Creationism - National Center for Science Education

Mother of Sciences (1953) under the pseudonym Pincas Dov, which Cavanaugh (1983)
describes as a Jewish creationist work.
“Shamir,” based in Israel, is an organization for religious Jewish scientists and
professionals from the Soviet Union and other communist nations. Dr. Yaacov Hanoka, a
physicist with Mobil who lives near Boston, is the U.S. representative for Shamir.
Shamir publishes a journal B’or Ha’Torah which has included several creationist articles,
such as Hanoka’s “Torah, Science and Carbon 14” (n.d.), Lee Spetner’s “Information
Theory Considerations of Organic Evolution” (n.d.), and “The Doctrine of Evolution”
(author unknown, n.d.). Hanoka argues that science supports the assertion in the Torah
that the earth is 5742 years old and that Adam and Eve were created fully formed
(n.d.:33, 37). Moshe Trop, a chemist at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel and
former visiting professor at Rutgers, is active in Shamir. He has written a book in
Hebrew called Creation: Origin of Life (1982), which he described to me in a letter
(2/27/84) as showing the “scientific alternatives to evolution.” Trop has also published
articles in the Creation Research Society Quarterly (despite the CRS doctrinal statement
that it is “an organization of Christian men of science, who accept Jesus Christ as our
Lord and Savior”), e.g. “Was Evolution Really Possible?” (1974).
In 1983 Trop published an item in CRSQ titled “Is the Archaeopteryx a Fake?”
defending the claim of Lee Spetner that this celebrated transitional fossil is a hoax.
Spetner, a professor at Bar Ilan University in Israel, studied the British Museum
specimen, and reported that the fossils were “probably false and counterfeit” at a meeting
of orthodox Jewish scientists in 1980. (This claim received wide publicity when Sir Fred
Hoyle, the anti-evolutionist astronomer, championed it later.)
“Arachim,” an Israeli organization for the “furtherance of Jewish awareness,”
published a book Pathways to the Torah which is very strongly creationist. The “Science
and Torah—Evolution” section is a collage of hundreds of anti-evolution quotes (or
quotes supposedly damaging to evolution) by creationists and by various scientists and
others. The “Science vs. Scientism” section also denounces evolution. Other sections
include “Archeology and the Torah,” and “Prophecy.” “The Codes of the Torah”
describes sophisticated mathematical anaylsis which reveals hidden patterns and
distributions of words and phrases in the text of the Torah, supposedly proving its divine
origin. 27 A 1985 edition of Pathways to the Torah was prepared by the staff of Aish
Ha’Torah under the direction of Rabbi Yehuda Silver. Aish Ha’Torah, located in
Century City (Los Angeles), California, is the local affiliate of an Israeli Yeshiva. This
edition adds some of the more recent anti-evolution quotes.
Jews for Jesus is a San Francisco-based organization headed by Moishe Rosen of
“saved” Jews who have accepted Jesus as the Messiah, and generally support Protestant
fundamentalist goals. Rosen is a member of the International Council on Biblical
Inerrancy. Jews for Jesus express their support for creationism in their tract Evolution
(n.d. [1980:5]). Evolution says that we are getting better—but really we aren’t, the tract
points out. Evolution is really “devil-ution.”
scholars, co-edited by Velikovsky, included a volume edited by Einstein (Juergens 1966:11-12).
27 Daniel Michelson, a UCLA professor affiliated with Aish Ha’Torah, is one of the foremost practitioners
of this type of analysis (Cziment; see also Cornell). The statistical results of his computer studies, and
those of his Israeli colleagues, show millions-to-one odds against chance; they also contain predictions
about Zionism, the Holocaust, and Armageddon (forecast for 1988).