Creationism

This article is about the Abrahamic belief; creationism can also refer to origin beliefs in general or, centuries earlier, to an alternative to traducianism.

Jewish creationism

Jewish creationism includes a continuum of views about creationism, on aspects including the origin of life and the role of evolution in the formation of species as debated in the creation-evolution controversy. In general, the major Jewish denominations, including many Orthodox Jewish groups, accept evolutionary creationism or theistic evolution. The contemporary general approach of Judaism, excepting Orthodox traditions, is to not take the Torah as a literal text, but rather as a symbolic or open-ended work. As far as Orthodox Jews, who seek to reconcile discrepancies between science and the Bible, go, the notion that science and the Bible should even be reconciled through traditional scientific means is questioned. To these groups, Science is as true as the Torah and if there seems to be a problem, our own epistemological limits are to blame for any apparent unreconcileable point. They point to various discrepancies between what is expected and what actually is (see science), to demonstrate that things are not always as they appear. They point out to the fact that the even root word for "world" in the Hebrew language — ???? (oh?luhm) — means hidden. Just as they believe God apparently created man and trees and the light on its way from the stars in their adult state, so too can they believe that the world was created in its "adult" state, with the understanding that there are, and can be, no physical ways to verify this. This belief has been advanced by Rabbi Dr. Dovid Gottlieb, former philosophy professor at Johns Hopkins University. Also, relatively old Kabbalistic sources from well before the scientifically apparent age of the universe was first determined are in close concord with modern scientific estimates of the age of the universe, as relayed by Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan. Other interesting parallels are brought down from, among other sources, Nachmanides, who expounds exegetically that there was a Neanderthal-like species for Adam to have mated with (all before neanderthals had even been discovered).

Related Topics:
Jewish creationism - Jewish denominations - Torah - Science - Hebrew language - Aryeh Kaplan - Nachmanides - Neanderthal - Adam

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