Torah and Science: The problems with the first answer to a Young Creation

Part 2 to a series.

Note: This post and series is not as in depth as I would have preferred, but due to lack of time, I had to choose between the good and the perfect. As a result, instead of writing the scientific explanations myself, I link to popular sites. Before criticizing me for doing so, based on the fact that it’s a popular site and not real science, keep in mind that creationism is even less real science. Furthermore, I summarize and simplify the essence of positions to the best of my understanding instead of giving exact quotes. If I am wrong about my summary, please point it out in the comments.

The mainstream chareidi approach when it comes to issues like the age of the world and the flood is literalism. They assume a worldwide flood actually happened, and the world is around 6000 years old. (Because they accept Chazal as being literal, and largely accept Seder Olam as accurate, they don’t even have the leeway Christian Young Earth Creationists have of extending certain periods to get an amount of 10000 years, which avoids a small amount of issues.)

This approach results in a number of problems, some of which will be detailed below. But simply, the modern day scientific conclusion is that Earth is around 4.5 billion years old and the universe is 14 billion. They have certain ways of getting to those numbers. The Wikipedia pages for these have a good rundown. (Additionally, although it is a subject of a future article, they also claim there was no global flood 5000 years ago). As a result, Chareidi approaches have to deal with the scientific conclusion, as it disagrees with theirs. This is not a new issue, and many intelligent people (and many more unintelligent people) have spent lots of time and space on this issue. I have probably read every book on this subject that has been published from the rationalistic The Science of Torah by our good friend Rabbi Slifkin, to the Marvel-universe-worthy fantastical Mysteries of the Creation by Rabbi Dovid Brown, to the various obscure books written by various crazy individuals.

There are three common ways to answer this problem: Attacking The Science, Reinterpreting the Psukim in an Authentic Torah Way (According to that Individual Author) and The World was Created Looking Old. Today, we will focus on the first.

The first is Attacking The Science: Many, if not most, books on this subject attack the scientific conclusions, especially on evolution. R’ Ahron Lopiansky has a very decent series of shiurim on Torah and science, but a very large proportion of them are based on evolution and why it is wrong. Many other books do the same. R Dovid Sapirman, Shmuel Waldman, and others seem satisfied that if they “debunk” evolution they proved the Torah’s age correct. Of course, this is ridiculous, because even if the scientific community discards evolution tomorrow, which it won’t do, that still helps nothing! There are hundreds of different ways without evolution that we know the world is older than 6000 years. The Torah is still ‘wrong’! (This might help for intelligent design, but most of these books try using it as an answer for the age of the earth).¹

Here are three of my favorite ways to prove the world is older than 6000 years that have nothing to do with evolution (or carbon dating, another boogeyman, for that matter):

A nice example of the age of the earth.

1) Ice core layers: Sort of like tree rings, these form once a year and are consistent, allowing one to trace hundreds of thousands of years of history. This conclusively proves the world is older than 6000 years (barring solution #3 below). It also disproves a worldwide flood, as you’d see some disturbance in the ice layer.

A nice example of the age of the earth.

2) Widmanstätten patterns: A Widmanstätten pattern is a pattern on a meteorite that cannot be reproduced in a laboratory because the process needed to produce them requires at a minimum 50,000 years of slow cooling, with some requiring 10 million years or so.

A nice example of the age of the earth

3) Starlight. Since some visible stars are billions of lightyears away and the speed of light is constant, and yet we can see them, it clearly took billions of years for the light to get here.

So what to do based on these proofs? There are a number of approaches.

First, some unusual books claim to rely on the “YEC scientists”. Like it’s a machlokes haposkim. I don’t want to get into a discussion about this, but suffice to say that Rationalwiki and Age of Rocks have many more proofs, some better than others. If you think you can debunk them all, knock yourself out! There’s a reason that they are looked at as cranks and even most frum books ignore the answers given by Answers In Genesis.

As a result, some other chareidi books try debunking or ignoring the science in other ways.

Some, like R Avigdor Miller, essentially imply a huge conspiracy - scientists are atheists who are biased! If they would be openminded, they’d certainly see the truth of a young earth. (R’ Avigdor Miller also plagiarizes some 1920 science arguments by George McReady Price, about the age of the fossils being solely determined by the age of the rocks and other bad arguments). However, while there is no question that many scientists are blinded (like certain watchmaker-authors), most are people trying to find the truth, and the evidence by itself clearly shows that the earth is indeed old.

Others, like R Moshe Wolfson or Yoram Bogacz’s excellent Genesis and Genes, say that science has made many mistakes and thus they will be proven wrong again. However, while science does make mistakes, they are almost always, barring fraud, mistakes in theory, not observation. (For example, science could correctly predict the planetary cycles while updating the theory from geocentric to heliocentric, but the cycles won’t magically be proven wrong.) Thus, the ice cores won’t magically turn out to actually grow seven times a year. Light won’t magically become faster. Furthermore, while it is indeed possible that one or more methods used to date the earth will be discovered to be mistaken, the total amount of methods used is so enormous that one can be certain it will never be overturned. This is a process called consilience, or convergence of evidence. And the convergence of evidence here is too much that the world is older than 6000 years.² Finally, there is a level in science’s mistakes. As the quote goes, one who says the world is flat and one who says its a perfect sphere are both wrong, but one is far more wrong than the other. Saying the world is 6000 years old, according to mainstream scientists, is about as scientific as saying the world is flat.³

Finally, there are those, like R Moshe Meiselman, who get bogged down in Aristotle’s or other people’s definition of science and they claim that the scientific study of the past is not real science according to the philosophy of science because it is studying the past, not reproduceable in a lab, or based on the wrong presumptions or some other similar issue. I am not a philosopher myself, so I won’t involve myself in this discussion, but I will point out that nearly all scientists disagree with this view as far as I can tell. If you hold of this view, mentally substitute “factual statement based on very strong evidence” wherever you see the word science, because even if it is not “real science” there is very strong evidence for the conclusions drawn.

Unfortunately, for someone who has looked at the evidence, none of these approaches seem tenable. In the next post, we will look at Reinterpreting the Psukim in an Authentic Torah Way.

1. Personally, I fully accept that evolution happened. That is happened by pure chance or purely natural selection I cannot accept. (There are many scientists who believe the process must have been directed in some nonrandom way, such as James Shapiro). However, even if the Darwinian method is fully debunked, there is much evidence that all life evolved from one ancestor.

2. Bogacz does claim to have an example of where he claims even consilience was proven wrong. However, his example actually disproves his thesis, because what happened there was one piece of evidence being wrongly interpreted, and was therefore discarded because of other converging pieces of evidence. This is not the place to get into it here.)

3. To quote Marc Shapiro:

Now why is it that Modern Orthodox scholars cannot take the story literally? The answer if very simple and I'm sure most people know what I'm going to say. To believe that the entire world was destroyed some four thousand years ago and that we and all the animals are descended from Noah and those in his ark (similarly to believe that we are all descended from a first man named Adam who lived 5000 years ago) is not merely to dispute a certain historical fact, or to deny the existence of say Alexander, Caesar or George Washington. On the contrary, it is this and much more. One who believes in the flood story literally (or in the five thousand year history of the world) rejects the entire historical enterprise. He denies history itself and places himself outside of time.

I wasn’t going to include this hyperbole in the main body of the article because it might rile people up. But its a fun and largely accurate quote.