confronts...the Big Bang and Evolution Daniel Anderson - Limmud Conference (Dec 2014/Tevet 5775)

1) The literalist perspective: Lubavitcher Rebbe and Rabbi Dr David Gottlieb

The universe is 6 days old and science is wrong ...it was quite a surprise to me to learn that you are still troubled by the problem of the age of the world as suggested by various scientific theories which cannot be reconciled with the view that the world is 5722 years old. I underlined the word theories, for it is necessary to bear in mind, first of all, that science formulates and deals with theories and hypotheses while the Torah deals with absolute truths. These are two different disciplines, where reconciliation is entirely out of place... In short, of all the weak scientific theories, those which deal with the origin of the cosmos and with its dating are (admittedly by the scientists themselves) the weakest of the weak... Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson/Lubavitcher Rebbe (1902-1994), 18th Tevet 5722 [December 25, 1961] Brooklyn, NY

The solution to the contradiction between the age of the earth and the universe according to science and the Jewish date of 5755 years since Creation is this: the real age of the universe is 5755 years, but it has misleading evidence of greater age. Rabbi David Gottlieb, PhD in Mathematics, former Professor of Philosophy at John Hopkins University, Senior faculty of Somayach Yeshiva

Evolution is nonsense ...The argument from the discovery of the fossils is by no means conclusive evidence of the great antiquity of the earth... [for] one cannot exclude the possibility that dinosaurs existed 5722 years ago, and became fossilized under terrific natural cataclysms in the course of a few years rather than in millions of years; since we have no conceivable measurements or criteria of calculations under those unknown conditions...... Even assuming that the period of time which the Torah allows for the age of the world is definitely too short for fossilization (although I do not see how one can be so categorical), we can still readily accept the possibility that God created ready fossils, bones or skeletons (for reasons best known to him), just as he could create ready living organisms, a complete man, and such ready products as oil, coal or diamonds, without any evolutionary process...We cannot know the reason why God chose this manner of creation in preference to another, and whatever theory of creation is accepted, the question will remain unanswered. The question, Why create a fossil? is no more valid than the question, Why create an atom? Certainly, such a question cannot serve as a sound argument, much less as a logical basis, for the evolutionary theory, [for which there is not a shred of evidence to support]... [However] the theory, to which reference has been made, actually has no bearing on the Torah account of Creation. For even if the theory of evolution were substantiated today, and the mutation of species were proven in laboratory tests, this would still not contradict the possibility of the world having been created as stated in the Torah, rather than through the evolutionary process. Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson/Lubavitcher Rebbe (1902-1994), 18th Tevet 5722 [December 25, 1961] Brooklyn, NY

The bones, artefacts, partially decayed radium, potassium-argon, uranium, the red-shifted light from space, etc. - all of it points to a greater age which nevertheless is not true. G-d put these things in the universe and they lead many to the false conclusion of a much greater age. I said the evidence is misleading. Does that mean that God is tricking us? Not at all: He told us the truth! Only

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Judaism confronts...the Big Bang and Evolution Daniel Anderson - Limmud Conference (Dec 2014/Tevet 5775) someone who [perversely] decides to ignore the statement of the Creator and rely only on what he can investigate will be lead to a false conclusion. Only to such a person is the evidence misleading. And note that this policy of creating the world looking different from its true nature is an inescapable Jewish idea. For, we recite twice every morning that God constantly recreates the universe, even though this is not observable. Let's first understand that G-d certainly can do this if He wishes. There is no logical impossibility in imagining such indicators of false age. Furthermore, something like this is part of the naive understanding of Genesis. was created as an adult. Observing him a few minutes after he was created, we would assume him to be at least twenty years old: he was created with misleading symptoms of greater age than he possessed. The trees created in the Garden of Eden presumably had tree rings. Tree rings usually indicate the age of the tree, but in this case the rings are misleading evidence of age the trees did not possess. So the idea is not inherently absurd. Rabbi David Gottlieb, PhD in Mathematics, former Professor of Philosophy at John Hopkins University, Senior faculty of Ohr Somayach Yeshiva

2) The accommodative perspective: Isaac of Acre and Rabbi Israel Lipschitz

The age of the universe is 15 billion years old The Sefer HaTemunah [13th-14th C] speaks about Sabbatical cycles (Shemitot). This is based on the Talmudic teaching that “the world will exist for six thousand years, and in the seventh thousand year, it will be destroyed” (BT, Sanhedrin 97a). The Sefer HaTemunah states that this seven year cycle is merely one Sabbatical cycle. However, since there are seven Sabbatical cycles in a Jubilee, the world is destined to exist for 49,000 years. There is a question as to which cycle we are in today... According to one opinion, we are in the seventh cycle, [which would suggest that] the universe is 42,000 years old. Rabbi Aryan Kaplan (1934-1983), ‘The Age of the Universe’ (Published 1993)

I, the insignificant Isaac of Acre, have seen fit to record a great mystery that should be kept well hidden. One of God’s days is one thousand years, as it is written: ‘For a thousand years in Your sight are as a day’ (Tehillim/Psalms 90:4). Since one of our years is 365.25 days, a year on high is 365,250 of our years (i.e. 365.25 x 1000). Two years on high is 730,500 of our years (i.e. 365,250 x2). From this, continue multiplying to 42,000 years, each year consisting of 365.25 days, and each supernal day being one thousand of our years, as it is written: ’God alone will prevail on that day’ (Yeshiyah/Isaiah 2:11). ‘Who can speak of G-d’s greatness?’ (Tehillim/Psalms 106:2). Blessed be the name of Him whose glorious Kingdom is forever and ever. [NB Thus according to Isaac of Acre the age of the universe is 42,000 x 365,250 = 15,340,500,000 years old, which is in alignment with current scientific thinking, which suggests that it is 14.46±0.8 billion years.]...... Behold, our eyes see that the world has existed for a very long time. This is to refute the opinion of those who say that the world has not existed more than forty-nine thousand years, which is seven Sabbatical cycles. Isaac ben Samuel of Acre (1250-1350), Ozar ha-Hayyim, pp.86b-87b

Evolution is part of God’s creation …As regards the past, Rabbi Abbahu states at the beginning of Bereishet Rabbah that the words ‘and it was evening, and it was morning’ (in the apparent absence of the sun) indicate that “there was a series of epochs before then; the Holy One created worlds and destroyed them, approving some and not others.” [ Rabbah (Bereishit 3:7)]

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Judaism confronts...the Big Bang and Evolution Daniel Anderson - Limmud Conference (Dec 2014/Tevet 5775)

The Kabbalists expanded upon this statement and revealed that this process is repeated seven times, each Sabbatical cycle [Sh’mita] achieving greater perfection than the last…They also tell us that we are now in the midst of the fourth of these great cycles of perfection… [NB: Many paleontologists also consider there to have been four eras: the Precambrian, Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic.] We are enabled to appreciate to the full the wonderful accuracy of our Holy Torah when we see that this secret doctrine, handed down by word of mouth for so long, and revealed to us by the Sages of the many centuries ago, has been borne out in the clearest possible way by the science of our generation. The questing spirit of man, probing and delving into the recesses of the earth, in the Pyrenees, the Carpathians, the Rocky Mountains in America, and the Himalayas, has found them to be formed of mighty layers of rock lying upon one another in amazing and chaotic formations, explicable only in terms of revolutionary transformations of the earth’s surface. Probing still further, deep below the earth’s surface, geologists have found four distinct layers of rock, and between the layers fossilized remains of creatures. Those in the lower layers are of monstrous size and structure, while those in the higher layers are progressively smaller in size but incomparably more refined in structure and form. Furthermore, they found in Siberia in 1807, under the eternal ice of those regions, a monstrous type of elephant, some three or four times larger than those found today… Similarly, fossilized remains of sea creatures have been found within the recesses of the highest mountains, and scientists have calculated that of every 78 species found in the earth, 48 are species that are no longer found in our present epoch. We also know of the remains of an enormous creature found deep in the earth near Baltimore, seventeen feet long and eleven feet high. These have also been found in Europe, and have been given the name “mammoth.” Another gigantic creature whose fossilized remains have been found is that which is called “Iguanadon,” which stood fifteen feet high and measured ninety feet in length; from its internal structure, scientists have determined that it was herbivorous. Another creature is that which is called “Megalosaurus,” which was slightly smaller than the Iguanodon, but which was meat-eating. From all this, we can see that all that the Kabbalists have told us for so many years about the repeated destruction and renewal of the earth has found clear confirmation in our time. Rabbi Israel Lipschitz/ Yisrael (1782–1860), Derush Ohr HaChayyim

3) The reverential perspective: Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch and Rav Kook

The universe is a sense of wonder Judaism is not frightened even by the hundreds of thousands and millions of years which the geological theory of the earth’s development bandies about so freely. Judaism would have nothing to fear from that theory even if it were based on something more than mere hypothesis, on the still unproven presumption that the forces we see at work in our world today are the same as those that were in existence, with the same degree of potency, when the world was first created. Our Rabbis, the Sages of Judaism, discuss [in Midrash Rabbah 9; Chagiga 16a] the possibility that earlier worlds were brought into existence and subsequently destroyed by the Creator before He made our own earth in its present form and order. However, the Rabbis have never made the acceptance or rejection of this

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Judaism confronts...the Big Bang and Evolution Daniel Anderson - Limmud Conference (Dec 2014/Tevet 5775) and similar possibilities an article of faith binding on all Jews. They were willing to live with any theory that did not reject the basic truth that “every beginning is from God.” In fact, they were generally averse to speculations about what was in the past and what will be in the future, because, in their view, such questions transgressed the limits of that which is knowable to man, or, at best, they did not enhance man’s understanding of his moral function. In the view of our Rabbis, the Book of Books was intended to be mankind’s guide for life on earth as it is at present, to teach man to recognize God, in the here and now, as the everlasting Creator and Master of the universe, and to worship Him by faithfully obeying the laws by which He governs mankind. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-1888), Collected Writings #7 p.265

Evolution is part of God’s creation This will never change, not even if the latest scientific notion that the genesis of all the multitudes of organic forms on earth can be traced back to one single, most primitive, primeval form of life should ever appear to be anything more than what it is today, a vague hypothesis still unsupported by fact. Even if this notion were ever to gain complete acceptance by the scientific world, Jewish thought, unlike the reasoning of the high priest of that notion [i.e. Thomas Henry Huxley], would nonetheless never summon us to revere a still extant representative of this primal form as the supposed ancestor of us all. Rather, Judaism in that case would call upon its adherents to give even greater reverence than ever before to the one, sole God Who, in His boundless creative wisdom and eternal omnipotence, needed to bring into existence no more than one single, amorphous nucleus and one single law of "adaptation and heredity" in order to bring forth, from what seemed chaos but was in fact a very definite order, the infinite variety of species we know today, each with its unique characteristics that sets it apart from all other creatures. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-1888), Collected Writings #7 p.265

The theory of evolution is increasingly conquering the world at this time, and, more so than all other philosophical theories, conforms to the kabbalistic secrets of the world. Evolution, which proceeds on a path of ascendancy, provides an optimistic foundation for the world. How is it possible to despair at a time when we see that everything evolves and ascends? When we penetrate the inner meaning of ascending evolution, we find in it the divine element shining with absolute brilliance. It is precisely the [God] in reality which manages to bring to realization that which is Ein Sof [God] as a possibility. Rav (1865–1935), Orot Hakodesh II: 537

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