Advancing ignorance

Dear Editor:Congratulations, Mr. Cristea. Your horrific, Frankenstein-like views of science, replete with Hollywood images of dogs birthing elephants and whales growing on cornstalks, have advanced ignorance another 2,000 years. ("Philosophies of Evolution," 11/27/09) Let me first say, Mr. Cristea, that as a Jew, a man of faith, I believe in the Torah, especially in the book that you call Leviticus in which we have been given the supreme mitzvah (commandment) to love our fellow man because there is a Creator who loves us, His creation. Let us look, rationally, at this creation. As an educator, and as an educated man, who has discovered, observed, studied, experienced, analyzed and learned about this creation for a lifetime, it has become clear to me that we humans, as a part of Creation, are endowed with the unique intellectual capacity to study and to deduce what there is to know about Creation. We call this process science. It is equally clear to me that we are also endowed with an ability to believe in a faith that assists us in comprehending many parts of Creation that our limited ability in science cannot explain, such as the existence of the human soul, and other inexplicable phenomena we call miracles, for lack of a better term. Somewhere, along the line of Creation, Mr. Cristea, you and others of your narrow minded, fundamentalist ilk, have succeeded in separating reason from faith and the Creator from science. The greatest scientific mind of the last century, Albert Einstein, believed that all science led to an understanding of the presence of the Divine in the universe. In the 10th Century in Spain the Jewish scientist, philosopher, physician and scholar, Rambam (you may know him as Maimonides) when asked how the Earth could have been created in six days, responded, "How long is a day in the eyes of the Creator?" Clearly both these scientists and men of faith, were at home with the idea of a Creator working in a rational, scientific way to bring about the miracle of Creation and human life. When we separate reason from faith, science from religion, we create the ignorance of religious extremism and the emptiness of science without ethics. Four hundred years after Rambam's writings, the ignorance of the Spanish Inquisition caused the eradication of the Jewish and Muslim peoples from the Iberian Peninsula so that pure and Catholic kingdoms could be created in Spain and Portugal. Within our own lifetime, the denial of religion produced the horrors of Mengele's laboratory experiments at Auschwitz. You see, Mr. Cristea, when we separate religion from reason, science from faith, we journey into the existentialist desert of despair that is Sinai. - Michael Parmer, Downey

********** Published: December 4, 2009 - Volume 8 - Issue 32