Question

Hello Rabbi,
I read your book God Plays Dice, and I have a question that accompanied me throughout the entire book:
In the book, the Rabbi presents two approaches within creationist thinking. I’ll present them here briefly just for the sake of discussion:
1. The fundamentalist one, which maintains that the world was created in six days and denies the theory of evolution in all its parts without any distinction whatsoever (including natural selection).
2. A more clear-eyed approach which, on the one hand, accepts the theory of evolution because it is scientific and teleological. And yet belief in an intelligent designer is only strengthened, because such an extremely improbable process is unlikely to occur without an intelligent designer.
Throughout the book, which deals with the process of the world’s creation, an additional mode of thinking that exists within creationist thought is not mentioned at all (and by the way, after reading the book this approach became clearer to me). I don’t even know what your view is about it, since you didn’t mention it.
Now I’ll suggest the approach:
1. There is no point in denying the contemporary evolutionary process that takes place in the world: survival of the fittest (natural selection) is teleology, and heredity is a scientific fact.
2. The discussion is about the past, that is, about the question of how the different species in plant and animal life came into being. How was man created?
And regarding this question I would argue that: a. there is no good scientific answer, and b. there is an answer in the Torah that should be accepted, as follows:
(As for the scientific answer, regarding most of the problems they are already discussed in the book, but there for some reason this leads us to the management of the process by an intelligent designer instead of discarding the theory.)
 
The starting point of the discussion is that there is God—an intelligent designer (as you proved in your book, that the proof of His existence is accepted by everyone). Now the question is: how did the Creator create His world?
Here we have a scientific possibility—the evolutionary process—which assumes: 1. the leap from inanimate matter to life—which is improbable; 2. that mutations always ultimately survive and develop—which is improbable; 3. the creation of man (the soul)—there is no answer; and a few more points.
Set against that is a one-time creation of all created beings as they are, which is also improbable, but only prior to the assumption that there is an intelligent cause for the universe.
Here we enter a theological question whose answer seems simple: can God only create laws of nature that will produce all creation, or can He also create it all directly? Simply put, there is no reason for such a distinction.
And after the theological layer, this approach would still seem to face difficulties from the fossil findings and from experts’ dating of the age of the world.
But in my view these are not difficulties at all, because: a. there is no agreement among the experts about dating the age of the world; every expert, according to his field, suggests a different age, which means that the tests (or at least all of them except one) are misleading. The reason is simple, because the world has changed greatly in the past thousands of years (the Flood, for example).
It is impossible to know, based on today’s data, what happened thousands of years ago.
I’ll present the second refutation shortly. So much for creation in an evolutionary way.
Against this stands the testimony of the Creator of the world in His Torah, where the plain sense of the verses indicates that each species was created separately.
But about this you argued in the book that it is possible to take the verses away from their simple meaning. But even you would agree that I shouldn’t do that without great need.
Here another question arises that you presented in the book (a theological question), namely: why would God create fossils and a universe that appears to us to have been created millions of years ago?
And against that I’ll present to you the question that you also brought in the book: why, in the evolutionary process, did God create dead chains?
That too is a theological question. Therefore, this question is not worthy of special weight, because it exists for both sides.
I’m writing these things briefly so that you can respond to them, and therefore I assumed several premises without spelling them out. So please respond anyway and tell me what you think about these points.