Recently in Life's Origins & Evolution Category

Orthodox Jews have almost a sixth sense for feeling out of place. Many of us know this experience: On a visit to an unfamiliar city, you head into a restaurant that you have been assured is strictly kosher. On entering, you look around at the crowd of diners, expecting to see identifiably religious Jews -- men wearing kippot -- but there are none. Uneasy, you ask to see the establishment's kosher certification. Maybe the place is no longer under rabbinic supervision? Maybe you're in the wrong restaurant altogether. The manager produces a piece of paper with a rabbi's name on it, which looks legitimate. And yet...something doesn't sit right.

If there are no frum Jews there, could it really be kosher? That is a question I'm often asked by other Jews of all stripes, if not in exactly those words, about what I do in my professional life. And what is that? Do I work as a pork butcher? As the door attendant at a radical Muslim mosque? No, I'm a senior fellow at a think tank, the Discovery Institute, well known for supporting research in intelligent design -- the scientific critique of and alternative to Darwinian evolution. 

At first glance, you might think nothing could be more Jewish. Very shortly Jews around the world will be celebrating a new yearly cycle of Torah readings, beginning with Genesis, the parsha of Bereishit, narrating God's creation of the world. Like Shabbat, which similarly recalls the primordial sequence of divine creativity, studying Bereishit again is a time to re-center ourselves as Jews on a truth that today is widely forgotten or denied. 

That truth is that we live in a world bearing testimony to purposeful design. The very idea is under widespread, influential attack from Darwinists who insist overwhelming scientific evidence demonstrates that life originated and developed as the product of blind, churning, purposeless natural forces. Answering the challenge is a scientific pursuit, but it has spiritual implications as well, just as Darwinism has its own implications that rule out purpose, meaning or design in life's history.

Many Jews, however, including many on the more liberal end of the Orthodox spectrum, see intelligent design as a purely Christian undertaking, with no support from Jewish tradition. The Wall Street Journal has promoted as a representative Jewish view that of Yeshiva University biologist Carl Feit "who is an ordained rabbi and Talmudic scholar.... Prof. Feit says that in nearly a quarter-century of teaching introductory biology, he has always taught evolution -- supported by traditional Jewish source material -- and that 'there has never been a blip on the radar here.' His assessment echoes the official line of the Modern Orthodox rabbinical association, which states that evolution is entirely consistent with Judaism."