Dr. Stephen Jay Gould

By Rabbi David Eidensohn

            In a lengthy article on May 20, '02, the New York Times eulogized the great evolutionist Steven Jay Gould of Harvard, who died in May at the age of sixty. The world of biology and paleontology will surely miss Mr. Gould, as will his world-wide fan-club who kept buying his many books, which let them in on the inside story of evolution and related topics.

            Why should I, an Orthodox rabbi who believes that the world is six thousand years old, write about Mr. Gould? He is my hero. As the Times pointed out, Gould believed in evolution, but he told the facts as they are. Gould was great enough to pronounce the secular heresy that there is no biological process to produce evolution. If people evolved, as Gould believed they did, it was an atypical accident that could only occur over extremely long periods. The importance of this cannot be overemphasized. Evolution is not a scientific process, said Mr. Gould. "If the Tree of Life was planted anew," said he, "life would not form as we know it." Gould stood evolution on its head. It has no scientific basis, because "accidents" are not science.

            Actually, the world of science is dealing a lot with accidents these days. Cosmology was once awash with four theories on the origin of the moon. All institutions of higher learning taught them with great enthusiasm. When Americans went to the moon and brought back rocks, all four theories vanished, and were replaced by the latest "accident" theory. Accidents, of course, are not science, they are not processes that replicate in the laboratory or any other place, and are even akin to fantasy.

            Scientists had known for a long time that the fossil record does not support Darwinian theory. If Darwin was right, the fossil record should be clearly structured from lower to higher, but it isn't. Mr. Gould, like the boy who declared the Emperor naked, finally broke with the mumbo-mumbo and said it like it is. The fossil record opposes Darwinian biological evolutionary process.

            When I was a young student, an Orthodox rabbi, Avigder Miller, wrote a lengthy book refuting the evolutionists. He quoted at length from the scientific journals that questioned the secular orthodoxy. That was thirty years ago. All of us asked, "If this is true, where are the scientists? Can they support lies?" Only last year did a Catholic researcher publicize the fact that a major evolutionary tenet, that human embryos have tails, is a complete lie. Darwin had an apostle, Ernst Haeckel, who preached a theory called biogenetic law, or recapitulation theory. Haeckel said that all humans in the process of gestation go through the phases of evolution. At one point, they have a tail. To impress people, Haeckel used some big words, "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." Ontogeny, or ontogenesis, is the formation of living embryos. Phylogeny is the supposed evolutionary development of species. Thus, Haeckel taught that the baby in embryo form went through stages similar to earlier animals. This lie was taught in Harvard, Hopkins and all medical schools for a hundred years. Only very recently did people bother to find out that it wasn't true. Many people knew that evolution invoked fraud. Only Gould, however, said, in the name of science, that there is no scientific process for evolution, only accident, and an out of the ordinary accident at that.

            How strange that any scientist could believe in evolution, and in a biological process that advances an organism from lower to higher organization. Entropy, a principle of thermodynamics, declares that nature declines and does not improve. Just as your desktop clutters and becomes disorganized, so do all biological and physical systems decline and eventually loose function. How then can a scientist believe in evolution, a process of turning an organism into something higher? As one evolutionist stated when faced with a similar challenge to Darwin: "What is the alternative?" If it is G-d and creation, we will believe in anything. Evolutionists thus became fanatics, believing against all rational science in a process that wasn't.

            Science itself provides facts that challenge evolution. First of all, it declares that the world is only some twelve billion years old. That is, from the Big Bang to today, is only about twelve billion years. For an accident such as Gould's evolution to happen, for people to spring from the bleak radioactive crashings of outer space, would require an incredible string of coincidences. Could they take place in a mere twelve billion years? A recent study showed that in the entire universe, the conditions (due to radioactivity, the crashing of meteors, and the requirements of the makeup of life-sustaining planetary orbs) prohibit the formation of life, except on earth. How many "accidents" had to take place before the cosmic plasma turned into quarks and electrons? How many "accidents" had to take place before the solar system formed? How many "accidents" had to take place before the earth landed exactly where it needed to be relative to the sun? How many "accidents" had to take place before the chemicals of the arid rock produced water and living cells? How many "accidents" had to take place before these cells became RNA and then DNA? Remember also that science claims that there were many setbacks to evolution, so that entire ages of ice and chaos destroyed the earlier "accidents." Did all of these "accidents" and destruction produce a human being with thirty billion perfectly coordinated genes in a mere twelve billion years? If accidents in between ice ages and meteor bombings produced one gene with its incredible marvel a year, it would take thirty billion years. Accidents that put all thirty billion of them together would be impossible to even contemplate, unless you are a secular fanatic like the professors of evolution.

            Where are the millions of life forms predicted by the evolutionists all over the cosmos? Anyone listening out there? (G-d doesn't count, of course.) Life could not form without oceans, because ocean waters hold enormous deposits of carbon dioxide, which would kill life if released. Thus, there had to be an earth with oceans. This earth had to be exactly the right removal from the sun, not too close, not to far. How did this incredible accident happen in just twelve billion years, that a chunk of rock, with oceans, just swished around the sun in the proper orbit, and then, began producing complex life?

            Can anyone who reads about DNA, the incredible team play of thirty billion genes, the constant splitting of the double helix ladder so its rungs fall apart and its bases rejoin producing more and more cells, believe in accidental evolution?

            Where are our ancestors? The New York Public Library Science Desk Reference, page 405-6, presents the embarrassing "scientific" thoughts on that. To quote one passage, "Theories on the evolution of humans and the dates of their existence, are highly debated." And, "Because of a gap in the human fossil records, humankind's lineage is relatively difficult to chart from about 10 million years ago."

            The New York Public Library Science Desk Reference, page 93, tells us that there is evolution going on today. A white moth in England turned black, because it knew that being white was no good. The factories made walls black with soot, so the moths, in order to survive and not be seen, turned black. Sounds impressive? I remember reading this discovery in Scientific American Magazine thirty years ago. However, the article noted that the chemicals in soot, when injected into the white moths, turned them black. If you are true believer, don't let things like that stop you from believing in evolution.

            By the standards of fraud and lies that pass for evolutionary science, Gould was an honest broker. He said that there was no biological process, and even though he accepted the accidental theory, he declared it to be a far-fetched and atypical thing, unlikely to have happened and surely unlikely to happen elsewhere or again. Such talk, of course, strengthens the hands of Creationists like me. However, I have another hero in the scientific world, who strengthens my religious beliefs, Albert Einstein.

            Einstein's teachings in the early twentieth century about relativity were studied throughout the world, and someone, a Dr. Friedmann, discovered that Einstein's ideas proved Creation! Einstein was shocked. Such an idea turned science upside down, so Einstein refused to accept this without a struggle, and developed a cosmic constant to recast his theory without creation. Later, in 1929, however, the red shift in the stars were discerned by astronomer Edwin Hubble, who declared that the universe is expanding, and that nebulae farther away in space are going faster than those near the center of the cosmic orb. This proof of the expansion of the universe convinced Einstein, and he declared that his refusal to accept the Big Bang was his greatest mistake. Science proves Creation! Not bad, for secular science.

            The Big Bang is far more complicated than the creation or evolution of man. The Big Bang was not water and rock turning into people. The Big Bang was a tiny speck, tinier than can be described, that contained in it the entire mass and energy of the cosmos. The Big Bang was not an event in time or space. Without the Big Bang, before it, and in those places where the matter in the Big Bang had not yet expanded, there was no time and no space. There was nothing. Where did time, space, energy and matter in the Big Bang come from? Come on fellows; don't tell me it was an accident. It's lucky that Stephen Gould was a biologist and paleontologist and not a cosmologist. What would he have said to his colleagues who refuse to answer who made the Big Bang?

            Modern scientists are being squeezed by science into considering spirituality. David Bohm and Karl Pribram are playing my song, although they would deny it. If David Bohm believes in the process of life and matter being guided by some force above time, he doesn't call it G-d; he calls it the super-implicate. Tell me, David, if there is a super-implicate as you suggest calling out to all of the particles and energies that exist, to bring them to higher challenge and perfection, why is there imperfection? More important, how can entropy, the guarantee of natural decline of organization compete with this "super-implicate"? I call it G-d, and I say that scientifically. At least this way I avoid being sued for fraud.

            Aristotle was the first Western scientist. However, he created a science rooted in observation and intuitive application of systematic structure. Aristotle's science was the same as a painting; it looked nice and it worked. Newton came along and declared modern physics. He broke with Aristotle, but although he won the battle, Aristotle may have won the war, at least, in a way, as we explain.

            Einstein writes that Newton's First Law of Motion, that all motion is eternal, defies common sense and intuition. How can something be touched and nudged just a bit and travel forever? Where is the energy to provide eternal motion? To Newton, there is no difference between an object at rest and an object in motion. An object continues to do its thing, sitting or sailing, forever. Its velocity is always constant, unless another force interacts with it and changes the direction of force of motion. All scientists accept Newton's Law, not because anybody understands it, but because the mathematics Newton put on paper work. Modern science is thus the rejection of Aristotle's scientific logic as beauty and the reduction of science to cold and not understood mathematics. Modern quantum theory is so illogical that even Einstein rebelled against its weird ideas. However, they do appeal to the mathematical computers, so people accept the modern ideas of quantum theory, while acknowledging that they are dizzying and far from beautiful in concept.

            People once hoped that science would pierce the veil of the finite and reveal Truth. Now, the computers are cranking out a new mishmash world that frightens humans with its incredible phenomena. As science goes deeper and deeper into the mush, something happens. The finite structure and limitations of life shudder and even collapse. Science thus turns to the black mystery of life and seeks to leapfrog the cold computers with spirituality.

            Mr. Gould is now in heaven, standing before the Creator. He deserves credit for breaking new ground in science, and hastening the process whereby science will one day study facts without fanaticism. For those of us who fight the new "science" that supports pedophilia, and ignores large numbers of homosexuals who changed into heterosexuals, this will be most welcome.