From the very first words of Parashat Breishit, we encounter the biblical version of the origin of the earth and of the universe. In this story, we learn that everything that exists within the confines of our understanding and senses was created in six days. On this basis, and until less than 500 years ago, the classical Jewish view has been that, until today, a mere 5786 years have passed since the act of creation.

Yet, since the Enlightenment and the development of the scientific method, we have learned, insofar as we know today, that the universe was created approximately 14.5 billion years ago and that the earth began to form approximately 4.5 billion years ago.

This dissonance between the biblical story of creation and the findings of science have created a situation in which the two versions have been continuously at war with one another, in which those fundamentalists who cling to the biblical account deny the science and those who rely on the science denigrate the biblical account and those who believe in it. We are all familiar with this controversy.

However, there are undeniable parallels between them:

• The biblical account describes a situation in which chaos reigns in the beginning, gradually leading to the development of simple lifeforms, at first, and progressively to higher lifeforms and eventually to the rise of humankind.
• The scientific method has shown that earth was originally created, along with the other planets in a long and messy process, in which the material of our solar system slowly accreted, and in which life arose on Earth from single-celled organisms, progressively leading to higher lifeforms and, eventually, to the rise of humankind.

In the biblical account, we read, for example, about the Taninim Hagadolim (התנינים הגדולים), which are translated as the great sea monsters.  Yet, these great animals appear on the fifth day together with swarming and flying animals and not with other advanced creatures on the sixth day. Could these great creatures have been the dinosaurs?

Thus, both accounts describe the development of the earth and life on it as a step-by-step progression, even though the timescales are completely irreconcilable.

Others have already pointed out that the biblical reckoning of one day could also be interpreted otherwise – as many years. In Psalms 90:4 we read:

For in Your sight a thousand years
are like yesterday that has passed,
like a watch of the night.

Does this mean that each day in the biblical account of creation is literally equal to a thousand years? Or could it possibly also mean, in a figurative sense, that many years – perhaps eons – have passed? The fundamentalist view of time, originating from a flawed understanding of the timescales of the universe, would then, in a very real sense, be a denial of the true awesomeness of God’s creation, and thus a form of idolatry in that it denies us the use of the very intelligence bestowed upon us by God.

Indeed, scientific findings not only do not refute the creation story of the Torah – on the contrary, they also affirm the process it describes, even if not in every detail. However, as I stated, from the standpoint of pure science, the biblical account is considered to be bunk. Such a view, it should be stated, is in itself acceptance of the fundamentalist approach.

But science needs to ask a simple question – if the biblical account is taken in its figurative – or perhaps poetic – sense, and reflects, to some extent or other, the findings of science, how did the biblical account, which preceded the scientific account, come about? From where did the idea of the progression of the development of life on earth that we read about today in Breishit come from?

Did this idea perhaps come from an earlier civilization, much in the same way that the biblical account of the flood and some laws of the Torah originate from Mesopotamian, Egyptian or other sources? And even if it did, where did this idea originate from in these earlier civilizations?

Do we carry somewhere in our genes – in our prehistoric memory – this experience of crawling out of the primordial ooze, onto land, and the slow painful development of our intellects and of society?

Or perhaps, is this knowledge, which we set down in writing thousands of years ago long before development of the scientific method, is exactly what it purports to be – divinely-inspired?

Understood in this way, perhaps this conflict between creationism and evolution can be seen as a false dichotomy – and instead, as a process in which one complements the other, where creation is the force that drives the progression of days and evolution is the mechanism through which creation is expressed in our world and in our universe.

Shabbat Shalom

Don Jacobson