Posts
Dr. Ostroff is eminently capable of responding on his website, so I won't go through every issue. Here are many that I found particularly noteworthy and worth commenting on:
- "he has a passionate religious belief that his soul will suffer for all eternity if he were to believe these things. In light of that belief, an objective evaluation of the scientific evidence is simply impossible and is ruled out from the outset. Any pretense of such an objective evaluation is false and misleading."
This really amounts to a complete dismissal of any defense of religion against the skeptic. According to RNS' logic, the skeptic can always get out of a jam when cornered by claiming, "I don't have a response to your reasoning, but I can be assured that one will eventually be found simply based on the fact that you aren't capable of objective evaluation and therefore your arguments must ipso-facto be flawed."
- "A common error made by Dr. Ostroff and other creationists is to use quotations from scientists out of context. By "out of context," I mean that they use it to convey a different message than was intended by the author of the statement."
This is a hypocritical objection against Dr. Ostroff since the last 2 thirds of RNS' new book "Challenge of Creation" suffers precisely from this flaw. The liberties he takes in mounting "conceptual support" for his theology are becoming legendary.
In addition, the scientists who present the raw data in their books don't "own" their research. The critical reader is entitled to draw divergent conclusions from the same set of information based on the greater merit of other considerations not appreciated by the author of the book. It is a sign of confidence, creativity and ingenuity that a reader can discern fact from theory and construct a competing explanation to account for all the data under discussion. RNS may very well have reservations in accepting Dr. Ostroff's conclusions over the scientists, but his sloven subordination to the published word of the scientists is a fatal weakness in his attempt to understand the truth about the world.
- "Probably the most common error made by Dr. Ostroff and other creationists is to present statements from scientists to give the impression that the scientists support the creationist case."
Once again, RNS fails to distinguish between the support of the scientist as an individual making his own professional or biased assessment of the data, and the statement in which the scientist is merely PRESENTING THE RAW DATA.
Now I skip around and consolidate some of the redundant points in this letter which make it look more impressive than it is. (This may not have been RNS' intention.)
Point 9:
However, there are many lines of evidence that the laws of science have remained largely constant for billions of years, as I present in my book.
As I explained in my original critique of Science of Torah, ALL of his lines of evidence simply beg the question. Once you entertain the possibility of non-scientific physical creation, all these lines lack any objective basis.
- Furthermore, Dr. Ostroff's approach is certainly not based on empirical evidence, nor is it testable! Dr. Ostroff repeatedly insists that science should and does not conform to various requirements, yet he does not show that Torah addresses these requirements.
Um, Hello!
RNS seems to be oblivious to the fact that there are methodological constraints to the scientific method that prevent it from making any definitive assessment of events that are not observed. He also seems oblivious to the fact that the explicit ideological bias of the professional scientist is to factor out any irregularities that defy natural law. These combined impediments to truth-seeking is what will leave any strictly scientific account of creation fatally flawed.
God help us if we force the truth of the Torah to conform to these artificial extraneous requirements as RNS does in all his banned books. Rav Solovetchik aptly labelled this imposition from without as symptomatic of a religious inferiority complex.
Now on to point 13 which is a re-statement of point 9:
Dr. Ostroff frequently claims that he has support from "expert published scientific literature." However, the expert published scientists believe that he has no support at all and that his case is absurd. Of course, many of these scientists possess a secular bias. But there are many religious scientists, both Jewish and Christian, all of whom likewise consider his case to be absurd. Even the scientists of the Intelligent Design movement accept the antiquity of the universe and the common ancestry of species.
Curious that RNS never has actually address the support from the literature cited by Dr. Osroff. He seems only capable of noting that the beliefs of the quoted scientists do not accommodate the interference of the super-natural in physical reality. Well, that's really a no-brainer there.
As explained above, Dr.Osrtoff, a secure confidently believing Jew, is simply showing that there is no coherent self-consistent scientific account of creation. This is precisely what gives his meta-natural approach rational credibility! How obtuse of RNS to assume that Dr. Ostroff claims to limit himself to the very naturalistic constraints that he is militating against! Is he so locked into world-view of scientism as to not comprehend that there is another approach to reality?
Again, Hello? Here is more re-statement of point 9 in point 14 but now with some subtle word manipulations to make a staw-man. Note the qualification on the first sentence "via naturalistic mechanisms" is dropped in the second sentence:
- Dr. Ostroff considers it absurd to accept that life could arise via naturalistic mechanisms (note: in my book I state that in the opinion of most scientists, we have yet to come with a viable explanation for this.) He also considers it absurd to accept that one species could evolve into another. Yet he believes that mice can grow from dirt (because the Talmud makes such a claim, and he rejects Rav Hirsch's approach that the Sages accepted the beliefs of their era concerning the natural world). Of course, believing that a mouse can grow from dirt is vastly more far-fetched than believing that a microbe can develop from primordial soup, or that a mouse can develop from a reptile. This makes Dr. Ostroff's purported "scientific objections" to evolution into a joke.
I don't believe Dr. Ostroff ever claimed that mice growing from dirt was due to any strictly "naturalistic mechanism". (Ever heard of nishtaneh hateva? RNS' principled resistence to this possibility is due to his strict adherence to scientism.) As RNS pointed out, the acceptance of the existence of this creature is based solely on eye-witness testimony of Chazal. (See Avi Shafran's excellent piece recently in Cross-Currents, contra RNS) I imagine if evolution would be observed the way these mice were observed, Dr. Ostroff would accept it as fact despite its apparent scientific absurdity as we do with many discoveries.
Thus this point, as with most points on his list, is moot. Time and time again, he simply fails to comprehend the opposing point-of-view.
