"I'm just answering answers"
The Yeshivish and atheistic bad answers - and a good one
This post is too long for email. Read it in your browser.
When I was younger, I used to love the Torah and Science books1. I would devour them, especially the Torah-true™ books like those by R Avigdor Miller.2 (Look at me now, nebach.) I even recall explaining to a cousin why we dont have to worry about the age of the earth: it's because the scientists don’t know about the mabul, but if they did, they would have figured out that the world is much younger. Silly them! It's a pity the Bible is so inaccessible and untranslated so they were never able to figure it out. Had they had any access to the Bible they certainly would not have been fooled.
Luckily, I figured out why that answer was stupid by the time I was in my twenties. Unfortunately, the Yeshiva world’s kiruv Gadol Hador didn't:3
An Era of Giants
The existence of dinosaurs does not contradict any Torah fundamentals. The Malbim, one of the great Torah sages of the 19th century, makes mention of the dinosaur fossils that are evidence dinosaurs walked this earth, probably before the Great Flood. Since the Torah describes those times as an era of giants, and there is other evidence of a stronger world, such as their longevity, it is understandable that there would be giant animals as well. They existed, and the bones we find today are clear proof of that.
The Age of the Universe
The conflict between the Torah and science is not if dinosaurs existed, but in regard to the age of the universe. The scientists claim that these fossils serve as proof that the world has been around for millions of years. However, there are a number of factors that they don’t take into account, which change the whole picture.
The Impact of the Flood
The first point is that the Flood changed the nature of the world. Scientists using the carbon dating method to estimate the age of the bones and fossils do not take into account the fact that the earth as it exists now is not the same as it was prior to the Flood. This was a flood of global proportions, like no other that has taken place in the entire history of the world, and scientists have no way of knowing how it affected the chemistry and physics of the earth.
A Mature World
Another important point to keep in mind is that Hashem (God) created a mature world, which may appear as if it is millions of years old. He created Adam and Chava (Eve) as adults. He placed the light of the stars into the sky even though the stars are thousands of light-years away. He put coal, oil, and diamonds into the earth, which by the laws of nature, would have taken millions of years to form out of carbon. Because scientists do not take these facts into account, their proof of the age of the earth is not a proof.
Now this is an incredibly idiotic answer. Besides the obvious reasons scientifically it doesn’t work which even a fifth grader should know4, there are actually two different answers here: 1) Flooddidit and 2) the Omphalos Hypothesis5. Worse, it assumes that the Giants of the Torah were literal and the worldwide flood actually happened as described, both contradicted by ample scientific evidence, and thus unusable logically for an answer.
So why is R’ Mintz giving such a dumb answer? He is a pretty intelligent person, and if he can create a giant Kars4Kids charity scam he should be able to Google why his answer isn’t correct.
The answer to this question is hinted to in his phrasing:
The existence of dinosaurs does not contradict any Torah fundamentals.
And if they did? Well, then, it’s Brucha Weisberger time:
You see, R Mintz is not actually looking for an answer. He doesn’t need one. He already has the Torah Fundamentals®, and that determines the truth. Unfortunately, the questioner nebach believes in scientists, so he needs “an answer”. Which is why he even has two! If he was actually looking for the truth, he would try to figure out which one it is, but he is not, because he already believes the Torah is true, and the science needs to be simply “explained away” with anything - even if it doesn’t make sense and is easily disprovable via a quick Google search.
This is the Yeshivish equivalent to a famous conspiracy theorist technique called “Just Asking Questions”.
A 9/11 truther may ask questions about perceived irregularities in the collapse, Larry Silverstein saying "pull it," and the plane that hit the Pentagon. If turned back around on the truther, the implication is that they think that the plot involved numerous bizarre complications (rigging three buildings with explosives, making an on-the-spot decision to instruct the FDNY to detonate one of them, replacing a plane with a missile and later littering the Pentagon with plane wreckage). In avoiding proposing their own hypothesis, the questioner can come across as smoothly winning a debate, since the other person is unable to answer a "just being asked" question.
Here’s a good example from a frum flat earther6, from a private email thread:
Some questions on the globe model that we grew up with. How can we be spinning at 1000 miles per hour and not feel it at all. How come the clouds aren't left way behind us as we go so fast? If you say the clouds also are moving, what's holding all the air together? If we rotate West to east at 1000 miles an hour why do flights east to West and West to east take the same time. Why do flights from South Africa to Australia stop over in Dubai? What holds the air from going into the giant vacuum of space? Why do the great lakes not have waves like the ocean from the moons gravity? What keeps the Moon close to earth as earth travels at hundreds of thousands of miles an hour? Why do the stars in the sky keep their exact positions as we travel hundreds of millions of miles across the galaxy? What air did the rockets push on to go forward? Why are the crew from the Challenger still alive?7 The arc of the suns movement should be opposite between summer and winter. How can we see pictures hundreds of miles away? How do laser beams go hundreds of miles away and stay at the same height? How come when you are on a plane seeing buildings far away, they aren't leaning backwards? How come airplanes traveling hundreds of miles an hour don't constantly dip forward to maintain the same height. The curvature formula is 8 inches per miles squared8.
As you can see, this person doesn’t actually want an answer, he is trying to prove flat earth. Answering these questions would take around five seconds to Google, and less via chatGPT. He is “Just Asking Questions”.
The Yeshivish equivalent to this is “Just Answering Answers”. The answer doesn’t need to make sense. It doesn’t need to be true. We already know the Torah is true. The question doesn’t need an actual answer, it needs an “answer” to explain to the poor questioner why his question is wrong. That’s why one could have multiple answers to the same question! I once heard a rov say “its created looking old and 6 days doesn’t mean 6 days”. Well, which one is it? If one is trying to find out the truth, one should have one answer or at least attempt to try to find the truth.9
Unfortunately, many kiruv books are like this. And then frum people get to say “there’s an answer to every question.”. Yes, but not real answers, only “answers”. It’s no wonder that people go off the derech due to intellectual questions.
Which brings me to the infamous Gershon Ribner podcast:
In it, R Ribner talks about an adult who went OTD.
He brings four reasons, the third being intellectual questions: (Summary from a friend)
Reason Three: You had questions on the religion and believe there to be flaws in the religion and you turned to some people and pointed out these flaws and did not get satisfactory answers and feel a right to reject the religion.
His response:
Did you turn to the greatest sages of Israel who are most competent to answer or the people responsible for your chinuch? Did you go to people who know how to deal with these questions? Avraham did something like what you did, he rejected his tradition but he didn't just say it don't make sense he went and debated Nimrod and showed him the flaws of it. If you have serious flaws you must go to the experts of the faith, challenge them and write over the debate and how you showed them how unsatisfactory their answers are. You can't just reject it, it's too time-honored and valuable.
When asked who to go to I furnish names and phone numbers on the spot and ask to keep me appraised of the debate because if this religion is full of flaws I need to know too. I show him the vikuach barcelona and showed how the Ramban wrote over exactly what was said and judge for yourself instead of just saying, "I spoke to him and he said something silly." Write over exactly what was said or there's just no place.10
This is a frankly ridiculous requirement. Has R Ribner ever researched the questions himself? Of course not. He asks to be appraised, but he is just gaslighting. If there is a possiblity his religion is full of flaws, R Ribner should be investigating himself! Yet, of course, he doesn’t. One wonders why R Ribner lacks the intellectual curiosity to research. (See, I can ‘just ask questions’ too! ). Of course, the reason why R’ Ribner doesn’t research because he doesn’t actually care about the question. This is yet another form of “Just answering answers” where he doesn’t actually have to answer because he is outsourcing it to ‘experts of the faith’ - i.e., people like R Chaim Mintz who also don’t have the answers.11
Unfortunately, this tendency to not look for truth results in a far bigger issue: The real truth is never actually found. Instead, the Yeshiva oilam just keeps living in their young earth bubble, confident that R Chaim Mintz and R Gershon Ribner have the answers, while the questioners get sick of the gaslighting and just go off.
That almost what happened to me. A few years ago, I realized that I lived in a bubble, and that Chazal didn't know everything, the world was older than 6000 years old, and that the mabul likely never happened. I also started dabbling in Biblical criticism , and found most of the conventional answers extremely unsatisfying. I was gaslit by my rebbeim. (I remember clearly one telling me “it's not kefira to say a rishon didn't know science, but it's also not true”.)
I could have just gone off the derech, except that I had lived real spirituality. I had gone to Uman and felt real spiritual feelings there. I had experienced miracles due to prayer. I had felt connected to Hashem on Yom Kippur. And it wasn't just me, but tens of thousands of others who had felt this.12
And I noticed the atheist world also does this “just answering answers”shtick, avoiding inconvenient questions for them with just pat answers.
Their favorites: “illusion” and “coincidence”.13
The atheism answer sidebar: A fun game show!
Why does this world look so incredibly designed, despite being the result of chance? (Illusion or coincidence).
Why is this the only planet fine-tuned for life? (Lucky coincidence. Or multiverse. This shows just how crazy and desperate the atheistic claim is. If someone won the Powerball five times in a row and claimed it was because I'm the multiverse this was bound to happen, he'd be laughed at. Yet when the odds of this world being so fit for us is calculated as roughly equivalent, it is explained away via a multiverse).
Why do we have free will? (It's an illusion).
Why do we have consciousness? (Also a lucky illusion. Here in my experience the atheist you are discussing this with will with mere certainty claim more knowledge of the brain than neurology currently possesses).
What are all the deep spiritual feelings we all feel? (it's just an illusion)
How about the deep sense of morality we all have? (Illusion again).
Why did the Jewish nation return to Israel after 2000 years, as predicted? (Coincidence. Also here the atheist gets very Frum and starts calculating how many times Ben Gurion missed krias shema).
The seemingly miraculous survival of the Jewish people? Lucky coincidence.
Why is the Torah the most influential book in history, as predicted by itself? (Also a lucky coincidence).
What's the meaning of it all? (Meaning is an illusion too. Sorry. Don't get too suicidal).
Why is antisemitism so persistent? (It's an illusion. And a coincidence. It's just random that everyone from Esau to Hitler to Tucker hate and focus on the Jews).
This combined with my deep spiritual feelings made me actually look for real answers. And I found them. Even better, they explained issues I always had with Judaism even before my crisis of faith. This deserves a longer post, but I'll summarize here.
The Torah was never meant to be a history book. It also wasn't given in a universal form. It was monotheism guide. Hashem wanted to be revealed in this world without revealing himself.14 Our job in this world is to connect with him and also reveal to the world his existence. Learning Torah isn’t a pointless intellectual exercise that God happens to love (though he could have easily picked math instead - or drawing circles), but rather we are supposed to be teaching Monotheism to the world. Chazal weren’t superheroes who knew everything but people - holy people - trying their best to understand the Torah in their time and that is incumbent on us as well.
Even the questions of biblical criticism helped me and others have a new understanding of the Torah. People like R Joshua Berman and R Amnon Bazak were able to formulate new understandings of Torah and its role thanks to taking the questions seriously, instead of just telling themselves that R Ahron Lichtenstein (their rebbe in Gush) has all the answers. People like R Shagar were able to use their questions to create new hashkafa and philosophy for a modern world.
Perhaps these beliefs are a little unorthodox - but they are logical and consistent with the evidence. And if you don’t like them, feel free to find your own. We need you too to find answers. It is possible I am wrong and something else is correct. But that requires taking the questions seriously, and not “just answering answers”.
Related posts:
I used to love them. I still do too. Thanks Mitch Hedberg.
Fun fact: Despite him claiming to have read the “goyish evolution literature”, all his stuff is straight out plagiarism from George McCready Price. Required reading is Martin Gardner’s Fads and Fallacies’ chapter on him (Price not R Miller).
This answer also appears in “Ask the Rabbi” by R Chaim Mintz, published by Artscroll, making it an approved Torah-True™ answer.
For one, humans and dinos don’t ever appear together in the fossil layers, something even Encyclopedia Brown knows. My school edited out that story, which is sad.
This one is far better of an answer, because it is scientifically unfalsifiable, but it does not address the evidence of early humans such as Gobekil Tepe, which shouldn’t exist according to the Torah’s literal understanding.
As an aside, I blame R Avigdor Miller for this craziness. He explicitly advocates for huge conspiracies among scientists (he calls them ‘theorists’) to deliberately deny Hashem’s world. He posits they intentionally made up evolution in order to espouse atheism and not because they were following evidence - in essence a huge conspiracy that all scientists are in on. From there, it’s just a skip, hop and jump to antivaxxism - which his grandson R Eliyahu Brog is a major one - to full on flat eartherism, where everyone in the world is conspiring to cover up the round earth due to a tremendous tayva to eat cheeseburgers. Every frum flat earther I met was heavily inspired by R Miller, and although R Miller would have thought them nuts, his conspiracy of blaming scientists of denying the evidence of a young earth because they need to be atheists is not much different.
They’re not.
It’s not.
To their credit, not all Yeshivish answers are like this. There’s a great book called “Mysteries of the Creation” by R Dovid Brown that attempts to answer in depth what happened. Unfortunately it’s not a very scientifically accurate work, but it is a very enjoyable one which takes the Medrashim literally and makes the world look like a Marvel universe.
Lakewood from Afar also has a piece, but I am not quoting it because I think its AI edited.
I have seen many emails or transcripts of conversations back and forth with R Dovid Gottlieb, R Lawrence Kellerman and others. It usually reads as a train wreck and is about as effective as one too.
This is true regardless of which religion. The universal religious instinct shows that people are connecting to something.
Sometimes they also go to their daas torah, Sam Harris!
This is probably the hardest claim to explain. R Aryeh Kaplan attempts it in his “If You Were God”. But lets grant it as the Bible clearly accepts this and it seems to match the facts.
My response.
https://vitalistjew.substack.com/p/kiruv-kars-and-konniptions
Thank you for this post.
I claim to be looking for real answers, but I also have other information which "ruins" your answer. This doesn't mean you're wrong, and your question on the omphalos argument (from early civilizations) isn't and shouldn't be taken lightly. But is yours better?
What do you do with the idea that Bereishis has a deeper meaning, and that the world was created with tzirufei osiyos, and that acc. to you Hashem created a billion years for basically no reason, and that Hashem could've written the Torah differently, especially the mabul part (how did you answer the mabul exactly?). If you deny things like sefer yetzira (which I imagine you know little about, like we all do), there's another discussion we would need to have first so I'll let you talk before I go off about that.
Basically, your approach, while acceptable and not kefirah, is still far from "the perfect answer". It's worth strong consideration, and other answers or approaches may have their flaws, but I think there's a lot we don't know. A lot.