No, not the Maverick, a new guy: In “Does Questioning Evolution Make You Anti-Science?” (Huffington Post, September 1, 2011), Rabbi Schmuley Boteach tells us,
Beginning in about 1990 I started organizing an annual debate at Oxford University on science versus religion where the focus was almost always on evolution and which featured some of the world’s greatest evolutionists like Richard Dawkins, who appeared several times, and the late John Maynard-Smith of the University of Sussex, who, at the time, was regarded by many as the greatest living evolutionary theorist. While I moderated the first few debates, I later participated in a debate against Richard Dawkins at Oxford which he later denied ever took place, forcing us to post the full video of the debate online where Dawkins is not only the principal proponent of the science side but actually loses the debate in a student vote at the end. I later debated Dawkins again at the Idea City Convention at the University of Toronto, the video of which is likewise available online.
What I learned from these debates, as well as reading extensively on evolution, is that evolutionists have a tough time defending the theory when challenged in open dialogue.
That observation is strong evidence that the Rev. Mr. Boteach is an eye witness – he certainly did not learn such easily established facts from Dawkins’s many devotees in media. You have to literally be there, to see what today’s Darwin defenders are willing to do. What their media supporters are willing to cover up.
He also displays a remarkable familiarity with fact. With respect to the Icon of the Peppered Moth and the Beak of the Finch, he observes,
The problem with both these observations is that they are manifestations of horizontal, rather than vertical, evolution, as it describes how members of a species may change within the range of characteristics that they already possess. No new traits are generated. Rather, the traits that already exist are merely distributed differently. Vertical evolution, whereby natural selection can supposedly create entirely new structures, has yet to be directly observed and is thus a theory.
Yes, of course, but, it feels spooky hearing someone say that who hasn’t yet been Expelled.
He muses a bit on epsilon, the constant that holds matter together:
The value of epsilon is one of the most profound mysteries of the universe. Scientists have spent their careers trying to understand why it has the value it does. As Max Born, the brilliant and influential twentieth-century physicist put it, “The explanation of this number must be the central problem of natural philosophy.” The Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, in his typically flamboyant way, put it differently: “It’s one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say ‘the hand of God wrote that number….'”
Of course, all numbers do. More.
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