Last week, right before the holiday of Receiving the Torah [Shavuos], we were informed that the Israeli Ministry of Education has taken another step against the Torah. This time they mandated teaching evolutionary theory to both the state secular and state religious school systems. It is important to realize that although the Ministry of Education said that it would not include that part of the theory of evolution that posits the development of humans from a so-called primordial animal, the whole evolutionary theory stems from a destructive source that will negatively affect the students exposed to it.
Everyone should take their children out of the public schools and put them in religious schools. Even without mentioning the other problems that infests these educational frameworks, parents are forbidden to leave their children in these schools which will imbue the next generation with heretical views that will distance them from G-d and Torah. There is no difference between believing in the evolution of animals and the evolution of humans. Both of them completely oppose the verses of the Torah that animals and man were created directly from the earth, as the Talmud says (Hulin 60a): “Every creation was created complete (in their complete form and not in stages), intelligent (with adult intelligence), and in its proper shape (the most beautiful form of that creation).” See Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed, Part 2 Chapter 30.
The Theory of Evolution was created by those who do not believe in a Creator. When asked how an inanimate world (created by a Big Bang) could generate living creatures, they are stuck. Their cumbersome response is that a particle became alive (although they fully admit that they have no answer to the question of how inanimate material can become alive without divine intervention), evolved into an ape form, until it ultimately became a person. The entire theory is based on heresy. The truth must be clearly told: Whoever believes in G-d, knows that He can a priori create humans and every other animal in their perfect form, exactly as it is related in the Torah. On such a core issue, there is no room for heretical compromise or theories.
At the same time, it is clear is that G-d created man and animals with protective and adaptative systems which helps them adapt to different places and situations. But this is only at the micro level, not the macro. A giraffe will never turn into a duck, and an elephant will never grow wings, even if a million years passes.
As mentioned, scientists admit that science has no answer to the question of how inanimate material became living material. The theory of evolution is full of holes and internal contradictions even at the scientific level, but it has become the default for those who are unwilling to admit that a Creator created the world, because admitting this truth would obligate them to change their way of life.
Morally, we should ask what evolution conveys to the younger generation. Various studies have shown that Nazism utilized the theory of evolution, which claims that only the fittest survive in nature. Actually, evolution wiped out human conscience and human emotion, and replaced them with a jungle mentality. If humans are not the crown of creation, but only a sophisticated animal, then we are all part of a big jungle where there is no point in asking why the lion devours the weak deer.
The former director of “Yad Vashem” said that evolution wiped out the Torah commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” Is this the education that we want to imbue our children with?
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To go more in-deep into the scientific aspect of evolution, we bring the following about Darwin’s Origin of Species, from Rav Zamir Cohen’s book “The Second Revolution.”
Currently there are three common views regarding the origin of species in the world:
The Jewish view: each species individually came into being by divine creation during two periods of time (on the fifth day, sea creatures, birds, insects, and large reptiles, and on the sixth day, mammals and humans), as described in the Bible in the Book of Genesis.
The conjecture of creation deniers: Random development, no divine intervention, in the following way: an inanimate particle suddenly became living, underwent changes over many years during which it developed all the facets necessary to properly function. It developed its own internal cameras and the ability to walk, eat, digest and excrete waste, male and female reproductive systems, until it became a creation that could swim or walk. At one point it also developed wings and managed to fly. These changes occurred from natural selection. In other words, whatever worked, survived, and whatever didn’t, become extinct.
A view that attempts to integrate both views: G-d created the world in an evolutionary way. In other words, the various creatures did not appear individually, but G-d created them in stages. At first He created a single-celled organism that developed into various species from which humans eventually evolved.
This latter false opinion is advocated by quite a few people because it has the seeming advantage of combining Torah and science. It tells evolution scientists: “You are right, but there is no contradiction between your words and the Bible of how G-d created the world.”
In fact, if G-d had chosen to create His creatures this way, no one would have a problem with this view of the origin of species. But G-d forbid we should distort the truth and contradict the Bible’s clear words just to please some people. This is all the more true today when, as we mentioned early in this article, recent and new discoveries refute evolutionary theory and confirm the Bible’s story of how species were created.
The Bible states about the different species and the crown of creation, man, that they came from the earth and the water (Gen. 1:20-24):
And God said, “Let the waters swarm a swarming of living creatures, and let fowl fly over the earth, across the expanse of the heavens.”
And God created the great sea monsters, and every living creature that crawls, with which the waters swarmed, according to their kind, and every winged fowl, according to its kind, and God saw that it was good.
And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters of the seas, and let the fowl multiply upon the earth.”
And it was evening, and it was morning, a fifth day.
And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kind, cattle and creeping things and the beasts of the earth according to their kind,” and it was so.
It also says:
And the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and He breathed into his nostrils the soul of life, and man became a living soul. (Gen. 2:7)
As stated above, the words “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kind”, and the rest of the verses cited here clearly indicate that each species of animals were created in its own right, some from the water and some from the dirt.
As stated in the Talmud: “Every creation was created complete” — from their inception, in their complete, adult form.
From Evolution to Nazism
It is worthwhile noting a fact that not many are aware of, that Hitler's Nazi ideology grew out of Darwin's theory of evolution. Hitler studied and was familiar with what Darwin wrote in 1871 in his book “Descent of Man”, whose words’ meaning was clearly in favor of racial selection and the elimination of weak people:
“The weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind… but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed. The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy… Nor could we check our sympathy, if so urged by hard reason…”
A few years later, in 1883, the Eugenics theory was formulated in Europe which strove to “improve” the human race. There is no doubt that Darwin's views provided the ideological foundation for the Nazi racial doctrine, the Nuremberg Laws and the euthanasia program through which the Nazi regime abused and killed hundreds of thousands of the chronically ill and the mentally ill under the pretext of eugenics. Hitler realized that if we are all descendants of animals who survived because they were the fittest, then according to the evolutionary principle that the weak perish and the strong survive, there is no reason why the powerful Nazi beast shouldn’t eliminate the weak “animals”.
This fact is well known to experts in the field. For example, Sir Arthur Keith, who was president of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain, an atheist and a supporter of evolution, notes in his book:
“The German Fuhrer, as I have consistently maintained, is an evolutionist; he has consciously sought to make the practice of Germany conform to the theory of evolution. (Page 229 of Evolution and Ethics) We see Hitler devoutly convinced that evolution provides the only real basis for a national policy.” (Page 27)
As Prof. Jacob Talmon emphasized in his article in a Yad Vashem symposium in 1973:
“Darwinism dropped one of the strongest barriers that upheld the Biblical command “Thou shalt not kill”, and it was among the main factors that led to the Holocaust, the extermination of millions of our people, and cruelty previously unseen in the world.”
Regrettably, even today’s evolutionists have an approach which is reminiscent of these “survival of the fittest” views and dispensing with the weak as those who finished their biological role. When in a media interview in 2001, the famous British evolutionist Professor Steve Jones was asked why people die, he said [non-verbatim]:
“Each gene that increases our ability to have progeny is a greater preference in the human body … What is important is, to live long enough to suffice with passing on your genes [to your children], and immediately after transferring your genes, you are not needed any more in Darwin's mechanical process, and you can die.”
Judaism's approach to the essence of life, its purpose and the cause of death is of course loftier, more spiritual, and completely different.
Remarks by senior scientists on evolution
We have collected quotes by famous scientists, from the perspective of current science, which refute and undermine the theory of evolution not from religious reasons, but totally from logic:
• Pierre-Paul Grassé, a zoologist and president of the French Academy of Sciences:
“Through use and abuse of hidden postulates, of bold, often ill-founded extrapolations, a pseudoscience has been created. It is taking root in the very heart of biology and is leading astray many biochemists and biologists, who sincerely believe that the accuracy of fundamental concepts has been demonstrated, which is not the case.” (Evolution of Living Organisms (1977), p.6)
“Today, our duty is to destroy the myth of evolution… Biologists must be encouraged to think about the weaknesses of the interpretations and extrapolations that theoreticians put forward or lay down as established truths. The deceit is sometimes unconscious, but not always, since some people, owing to their sectarianism, purposely overlook reality and refuse to acknowledge the inadequacies and the falsity of their beliefs. (Evolution of Living Organisms) (1977), p.8.
• Professor Ernst Mayr, Zoologist, Harvard University:
“It must be admitted, however, that it is a considerable strain on one’s credulity to assume that finely balanced systems such as certain sense organs (the eye of vertebrates, or the bird’s feather) could be improved by random mutations.”
“A process of selection would have a concrete objective, the determination of the ‘best' or ‘fittest' phenotype. But in reality, the environment (or ‘nature’) never selects or sets ‘concrete objectives’.”
• Professor Albert Fleishman, zoology and comparative anatomy, University of Erlangen, Germany:
““The theory of evolution suffers from grave defects, which are becoming more and more apparent as time advances. It can no longer square with practical scientific knowledge, nor does it suffice for our theoretical grasp of the facts. The Darwinian theory of descent has not a single fact to confirm it in the realm of nature. It is not the result of scientific research, but purely the product of imagination.” (Victoria Institute, Vol. 65, pages 194, 195).
• Dr. Nils Heribert-Nilsson, a geneticist and botanist, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences:
“My attempt to demonstrate evolution… an experiment carried on for more than 40 years, has completely failed. I should hardly be accused of having started from a preconceived anti-evolutionary standpoint.” (Nilsson, H. 1953. Synthetische Artbildting [sic]. CWK Gleerup, Lund, Sweden, p. 1185.)
“The fossil material is now so complete that it has been possible to construct new classes and the lack of transitional series cannot be explained as due to the scarcity of the material. The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled. . . The idea of an evolution rests on pure belief.” (p. 1212.)
• Dr. Colin Patterson, a paleontologist and senior scientist at the British Museum of Natural History:
“One morning I woke up and something had happened in the night, and it struck me that I had been working on this stuff for twenty years and there was not one thing I knew about it. That's quite a shock to learn that one can be misled for so long. Either there was something wrong with me or there was something wrong with evolutionary theory. Naturally, I know there is nothing wrong with me, so for the last few weeks I've been putting a simple question to various people and groups of people. Question is: Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing that is true? I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural History and the only answer I got was silence. I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar in the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all I got there was silence for a long time and eventually one person said, ‘I do know one thing — it ought not to be taught in high school’.” (Keynote address at the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, November 5, 1981).
“A theory, even a scientific theory, may become an intellectual fashion, a substitute for religion, an entrenched dogma. This has certainly been true of evolutionary theory.” (Evolution, 1977, p. 150).
• Prof. Kent Hsu, geologist at the Geological Institute at Zurich and paleo-climatologist; Fellow American Academy of Sciences; Served as president, chairman and senior adviser in dozens academic and government organizations around the world:
“We have had enough of the Darwinian fallacy. It is time that we cry: ‘The emperor has no clothes.'”
“Darwinism contains 'wicked lies'; it is not a 'natural law' formulated on the basis of factual evidence, but a dogma, reflecting the dominating social philosophy of the last century.”
(“Sedimentary Petrology and Biologic Evolution,” Journal of Sedimentary Petrology #56, September, 1986, p. 730)
• Dr. Harrison Matthews, an evolutionist and Scientific Director of the Zoological Society in London:
“The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an unproved theory — is it then science, or a faith? Belief in the theory of evolution is thus exactly parallel to belief in special creation — both are concepts which believers know to be true but neither, up to the present, has been capable of proof …although their conviction rests upon circumstantial evidence; it forms a satisfactory faith on which to base our interpretation of nature. ” (in his introduction to the 1972 edition of the Darwin’s “Origin of Species”)
• Dr. Michael Denton, an Australian-British biochemist:
“The fact that so many of the founders of modern biology, those who discovered all the basic facts of comparative morphology upon which modern evolutionary biology is based, held nature to be fundamentally a discontinuum of isolated and unique types unbridged by transitional varieties, a position absolutely at odds with evolutionary ideas, is obviously very difficult to reconcile with the popular notion that all the facts of biology irrefutably support an evolutionary interpretation.” (Denton, Michael. Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, 3rd rev. ed. Adler & Adler. 1986, p. 100.)
• Dr. Michael Ruse, Professor of Philosophy, Florida State University, internationally renowned as a philosopher of science:
“Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.” (“Is Darwinism a Religion?” Huffington Post, 07/21/2011)
• Professor Stephen Jay Goּuld, Professor of Geology at Harvard University, made a mockery of the prevailing tendency of the view that natural selection is a virtually omnipotent architect, constructing organisms part by part as best solutions to problems of life in local environments… “We are presented with unproved and unprovable speculations about the adaptive and genetic basis of specific human behaviors…”