The non-Orthodox Jewish religious movements generally appear to have made their peace with evolution and science. Orthodox Judaism, however, appears to contain divergent views of the matter.
Orthodox Jews believe that the Hebrew Bible is the word of God. But some ancient Jewish writings contain passages that lead some Orthodox thinkers to be more flexible than most fundamentalist Christians in resolving some contentious Genesis-vs.-science issues. These issues include:
• The age of the universe
The Jewish calendar is supposed to date from creation. That would make the universe 5,765 years old. The scientific estimate based on evidence from geology, astronomy, chemistry and physics would put its age at 15 billion years or more.
This was one of the issues for which 23 haredi Orthodox rabbis in their open letter in January condemned three of “Zoo Rabbi” Nosson Slifkin’s books: “He believes the world is millions of years old — All nonsense! — and many other things that should not be heard and certainly not believed.”
However, passages in the Talmud, midrashic literature and commentaries indicate that some ancient rabbis believed in at least the possibility of a much older universe.
Some contend that the Torah’s “days” of creation are not periods of 24 hours (Genesis Rabbah 19:8) or that God “created worlds and destroyed them” (Genesis Rabbah 3:7) before creating the one we have today.
• People and (other?) animals
Most Orthodox Jewish (and fundamentalist Christian) critics of evolution insist that human beings are so qualitatively different from all other life forms that they must have come into existence in a supernatural way. They further contend that human ethical behavior depends on that belief.
“Beneath the surface of the societal debate about whether the theory of evolution should be the only approach to biology in the American public school lies the real issue of contention: whether human beings are essentially different from the other occupants of the biosphere,” wrote Rabbi Avi Shafran, director of public affairs for the haredi Orthodox Agudath Israel of America, in a recent opinion article.
“And yet, all people who possess [moral convictions] believe — against the dictates of Darwinism — that the human realm is qualitatively different from the animal,” Shafran continued.
“Either we humans are just another evolutionary development, leaving words like ‘right,’ ‘wrong,’ ‘good’ and ‘bad’ without any real meaning; or we are answerable, as most of us feel deeply we are, to Something Higher. The latter, of course, is the bedrock principle of Judaism.”
Many scientists not only disagree, but also say this issue constitutes a fundamental difference between science and religion. As biologist Douglas J. Futuyma wrote in his 1983 book “Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution”:
“In the Western tradition, humans are set apart from the natural world. The gap in mental and emotional powers between humans and animals is thought to be a profound, unbridgeable difference in kind….
“Nothing could be more antithetical to such a world view than a science that tells us the earth is not the center of the universe; that life came and went for billions of years before man appeared on the scene; that living things and the human species itself originated by natural, impersonal causes rather than the direct intervention of a Creator; that we are as much a part of nature as each of the millions of other species with which we share a common bond of inheritance.”
Yet there are passages in Jewish literature suggesting that some ancient Jews saw bridges across the human-animal divide. The biblical book of Ecclesiastes, contains a passage (3:18-21) pointing to an essential similarity between people and animals. The midrash collection Genesis Rabbah (14:12) suggests that the first people had tails or (23:6) at one time had faces that resembled those of apes.
Still, at least one issue presents an apparently unbridgeable intellectual gap between Judaism — and perhaps religion generally — and science, which is:
• Does the existence of order and pattern in nature mean nature has design and purpose, culminating in the existence of people?
To at least some scientists, science says no. As Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg wrote in the October 1994 Scientific American: “The experience of the past 150 years has shown that life is subject to the same laws of nature as is inanimate matter. Nor is there any evidence of a grand design in the origin and evolution of life.”
Or as biologist Stephen Jay Gould said (Chicago Tribune, May 23, 1990), “Evolution is a complete lottery. If you were to rewind the tape of life back in time and let it play again, you’d get a totally different set of survivors, and maybe humans wouldn’t even be among them.”
This idea troubles even thinkers in liberal Jewish movements. Rabbi Janet Marder of Congregation Beth Am (Reform) in Los Altos Hills, Calif., expressed this in a 2002 sermon on “Evolution and the Grand Design” (available on the synagogue’s Web site):
“Gould told us … that there is no supreme intelligence; no grand, shaping hand; no master plan at all behind the great pageant of the universe. And that assertion challenges more than the literalism of biblical fundamentalists. That’s a dagger in the heart of religious faith….
“Liberal religion can readily incorporate science … But even the most liberal and progressive religion falters when forced to confront the possibility that none of it matters; that nature is amoral; that there is no supreme Power that unifies all life and summons us to respond with compassion and justice; that we are simply here by accident.”
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