Scientific Method

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 B-H

What is the scientific method?

Every day, we are inundated with media statements about what "scientists think" on a vast range of topics. The message often seems to be that if scientists say something, it is an indisputable truth. We've seen this particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

At one point, many of us accepted that explanations provided by certain authorities or groups were final. Questioning them was seen as backward, even unscientific. However, I don’t want to delve into the specifics of COVID-19 here—perhaps that’s a discussion for another time. What I aim to explore is the perception of science itself and how we understand its role in our lives.

Of course, this is merely my personal perspective, though I welcome anyone who shares similar views to join the conversation.

To begin, let’s start with a basic definition. I’ll reference Wikipedia briefly at the start, but I encourage you to explore the full article for a more comprehensive understanding.

“The scientific method is an empirical method for acquiring knowledge that has characterized the development of science since at least the 17th century (with notable practitioners in previous centuries; see the article history of scientific method for additional detail.) It involves careful observation, applying rigorous skepticism about what is observed, given that cognitive assumptions can distort how one interprets the observation. It involves formulating hypotheses, via induction, based on such observations; the testability of hypotheses, experimental and the measurement-based statistical testing of deductions drawn from the hypotheses; and refinement (or elimination) of the hypotheses based on the experimental findings. These are principles of the scientific method, as distinguished from a definitive series of steps applicable to all scientific enterprises.”

The definition presented is compelling, particularly the notion that our cognitive assumptions can distort our interpretation of observations. However, what if multiple individuals, rather than just one, are ensnared by these cognitive assumptions? What if bias is an inherent byproduct of our worldview, preventing any seemingly contradictory ideas from penetrating our minds, which may mistakenly consider themselves independent and unbiased?

What if scientific observations cannot be interpreted objectively? What if the peer review system is compromised, with participants sharing a common worldview that skews cognitive abilities into assumptions? What if researchers, whose livelihoods depend on conforming to a specific narrative, find themselves trapped in this cycle?

What if narratives serve as self-serving tools that keep our conscience dormant? What if "science" evolves into a "beautiful idea of design without a Designer"?

Rather than addressing each question individually, I will provide examples where proven scientific observations contradict established scientific hypotheses. No consensus or peer review can persuade me to accept something that has been demonstrated through the scientific method as impossible.

Let’s begin with the concept of entropy. To illustrate, I will reference the beginning of an article from Wikipedia.

“Entropy is a scientific concept, as well as a measurable physical property, that is most commonly associated with a state of disorder, randomness, or uncertainty. The term and the concept are used in diverse fields, from classical thermodynamics, where it was first recognized, to the microscopic description of nature in statistical physics, and to the principles of information theory. It has found far-ranging applications in chemistry and physics, in biological systems and their relation to life, in cosmology, economics, sociology, weather science, climate change, and information systems including the transmission of information in telecommunication.”

Everything made of matter eventually disintegrates, from biological organisms to individual atoms that over time transform into sub-particles of energy. This phenomenon occurs in both closed and open systems. The only instance where matter becomes more complex is through the emergence of life and the processes that sustain it. Once the life force departs from an organism, entropy sets in. Over time, what was once a living entity reverts to simple matter and ultimately energy.

I won't burden you with intricate computations or mathematics, as that is beyond my expertise. Many mathematicians and physicists have tackled this subject, some of whom can explain it in a way that is accessible to laypeople like myself, allowing for understanding through empirical observation.

Entropy is a concept we observe in life and in laboratory settings. Yet, in a galaxy far, far away, we are told that the opposite is occurring. Cosmic dust coalesces to form celestial bodies, with molecules spontaneously gathering to create planets, stars, and galaxies. This is how the universe has come into being.

Can this process be observed? Certainly, we can see that the world exists. Therefore, if it does not persist in its current form indefinitely, as was believed just a few decades ago, there must be a force in the universe that drives the transformation from simple to complex. However, what we observe is just the reverse process! This is where the leap of faith becomes relevant.

We witness the 'complex' devolving into the 'simple,' yet we are asked to accept the notion that somehow the 'simple' evolves into the 'complex' through a spontaneous process governed by unknown sources and laws. This perspective is convenient, as it allows us to claim that design emerged without a Designer. Any alternative suggestion is considered taboo. Is it not interesting that 'taboo' is a term often associated with religion?

 

Another example:

“Pasteur was responsible for disproving the doctrine of spontaneous generation. Under the auspices of the French Academy of Sciences, his experiment demonstrated that in sterilized and sealed flasks, nothing ever developed; conversely, in sterilized but open flasks, microorganisms could grow.”(Wikipedia)

Abiogenesis is fundamentally impossible. Louis Pasteur was a remarkable scientist whose contributions saved millions of lives through vaccines and medical innovations that prevented early deaths from various diseases. He developed methods that effectively preserved life, employing rigorous scientific techniques. One of his significant achievements was conclusively demonstrating that life does not arise spontaneously from an inorganic matter. This principle has become an established axiom, widely accepted without the need for peer review. No rational individual would contest this truth, as it is not merely a matter of opinion or belief, but a verified fact of nature.

Despite this, we are told that life on our planet originated in a manner that contradicts Pasteur's findings and the scientific consensus that has followed. While science presents one perspective, the "scientific hypothesis" suggests an opposing narrative.

Now, let me share a story from my favorite anti-Darwinian mathematician, David Berlinski. Before that, I will refer to another work, "The Origin of Speeches" by Isaac E. Mozeson.

“Any studies considered anti-Darwinian will guarantee no tenure or employment according to the strict code of Academic Freedom.”

To gain a deeper understanding of "academic freedom," consider researching David Berlinski. Below is the anticipated narrative by Berlinski, extracted from "The Deniable Darwin."

“Postscript: On the Derivation of Ulysses from Don Quixote IMAGINE THIS STORY BEING told to me by Jorge Luis Borges one evening in a Buenos Aires cafe. His voice dry and infinitely ironic, the aging, nearly blind literary master observes that "the Ulysses," mistakenly attributed to the Irish-man James Joyce, is in fact derived from "the Quixote." I raise my eyebrows. Borges pauses to sip discreetly at the bitter coffee our waiter has placed in front of him, guiding his hands to the saucer. "The details of the remarkable series of events in question may be found at the University of Leiden," he says. "They were conveyed to me by the Freemason Alejandro Ferri in Montevideo." Borges wipes his thin lips with a linen handkerchief that he has withdrawn from his breast pocket. "Asyou know," he continues, "the original handwritten text of the Quixote was given to an order of French Cistercians in the autumn of 1576." I hold up my hand to signify to our waiter that no further service is needed. "Curiously enough, for none of the brothers could read Spanish, the Order was charged by the Papal Nuncio, Ho yo dos Monterrey (a man of great refinement and implacable will), with the responsibility for copying the Quixote, the printing press having then gained no currency in the wilderness of what is now known as the department of Auvergne. Un-able to speak or read Spanish, a language they not unreasonably detested, the brothers copied the Quixote over and over again, re-creating the text hut, of course, compromising it as well, and so inadvertently discovering the true nature of authorship. Thus they created Fernando Lor's Los Hombres d'Estado in 1585 by means of a singular series of copying errors, and then in 1654 Juan Luis Samorza's remarkable epistolary novel Po;- Favor by the same means, and then in 1685, the errors having accumulated sufficiently to change Spanish into French, Moliere's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, their copying continuous and indefatigable, the work handed down from generation to generation as a sacred but secret trust, so that in time the brothers of the monastery, known only to members of the Bourbon house and, rumor has it, the Englishman and psychic Conan Doyle, copied into creation Stendhal's The Red and the Black and Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and then as a result of a particularly significant series of errors, in which French changed into Russian, Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Anna Karenina. Late in the last decade of the nineteenth century there suddenly emerged, in English, Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, and then the brothers, their numbers reduced by an infectious disease of mysterious origin, finally copied the Ulysses into creation in 1902, the manuscript lying neglected for almost thirteen years and then mysteriously making its way to Paris in 1915, just months before the British attack on the Somme, a circumstance whose significance remains to be determined." I sit there, amazed at what Borges has recounted. "Is it your under-standing, then," I ask, "that every novel in the West was created in this way?" "Of course," replies Borges imperturbably. Then he adds: "Although every novel is derived directly from another novel, there is really only one novel, the Quixote."

I appreciate the story crafted by a mathematician and narrated by a renowned writer. It is hard to believe it is true. No scientific method was required or employed—just straightforward observation and simple analysis. We just KNOW that this story CANNOT be true.

From a mathematical perspective, the DNA of an amoeba is millions of times more complex than all those remarkable literary works. Yet, we are told that DNA code formed itself through a series of mistakes during a slow transformation, leading to existence of Darwin and his followers.

Oh, woe is me, a man of no faith!

It is not that I require a Designer in the equation of life; life itself is a testament to His Name and His love! I don’t believe – I Know.

 

Now, let us delve into a bit of history. Unlike Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, and even Biology, History relies more on research than on scientific methods. Indeed, the conclusions drawn from partial observations in History cannot be treated in the same manner as scientific conclusions.

The Jewish people are not only observers and preservers of history but also significant actors within it. Our sages have received and developed rigorous tools for preserving the knowledge passed down through generations. They acknowledge that some content has been lost amid the turbulence of Jewish history, which is precisely why, during many crucial moments, the Law and its context—i.e., history—were preserved in written form.

 

Jews utilized the alphabet earlier than any other nation in the world. Yet, this fact is often overlooked by those who cloak themselves in the guise of science.

Gretz and Wellhausen arrive, welcomed with eager eyes and thirsty ears, and their every folly is published under their names. Consequently, they inspire thousands of imitators and followers.

It goes without saying that most of these individuals possess limited skills in the Hebrew language and methodology, not to mention their ideological biases.

Bias—why does it all boil down to bias? Why is there seemingly a single underlying ideology across these subjects? Why does it appear that a significant portion of what is deemed science, which has undeniably enriched humanity—such as Pasteur's contributions to saving and extending the lives of millions, if not billions—seems to be focused on discrediting Jewish history and worldview, or at least undermining or compromising it?

Who decided, and when, that science must be atheistic? As if accepting the idea of Creation by a Creator would render the invention of penicillin or smartphones impossible.

Science and the scientific method were not atheistic from their inception in the 17th century; this shift occurred only in the latter half of the 18th century. This historical fact alone indicates that the exclusion of Creation from “science” is unrelated to the essence of Science itself. Instead, it was ideological bias that fueled the ongoing conflict of “science” against Creation.

But why?

I believe I have found the answer. It seems quite evident if you are honest with yourself.

And no, I will not conclude this essay with my own convictions, which may already be apparent. I will leave you with the freedom to conduct your own analysis.

Jews in Ghetto

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       B-H

A Few Reflections on My 57th Birthday and the Warsaw Ghetto

A few days ago, on May 16, 2023, or the 25th of Iyar in the Hebrew calendar, I turned 57. My Hebrew birthday, fell just one day after my solar birthday, marking the moment when Earth was in the same position in its orbit around the sun as it was on the day I was born.

As I was scrolling through a Polish newspaper, as I often do to gather information from various sources and perspectives, I came across an article commemorating the last day of the Warsaw Ghetto. The piece featured several images from the infamous chronicle of Jürgen Stroop, the Nazi officer responsible for the liquidation of the Ghetto, along with a reminder of the basic facts about the Ghetto and the uprising by its remaining inhabitants.

Many of these images are well-known, even iconic, in Holocaust and WWII historiography. Among them was one I had seen countless times before: a group of Hasidic Jews standing before Nazi soldiers.

What I didn’t realize, or what I hadn’t fully comprehended before, was that this particular photograph was taken around May 16, 1943—just days before the Ghetto’s destruction.

The realization struck me deeply, and I couldn’t shake it. The image of these Hasidic Jews, standing in the final days of the Ghetto, stayed with me longer than a day—almost obsessively. This was a community caught at the end of an unimaginable tragedy, in the final days of a war that had already annihilated so much. In those final days, the Ghetto was no longer the home to an almost half-million-strong Jewish population. Of the initial number, over 300,000 had already perished in the gas chambers and crematoria of the Treblinka death camp, part of the Nazi "death industrial complex."

I think I’ve already described my personal discovery of the Holocaust in my book, but since it’s currently unavailable, I’ll briefly recount it here.

Growing up in 1970s Poland was, in many ways, a blissful childhood. We weren’t taught much about the large Jewish population that had coexisted with us for over a thousand years. In fact, I didn’t know about it at all—not my generation. Poland had once been home to one of the largest Jewish populations in Europe, with Jews making up about 8-10% of the population for centuries. Yet, the trauma of WWII overshadowed any meaningful education about Jews, their culture, or their history in our schools. Nearly every Polish family had lost someone during the war, with personal stories of suffering, death, and slavery under the Nazi regime. My own maternal grandfather had survived a gunshot wound to the chest, thanks only to a thick ID booklet he carried. My paternal grandfather, along with his two brothers, was murdered at Mauthausen.

What we didn’t realize at the time was that the Jewish people had faced an entirely different, far more tragic fate. For many Jews, surviving the war, even one member of a family, would have been an extraordinary rarity. If multiple family members survived, it was nothing short of a miracle.

At the age of 19, I learned the full extent of the Holocaust. By then, I was already a student of the Bible, and had recently become the youngest clergyman in my religious denomination. It was at this time that I began to grasp the profound tragedy of the Jewish people’s fate during the war. In 1985, French filmmaker Claude Lanzman released his nine-hour documentary Shoah, which would be instrumental in deepening my understanding of the Holocaust. In Poland, the state-controlled TV aired two hours of the film, primarily to show how it portrayed some Polish collaboration with Nazi forces. The documentary, which was shown in select cities, further fueled my awareness of the horrors that took place during those years.

Watching Shoah changed my perspective forever. I remember going to the screening, as a young person eager to understand the truth of what happened, though I wasn’t a journalist and had no particular access. The film’s portrayal of the systematic extermination of the Jewish people left a lasting imprint on me. It was not just the physical killing but the calculated dehumanization and moral degradation that stunned me.

Polish state TV disclosed two hours of experts from the film in order to show that the film is anti-Polish for in hours of interviews with survivors, perpetrators, collaborators and heroes, there were some parts of the documentary indicating collaboration of some Polish individuals or groups with German nazis.

The Polish nation is still struggling with this topic.

Historians have long pointed out that the Holocaust stands out because of its unprecedented scale and efficiency. The Nazis had created a "death industry," making use of modern technology and bureaucratic organization to carry out mass murder. This was a new level of cruelty in human history.

For thousands of years, Jews had adhered to the teachings of the Torah, believing in a divine, spiritual connection to the Creator. But the rise of nationalism in Europe two centuries ago introduced a new, dangerous ideology: the idea of defining nations through blood, language, and land. For the Nazis, this meant reducing Jews to an inferior race—a view that ultimately led to the horror of the Holocaust.

It was the Shoah documentary that first brought the topic of Jews in Poland to the forefront. For several more years, Poland remained under communist rule, with censorship still in place, yet the conversation gradually became more open.

In the years that followed, Jews were rediscovered as an integral part of Polish history, and this rediscovery was not viewed negatively. The younger generation of Poles was increasingly willing to acknowledge the part of the population that had, at times, openly collaborated with the Nazis, as well as the far more widespread passive indifference of the majority. By the time I was living in the United States, a nationalist movement had reemerged in Poland, sometimes in mild forms, other times in more extreme manifestations. Curiously, this movement found some common ground with the Israeli government and Zionist ideology.

However, in the second half of the 1980s, some books on Jewish topics began to be published. Holocaust history, though crucial, was not the direct catalyst for my eventual decision to convert to Judaism. That process had begun much earlier, driven solely by my desire to connect with the Supreme One—a relationship as described and expressed in His Revelation.

Yet, discovering the scope and scale of the Holocaust, especially the fact that it occurred on the land of my youth and ancestry, was something no intellectually curious or sensitive person could ignore. I immersed myself in the subject, reading everything I could about holocaust and the Warsaw Ghetto. Warsaw was not my own city, but I was familiar with it.

I believe the first book I encountered on the topic was the diary of Henryk Makower, a doctor in the Ghetto’s Jewish Police. From there, I explored every memoir, diary, interview, and, eventually, Jürgen Stroop’s chronicle of the Ghetto’s destruction. Edition of his work, however, lacked photographs or, if they were included, they didn’t stand out in my memory.

Most of the material I came across was written by non-practicing Jews, including Marek Edelman, one of the leaders of the Ghetto uprising, who lived in Poland until his death in 2009. I pored over maps, timelines, and any available resources. But no matter how much I studied, it was clear that only a small fragment of the Ghetto’s reality could be understood. The horror that unfolded there is impossible to fully grasp.

Then came the Ghetto’s picture album, a powerful collection of images. One picture can convey more than a thousand words, and in this album, there were hundreds of such images. Many of them were taken by Nazis themselves, part of their antisemitic propaganda aimed at justifying the existence of the Ghetto and its brutal enclosures. Walls, after all, always require justification, while bridges are self-explanatory.

It became clear to me—and to many historians and sociologists—that the Nazis had a plan, and that plan was grounded in a disturbing social philosophy: "We are all animals—and Jews are no exception." The Nazis sought to destroy the Jewish claim to an angelic, spiritual essence within humanity. They aimed to shatter the notion of a divine connection between the Jewish people and the Supreme Creator. Darwin’s theories provided the foundation they needed, offering the "beautiful idea of design without the Designer," as they saw it.

From the very beginning, it was openly declared that Darwin had provided humanity with the “beautiful idea of design without the Designer.” The existence of Jews became the final obstacle on the path to a world free from guilt and moral responsibility. As outlined in Mein Kampf, Jews were said to have caused two scars on humanity: one on the male organ, symbolizing moral purity, and the other on human conscience—where the weak, sick, and underprivileged must be helped, rather than eliminated from existence or erased from view.

Nazi propaganda sought to reinforce this narrative. It portrayed humanity as merely a higher form of randomly evolved animals, where only the fittest and strongest survive, dominating and ultimately eliminating the weak. This, they argued, was the law of nature. The elimination of the “parasitic element,” namely Jews, was depicted as the righteous thing to do.

The Nazis insisted that Jews were not merely animals like themselves, but that in order to prove the superiority of their own race, it was necessary to eradicate both Jews and their ideology from the conscience of mankind. To achieve this, they created a multitude of propaganda films designed to portray Jews as deserving of their fate.

One such film was made in May 1942, just two months after the Wannsee Conference, where Nazi officials formalized the Endlösung—the Final Solution—to exterminate all Jews. Nazi filmmakers were sent to the Warsaw Ghetto to document the supposed inhumanity of its inhabitants. The resulting footage depicted the Jews as immoral and animalistic in their behavior. Some of the scenes were staged, while others documented the very real moral degradation that occurred within the Ghetto’s walls.

When basic human needs such as breathing are denied, survival instincts force people to act in ways that defy their inherent sense of rationality and dignity. You can label any kind of torture as “enhanced interrogation,” but it does not change the fundamental truth that denying someone the ability to breathe—denying the most basic instinct of survival—compels a person to behave in ways that strip them of their humanity.

The Nazis exploited this second instinct: the need for food. By cruelly depriving the Ghetto population of sustenance, they created horrific scenes for their propaganda films—scenes in which Jews were forced to engage in behaviors that, in any other time, they would have never considered. These were actions that violated their deeply ingrained conscience, shaped over millennia of tradition. The Nazis thought they had succeeded in their mission: they believed they had broken the spirit of the Ghetto’s inhabitants.

But the truth is, the horrific conditions of the Ghetto did not simply degrade its inhabitants. They tested the limits of human endurance, and for many, the Ghetto undermined, if not destroyed, their sense of humanity and their identity as Jews.

The film was made in May 1942, at a time when gas chambers were already under construction in Treblinka and other camps. The deportation from the Ghetto began on Tisha B'Av, 22 July 1942. Over the course of the summer, approximately 300,000 Jews were transported to Treblinka, where they were murdered.

Adolf Eichmann, may his name be erased, was responsible for overseeing the logistics of these deportations. In an act of cruel manipulation, the Nazis handed the task of selecting and organizing the quotas of people to the Judenrat—the Ghetto’s Jewish Council.

The head of the Judenrat, Adam Czerniaków, upon learning what was expected of him, chose to end his life by swallowing a cyanide pill. His successor, however, proved more compliant.

During the first wave of deportations, the Nazis targeted the “unproductive” elements of society: the sick, the elderly, the young, and the so-called “kley kodesh”—the rabbis, scholars, and spiritual leaders of the Jewish community, along with their families. Those who could prove their usefulness or skills were spared, but only for a short while, as long as the Third Reich deemed them of any value.

Some Jews, determined to survive, refused to register with the Judenrat and consequently were denied food rations. Without official registration, survival became almost impossible, and many perished from starvation.

By the fall of 1942, approximately 35,000 Jews remained in the Ghetto, forced to work as slave labor in the Nazi war effort. However, estimates suggest that between 20,000 and 25,000 additional Jews lived illegally within the Ghetto. These individuals survived, often against all odds, through a “smuggling economy” that became increasingly difficult to maintain as the Ghetto shrank and emptied.

On 19 April 1943, the first day of Passover, the Ghetto Uprising began.

I will not delve into the specifics of the Uprising itself, as it falls outside the scope of this discussion. Instead, I will return to the image with which I began this narrative.

The same group of holy tzaddikim—nothing less than malachim (angels) in human form—stood tall in defiance of the forces of evil, once again proving that the forces of darkness could never uproot the Torah from the hearts of the people of Torah. These were the men and women who, in the face of unspeakable horrors, preserved their identity, held onto their faith, and upheld their moral and spiritual convictions in the most dire of circumstances.

They were the ones who, at great personal risk, provided sustenance and strength to the Torah scholars, the Talmidei Chachamim.

There are dark chapters in human history and places so filled with evil that they are beyond comprehension. It is profoundly disturbing to reflect on these moments in time. But the Warsaw Ghetto stands as one of the darkest, most heart-wrenching of them all.

Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek, Chelmno… these places, like Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Armenia, Cambodia, Rwanda—the list is endless—represent the physical annihilation of human beings by other humans. But the Ghetto, with its pervasive dehumanization and demoralization, symbolizes something far more insidious.

The Nazis sought to uproot the Divine from the human spirit, to reduce humanity's angelic potential to mere physicality or biology—according to their twisted vision of what it meant to be human.

In image above, Nazis saw the angels, yet they refused to bow.

Perhaps it requires one to be truly human, in the most profound sense, to recognize the Divine.

Religious Jews captured by the SS during the Warsaw ghetto uprising. The original German caption reads: "Jewish rabbis."

From left to right are Rabbi Lipa Kaplan, Eliyahu Levin (son of Rabbi Hersh Henoch of Bedzin), Mendel Alter (son of Rabbi Nechemya Alter); Yankel Levin (son of Rabbi Mottel Levin of Lodz and grandson of the rabbi of Bedzin), unknown and Rabbi Heschel Rappaport, a Gerer Chassid and mentor to young Chassidim.

Photo Credit

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park

 

https://jewishaction.com/holocaust/the-warsaw-ghetto-an-eyewitness-account/