Plebe

Keep scrolling down, this gives an idea of how even Orthodox Jews defend the creation story, omitting of course the two different versions in Genesis.Rather 'twisted' I'd say but then where do you think some of the best lawyers learn their basic skills?..LOL!
-Your fellow citizen, Plebe..

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"And G-d created man in His image, in the image of G-d
He created him,
male
and female He created them." [1:27]

The Origin of Life is back in the news, with the
recent announcement by
the Cobb County, Georgia Board of Education to allow
"discussion of
disputed views" in the classroom.

It seems that both parties in this argument are being
unnecessarily
confrontational, as well as claiming expertise that
they do not have.

Both sides assume that there is, in actuality, an
argument: one claims
that the earth is roughly 6000 years old, the other
says several
billion
years, and never the twain shall meet.

A Jewish perspective reveals that this is not
necessarily correct. Or
as
Dr. Gerald Schroeder, Professor emeritus of Nuclear
Physics and author
of
"Genesis and the Big Bang" paraphrased Maimonides, any
contradiction
results from bad Torah or bad science. This argument
may result from
both.

Why should we assume that the six days of Creation
were 24 hours long,
when
there was no sun to orbit until the Fourth Day? Jewish
sources
discussed
and debated this possibility long before Newton,
Darwin, or Einstein,
but
Dr. Schroeder made a fascinating observation.

Those familiar with general relativity know that time
and gravity are
related: those outside a mass will see time pass more
slowly than those
inside it. In fact, says Dr. Schroeder, where a being
located outside
the
great mass of the universe would see the passing of
5.5 days, those
inside
would see 15 billion years go by.

Misunderstanding the limits of science is still
easier. As an
examination
of the natural world, it must assume the absence of
unnatural events,
a.k.a. miracles.

Yet Adam and Chava were, by the Torah's account,
immediately able to
think
and interact. They were hardly newborn children. The
Midrash tells us
not
only that they were twenty-year-old adults, but that
all Creation
appeared
to have developed naturally as well.

Thus the Midrash not only posits unnatural events, but
tells us to
expect
no lingering evidence. We cannot examine Adam and
Chava today, but at
the
time they truly were, physiologically, twenty years
old. Trees within
and
without the Garden of Eden contained age rings for
hundreds, even
thousands
of years that never existed.

And what of those components of their world which we
can still see
today?
They, too, should present themselves as having formed
naturally -- and
as
if they were old enough for that natural formation to
have occurred.
Working from these fundamentals, other Midrashim, and
passages from the
Zohar, one finds nothing in our world, from the age of
the earth to the
fossil record, that contradicts the recent arrival of
the year 5763
since
Creation.

The Cobb County combatants are making yet another
error: each side is
attempting to claim the expertise of the other.
Science attempts to
determine how things happened naturally; Torah tells
us why they
actually happened, even in ways that defy natural
measurement.

Nothing could be more counter-productive than the
attempt of
"scientific
creationists" to invade the science classroom. Even
were the natural
age
of the earth not so well-established in the billions
of years, one
cannot
inject into science supernatural events which, by
definition, defy
scientific investigation.

If scientific analysis is misinterpreted as to deny
the possibility of
miracles or to assert absolute knowledge of the
distant past, this is
similarly foolish -- it extrapolates beyond the limits
of scientific
knowledge.

Concerning evolution in particular, there is no
alternative scientific,
or
natural, theory concerning how we might have arrived
at this point. For
this reason, we do not see biologists flocking to
alternative theories
when challenges are discovered. Whether geologists
discover fossils in
the
wrong strata, or theoretically we determine events to
be fantastically
improbable, these are universally dismissed as the
result of chance.

Uri Zohar, the Israeli
entertainer-turned-religious-lecturer, found a
profound example of this in a textbook on the
physiology of sight. The
authors recognized that without photon detectors (a
primitive eye), an
optic nerve is useless, and that the reverse is true
as well. There is
no reason to assume favorable natural selection for
one without the
other,
and all evidence indicates that both evolved at the
same time.

How did such an impossible scenario come to pass? The
authors' answer
is
as confident as it is predictable: simple "trial and
error" on the part
of natural selection. Their own words point to the
conclusion they
avoid,
for random events do not "try."

Clearly there is room for philosophical discussions of
alternative
origin
theories, in a way that promotes no particular
religion. This should
not
threaten the realm of science, any more than science
can claim
knowledge of
the unknowable. There is ample reason for a person to
emerge from the
biology classroom exclaiming with yet greater fervor,
"how great are
your
works, oh G-d!" [Psalms 104:24]

Good Shabbos,

Rabbi Yaakov Menken

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Jayhawker Soule

Actually, I didn't find that funny.