Key words: evolution, science, Torah, contradiction
As educators who value the teaching of science as part of the halachic mandate to "fill the earth and conquer it," we should recognize these approaches as both bad hashkafah and worse science. Carl Feit1 and Baruch Sterman2 have recently written about this topic, and we need not fully recapitulate here their cogent arguments. There are, however, a few points worth making clear for educators thinking through this topic.
Why then should we be teaching any scientific material that we know will have to be modified later on? For the same reason that we teach - should we, indeed, say lehavdil? - Talmud in high school or elementary school. Students who thought they had understood the daf will eventually discover - when they learn through Tosafot and eventually other Rishonim - that they had missed many important points and that their notion of many fundamental concepts will have to be reformulated. That's what good education is all about. We work with our current understanding of the issues, realize that no matter how much we know we are missing some important parts, and move on to a better understanding of the subject. The alternative is ignorance.
Second, we should admit that evolutionary biology draws many of its conclusions from the other scientific disciplines. For example, dating fossils depends in part on physics and chemistry. If we cannot rely on these results in this area, we should similarly ignore conclusions drawn in other disciplines (like medicine!) that rely on the same scientific theories. We are - quite thankfully - unwilling to do this. Indeed, we are unwilling to reject the conclusions of evolutionary biology itself in our everyday life or else we would, for example, dismiss warnings that indiscriminately taking antibiotics will allow for the evolution of resistant strains. We cannot pretend that evolutionary theory is nonsense when in reality we rely on its basic assumptions (albeit, perhaps, unconsciously) in making every day and sometimes crucial decisions in our lives.
But, of course, the Torah tells us that human civilization is some six thousand years old. We need not review here the various arguments and proof-texts that the six "days" of creation were not the days that we experience ourselves. The Biblical text itself makes that obvious: There cannot be a contemporary-like dawn or evening before there is a sun and moon. The Torah is clearly describing various stages in the development of the world as we know it. Just as we take yeshivah elementary school students to the zoo to see the marvels of God's creations around the world (and offer an opportunity to say the berakhah of meshaneh haberiyot), so too should we take them to the museum to see the dramatic remains of the animals He created in the era before He decided to create humans.
The leading hashkafic issue is the rejection of the world-view of the pagans who saw the world at the mercy of uncontrollable and unethical forces personified as their gods. The Torah dismisses with the back of its hand such a heathen world-view, presenting a creation evolving effortlessly, directed by an omnipotent and ethical God who, like a sculptor, reveals and unfolds the diffuse potential in His creation. Shamayim, for example, gives way to raki'a which, in turn, give sway to specific points of light. "Detail is drawn out of chaos in a continuous process of refinement, making finer and finer distinctions, one after another,"3 We are so far removed from the pagan world-view known all too well to the Jews who received the Torah that we miss the revolutionary message, one far more important then any science lesson.
Evolutionary biologists posit a randomness in the processes associated with evolutionary theory. It was - in addition to natural selection - chance mutations, lucky environmental opportunities, and so on, which moved nature through the evolutionary tree, we are told. God played no part in it. This is a very serious matter, but it, too, is a false issue in confronting evolutionary biology. That is because it is a general problem in confronting science.
A doctor, for example, has a simple explanation for a person's returning to good health. He or she might well be frum, but the explanation comes in terms of bacteria, viruses, T-cells, etc. indeed, that is how we want our doctors to think in treating us. Should they suggest that it is teshuvah and not some medication that will turn the tide, we would probably look elsewhere - even if we ourselves trusted in the power of teshuvah and planned to say birkat hagomel upon returning to good health.
There is nothing surprising or hypocritical about this. As the Rav, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, remarked: "Modern science has emerged victorious from its encounter with nature because it sacrificed qualitative-metaphysical speculation for the sake of a functional duplication of reality, and substituted the quantus for the qualis question."4 As religious people, we see God behind every natural phenomenon. But if we want to master the universe, we must put that insight aside for the sake of the scientific discussion. We must, for example, seek the electronic bond that holds particles together even though we know that ultimately it is the divine will which actually prevents the world from falling apart. Scientific laws merely describe the regularities and processes which govern nature; they do not explain how or why such regularities or processes exist.
If we want to understand the world of biology, we have to appreciate the scientific mechanism of evolution, even if we are prepared to say meshaneh haberiyot in recognition of God's hidden guiding hand. There is no arguing the theological point, only accepting or rejecting it. But we should not fool ourselves into thinking that it is any more problematic to confront this issue in biology than it is in chemistry or physics.
There are, however, two issues which we should be prepared to confront and challenge. Both are common errors and, strangely, they contradict each other. The first is Social Darwinism, the belief that the higher one is on the evolutionary tree the greater the value of the being. Primates are more important than fish; twentieth-century people are more moral than those who lived in the fourteenth century. We need not belabor the point that this social doctrine is a misapplication of evolutionary science; it should, however, be disavowed in the biology classroom as bad science and bad sociology.
The second is the obverse side of the coin, the belief that man is not qualitatively different from the animals because he, too, is but another branch on the evolutionary tree. Here we do not have a contradiction between the Biblical and scientific texts.
It is only humans into whom God has breathed the breath of life. Better stated: Animals became human only when God breathed in them His divine breath. That is why we can perform medical experiments on animals, for example, but not on people. For us, humans and animals differ fundamentally on the metaphysical level, not the physical plane. This is a theological, rather than a scientific, statement, and evolutionary biologists have nothing to say on it one way or another. We have no trouble saying that humans came from dust and will return to dust. So, too, should we feel comfortable in saying that humans came from the animals and, if they do not pay attention to their souls and to the Torah which guides them, they can become animals again. Anyone familiar with the history of the second half of the twentieth century should easily acknowledge this.
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