An article by a Rabbi Gerard spoke against intelligent design (ID) claiming it is based on false assumptions. He discussed a lot of basic arguments opposing ID, but doesn't go in-depth. The article is more of a thought provoker than a thesis. Even then, I'd like to counter the arguments he presented. He began the article by asking the supporters of ID to explain mildew, mosquitoes, lower back problems, cancer, and childhood leukemia. I sat there thinking, What about them? To me they're minor issues. Yes, I'm aware that minor issues tend to be a stumbling block to people. "I just get stuck at childhood leukemia," he writes. Really they don't want to submit to the idea of being accountable to God and would use any excuse to not understand, even simple things. He doesn't want to understand because he has a fundamental misunderstanding of God and the Bible.
The essence of his article, and a question many people ask is, if this God who designed the universe is a good God, why does he let these bad things happen? So his article is not so much ID, but "the seeming irreconcilability of a good God and the world all around." It's the reason he can't get around those five "bad" things he mentioned. Why he's a rabbi and doesn't have a basic understanding of the Bible, I wouldn't know. His rabbinical school must've left a few things out. Or he slept through Torah class and missed a few good points about life and God. He tells a story about a conversation between Tanna, one of the earliest rabbis, and a person who asked why fruit rots. Tanna's answer: "so that produce merchants cannot hold on to their merchandise indefinitely, selfishly driving up the price." Much like Bryan's answer to Darrow's question "Where did Cain's wife come from?" Bryan: "Why are you asking about another man's wife?" Cute and curt, but it doesn't answer the question and it is a bad example for creationists and ID supporters. (For that Bryan could've at least said that Adam and Eve had more children other than Abel and Seth. And if he knew any genetics, he could've at least said that the gene pool was still clean and free of mutative effects.)
Gerard goes on to say "scientists claim the problem with ID is that it's not subject to testing; it can't be proved or disproved and thus remain in the realm of religion. But this is an unsatisfying conclusion because it leaves us with the possibility that it might be true. And it can't be." All I have to say to that is, the claims of evolution also leads scientists to the same conclusion, that "it can't be proved or disproved and thus remain in the realm of religion." Evolution is nothing more than modern man's origins myth, a religion of the self with science terms ornamenting it. Gerard's statement is an extension of his problem - he can't figure out the answer to the good God question so everything else can't be true. He compares Darwinian evolution (DE) and ID saying that if DE is accurate then some things will look intelligently designed while others not and if ID true then all things will look intelligently designed "and very clearly it is not." I know a provoker opinion article isn't the place to state scientific findings, but he should have at least presented one. Those five he mentioned aren't good enough, and, fortunately, not much of a challenge. I'll take on one of them (I won't be too detailed, just want to give an idea):
One problem he mentioned is lower back pain. Evolutionists believe that humans have lower back pain because we were originally hunched over quadrupedally before our ancestors decided to stand bipedally. But we still naturally want to hunch over, much like one of the middle pictures in the debunked “evolution of man” chart. Evolutionists believe that the spine was a suspension bridge rather than a tent pole and only over time did we start to develop a stronger lumbar region. I’m sorry, but our lumbar region has no clear sign that it ever acted like a suspension bridge. It was like that from the very beginning because it was created to be that way. Many years ago, because evolutionists believed the lumbar lie, they developed a method to treat lower back pain, but with negative results. They were confounded when they realized that the treatment needs to be based on the simple fact of keeping the lumbar erect with good anatomically correct exercises instead of treating it like an evolutionary anomaly (ie they suggested to bend forward like an animal). Lower back pain is usually the result of poor body mechanics, a sedentary lifestyle, and obesity, not because of an evolutionary change. People in Third World countries have dramatically less instances of lower back pain than in Industrial nations. They actually move around and do manual labor instead of sitting in front of a computer all day in an office, hunched over like a Neanderthal.
To get back to the important issue, Gerard simply doesn’t understand God. He doesn’t have good Theology proper. Rabbi Gerard, the reason why the world is messed up is because the first humans rebelled against their Creator God. (This account is in the Torah if you want to read about it. And no, it’s not a metaphor.) God made everything good, but because man sinned, everything was shot to pieces. Death, disease, destruction (and lower back pain) entered the world because man disobeyed. He didn’t want to choose God. He instead chose to elevate himself and sinned and everything in creation was negatively affected. Once you get that from the Torah, realize that there’s more scientific evidence out there supporting what you studied in rabbinical school than there is on the defunct ideas of evolutionists, which amounts to nothing more than science fiction.
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