Does Science Contradict the Torah?
How Should a Modern Student of Science Read the Torah?
By Ari Levisohn | 15 February 2024 | 3 Minute Read
Science vs. Torah
The Dilemma
Anyone who reads the Torah and is even a little familiar with scientific theories of the big bang, dinosaurs, carbon dating, etc.—immediately runs into a pretty serious dilemma: Science and Torah seem to contradict each other. Here are just a few of the many questions a modern reader might wonder about:
- How Old is the World? Chief among all of these questions is the age of the universe. Scientists now estimate that the universe to be 13.7 Billion years old. According to the Torah the universe is coming up on 5800 years. That’s quite a massive discrepancy. It’s not exactly a rounding error. What are we supposed to make of that?
- Was the World Created in 6 Days? What about how long it took for the world to go from nothing to the world we recognize? We know from modern science that it took almost 9 Billions years for the Milky Way galaxy to form. The earth itself took millions of years for the earth to condense from a cloud of gas and dust into a fiery ball of magma, then for a solid crust to form, for the oceans to collect, etc. Are we really supposed to believe that God did all this in just six days?
- Were Dinosaurs Real? The scientific evidence for dinosaurs is pretty convincing. You can go to a museum of natural history and see real life fossils of extinct dinosaurs, some dating back as far as 200 million years! And yet, if you read the Torah, there is no mention of these beasts. If we trust the Torah to tell us the history of the world, how come it leaves out such an important chapter?
- The Theory of Evolution. The Theory of Evolution claims that all species, including humans, evolved from one common ancestor. Modern genetic analysis has confirmed this to be true. But the Torah describes God creating each type of creature separately. God created Man independently from the earth and breathed life into him. Did we evolve from apes or were we created from scratch? How can these both be true?
And I am sure you can list many more!
What are we supposed to make of all these inconsistencies between Torah and Science? Should we brush them aside and pretend they don’t exist? This doesn’t feel right. Learning Torah is all about a search for truth. Surely that truth should be absolute and not conflict with any other sources of truth.
How to Reconcile Torah and Science
In this video Rabbi David Fohrman argues that these aren’t contradictions at all. He offers a novel approach to read the Torah which doesn’t just answer these questions. It teaches us how to actually relate to the book we know so well. Click here to watch now
Pages about Science and the Torah
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