Jewish views on evolution
Today, many Jewish people accept the theory of evolution and do not see it as incompatible with traditional Judaism, reflecting the emphasis of prominent rabbis such as the Vilna Gaon[1] and Maimonides[2] on the ethical rather than factual significance of scripture.
He quoted the Mishnah in Tractate Hagigah which states that the actual meaning of the Creation account, mystical in nature, was traditionally transmitted from teachers to advanced scholars in a private setting.
[23][24] In his commentary on the Torah, Rabbi Bahya ben Asher (11th century, Spain) concludes that there were many time systems occurring in the universe long before the spans of history that man is familiar with.
Benamozegh came to view Darwin's account of the common descent of all life as evidence in support of kabbalistic teachings, which he synthesized to offer a majestic vision of cosmic evolution, with radical implications for understanding the development of morality and religion itself.
[27] Rabbi Israel Lipschitz of Danzig (19th century) gave a famous lecture on Torah and paleontology, which is printed in the Yachin u-Boaz edition of the Mishnah, after Massechet Sanhedrin.
Finding no contradiction between this and Jewish teachings, he states "From all this, we can see that all the Kabbalists have told us for so many centuries about the fourfold destruction and renewal of the Earth has found its clearest possible confirmation in our time."
When scientists first developed the theory of evolution, this idea was seized upon by rabbis such as Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin, known as the Netziv, who saw Kabbalah as a way to resolve the differences between traditional readings of the Bible and modern day scientific findings.
The proponents of Reform or progressive forms of Judaism had consistently claimed since the early nineteenth-century that they sought to reconcile Jewish religion with the best of contemporary scientific thought.
A good example is the series of twelve sermons published as The Cosmic God (1876) by the founder of American Reform Judaism, Isaac Meyer Wise, who offered an alternative theistic account of transmutation to that of Darwinism, which he dismissed as "homo-brutalism".
These engaged with high profile sceptics and atheists such as Robert Ingersoll and Felix Adler[29] as well as with proponents of biological evolutionary theory, with the result that a distinctly panentheistic character of US Reform Jewish theology was observable.
[30] Emil G. Hirsch wrote: In notes clearer than ever were entoned by human tongue does the philosophy of evolution confirm essential verity of Judaism’s insistent protest and proclamation that God is one.
If throughout all visible form one energy is manifest and in all material shape one substance is apparent, the conclusion is all the better assured which holds this essentially one world of life to be the thought of one all embracing and all underlying creative directive mind.
Wolf understood evolution in the strongly progressive sense that was common to much Victorian thought, with the environment selecting for traits that would maximize racial hygiene and permanently and continually improve the character of the Jewish race over time.
Wolf asserted that "the optimism of Judaism" as "expressed in "legalism" gave Jews a 30% or 40% advantage over those of other religions and creeds, and not only explained their survival over the ages but actually represented an important moment in the story of human evolution.
He compiled measurements of skulls sizes, analyzed nose shapes, and carefully tabulated various vital statistics, wealth distribution, and even genius per capita in his application of the eugenic science of Galton, his tutor.
Despite this, Jacobs insisted that the over-arching framework and context for his pursuit of the quantitative science was always a qualitative historical one, and one might therefore argue that, as such, his work represents the first truly interdisciplinary answer to the question: what is a Jew?
Fourth, Kaplan discusses evolution in relation to what we would now call Social Darwinism, that is, the application of a theoretical framework for organic biology to human society, and in particular the Nazi theory of race competition.
Kaplan, as one might expect, is hostile to such ideologies, but his key reason is that they threaten to undermine his understanding of humans as partners with the divine in bringing meaning and order to the universe.
For the philosopher of technology, Jonas, the revisions to the traditional categories of Jewish theology arguably followed from his struggle to make some kind of moral sense of the Holocaust in the light of his interest in the biological emergence of selfhood.
This God, who contained the cosmos but was not to be identified with it, as is made explicit in an earlier version, had created it by establishing the physical and biological laws that unfolded over time and space without any divine direction or correction and without foreknowledge of how it would develop.
Following the surprising emergence of life (described as "the world accident for which the becoming deity had waited"), blind evolutionary forces had eventually generated the human mind with its capacity for "knowledge and freedom," that is, for moral choice.
"[38] Prominent Orthodox rabbis who have affirmed that the world is older, and that life has evolved over time include Israel Lipschitz, Sholom Mordechai Schwadron[citation needed] (the MaHaRSHaM) (1835–1911), Zvi Hirsch Chajes (1805–1855) and Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935).
He has written a number of articles and popular books attempting to reconcile Jewish theology with modern scientific findings that the world is billions of years old and that life has evolved over time.
Other physicists writing on this topic include Alvin Radkowsky, Nathan Aviezer, Herman Branover, Cyril Domb, Aryeh Kaplan and Yehuda (Leo) Levi.
Various popular works, citing an array of classical, Orthodox views, attempt to reconcile traditional Jewish texts with modern scientific findings concerning evolution, the age of the Earth and the age of the Universe; these include: Conservative Judaism embraces science as a way to learn about the world,[citation needed] and, like Modern Orthodox and Reform Judaism, has not found the theory of evolution a challenge to traditional Jewish theology.
Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Rebbe of the worldwide movement of Lubavitcher or Chabad Hasidism, was avidly opposed to evolution, and his following remains committed to that position.
He writes, "An unfortunate side-effect of our affirmation of purpose in creation at a time of controversy is the assumption made by some that we believing Jews share some other groups’ broader skepticism of science.
Known to his admirers as the "Zoo Rabbi," Nosson Slifkin was the author of The Torah Universe, a series of books on science and religion that were widely read in Orthodox communities until they were suddenly banned.
If Genesis could be shown to have anticipated Darwin or Einstein, then the Bible would regain an aura of truth that it had been losing since the advent of biblical criticism and modern science.
[53] Nathan Robertson a researcher in Biophysics has also released a book titled "The First Six Days" which claims to reconcile the scientific theory of the beginnings of the universe and life with the biblical account of creation.
