[button style=’blue’ url=’tlv1.fm/telavivreview’ target=’_blank’]Subscribe To The Podcast[/button] [button style=’blue’ url=’tlv1.fm/content/the-tel-aviv-review/’ target=’_blank’]Previous Episodes[/button]
Dr. Rachel Pear, a teaching assistant at the School of Education at Bar-Ilan University and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Haifa, gives us a breakdown of the great variety of Jewish Orthodox attitudes to Darwin’s theory of evolution over the years.
This is a segment from The Tel Aviv Review: Listen to the full show.
Perhaps strangely, evolution and creation Judaism may have a core common position–that neither expects itself to be globally held, which means that strategies of coexistence are inevitable.
On the Judaism side, this follows from the simple fact that it is quite unreasonable to believe that most people, not chosen of God, will embrace the correct view of those chosen by God. “Chosen” here is variable. It can mean the Jewish People, the Jewish People and converts thereto, or that subset of the Jewish People who understand and practice the true way. Christianity purports universalism; Judaism really doesn’t. Even the pluralist Micah does not expect universal conversion but rather coexistence.
Nor can a theory of cultural evolution reasonably suggest that it will ultimately be embraced universally or even by all elites that matter. In fact, a theory of cultural evolution must account both for its own appearance and conditions leading to its eradication. Religious views tend to have genesis stories but rarely predict their eradication, but old Norse religion may be an exception, although eradication if global, not just of itself, and science now predicts identically after eons (Buddhism is in some versions cyclic, but the cycle itself is stable, with genesis and demise ever inevitable; it does not provide conditions for its vanishing). Mostly, because religion asserts escape from material causation (which is really what salvation is), or a cause employing material causes as mere tools, immune to change itself, its core cannot be removed; science, being part of the causal stream, not above it, must admit its own demise in culture as possibility. Beyond demise, the very factors which account for the emergence and maintenance of religion are unlikely to vanish, so an evolutionary theory explaining them is likely to always encounter them–and to explain is not to control (ask the Moon, which goes as it goes after all the equations are done).
So religion and evolution have the same problem: they must live with one another. Consider Star Trek’s Prime Directive and First Contact principles, which come from places of great superiority; these limit the imposition of cultural power onto others. Science’s reality is much more difficult: it must negotiate in a world where, quite reasonably, a majority will always opt out of its principles (in panic!) at some decisional point (such as death or life crisis). Science usually retreats back into its starship and zooms off for another adventure (with much blood on paper) in discovery. But now it cannot. Global warming requires full immersion by science, and that means encounter of religion. And background in science lies ever evolution. Perhaps the only–er–salvation is that religion has the exact same problem, having been in relative retreat (which is not defeat) for a century. Religion has had to take the bounty of science and not lose itself. Science now must face religion as a partner in global crisis in such a way that religion knows it will survive. This is a position E O Wilson staked out some time ago in The Creation.
Because you didn’t ask.