Intelligent Designs Living Dimensions

Books: Greening of Judaism

Many of those who may be defined as such often found themselves at odds with the mainstream community: Philo, Maimonides and Spinoza to name but three. In more recent times, weighty figures such as Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Avraham Heschel and Rabbi Yosef Soloveitchik might be added to this brief list. These are thinkers who have tried to articulate a coherent philosophy behind Judaism’s complex amalgam of beliefs, historical experiences and existential concerns. Among contemporaries, Arthur Green must surely be ranked in the forefront as a major theological thinker, although some might query his legitimacy to speak in the name of no more than a fraction of the Jewish religious community. When he visited Israel recently, in part to promote his latest book “Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition,” he spoke at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem as well as to The Jerusalem Report about his concerns for the future of Judaism. Stating his belief that “theology is an art, not a science,” he nevertheless embraces the scientific discoveries of the modern world – particularly the evolutionary hypothesis which for him offers, as he told me, “the greatest possible drama of an ever-unfolding, evolving universe, continuously revealing the creator’s work. What an incredible story! It is a process that moves forward by two simple mechanisms – natural selection and mutation. Yet for all its simplicity it moves dynamically in the direction of greater complexity and diversity. Moreover, it is something that is still ongoing. We should never forget that we, too, were once sea creatures. We can only marvel at the fish which stepped out of the water and realized that he could flourish on dry land. Today, only the most fundamentalist of believers hold that the world is 5,771 years old.” The attempt to deny the modern world is for Green a fruitless, Canute-like exercise: “Over the past 150 years or so,” he told the overflowing audience at the Hartman Institute, “the major religions in the West have fought two battles. One is that of Darwinism and evolution. The second one was biblical criticism and this did not affect our perception of the Torah, except perhaps for the fundamentalists. I think both these battles have been well and truly lost. Evolution has been accepted by thinking people throughout the world: to believe otherwise is to live with one’s head in the sand.

Skeptic » eSkeptic » Wednesday, June 15th, 2011

As the international skeptical community gears up for another season of conferences presented by established organizations like: the Skeptics Society (Science Symposium), the James Randi Educational Foundation (The Amazing Meeting), and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSICon), a new generation of skeptics are also finding the critical thinking movement in their own back yards at local meet ups called SkeptiCamps (community driven, informal ‘un-conferences’ born of people’s desire to share and learn in an open environment).

This week on Skepticality , Derek & Swoopy report from Atlanta SkeptiCamp 2011 and share one of this year’s SkeptiCamp talks by Skeptic History contributor Tim Farley appropriately entitled “Don’t Start a Blog or Podcast,” on the topic of how to handle the vast amount of skeptical content created by blogs and podcasts, and how to stand out if you decide to jump into the fray.

LISTEN to this episode f there’s one thing that best-selling author and physicist Victor Stenger loves, it’s a good story. That was probably the first thing I noticed when we spoke in his home study on a crisp early summer morning in Lafayette, Colorado.

Stenger is one of the most prominent atheist science writers of the last decade, so I was curious to know where his antipathy toward religion came from. His answer has taken me on a 40-year journey from his student days at UCLA, to meeting his future wife while singing in a Methodist church choir, and on to being a physics professor at the University of Hawaii. After ten minutes, he hasn’t even reached the part where he became an atheist so I feel that I have to interrupt him: “You sang in a church choir?”

“Religion and atheism weren’t matters which I thought a lot about,” he explains. “It wasn’t until the eighties that that changed. That’s when it really started to annoy me how science, and in particular physics, was being abused by religious people. My concern was that they were misusing science to come to conclusions which they had reached only for religious reasons. That’s probably when I realized that I was an atheist.”

As he talks, Stenger takes in the impressive view from his study window, albeit one that narrowly misses the nearby mountain range. A pristine copy of his new book, The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning . He had something in there called the Law of Conservation of Information. He claimed that the amount of information output by a living system could never exceed the amount of information input without the involvement of an intelligent designer. As a physicist I knew that that wasn’t true because information is linked to entropy, and the entropy of a closed system can increase with time. And so I explained in my book how Dembski had got it wrong.