W e live in an age of disbelief: Traditional (non-Muslim) religious practice and belief has almost disappeared in Europe and is waning in America. Science it is widely assumed has somehow disproven G-d and provides answers to the questions for which human beings formerly turned to religion. That general climate of disbelief has inevitably had an impact on the Orthodox Jewish community as well.
The challenge of science to religion is not a new one. Nearly a century ago Rabbi Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler devoted considerable time with the youngsters he tutored in London to debunking the authority of scientists as disinterested objective observers untouched by personal biases. Now in Nonsense of a High Order: The Confused World of Modern Atheism Rabbi Moshe Averick has written in the words of Rabbi Aharon Feldman “an important book that pulls the rug out from under atheistic philosophies and will strengthen every reader’s belief in the Creator.” (I would also commend the work as a perfect gift for non-observant Jews who have been raised to believe that science has disproved G-d.)
First let us emphasize what Nonsense of a High Order is not. It is not an attempt to answer every challenge to religion posed by science. Nor is it a proof of Torah m’Sinai. Averick’s sole purpose is to establish the case for the Creator of the Universe — and to do so based largely on the words of the world’s leading scientists themselves even when they deny the evidence before them.
PROPONENTS OF THE THEORY of evolution such as Richard Dawkins in the Blind Watchmaker claim to have solved the riddle of how creatures so perfectly suited for their environment could have developed that way without G-d. But their theories avail them nothing for they are clueless as to how the simplest bacterium from which they claim all life evolved could have come into being. Nobel Prize winning biochemist Jacques Monod summarizes the problem: “The [genetic] code is meaningless unless translated. The modern cell’s translating machinery consists of at least 50 macromolecular components which are themselves coded in DNA; the code cannot be translated otherwise than by products of translation.” But where did the first translator come from?
