Dear Shayni,



The response of religious people to rational claims is amusing and hilarious. Their great efforts at reconciling their faith with rationality clearly shows how far a person can go in distorting and warping his intelligence to defend his whimsy (his faith). Thus, for example, the Lubavitcher Rebbe tried to defend Chazal’s error in stating that lice are created from dust and dirt and have no male or female. He wrote (Emunah U’Mada, pg. 131): “As to worms creating themselves, the matter is simple: experiments allow one to follow the process of development of the worm from the egg, and when the process of producing these eggs is observed, one can also determine that the specific worm was formed through birth, but when a sample of something rotted contains eggs of a certain species and worms which are identifiably of that same species, these facts are not enough to prove at all the impossibility of worms forming without birth, via abiogenesis.” The Lubavitcher Rebbe questions the scientific method in order to uphold his faith, though in real life he and his followers used the scientific method — they would buy lice shampoo based on the conclusions of science, that lice multiply sexually, and not following Chazal’s conclusions that lice are formed from Man’s sweat.

Thus did Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz OBM write: “The ridiculous efforts [by representatives of religion] ‘to rescue’ (as it were) the veracity of the Torah by casting doubt on the certainty of results obtained through the scientific method or by explaining that ‘scientific truth’ is not a matter of certainty but of probability alone while the Torahs’ truth is absolute — all these are complete mistakes in understanding the essence of science and are seriously misguided from the aspect of religious faith” (Judaism, the Jewish people, and the State of Israel, pg. 339).

As to the rabbinic response you mentioned, see our essay Dealing with the Contradictions Between Torah and Reason.



Sincerely,



Daat Emet