The Challenge of Creation

Rabbi Natan Slifkin has made a career of writing books that examine the tensions between contemporary science and the Torah and Talmud. I reviewed one of his books, Sacred Monsters a few months ago. In The Challenge of Creation he examines perhaps the most controversial of all these tensions: the conflict between the creation story of Bereshit (Genesis) and current scientific thinking about cosmology and evolution.

The book is divided into three sections. The first section, Science, examines the nature of conflicts between science and religion. I felt that this was the weakest section of the book. In it, Rabbi Slifkin argues that science is really the descendant of monotheism, not its enemy. To the ancient world, the universe was full of conflicting forces that could not be understood. It was Judaism that made the conceptual jump to a universe created by a single, logical intelligence according to a coherent plan. Such a universe was fundamentally intelligible and it was from here that science proceeded. This is an interesting argument and there is clearly a lot of truth in it. However, science also owes much to the ancient Greeks, who were pagans, and I find it difficult to accept Judaism as the only begetter of modern science.

In this section Rabbi Slifkin also examines the nature of miracles and explains why rationalist Judaism is sceptical of special miracles. Miracles indicate a flaw in God's planning for the universe, because God's means could not be accomplished by the laws of nature that God has established. He goes on to look at the laws of nature and notes that if a few basic laws of nature were slightly different, it would be impossible for life to evolve in the universe. In this way, he argues that the argument from design, the idea that there must be a God because the universe is so complex, is still a viable argument even accepting the teachings of modern cosmology and evolutionary biology about how the universe and life was created. However, there is a counter-argument to this: if the universe could not have bred life, there would be no creatures living in it to argue against the existence of God. Only in a universe where life exists is it possible to argue that a universe fine-tuned for life proves the existence of God.

In the second section of the book, Cosmology, Rabbi Slifkin deals with the age of the universe and the order of creation. He examines several theories as to why the universe appears so old while the Torah indicates that it is younger. For example, it has been suggested that the universe was created to look much older than it is or that each day of the creation story in Bereshit was actually millions of years long. However, Rabbi Slifkin views all these answers as unsatisfactory. Instead, he follows Rambam (Maimonides) in interpreting Bereshit as a theological text rather than a proto-scientific one. He argues that the creation story teaches us how to view the world, not how it was made. For example, most ancient cultures worshipped the sun as one of their most important gods. To discourage this, the biblical creation story does not have the sun made first or last, which would seem to indicate that it was particularly important, but rather it has it made in the middle of the creation story, as if it was just another item on God's 'to do' list. Likewise, many ancient cultures had legends about the battles between the gods and the sea monsters, so Bereshit simply describes the creation of whales as part of God's plan for the world, not as independent monsters that could challenge God.

The final part of the book, Evolution, deals with the creation of life. Rabbi Slifkin carefully lays out the arguments for evolution and attempts to reconcile these with the Torah, arguing that there is nothing in traditional Jewish sources to contradict the idea that life evolved and that even humans had bestial ancestors. He is very critical of the Intelligent Design movement, who he accuses of arguing that God can only be found in the mysteries of biology, the bacterial flagellum and the human blood clotting system, not in the understood wonders of science like the law of gravity and the beauty of the stars. He is critical of the 'God of the gaps' argument, that provides God as the answer to every scientific conundrum, because as science improves and more things are understood, the place for God diminishes. Rather, God should be seen as the author of the natural laws that support our universe.

When presented with the evidence of many civilizations over six thousand years old, Rabbi Slifkin argues that Adam the husband of Chava (Eve) and father of Cain and Hevel (Abel) may not be the same as 'Adam' the first man created on the sixth day of the creation story. He argues that the first Adam may be part of a parable about the role of mankind, not a true story. This may be true, and is an argument with a strong foundation, being based on Rambam again. However, it may be unnecessary, as I have seen from several distinct scientific sources that there was a human population bottleneck about six thousand years ago, and all humans living today share a common ancestor from that period of time. I would suggest (and I do no more than suggest) that this might support a more literal reading of the Adam story.

Rabbi Slifkin also deals with the argument against God sometimes presented from evolutionary theory and the natural world, namely why does a good God create a world with so much natural suffering. This seemed to be a little out of place in the book and I felt this part of the argument should have been expanded on or excised entirely.

The Challenge of Creation is an excellent book that shows how traditional Orthodox Judaism need not bury its head in the ground when confronted with the challenges of contemporary science, but can instead meet them face on.

Incidentally, Rabbi Slifkin's website can be found here and his blog can be found here.