Written at the request of North Ha'ir". Published 24.8.00
Avi Blizovsky
It used to be taken for granted that the world was designed by some intelligent being. What else could explain the existence of fire and rain, of lightning and earthquakes? And above all, the wonderful abilities of the animals pointed, as it were, to a creator who had a special interest in life. Today we understand most of these things in terms of physical forces operating by virtue of impersonal laws. This is how the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, Prof. Steven Weinberg, explains the simple position of science regarding the status of God, in his article The Universe and Design published in the Galileo magazine in the January 2000 issue.
And there have already been words from the past: "But Mr. Laplace, what about the word of God". "I have no need for this hypothesis," said the astronomer Pierre Simmons Marquis de Laplace when he explained to Napoleon his theory about the formation of the solar system.
Despite the waving of many religious scientists who somehow get along by also following science, one astronomer is known to study the early universe, explaining the fact that God created the world 6,000 years ago and wanted us to see the world as if it were older.
Many times religious parties try to take a controversy within a certain field and see it as proof that all science is wrong. The panhandlers (the child robbers who call themselves "repentants") throw into the hall space during the lecture because evolution has already been disproved by the scientists and it is only a matter of time until all the scientists admit it. The naysayers will try to find a scientist who disagrees with any of the stages of the theory of evolution, and will say that it undermines the entire foundation. As they tried to do when Mendel's laws of heredity were rediscovered, which were unknown to Darwin only due to lack of communication, and the opponents of evolution at the beginning of the twentieth century said that the genetic mechanism contradicts the theory of evolution. Not only is it not contradictory, but Darwin even predicted a quite similar mechanism although he could not elaborate. Another debate that was exploited by the fundamentalists was the debate about whether the change of species is permanent or is done in jumps. The theory of jumps seemed to contradict the theory of evolution, but it turns out that you can live with jumps, just as no religious person will say that it makes a difference if the Israelites walked 20 meters in the Sinai desert every day to reach the Land of Israel in 40 years or traveled and camped. The end result - in terms of evolution is the same - accumulated diversity in the species of animals and plants that populate the earth.
Prof. Yeremiahu Yuval, recipient of the Israel Prize for Philosophy, said at the award ceremony that took place at the end of Independence Day this year: "Today there is a new wave of turning to superstition, magic, sorcery and the cryptic and meaningless experience - all because reason, by its critical nature, is unable answer all the questions. That's why humans ask them for an answer through illusion and hallucination, through magicians and clouders and sorcerers of all kinds, and those who take advantage of the weakness of humans, create power bases for them at the expense of our illusions, or trade in our fears and hopes; And so they trade, in effect, in us, and get rich or acquire political power at the expense of the unavoidable uncertainty in our lives. Even serious religion is ashamed of such a superstition."
"The result is that these people, and those who fall into their net, destroy what reason is capable of building - - and this is no small thing at all (rather, this is the main point of human culture); And at the same time they create an illusion, as if it is possible to answer everything, and banish from our world all the elements of question and uncertainty. This is how we fall victim to charlatans on the one hand, and to a religious power establishment that uses superstition for its needs, on the other hand."
The only solution is education, education and once again education and according to many, it is not enough to teach citizenship, English and mathematics but also to assimilate scientific thinking - to get a generation of thinking people and not those who prefer others to think for them. And not only in the religious schools - even in the secular schools today they prefer to teach texts and not so much to teach how to think. When children think they will grow up if they don't think that God created man in his image but the opposite, and scientific curiosity makes man more and more God over nature. for better and for worse. And as the sticker article of the "Freedom" website says: "In the beginning, man created God."
The author is the editor of the "Hidan" website
