The MIT physicist Jeremy England, whose research concerns nonliving things that act like living things, is also an Orthodox Jew—and the inspiration for a character in a novel by the bestselling author Dan Brown. In an interview with Rachel Scheinerman, he discusses his reflections on the tensions between science and religion:

There are lots of Jews who are very observant and religious . . . who are also highly technically educated and find modern science very credible. But I think that one has to raise the question of how that level of intellectual comfort is achieved.

One possible way that it can be achieved is by creating a kind of divided mind. . . . And I don’t mean to denigrate that, but . . . I don’t want to have a divided mind. It’s necessary to acknowledge that the Tanakh [tries] to make you uncomfortable with the idea of fixed laws of nature. That’s at least one current within [scripture]. There are [also] countercurrents, [for instance], the Psalmist’s idea of “How many are the things You have made, O Lord; You have made them all with wisdom”—the idea that God made everything in His wisdom and it has a natural order and regularity to it. [T]hese currents are in tension with one another.

Papering over that tension and saying, “It’s easy, we don’t have to worry about it”—that can come at a cost. I think it’s possible to be very committed to the Torah in ways that are very authentic and ancient, and still be fully committed to scientific reasoning. . . . [But] there’s [also] a real, serious danger [of] turning science into not just a way of reasoning about what is predictable about the world, but into a full-blown belief system that has a mystical component to it. . . . [I]t can get very doctrinaire.

Here’s an example. Someone might say, “The rules of the universe are fundamentally mathematical and probabilistic. Furthermore, there is a very parsimonious mathematical theory that is the explanation of everything, and we are just trying to refine our understanding of that model. But the universe is mathematical.” That is, in a sense, a mystical claim. It is beautiful and nourishes the souls of people who devote themselves to it. And it’s very common . . . in my line of work. But I staunchly reject that way of talking, because I think the laws of physics are human contrivances.

Yasir Arafat was often quoted as saying that his “strongest weapon is the womb of an Arab woman.” That is, he believed the high birthrates of both Palestinians and Arab Israelis ensured that Jews would eventually be a minority in the Land of Israel, at which point Arabs could call for a binational state and get an Arab one. Using similar logic, both Israelis and their self-styled sympathizers have made the case for territorial concessions to prevent such an eventuality. Yet, Yoram Ettinger argues, the statistics have year after year told a different story:

Contrary to the projections of the demographic establishment at the end of the 19th century and during the 1940s, Israel’s Jewish fertility rate is higher than those of all Muslim countries other than Iraq and the sub-Saharan Muslim countries. Based on the latest data, the Jewish fertility rate of 3.13 births per woman is higher than the 2.85 Arab rate (since 2016) and the 3.01 Arab-Muslim fertility rate (since 2020).

The Westernization of Arab demography is a product of ongoing urbanization and modernization, with an increase in the number of women enrolling in higher education and increased use of contraceptives. Far from facing a “demographic time bomb” in Judea and Samaria, the Jewish state enjoys a robust demographic tailwind, aided by immigration.

However, the demographic and policy-making establishment persists in echoing official Palestinian figures without auditing them, ignoring a 100-percent artificial inflation of those population numbers. This inflation is accomplished via the inclusion of overseas residents, double-counting Jerusalem Arabs and Israeli Arabs married to Arabs living in Judea and Samaria, an inflated birth rate, and deflated death rate.

The U.S. should derive much satisfaction from Israel’s demographic viability and therefore, Israel’s enhanced posture of deterrence, which is America’s top force- and dollar-multiplier in the Middle East and beyond.