By Rabbi Moshe Averick (www.rabbimaverick.com)

On March 6 2011 Rabbi Adam Jacobs, managing director of Aish Hatorah, NYC, and columnist for the religion section of the Huffington Post, wrote an article entitled, “A Reasonable Argument for God’s Existence”.

It elicited an avalanche of both “Liked this” postings to Facebook (nearly 8000) and Comments (nearly 6500). Many of the comments were from non-believers who very strongly disagreed with its contents. Rabbi Jacobs mentioned that some of the ideas in the article had been drawn from my recently published book: Nonsense of a High Order: The Confused and Illusory World of the Atheist.

Dr. Jerry Coyne, the well known atheistic/evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, on his own blog, took some potshots at both Rabbi Jacobs and myself, and in a post that was long on sarcasm and short on substance, ridiculed the idea that one could draw conclusions about the existence of God from the complete bafflement of scientists regarding a naturalistic origin of life. He also accused Rabbi Jacobs of misrepresenting a statement by the late Nobel Prize winning scientist, Francis Crick.

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I personally was hoping that the King of Kings of Atheism, Professor Richard Dawkins, would also weigh in, but maybe he needed a break after lecturing at the Origins Conference at Arizona State University. Although Professor Dawkins was a member of the distinguished panel of scientists discussing the origin of life, the fact that everyone at the conference seemed to be clueless about how life began, probably squelched his enthusiasm to comment on the article. (See Dennis Overbye – New York Times, “A Romp Into Theories of the Cradle of Life”, Feb 22 2011).  Dr. Coyne would have done well to attend the conference also, because there he could have heard Dr. Paul Davies, an expert on Origin of Life research, explain the implications of the disputed statement by Francis Crick in the same way as Rabbi Jacobs. It’s a dark day for non-believers when an orthodox rabbi understands Francis Crick more clearly than a University of Chicago biologist.

The objections to “A Reasonable Argument for God’s Existence” invariably fell into one of the following categories:

1. Rabbi, this is just the old “Argument from Ignorance” or a “god-of-the gaps” argument
2. Rabbi, you ignored the implications of Darwinian Evolution
3. Rabbi, you ignored current Origin of Life research, particularly the RNA-World research
4. Rabbi, you are “quote mining” (i.e. presenting statements by scientists out of context and misleading the readers)
5. Rabbi, this is just the “Argument from Incredulity”
6. Rabbi, you are “primitive, backward, superstitious and anti-science”
7. Rabbi, we must have unwavering faith in Science and Scientists

In the spirit of reasoned discourse and seeking the truth, I present my response below to each of these objections. [Read more...]