Parasha B'reshit - Part 1

My formal training is as a scientist. The scientific portion of my mind has always had a problem with the Torah's account of creation. Creation vs Evolution. 6 Days vs. 16 Billion years...

I always wanted to believe in the Torah's account, but things just didn't sit well. I never bought the traditional ways of explaining away the problem. "If G-d can create the universe, he can make it look as old as he wants." To me, that just sounds like a cop-out. "The account of creation is poetic, a day is really an epoch." That one just goes against basic torah learning principles - the Torah is carefully worded, if the term "day" is used, it means day.

My dilemma was resolved a few years ago when I read a great book, "The Science of G-d" by Dr. Schroeder. He is both a torah scholar and a PhD in science. He uses relativity theory to resolve the issue.

First, we need to see that time in the first 6 days is different than time after that. Then we look at what time means in the first 6 days.

There are two ways of keeping time in the Torah. The first 6 days are a literal time keeping. "This happens, day one. This happens, a second day". After Adam, time is kept generational. "Person 1 lived for x years and fathered person 2, then lived y more years..." Different ways of keeping time implies time is somehow different.

So what does time mean in the first 6 days? Well, the term "day" is used, so that means a day as we know it. How do we define a day? A revolution of the earth on it's axis, 1/365 of the time around the sun... Problem is the sun wasn't around until day 3, so how can we define a day this way. We could define a day as 24 hours (hour being defined scientifically). But man isn't around yet, so it can't be mans hours. The only thing existing at this point is G-d, so it must be G-d time - i.e. 24 of our hours, experienced by G-d. Before you're "cop-out" alarm goes off, lets apply some scientific rigger to see what G-d time could mean.

G-d created the universe, so G-d must exist outside of it. The universe is expanding. This seems like a prime spot for some relativity theory. If we gave one of our watches to G-d, how would 24 hours from a position outside of the universe look to someone on earth?

The book works out the math (I'll spare you) and relativity theory says that 6 x 24 hours outside of the universe, would look like 16 billion years to someone sitting on earth. 16 billion years is fairly close to sciences best guess of the age of the universe.

But the book goes one step further. The author figures out what time period would be represented by each of the 6 days. The lists what the Torah claims happened on that day (in order), and compared it to what science claims happened in each of those periods. When the sun was formed, when plant life appeared, when fish appear... The two time-lines match exactly.

For me that was a very convincing argument.

That solves the age of the universe "problem". Now lets tackle the evolution "problem".

The Church always argued against evolution, since the bible says that G-d had a separate creation for every species. The only problem is that if you actually read the account of creation in the Torah (which was a no-no for the Church), it claims nothing of the sort.

The word for create is Barah, which is used exactly 3 times in the creation story:
1) the heavens and the earth
2) soul of animal
3) soul of man
Everything else, was "brought forth" or "sprung forth". So there is no problem there.

In fact if you look at the order of creation in the Torah, it goes from simple to complex. Plant life to fish, to mammal, to man. In fact the Torah agrees completely with the theory of evolution, with one exception. Evolutions believes all this was random, the Torah says it is guided. I'll leave it up to you to decide which one is more believable.

My next post will be about what I've learned about Adam and Eve.

That's enough for now, some other time I'll write more about Science vs. Religion - my favourate subject.

Shabbat Shalom.