Question

Hello Rabbi,
I’m writing to you not as a scientist and not as a rabbi, but as an ordinary person who has been carrying around an idea for over a decade that refuses to let go. I believe, perhaps like you, that there is no real contradiction between science and the Torah — quite the opposite:
when the basic concepts are defined correctly, the two complement one another.
I’d like to offer an alternative explanation for one of the clearest contradictions — the date of the creation of the world — and in addition, a new verbal definition that helps explain the creation story through scientific eyes. I’d be glad to know what you think of them.

1. The date of the world’s creation. Already in the second verse of the Torah it says, “And the earth was unformed and void…” — that is, the Torah recognizes that the story does not begin 5,785 years ago, that there was something before. On the other hand, archaeological research points to a “cognitive explosion” that took place around 5,000–6,000 years ago, with the appearance of writing, burial rituals, institutions of law and morality. The Torah marks this period as the creation of man, and I see in this an interesting overlap between the scientific findings and the religious tradition. So what exactly changed, and what was created in the Book of Genesis? The emergence of human consciousness. That is the creation of man described in the Torah: the creation of conscious, thinking man — what makes him different from the other animals.
2. A small change in definition that connects the Torah and science.
   Here I’ll use the tool of giving a different name to an existing concept. My proposal is simple: to use the word “God,” or in plural form “Gods,” as a general name for anything we do not know how to explain — but do know exists. The unknown. The unexplained.
    
   Examples:
    
   “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”
   The unknown created what exists — that’s a fact. It’s here. Science also confirms this: it is not known how matter, time, and space came into being. So for now, let’s call it God.
    
   “And God said to Noah” — something spoke to him from within. Today we call that an inner voice, intuition, a gut feeling, a dream, a moral impulse — science does not know how to explain their origins, and therefore they too are: God.

   With the help of such a simple verbal shift, the verse becomes logical even for those who do not believe in God as believers believe in Him. Giving the name “God” to “the unknown” makes parts of the biblical story possible even from a scientific point of view. After all, who can disprove the fact that it is “unknown” what created the stars, or the cow, or the eggplant? This change is a verbal one, but it is important in recognizing that there is some higher power, a power that cannot be denied even by science. If we call it “God,” that would explain much of what is written in the Torah, and also much of the reality we experience. This is not a theory of “God of the gaps,” because in my view God is in everything: in what science has revealed to us, and in what it has not; in what we have discovered how it came to be, and given a new name, and in what has not been revealed — the unknown — which, according to my approach, has no other name besides God.
    
    
    

My theory is very clear to me, but it is hard for me to explain because it’s too broad, and I’m not very good at writing or expressing complex ideas in writing. So I started with two points that I thought I could put into words relatively clearly. I’d be glad to hear your opinion.
Thank you