From The Jewish Press:
These pages have lately been the preferred venue for hashing out questions concerning the biblical and Talmudic view of Creation. A great deal of confusion tends to attend such discussions. The most menacing pitfall of all is when people begin mentioning particular figures, such as Darwin and Dawkins, and sparring with their contention that the processes of natural development could have occurred without being set in motion and/or guided by a supreme Creator.
Really, there is no more profound waste of time for a serious Jew than to engage such "theorists." It is just as absurd to suppose that the world existed on its own and developed through random evolution as it was when the Greeks maintained that it always existed in its present form without being created.
An honest, healthy mind, fearless of consequences, cannot look at this spectacularly complex world, made up of spectacularly complex subatomic particles, interacting in spectacularly complex couplings, without concluding it was designed to be just what it is. End of conversation.
What is interesting, not in any defensive, threatened or apologetic way, is to determine how closely the scientific information, gleaned through experimentation, mirrors the Torah concepts we have received through revelation.
First we need to establish perspective by seeing how the Oral Law processed the Bible’s presentation. One Mishna encapsulates the entire subject. It begins the 5th chapter of Avot: "The world was created by ten Divine statements. Why was this necessary? Couldn’t everything have been created in one statement? It must be to punish the wicked who destroy a ten-part world and reward the righteous who maintain a ten-part world."
In other words, the surprising part of the Bible’s Creation story is that it has phases. In purely religious terms, we would presume that the world was created at once, since an omnipotent Creator has no need for steps. Had Creation not been mentioned in Genesis, the natural assumption would be that it was done simultaneously. The purpose of the Bible story is to introduce a staged process. This somehow raises the stakes on the table of existence, making the righteous maintenance of the enterprise a more profound achievement.
