Evolution

The other day my dad told me that my blogs are too short. So I decided to write about a topic that needs many words to get right. I heard many lectures from different rabbis over the years and recently had a long discussion about the topic and came up with some interesting thoughts.

Before I begin to discuss the topic of evolution let me clearly state what I believe. First, Hashem is the creator of the entire world and is running it constantly. If he does not actively do this the world will cease to exist. Second, evolution will never be able to disprove the Torah because Hashem created the world with natural laws so that we will be able to doubt his existence and therefore all of science is at best proof to intelligent design.

The theory of evolution is at this point only a theory even the biggest evolutionists agree it has many problems. The Torah on the other hand is flawless it has been around for thousands of years and is yet to have a question that is unanswerable. The only real question that needs to be answered is that Chumash Bereishis (Genesis) states that Hashem created the world 5,770 years ago. We can even figure out the exact minute Adam was created. So how can evolution theory even begin to work with our belief?
Simple, our sages teach us that Adam was created at the age of 20 able to walk, talk and eat from the fruits of the Garden. This all means that the world was created fully functional. Further more it means that the world was created with age. If you were to test the tree that the fruit came from it would probably be many years old even though it was created less than a week before.

There is only one issue with this answer. If the world was created with age what’s to say that it was not created five minutes ago with all our memories built in?
This leads me to something I heard at a shabbos table a few years ago. I do not know where the speaker got this information but it fits well with this topic. We all know that modern science knows very little about the brain and especially memory. They can’t figure out where in the brain memory is stored, how we can remember for such long periods of time, why we forget and how we can remember something that we forgot.

He said, our sages tell us that Hashem creates the world every moment. He therefore creates our minds with the memories of our past. This means that we forget simply because in this round of creation he chose not to build in that memory. Also if you remember something you seem to have forgotten it can very well be that till now every time Hashem created your memories he left that one out and now he put it back in. (next time you need to remember something try praying that you should remember it maybe this time He will grant (create) it).

Another side point, we know that we are supposed to morn the dead for 7 days and then 30 days and then 12 months with each interval with a lesser level of morning. This is because it takes time for our memories of our loss to be forgotten. Even though we never forget the person with time we feel less pain. On the other hand Yaakov Avinu did not get over his son Yosef when he thought he was dead for years. This is because memory loss is not dependent on time but on Hashem’s desire to whether or not we need to or should remember.

This works out great as a big picture. Hashem created the world 5,770 years ago with science as part of a natural world (including parts of evolution), he recreates the world every second with all of our history intact and the more evolution is proven to make sense the more the Torah will be revealed to be true.