Anti-Evolution Heretics?
What do the events of the Purim story, the lottery via which the Land of Israel was divided, the survival of the Jewish People over millenia of persecution, the weather in Israel, and the creation of the State of Israel, all have in common?
The answer is that they are all events which secular scientists/ historians would attribute to the random, unplanned, circumstantial luck of history, but which religious Jews perceive as being orchestrated by God. (Exactly how this happens is difficult to understand - I devote a chapter to various possibilities in my book - but the religious viewpoint is unequivocal that this happens.) In the words of Malbim:
"There are things that appear given to chance but are actually providentially determined by God… “the lot is cast in the lap,” hidden from the eye of man, handed over to chance, but nevertheless the eye of God’s providence is displayed in it, and the verdict that the lot brings up is not chance but is from God; just as with the apportioning of the land and so on, where the lot was under God’s providence." (Malbim, Commentary to Mishlei 16:33)
Now, I cannot see any difference - any difference at all - between the above cases and the neo-Darwinian evolutionary mechanism of random genetic mutation plus natural selection, which most scientists see as explaining how life evolved.* All that scientists can do is say that in the physical world as we see it, there is no providence involved - which is exactly what they say with all the other phenomena. Religious people can perceive God behind it, just as with the Purim story, the lottery of Israel, the creation of the State of Israel, etc.
Amazingly, even Thomas Henry Huxley, the principle defender of Darwinism, acknowledged that "…there is a wider teleology which is not touched by the doctrine of evolution… The teleological and mechanical views of nature are not, necessarily, mutually exclusive. On the contrary, the more purely a mechanist the speculator is, the more firmly does he assume a primordial molecular arrangement of which all the phenomena of the universe are the consequences and the more completely is he at the mercy of the teleologist, who can always defy him to disprove that this primitive molecular arrangement was not intended to evolve the actual phenomena of the universe… Evolution has no more to do with theism than the first book of Euclid has." ("On the reception of the Origin of Species," in Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ref. 160, Vol. 2, p. 179)
It is surprising, therefore, to find anti-evolutionists insisting that Darwinian evolution is ultimately blind and unplanned and denies God. Are they saying that if these processes were really responsible for evolution, then God could not be involved? This is certainly kefirah - rank heresy. And once one takes that approach, it means that God's role in the Purim story, the Israel lottery, and the State of Israel would also be denied, chas v'shalom. How ironic that the opponents of my work should be the ones to be the genuine kofrim!
There is another possibility. Maybe these anti-evolutionists are not saying that God could not work via Darwinian mechanisms of evolution. Maybe they agree that God certainly could work through these evolutionary mechanisms, but they are simply saying that, according to the scientists who propose evolution, God was not involved.
Now, that may well be true for many (but certainly not all) scientists, but what difference does it make? After all, these same scientists would say that God was not involved in the events of the Purim story, the lottery via which the Land of Israel was divided, the survival of the Jewish People over millennia of persecution, and the creation of the State of Israel. But we do not see that as reason to deny the existence of these phenomena, or the historical/ scientific processes via which they occurred! We simply say that the physical, material processes are as described by scientists and historians, but we see God behind it. If there are scientists/ historians who claim that their material explanations of these phenomena rule out a Creator, then we dispute their metaphysical conclusions, but not their explanations of the physical phenomena!
All this is explained at great length in my book The Challenge Of Creation. Which the anti-evolutionists have surely read. So are they heretics, or did they simply not understand what I wrote, or are they deliberately disingenuous?
* Note: As I have made clear on numerous occasions, while my studies of zoology have led me to the conclusion that the evidence for common ancestry is overwhelming, I do not have this personal conviction regarding the adequacy of random mutation plus natural selection as a mechanism for evolution. I have many questions on it, but have never researched it carefully to discover if answers exist, for two reasons. One is that I just don't have the time to attain the necessary expertise to make an adequately informed judgment. The second reason is that it is simply irrelevant to me whether it is true or not, since there are no theological ramifications. But what is significant, and disturbing, is that despite my repeated statements that I have no personal conviction in the truth of these Darwinian explanations, several of my opponents (such as R. Coffer and Dr. Ostroff) repeatedly attribute this position to me. Perhaps this is to be relegated to the same shortcomings mentioned in the previous paragraph.