In 1859 he published his famous book "The Origin of Species". His views aroused sharp controversy, as they contradicted the biblical story of creation.
Charles Darwin's book, The Origin of Species, translated by S. Adler, was published by Mossad Bialik in early 1999.
Charles Darwin 1809-1882
British naturalist; Conceived the idea of the development of all living things through natural selection.
In 1859 he published his famous book "The Origin of Species". His views aroused sharp controversy, as they contradicted the biblical story of creation.
Charles Darwin's book, The Origin of Species, translated by S. Adler, was published by Mossad Bialik in early 1999.
At the beginning of the article, an article by Alon Goldstein was published for the first time on the "Freedom" website, below - quotes from Menachem Ben's article that first appeared in the Tel Aviv newspaper and were copied to the website of the Manof organization - an ultra-Orthodox organization that harasses the fighters against religious coercion and another note, in a few weeks we will provide a transcript on this website From a series of lectures given by Prof. Yuval Naaman at the Center for Technological Education in Holon about the impact that Darwin's theory had on the understanding of nature, the universe and human society
The Davin of Ben Menachem, by Alon Goldstein
In his article "Darwin's Darwin", the author Menachem Ben combines references to scientific studies, falsified extracts from the theory of evolution, together with pouring descriptions of the beauties of nature and the price of their creation, a conclusion that completely negates Darwin's teachings.
Although the author is not a scientist, as is evident both from the content of his words and from his own words, he considers himself already authorized to discuss the validity of a scientific theory, just because it came out in a book, and he is, after all, a literature critic. This is similar to contacting the architect of the Supreme Court building for an expert opinion on the judgments given there.
Since the misleading of the public by pseudo-scientific publications has recently become a widespread phenomenon, it seems that it is worthwhile to check these publications, before the day comes when when we arrive at the clinic a dealer in energetic crystals is found in her place, and when we come to buy an apartment the contractor will tell us that instead of paying an engineer he consults an expert in the direction of positive energy flow .
Before reading Ben Menachem's article, let's remind ourselves what distinguishes a scientific theory from other types of ideas such as an artistic work or a social ideal.
A scientific theory is an explanation given by man to a phenomenon (or a set of phenomena) revealed by observation or a scientific experiment, and does not claim to be an eternal and unchanging truth. When a certain theory successfully predicts the results of an experiment or observation before they are conducted, its validity is strengthened. When findings contradicting the theory are discovered, its validity is negated. For example, every time we turn an omelette we predict, based on the theory of gravity, that it will fall down. If, on the other hand, the omelette remains suspended in space, the physicists will be forced to reject this theory and offer in its place another explanation for the question "Why do some objects fall when you leave them and others do not?". A test of the new theory will, obviously, be its ability to predict in advance which objects will fall and which will remain in place.
The fact that scientific theories are occasionally rejected does not indicate the weakness of scientific thought. On the contrary - it is this process of negating theories and proposing new ones in their place that enabled the progress of science from the days when the earth was considered flat to the situation where a person can purchase a satellite navigation device that indicates his exact location on the surface of the earth.
When Darwin wrote his book "The Origin of Species" his intention was to offer a possible explanation (=theory) for the findings he collected during years of research, not to write a new holy book that should not be disputed. For this reason, he chose to use words such as "maybe" and "probably". In doing so, he acted as a scientist who is confident in his ability to convince the reader of the logic of his arguments, even without resorting to expressions such as "known" or "stupid theory" in relation to competing ideas.
Assuming that the critic chooses to attack the theory of evolution in good faith by relying on its first publication, and ignoring everything that has been renewed in the field in the last 140 years, I consider it my duty to inform him that parts of skeletons and skulls of creatures that appear to be human-like in different stages of development have indeed been found at different sites in Israel and in the world The fact that most of these findings were found after the publication of "The Origin of Species" only strengthens the validity of the theory of evolution by pointing to its predictive ability. But even if we assume that all those findings are a lie and a forgery by publicity-hungry scientists, does this negate the theory of evolution? After all, no one would think of claiming that the fact that the skeletons of the Israelites from the desert generation are not found in the Sinai desert shows that the Exodus did not take place (and after all, we are talking about thousands of years instead of millions!).
If the writer claims that he ignored any later scientific material that was published in the field since his list is a literary criticism of Darwin's work only, then his reliance on recent studies when these seem to him to support his opinion is somewhat puzzling.
If the esteemed critic had bothered to delve into the theory he is criticizing, even at the level of a high school student majoring in biology, he could have easily answered some of the questions he presented on his list. For example, according to Darwin's theory, a creature's ability to survive is not a function of its image in our eyes as "strong like a lion" or "weak like a butterfly", but of its adaptation to its living environment.
The insects that the writer chose as an example of "weak" animals are considered by evolutionists as an example of perfect adaptation to the environment, and indeed, insects can be found in deserts and other hostile living environments where more complex life forms fail to survive. The assumption that the insects survive in these places, being the most suitable form of life for the environmental conditions, is no less reasonable than the assumption that they are there by virtue of a divine decree.
The author's comparison between the effect of drugs on humans and bacterial strains is also irrelevant. While in the case of thalidomide victims, the drug directly caused damage to the embryos by creating a chemical change in their genetic material, in the case of bacteria adapting to the drug, the drug constitutes a hostile environment that destroys all bacteria except those whose genetic load is slightly different from the rest (= mutation) , in a way that gives them resistance to the drug. These bacteria pass the resistance feature to their offspring and thus a new bacterial strain develops, resistant to the existing drugs.
It is true that during history we did not get to see the wheels of Ramses' chariot turn into a Mercedes car on their own, but this is only because the reproduction process of cart wheels does not allow the development of mutations, and each wheel is born resembling its parents down to the smallest detail. On the other hand, scientists in the field of computers and artificial intelligence develop computer programs that produce other programs by means of reproduction, mutations and natural selection. Although I do not have data on the size of the amount invested in these projects in order to compare it with the price of Van Gogh's painting, I believe that the day the first software programs that were not written by humans appear on the market, the use of this used argument, which baselessly compares inanimate objects to biological systems, will finally stop .
Further down the list, the reason for this becomes clear because it is precisely a theory from the field of biology, and not the law of attraction, that gets the visitor's attention. The theory of evolution was attacked, from the day it was first published, by members of various religions who see an apparent contradiction between it and their faith. When the Bible was written thousands of years ago, the story of the creation of the world was an illustrative means designed to negate the idea of the deity of the forces of nature by the idolaters, by presenting all the forces of nature as being created in a very short time by the true deity. From a person of our time, who has an education and the ability to abstract, one can expect a deeper understanding of the creation story than simply reading it.
Although the natural sciences have never claimed to decide the question of the existence of God, several cases are known in which a narrow-minded religious establishment saw an apparent contradiction between discoveries in the natural sciences and the tenets of faith. As we all know, the Christian - Catholic faith did not collapse after Copernicus and Galileo's belief that the earth revolves around the sun was accepted (late). I am sure that if Menachem Ben had bothered to consult a number of scientists with religious beliefs, he could have settled the apparent contradiction between his religious beliefs and the theory of evolution without being required to write an entire list dealing with a field he is not familiar with.
Below are excerpts from Menachem Ben's article
The reader may wonder what I, a literary critic, have to do with scientific theory, which has been engaged in for about 140 years by senior scientists from the fields of biology and botany, zoology and geology? And the answer is simple: to understand how stupid the Darwinist theory is - the main points of which we all know - you don't need to be a scientist.
It's enough to open your eyes and look at the world, and also think a little, really think about everything, anew, something that most scientists these days are probably not really used to (since each of them deals, as we know, with one tiny scientific segment, and therefore we don't begin to see the whole picture) . And you can also, if you insist, read the original book of the idea of evolution, Darwin's "Origin of Species", which recently appeared in Hebrew in a new edition (first appeared in England in 1859). A book that is supposed to be scientific and proven, and here surprisingly it is full of guesses, conjectures and assumptions (which Darwin himself defines as guesses, conjectures and assumptions), unbelievably far-fetched.
Indeed, this is the second surprise, expected for those who read "The Origin of Species": almost all of Darwin's scientific assumptions are qualified by himself with words such as "maybe", "maybe", "could be", "probably" etc. That is, it is not about solid facts at all, but an attempt to interpret the facts and understand them in a certain (and incredibly childish) way. Therefore, there is no scientist who would not actually admit that Darwin's theory is merely a theory, even though ordinary laymen tend to believe that it is a proven theory.
But this is only the second surprise. The first surprise for the readers of Darwin's book is the discovery that appears in the opening chapter, which includes a historical overview of the incarnations of the Darwinian idea, and according to which the Darwinian concept itself is not Darwin's at all. It turns out that about a hundred years before Darwin (and Darwin himself, as mentioned, tells about it), in the middle of the 18th century, the French researcher Dipon claimed that "there was one origin for man and monkey, horse and donkey". And he attributed the differences created between a species and its predecessors to "environmental changes that acted on the living body".
Darwin's grandfather, a doctor named Erasmus Darwin, who was also a poet, published at the end of the 18th century (that is, in the century before the famous Darwin, who was born in the 19th century) an essay in rhymes called "The Temple of Nature", in which he rejected the idea of divine creation, and claimed , because life "appeared for the first time under the waves of the sea without shores, and was nurtured in its caves made of the crystal of the sea. Their beginnings were small, invisible bodies that moved in the mud at the bottom of the sea and these acquired new powers over the generations that kept growing, and from them came the plant groups and the finned breathing kingdom." That is, it is about the origin of a thing in the idea of poor poets, which was started by the poet grandfather and the famous grandson Darwin tried to find proofs for it "in nature".
Humans must assume that Darwin's "Origin of Species" is based, among other things, on the laws of heredity and geology, but here is what Darwin himself writes in his book "Origin of Species", "The laws that determine the ways of heredity are mostly unknown to us", and as for geology states Darwin: "Only a small part of the earth has been studied geologically, and you have not a single part that has been studied with sufficient care." And this is what Darwin himself writes to rebut claims about the lack of geological evidence for his theory of evolution. Also regarding the fossil remains, which are supposed to be overwhelming proof, Darwin claims: "Let us never forget what the excellent paleontologist Edward Forbes said, that many well-known fossils were named based on one example, which was often broken." And this was also claimed by Darwin to repel the claims of his opponents who asked where are the fossils, the remains of previous generations, that would prove your claim?
Because the critics said: if, for example, man was created from the monkey - how is it that between the most developed monkey and the most inferior man there are not countless intermediate levels? (Like in the animation film between one minimal transformation and a second minimal transformation in which there are several dozen or hundreds of intermediate drawings?) Where are these intermediate levels? asked the critics. And to this, as mentioned, Darwin replied that geology is not developed and the study of fossils is not developed, and therefore the fact that there is no actual and clear evidence does not prove the falsity of his theory, or in Darwin's words ("The Origin of Species", p. 348): "I can answer the questions And these findings are only hypothesized, that geological knowledge is much more incomplete than geologists believe, the number of examples in our collections is nothing compared to the countless generations of countless species." have you heard He has no real evidence from either geology or fossil research.
So what? The very physical, gradual proximity between these or other animals proves that they are "all descendants of one wild race". But there is no logic in this assumption. The fact that there is a graded sequence of one kind or another between different species of animals does not in any way prove that a certain species evolved from another species, but only that there are all kinds of gradations in nature and creation between the inferior and the more complex, and certainly there is no religious reason to assume that all of these were not created in one day (as told in Genesis) side by side. And one creator made them all.
And if indeed, according to the theory of the origin of species (whose subtitle is "Leaving gifted races in the war of life") - the more developed and more gifted survive, while the inferior and weaker disappear - how is it that the world is full of "weak" creatures of all kinds - butterflies, snails, worms - alongside "strong" and "gifted" creatures such as the lion and the monkey and the eagle? All these have no real answer in Darwin, because there cannot be any real answer. Because his whole theory of survival was born in vanity.
But we are told: it is a fact that certain bacteria change under the influence of drugs. So what? We also urinate under the influence of drugs, and sometimes in a shocking way (remember, for example, the terrible thalidomide cases). And in general, there are animals and insects that have a certain type of changeability inherent in them. This does not prove anything about a consistent sequence of changes throughout the generations.
But really, in order to stand up to the full stupidity of Darwin's theory, one has to stop arguing with his countless and endless hypotheses in countless botanical, zoological and biological matters (and as mentioned, these are always only theoretical hypotheses, according to the author's admission, Darwin himself). One should simply observe the world itself, the divine beauty of the world, the philological engineering of every cell in the material world. How can you believe that all this was created by itself, in a blind gradual process? After all, every cell in the living world is an amazingly sophisticated engineering mechanism. Protons, neutrons, electrons, arranged against each other in divine symmetry. And everything works in an engineering perfection, which the scientists can only try and describe. Certainly not to imitate him. After all, every animal and every flower in nature is a divine work of art in its entirety. Really, how can one look at the beauty of the tiger or the anemone and think that these things were created by themselves, in a process that was influenced by environmental conditions?
Could environmental conditions have created, for example, Van Gogh's famous "Sunflowers" painting ($42 million for you)? Or was a painter needed to draw it? So why is anyone willing to assume that the sunflowers themselves, the wonderful natural sunflowers themselves, were not created by anyone, and that's how they were created by themselves? Just as if someone is willing to believe that one chariot wheel from 4000 BC simply became a Mercedes over the generations, without any engineer or technician intervening in the process. Just like that, a wheel became a Mercedes in an evolutionary process, without human contact. would you believe
So how is it that so many people swallow such a foolish theory? One of the answers: for those who do not believe in God, there is no other answer. Because if there is no God, who painted the anemone and the tiger? Who engineered every cell in the body? Temporary answer: This is how it was created by itself, little by little, over billions of years. Ah, now everything is clear.
And I tell you: even if the world had existed not for 5 billion years, as the Darwinists believe, but for 500 billion years, still one petal of one flower could not have been formed, "by itself". As Darwin's contemporary, the brilliant English satirist Jonathan Swift (known among other things as the author of "Gulliver in the Land of the Dwarves") said, "I am ready to believe that the world is a random combination of circumstances and atoms about as much as I am ready to believe that the most ingenious article is a random combination of words." And this is, of course, still an English understatement.
The philosopher Schopenhauer, also a contemporary of Darwin, claimed that the fact that people are willing to believe in evolution indicates mainly the poor level of thinking of the generation. And since then, as we know, the generation is only decreasing. In any case, Darwin's "Origin of Species" should be read, with all the difficulties of the old-fashioned translation, just to be convinced of the depth of the intellectual primitiveness, which has become a so-called enlightened "scientific" mass religion. Unbelievable in what darkness of consciousness the western world is immersed.
