Religion and Sciences - Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz

[Music] today we're going to talk a little bit about uh the old conflicts between religion and Science and uh the idea that I want to bring out to you is that in many many ways this is almost an imaginary question uh it is not as important a question in Judaism at least as you would assume because we well when I say we in other words obviously some people some rabbis might disagree with me as well so I don't mean to I'm not the pop so to speak in other words what I say is not the only position within the Jewish tradition but I'm going to espouse a certain position within the Jewish tradition and that is it is essentially an apples and oranges type of problem and that is science deals with one aspect of reality and Torah and Judaism and religion deals with another aspect of reality they are addressing two fundamentally different types of questions and therefore they are not in contradiction because they are talking about two different things and that is to say uh science is an attempt to discover what you might call the what of the universe meaning what were the processes of creation how do you describe physical reality whether it's atoms subatomic particles and everything else and uh as a result science comes up with theories some of which have more evidence some of which have less evidence and that's an important Point don't believe every single scientific theory as reality but science comes up with theories that have a certain amount of explanatory power whether it be the Big Bang Theory of the origin of the universe whether it be darwinian Evolution but the one thing that science cannot answer and does not attempt to answer is why all of these things happened meaning science gives you the what and religion spirituality Torah gives you the why and uh any scientist will tell you that why certain things happened at certain times is not a scientific question uh if you believe in God you say it was guided it was per purposeful if you don't believe in God you say it was chaotic it was random so as a result as a general matter uh the what of the universe uh has nothing to do with the why of the universe and uh the Torah is not intended to be a scientific manual that is frankly not the interest of the Torah uh the Torah is intended to be a moral and spiritual guide for the purpose of my life and what my life is about so a priori there does not have to be a particular conflict between religious teachings and uh and Science Now there'll be some textual conflicts that one has to iron over but let me let me State explicitly what I mean the Torah can live with almost any type of scientific theory for the origin of the universe as long as you believe that it was Guided by God and was not random and chaotic God is infinite and because God is infinite he has an infinite toolbox an infinite number of tools that he used so whether God used Evolution whether God used Big Bang whether God did this or this did that is not really a serious theological matter historically Judaism has had much fewer problems with scientific theories than Christianity uh in Christianity the conflicts between religion and science have been very very serious as you know Galileo was forced to recant publicly by the Catholic Church Upon threat of actually being burnt at the stake when cernic developed the idea that the earth goes around the Sun instead of the Sun going around the earth there was a lot of problems within the Catholic church because that displaced man as the center of the universe uh in the Jewish tradition you find little or no opposition to these various theories as theories come down the pike we simply assist imate them that doesn't mean we accept them indiscriminately Evolution itself for example there are many many many problems and I'm not here to tell you what those problems are but there are many problems these things are far from certain and I don't mean to suggest that because science says something it's automatically true that absolutely is not the case and if you if you elevate science to absolute truth you are developing a new religion called scientism and that is every much of a Rel religion as any other religion and it has far less evidence than Judaism does as we talked about yesterday uh so I don't mean to suggest that whenever there's a conflict between science and Torah science is right God forbid and Torah is wrong I just mean to suggest that Torah can accommodate many many different types of scientific understandings because the scientific ways that God orchestrated the creation of physical laws or orchestrated the creation of man uh are not really the torah's primary interest the Torah is describing moral and spiritual truths and science is the Endeavor of mankind to try to understand the mechanics behind that endeavor so this is a very very general con uh cont uh context or concept uh which indicates that frankly uh science and religion are dealing with two different questions and therefore there does not have to be a uh one does not have to look at Genesis as a scientific manual for creation that was not the intention of the Torah that was not the purpose of the Torah the Torah can accommodate many theories the only Theory the Torah cannot accommodate is a theory of random chaotic undirected unguided creative processes as long as you believe God was in charge of this process then we can live with almost everything now I'll try to be more specific as I go on but this is kind of the general orientation so if you want to be a heretic or a non-believer uh I have to say you cannot do so because of the conflicts between the Torah and science you're going to have to find another reason to do so uh that reason is not a good one now will you find people that disagree with what I just said yes you will so I'm not stting this to be a universally Health belief but it's a belief that I actually feel quite strongly about uh that can be rooted in many many sources uh and uh I think it's very very useful because as a as a result scientific studies scientific discoveries whether it's age of the universe whether it's um uh the age of man whether it's the process of evolution and again I do hon to add that there are many many holes in these theories but even if one were convinced to accept them it would not be a fundamental threat to one's religious orientation now we actually find an opposite idea and this goes back to the Psalms but it was reiterated by my Mones that the deeper one's understanding of nature the more one senses the presence of God uh one sees the wonders of the universe one sees the multiplicity of phenomena that are ultimately reduced in an elegant structure to a few basic laws let's say four basic forces and now as you know physicists are seeking for one unifying force that would be the theory of everything I mentioned yesterday that every scientist intuitively grasps that there's some type of unitary Elegance in the structure of the universe and that is actually an unscientific assumption because there's no particular reason to assume that un unless you assume there's a unitary Creator take someone like Einstein Einstein certainly was a physicist that had a deep deep understanding of the universe perhaps one of the greatest who ever lived now Einstein was very very far from a a traditional Jew that I'm not going to say Einstein put on filling every day uh we know that he did not although it's interesting that when Einstein Einstein grew up in an assimilated German family he did not have any religious education but when he was 12 around his bar mitzvah he was actually flirting with Orthodoxy and uh he was thinking of kind of becoming a religious Jew on his own part of that is his own independent streak because he was rebelling against everything around him he eventually left that it was a very short-lived experiment but the one thing we have to say about Einstein is he had a deep deep understanding that there was some intelligence creative intelligence that guided the laws of the universe uh that is why uh for example many people feel that the last 30 years of his life he wasted because after just know formulating the theory of general relativity and special relativity and brownie in motion and various other things he spent the last 30 years of his life seeking what he called the Consolidated field theory in which all of the different forces electromagnetism and and strong force and weak Force kind of what call the four forces of the universe could somehow be United and he worked on it you know y Vala day and night for years and years and years and there were times that he was close to it and then he was far away and then it didn't work out but he worked because there was a drive within him that convinced him that there was an intelligence a unitary intelligence from which the Elegance of the universe proceeded and every physicist will tell you that there is such a thing but they haven't found J but there's a drive to discover that and indeed if you talk to physicists or if you've taken courses in modern physics and again I I speak with a bit of trepidation because I am certainly not a great expert in this sometimes a modern physicist sounds like a cabalist more than a scientist they talk about String Theory they talk about the fact that instead of they being four dimensions length width height and time is also a dimension of matter they will talk about 26 Dimensions many of which are compact you know we don't even know what that means and they don't even know what that means they cannot visually describe it but they just have it through mathematical equations uh let me just mention that in string theory and super string theory in compacted Dimensions you come up with numbers like 10 or a number like 26 those are numbers that often get kicked around let me just point out that cabalistic God's divine presence permeates the universe through the medium of what are called the 10 spheros the 10 mystical spheres and God's Divine name that's the tetraman that we do not pronounce the yud and the he and the V and the he that adds up gatria 26 so uh the fact that in the Deep structure of the universe uh we have this idea of 10 and this idea of 26 actually corresponds to spiritual realities I knew a physicist he's no longer alive a great professor of physics at the University of Illinois who was also a religious Jew and a bit of a cabalist he was saric he was from Tunisia and whenever he visited Israel he would visit the cabalist yeshivot in right there are mystical yeshivos or is not one of them but you know these are like uh very very Advanced places and these old physicists not phys these old cabalists who have certainly never gone to University and never even had a secular high school or Elementary education they study the holy books you know day and night they ask the physicist what are you working on these days and the physicist was working on crystal structure crystalline structures and he was explaining his work and they said to him oh okay that's where you're up to okay keep on going you know they already had a sense of all of these things and again listen to a physicist talk it does not sound rational it is superar rational because the the more we get into the deep structure of the universe the more we see a mystical Unity of the multiplicity of forces that ultimately converge and come from one this was Einstein's intuition and even an agnostic or an atheist like Stephen Hawking who doesn't believe in God is still pursuing this unitary structure and again I'm repeating my point if you don't believe in some guiding intelligence then why are you looking for a unitary structure why should there be a unitary structure so the point of the matter is every physicist believes in God whether they believe it or not in other words the very Quest is that quest for an ultimate unifying force that brings everything together so in reality scientific study far from creating a conflict with religion can actually be a source of deep deep deep spirituality a sense of wonder a sense of awe a sense of reverence a sense of beauty symmetry order coordination you see this on the macro level you see it on the micro level you see it in the flowers and the plants and the animals and you see it in the atoms and the subatomic particles you see a sense of unitary structure that creates wonder and reverence and that is a sense of Holiness uh one gets Holiness from studying the Torah and one can also get a certain degree of Holiness from studying the world that God has created by looking at the Torah now there is a very very interesting midic teaching a very very famous rabinal aphorism that records a tradition that the Torah predated the creation of the World by 2,000 years and the Torah was the blueprint from which God created The World God looked into the Torah and he created the world very odd meaning the Torah was not God's response to the world he created the Torah was God's blueprint for the world he created the way that's explained is let's take a Mitzvah like honoring parents so we think well since there are parents in the world that's the way we're born we're born from parents so that's a reality so God gives us a commandment dealing with that reality to honor and respect their parents but the cause and effect is actually reversed the reason there are parents is because since the Torah says you got to honor your parents so God had to create parents in other words God looked at the Torah as the basis for what he created in the world now we don't fully understand that but the basic idea is the Torah is not responding to the world but the world is a response to the transcendental meaning of the Torah let me give you one example how the Deep structures of science correspond to spiritual theological truths of the Torah and again here I I do proceed with with trepidation uh because I I will be speaking a bit beyond my uh my expertise but I think I think the point is is valid you know that um there are basically two different views of how we understand physics there is classical Newtonian physics formulated by the greatest of classical physicists Sir Isaac Newton in the 18th century uh Newton invented calculus although I can imagine that many high school students uh have eternal hatred to Newton for doing that although there's a co-inventor lebit there's actually still an argument to this very day who gets credit or blame for inventing the discipline of calculus was it LeBus or Newton but whatever it is uh Newton discovered the laws of Optics the laws of gravity an amazing thing Newton was C truly a phenomenal phenomenally gifted brilliant scientist one thing I'll tell you a bit of trivia about Newton that science was actually not Newton's greatest passion people don't know this Newton's greatest passion strangely enough was biblical interpretation Newton left thousands of pages of his own commentaries on the Bible and science was a little bit of a sideline you could see what what a genius he must have been that he could do what he did in science and kind of that was a sideline so Newton was fascinated with Biblical interpretation and he got in trouble this because his biblical interpretations were not in accord with the church of England and he had to keep it secret and the like but when we talk about Newtonian physics that is what is called a deterministic system there are laws and if you have an identical stimulus acting on an identical object and all things are equal there will always be the same results there will be stability there will be predictability now obviously variables can change and when variables changes either the force is different or the object is different you're going to have a different result but the the the load Stone of deterministic physics is the notion of absolute predictability and stability if all of the variables remain constant right there are laws of gravity laws of Optics and the like this is called Newtonian physics and Newtonian physics is enormously important that is the basis of how we have airplanes because if there wouldn't be some state laws of nature that you can count on I wouldn't be that comfortable going on a plane I'm not that comfortable now going on a plane but if you know if the law of gravity was well sometimes it goes up sometimes it goes down uh we wouldn't live in a very stable or safe world right so Newton is not the architect but Newton is the describer the identifier of the fundamental deterministic laws that govern the universe okay Newtonian physics deterministic system in the beginning of the 20th century let's talk about the early decades 1910 1920 into the 1930s very great physicists like Neil Bor and Einstein himself although Einstein later rebelled from the movement began to discover some very very strange things they began to discover that particles particularly subatomic particles did not always behave in predictable ways if a given Force were applied to a given particle sometimes it went there sometimes it went there sometimes it went there sometimes it didn't move sometimes it disappeared sometimes it doubled up and there was no predictability and the thesis was developed this is called quantum mechanics the thesis was developed that there is no such thing as a scientific law at all all there is is an assessment of probabilities so Neils Bor agreed that when you throw a pen up in the air most of the time it's going to fall but not because there's some immutable law that is called a law of gravity science cannot describe at all any stability or determin or determinism in what happens they can only describe in retrospect probabilities and then perhaps extrapolate to what the future probability would be this is what is called an indeterminate system this was actually a denial of the reality of scientific laws and it basically said reality itself is uncertain right this is quantum mechanics again I am grossly oversimplifying because within quantum mechanics there were many many schools Einstein initially through relativity was one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics but if you know Einstein's biography you know that eventually he broke with that school in fact one of Einstein's most famous quotes it was in German but I the English quote is he doesn't believe that God plays dice with the universe that Einstein was so con vinced of a unary guiding intelligence that he could not accept Randomness or chaos as the ordering principle the disordering principle of the universe so Einstein actually was in opposition to Quantum Mechanics although it was his very theory of relativity that established the predicates of quantum mechanics okay so now let's go back to normal life if you would ask a physicist who's right Isaac Newton or Neil's Bor is the universe based on deterministic laws or is everything just a matter of probability and Anything could happen at any time so this is what a physicist might tell you he would say Newtonian physics governs big things and quantum mechanics governs Little Things meaning when we're talking about a table or a car or a plane or a train or a rocket Newtonian physics work works perfectly well we have stable predictable laws of nature in which if an identical force is applied to an identical object all things equal you will always get the same result Newton is correct when it comes to big stuff but when it comes to subatomic stuff we have Quantum indeterminacy both systems are right Newton for the big stuff and Quantum Mechanics for the little stuff problem is that makes no sense to express it very simply because big stuff is nothing more than a bunch of little stuff I mean I look at a table the table is made up of atoms and the atoms are made up of subatomic particles and we identify new ones every time so if you're going to tell me that when something happens to this table it is always going to be predictable and deterministic but those little critters that are running around and spinning around they behave in crazy ways well the table equals the sum of trillions and trillions of these little critters so if the Little Critters are running around like a chicken without a head then how can the table as a whole have a stability right how can you say deterministic for big stuff and Randomness for little stuff if the big stuff is just a collection of little stuff again I'm saying this in a non-scientific way but it's a good question well I'm not going to answer that question because I don't have an answer and a physicist doesn't have an answer either but I want to show you this mirrors a deep theological concept the Deep structure of physical reality and the Paradox that is embedded in physical reality expresses a paradox that is embedded in God's Own Torah and this is really a beautiful example of how the Torah was the blueprint for the Deep structures of the physical Universe what do I mean okay all of us know the following all of us know that human beings are given the gift of free will this is a very very important idea that although God is the creator of Heaven and Earth and all Al though on some level nothing happens without God but we have the autonomy to decide to do good or to do evil that's a fundamental principle my Mones articulates the idea that man is not predestined to be righteous or to be evil because if man were born in a predetermined State how could he be punished for making the bad choices and how how could he be rewarded for making the good choices he's simply a machine that has to behave one way or the other in fact this is a whole conflict now with the mapping and sequencing of the human genome in which we are discovering that many types of behaviors have a genetic basis so philosophers and California defense attorneys are now combing the genetic code to see oh my client has the axe murderer Gene how can he go to jail Etc now suffice it to say that that type of genetic determinism is a great oversimplification because nobody has an axe murder or Gene you may have a propensity towards anger whatever it is but you can control it but we believe in Free Will that's fundamental and yet we have another proposition that nothing happens in the universe unless God decreases so this is the great mystery if a person walks into a 7-Eleven at 2: a.m. in the morning and gets shot by a robber did God make the robber shoot that person certainly not the robber could have decided to be righteous and not commit a crime or commit a crime God did not dictate that robber's choice the robber was a free agent on the other hand hand we have a proposition that nobody dies unless God will them to die so God must have willed that person to die at that moment but how would that work if the robber would have decided not to shoot the gun and you can't say God made the robber shoot the gun because that would be a contradiction to free will but you can't say the robber killed somebody God didn't want to die at that moment for whatever reason so there's kind of a paradox here between the notion of moral Free Will and the fact that God dictates the consequences that exist in the world at any given time this is a a difficult question and again there are different approaches to this question but all I'm saying is that in a sense it mirrors and reflects the Paradox that you can have a deterministic system and a random system system existing at the same time free choice is like a randomization factor because Free Will means God is Not dictating the results I decide yes no yes no yes no so I'm like the quantum subatomic particle in the overall structure of the universe and in the overall structure of the universe there's a Newtonian determinism that we will call the hand of God in which God clearly Maps out what is supposed to happen but the individual subcomponents of the system are not subject to that overall pattern because they have free will in other words we are like the subatomic particles but the overall plan of what happens in the world is God's Newtonian physics so I'm not answering that question either right that's a good question but all I'm showing you is that the paradoxes that are built into the theological and moral structure of the Torah find their expression in the Deep physical physical structures of the universe an amazing thing Paradox contradiction of course one of the fundamental ideas of life is that we have to learn to live with Paradox and contradiction uh that indeed that is part of the complexity of the universe but also its beauty and that is part of the idea that because God embodies all truths God can sometimes embody contradictory truths both of which are right and we don't know how to reconcile them but they find their reconciliation in the Infinity of the of the Divine okay so this is just something to to think about and again as I say the more you delve into physics and biology the structure of DNA and the like the more you will be amazed at the beauty and the elegance and the Simplicity that emerges from the complexity of the universe so now let me just take a a very very specific question and uh deal with it and that is let's deal with the age of the universe okay let's let's deal with a concrete physical uh question and that is we know that in the Jewish calendar we are in the year 5,775 this is the year 5000 now what is that claim our claim is that Adam after a creation process of uh six days right the God made the world made the universe verse in six days he rested on the chabas and the last thing he did on the sixth day of creation right before the chabas is he fashioned a human being from the dust of the earth he breathed into man a Divine soul and then later he separated man and woman creating a a woman and the man is called Adam the woman is called kava according to our tradition that Friday was the first rosashana it was the first of Tish and that is why rosashana to this very day is a day of judgment because it is the anniversary of the creation of mankind and therefore God judges us on the anniversary of our creation so that happened 5,775 years ago and preceding that was a mere five days so as far as the Torah is literally concerned the age of the universe is 5,775 years plus five days because rashash that is on the sixth day of creation well obviously uh most scientists perhaps all scientists are going to disagree with with that they're going to say that the age of the universe is billions of years old and they'll even argue with the age of man now man is not billions of years old but they'll say mankind homo sapien is at least uh 50,000 to 100,000 years old so the numbers are way way off track so let me just mention a few a few different points here there are many many different points uh that one can use or one can understand and again all of this goes back to the fact that the Torah is not that interested in giving you an exact scientific description of reality number one that wouldn't have been understood at the time anyway number two we still don't understand it today and number three the Torah is a about morality ethics and the fact that God created the universe in a purposeful way as a result uh there are a number of arguments that are made number one according to Genesis the sun was not created the sun and the moon were not created until the fourth day so as a result when you have the first three days of creation there is no particular reason to assume that it would be a 24-hour day because the notion of 24 hours is simply based on the amount of time it takes the Earth to rotate 360° on its axis which is measured from sunrise to Sunrise or Sunset to Sunset be a 24-hour uh period without a sun and a moon it could have been longer and remember too that the definition of a day is a function of the speed of the earth rotating on its axis meaning a 300 60° rotation is the definition of a day that's why in some planets in fact even in our existing solar system you'll see there are planets where the rotation is slower so a day might be equal to a month right so if one might assume we don't have proof one way or the other that the rotation of the Earth on its axis may have been at a different speed prior to the Sun and the Moon then it's very very possible that the first three days each day might have been a billion years you know 10 billion years whatever it is because everything is a function of how long it takes for there to be a 360 degree uh Revolution so that's like one aspect meaning a day you see a day is not 24 hours that's that's a big mistake people make a day is the amount of time it takes for a 360° Revolution on an axis it happens to be that it takes the Earth 24 hours to make such a revolution but if that speed could be changed for various reasons then a day could certainly be longer that's one one approach a second approach is this there is actually a madash going back thousands of years that actually says that God made worlds before this world because the problem basically is the following problem you you do have a certain problem and that is the Torah says in the beginning God created heaven and earth meaning God creates from nothing this is called creation ex nio creation out of nothing and yet the Torah says the world was formless and empty and jumbled and confused and the spirit of God hovered above the water what's the water doing there I mean there was nothing until God created there was nothingness why is there water that the spirit of God is hovering over so the midash says that God had created other worlds and that doesn't mean other worlds other planets meaning this world that God destroyed repeatedly and therefore the Genesis story is not starting with the first world there could have been X number of Worlds before that and that would explain cataclysms ice ages God destroyed exact L you know that would describe dinosaurs meaning yes the World As We Know It with Adam now I'll still describe the problem of the age of man that's still a problem is 5,775 years old but the age of the Earth could be based on remnants of the prior worlds that God destroyed now let me quantify that in an amazing numerical structure that one of the cabalistic works identified uh all the way back in the 11th century and that is the the following idea there is a cabalistic idea that just as you know the sabatical year in fact this year in Israel is a sabatical year where farmers are not supposed to farm so you have six days and a chabas six years and a Sabbath of the earth there is a concept that the world will go through 6,000 years and then we will have the Shabbat of mashiach this is the source of the tradition that I'm sure you've heard that the mashiach must come before the year 6000 because we finished the six days of creation in terms of the Millennia and then we have the Shabbat so all of that is fine that's a very familiar theme that the six Millennia which will take us to the year 6000 correspond to the six days of creation and the seventh Millennium corresponds to the chabas that's the Messiah but this cabalistic work goes further in the Torah you have six years and a shita six years on aita but the cycle goes on seven times are you familiar with the Jubilee year the Torah says that after seven cycles of seven year number 50 you have what is called the Jubilee year where slaves Go free property goes back to its original owners now we don't for halakic reasons we don't keep the Jubilee year today because that requires most of the Jews living in Israel although we're pretty close to to that but you have every seven years seventh year is shimita sabatical and after seven sevens you have the Jubilee this is in the Torah this is in Leviticus in fact those of you that are familiar with the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia the famous verse Proclaim Liberty throughout the land is taken from Leviticus and that is describing the Jubilee year when all slaves were automatically freed all of this is in the Kish this is not cabala but what the cabalist says is the following the same way that there are seven sabatical cycles and then there's the Jubilee so too the world will go through the universe will go through seven cycles of creation meaning 6,000 years a thousand years of redemption and then the world gets recreated on a higher level 6,000 years a thousand years of redemption and then it gets recreated on a higher level and that's going to happen seven times each time the world gets recreated on a higher and a higher level until you reach the Jubilee which is the ultimate Redemption and Perfection of the universe what cycle are we in right we're in a 6,000 no we're in a 7,000 year cycle okay but which cycle are we in so here I don't have any proof I'm just telling you what the safer says the safer doesn't doesn't really give us a proof but the safer says we are in the second cycle meaning before us there was an earlier cycle of 7,000 years there was six days of creation a th years of redemption and we are in cycle number two well that doesn't Advance the ball very much because the most that means is you add to 5,775 another 7,000 years that doesn't get you very much but now listen to this this is an amazing twist since there were no human beings in that first cycle the measure of time is God time rather than man time what is God time well we have a verse in Psalms where King David says to God a thousand years in your eyes God is like a single day you know the old joke about uh the person who is praying for money and he said to God you know God God a trillion dollars is like a penny in your eyes you can't give me a penny you can't give me a penny all I want is a penny give me a penny because I you know so God said I'll be happy to just wait a minute just wait a minute you know it's kind of you know infinite time all right now this obviously is a is a mechanical con I mean God is infinite but at least in Psalms we have a dictionary conversion table day of God equals a thousand years of man now listen to this if a day of God equals a thousand years of man then a year of God equals 365,000 man years so if the prior cycle was 7,000 years old because we're in the second cycle and that is based on God time not man time then the age of that first cycle is 365,000 times 7,000 anyone has a a calculator here 365,000 because that's the the the correspondence of a man year to God's year right God's year one year of God is 365,000 years of man and that first cycle was 7,000 365,000 time 7,000 uh well that will get you uh in the in the billions the low billions so the point I'm making is this that cabalistic books that were written hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years ago before the Big Bang before the Disco any of these scientific discoveries about the age of the universe already understood that there's a whole hidden dimension of existence that goes beyond the literal time that is described in the Torah and the Torah can be understood on multiple levels first of all as I said earlier even the initial six days certainly the first three days the days could have been longer but even if you say that those days are 24 hours you have the prior worlds which were operating on a different definition of time and this is quite amazing as I say these are these are rabbinic sources that go back hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years so as a result we can live with all sorts of age of the Earth there uh because the only claim we make now I'll have to address that claim in a moment the only claim we make is that Adam the first Man was created on rosashana 5,775 years ago now I'll address that because that also is a is a question and in terms of the six days of creation and certainly in terms of what happened in the prior worlds that may have existed we really can only speculate and we have some some traditions some insights some interpretations but we can live with all sorts of things but we still have a bit of a question maybe it's not this as big of a question as the age of the Earth and that as well okay the age of Adam even if we say the only thing Judaism claims is that Adam was created 5,775 years years ago that still raises a problem because we have five fossil evidence and skeleton evidence of of homo sapien uh human you know human beings walking the Earth 20,000 years ago 30,000 years ago and uh and and the like then of course we have the issue of evolution as well the Torah seems to negate Evolution God Adam was made from the dirt and as opposed to saying Adam came from from the Apes and the primates and and the like so here let me just say the following and that is the the the idea that some have expressed and again these are controversial ideas I don't I don't mean to say everybody will agree with them but they are possibilities you see the only thing I want to present to you is that you can be a faithful Jew by entertaining all of these different possibilities they are not a challenge to your faith I can't Advocate which possibility is right I don't know I was not there and science has many many limitations but the fact that these are interpretive possibilities should mean that they don't present a challenge to my faith and here is the idea when we say Adam was created some have suggested he was not the first Homo Sapien there may have been other creatures who looked like a human being who physiologically and biologically had the same characteristics as a human being who even had Advanced brains capable of tool making and the like but the singularity of the human being lies not only in their intelligence and in their Superior tool making ability but we believe it is the singularity of the Divine Soul a spark of God that is within them that is not just a question of the brain that is mind that is consciousness that is aw ESS that is morality and we believe that was a singular creation meaning the way it worked was the following in theory you could have had a lot of humanoid people around and that may go back 30,000 years 50,000 years 100,00 years that may go back but then God decided to take one of those many human beings and invest them with a Divine Spark quite amazing Adam wakes up one day and he sees that he's different he's not the same he's Divine that all of those people so to speak are essentially Advanced animals and the singularity of Adam's creation is the Divine Soul which cannot be explained by the way by Evolution Evolution could explain physical characteristics and the like it cannot explain this emergence of divinity and some want to say that this is the meaning if you remember there's a scene in Genesis where Adam is looking for a mate and he cannot find a mate and that's when God puts him to sleep and uh God makes Eve from Adam so what do you what is Adam looking for is Adam thinking he's gonna marry a cow what Adam's looking for a mate what is he actually thinking so some want to suggest he is looking at the homo sapiens with whom yesterday he was the same as them and now he sees there's an unbridgeable Chasm between them so the singularity of the creation of man lies in the Divinity of his soul and it is our position that that is 5,000 775 years old but that does not deny the possibility of other Homo sapiens now this does raise a host of questions there are a lot of questions here and that is well is it therefore automatically the case that all human beings are descended from Adam if there were these other human people that were around was their intermarriage or inter breeding between them that does raise I will admit you that does raise some theological questions because we say that the greatness of man is that man is made in the image of God but if that only refers to Adam and K once you have that other source into the genetic line you run into certain difficulties uh were they destroyed at some point now we know the flood but but but but but but the question is but but the question is even until the flood Noah himself if Noah would be a product of some intermingling you're going to have a problem there do we assume that once Adam had the Divine Soul he only made it with Eve perhaps that's what the Torah is telling us that the only partner he found was Wasa uh so I'm not suggesting at all that we have complete answers to these questions but as I say my goal is to Simply give you interpretive possibilities now if you are interested in pursuing issues about how to reconcile the Torah with age of the Earth how to reconcile the Torah with the age of man uh whether the Torah could accept evolution again uh the theory I'm telling you is that theoretically we could accept evolution as long as you believe it was guided and culminated in the Divine Soul which in itself is not explainable by Evolution so there are many many good uh books uh Gerald Schroeder as a doctor from MIT wrote a number of books on this uh natana azer is a physicist at Baran University a friend friend of mine Dr Andrew Goldfinger wrote a very excellent book thinking about creation there are other books as as well this is a topic that has been addressed extensively uh in English uh but again as I say the ultimate bottom line is that these are not matters of deep religious Faith because you can have a deep religious faith in God and you can accept all of these different theories again I they're not Ironclad a lot of the theories might be wrong I'm not suggesting any in these theories but if you're convinced so be it you can still be a very good a very good Jew at the same time I'll just end with this uh in uh a Conan Doyle's first Sherlock Holmes book a study in Scarlet so there's a little conversation between Dr Watson and Sherlock Holmes and uh Dr Watson discovers that Holmes seems to have be seems to be unaware of cernus discovery that Holmes seems to believe that the son goes around the earth and he's kind of incredulous and he says to Sherlock Holmes he says Mr Holmes I can't believe that such a brilliant person like you uh simply doesn't know that the Earth revolves around the Sun how could that be and Holmes answered in my line of work it really doesn't make much of a difference you know let the Earth go around the Sun let the sun go around the earth that really does not change what I have to do with my life and in many many ways although science is very interesting and it's religiously inspirational as well but in some ways whether it happened this way whether it happened that way doesn't make a difference to the life of a Jew you still have that same sanctity of the soul and that same obligation of listening to God it really doesn't change the picture one way or the other okay take care we we'll see you later [Music]