the rational belief in Creation. We want to show that science cannot accept evolution, by showing a few facts. But first, we want to show the prejudices of science regarding evolution and to explain them.
The New York Times Magazine quoted a statistic that ninety percent of Americans believe that G-d was involved in creation, as do forty percent of scientists. 95 percent of biologists, however, deny that G-d had anything to do with creation. We see an incredible philosophical factor in the science of biology, where evolution is the major idea. Other sciences are not so opposed to G-d. Why?
Science is going in two opposite directions regarding evolution or creation, or, the influence of a Creator in nature. Physics has already accepted, universally, the Anthropic Principle, namely, that the universe was designed for people. Who designed it? It doesn't really matter if science has not named the Creator. If there was a creation, there had to be a Creator.
But even this is not our point. I believe in creation and not evolution for purely scientific reasons, along with the prophetic ones. What are the scientific reasons? Let us first take a look at the secular or atheistic program of creation. It begins, according to Einstein and Relativity, with a tiny dot that emerged, in the Big Bang, from nothing. The problem is that science does not allow something to emerge from nothing. The Law of Conservation of Energy states that energy can be neither created nor destroyed, only changed in form. If so, how did something, containing all of the energy the universe would ever use, emerge from nothing?
Two, once the Big Bang produced a tiny drop, says science, the dot began to expand until it became a universe filled with a simple plasma or pre-atomic substance. Stop! According to Einstein and modern science, a large amount of matter, such as a star, shrunken to a small ball, such as a city block, is a Black Hole, and does not emit light nor can anything escape from it. The Black Hole's gravity pulls everything down to its center, forcing the ball to become smaller and smaller. Thus, the idea of a dot expanding is a violation of gravity.
Three, secular science believes that the simple plasma filling the universe began forming into complex atomic structures with quarks and electrons. This violates another principle of physics, entropy. Entropy is a law of thermodynamics, and states that everything in a closed system must decline in complexity and achieve, ultimately, a simple state of disorder and decline, known as "death of the universe." Nature goes down, not up. This applies to the earliest plasma becoming atoms, and it also applies to the evolution of life itself.
Such is the scientific reasoning I use to accept that only G-d created the world. If He did (and there is no scientific reason how creation could transpire otherwise) there is no reason to drag things on for more than a few days, as stated in Genesis. But there is more. Steven Gould, the senior evolutionist from Harvard, stated that there is no scientific basis for evolution. He did not believe in G-d, so he accepted the universe as an accident. I find it hard to accept that humans or even a bee came from an accident or a billion accidents. So, I am happy with the Torah and Talmud and their explanations of creation from a rational as well as prophetic aspect, from the prophets or the bible and Talmud.
I cannot understand why any Jew would want to believe in evolution. Hitler based his extermination of Jews upon Haeckel, the social Darwinist, whose ideas spread throughout the Western world. Even Justice Holmes in America believed in Haeckel's ideas, in an infamous ruling permitting sterilization of "undesirables" in Virginia.
One who believes in Creation by G-d is buttressed by both science, prophecy, and even morality and ethics. One who denies heavenly creation has no explanation of how the world came into being, and no explanation of why humans are here. Furthermore, those who espouse evolution support the evil ideas of survival of the fittest, and the corollary that the superior people must fulfill the will of nature and destroy the inferior people. Even if they personally repudiate these actions, they support the source of these actions.
Hitler would be proud.