Torah and science: what to do with contradictions?

Where does the problem come from?

“Contradictions between Torah and science” sounds like one topic, but there are really two very different kinds of problems here, and it is worth separating them from the start.

The first kind is a contradiction between science and a statement of the Sages: for example, a scientific detail that appears in the Talmud and seems wrong. Here, after everything we have seen, there is no real problem. The Sages were human beings, they lived in the scientific world of their time, and sometimes they erred. They have no authority over facts. This removes a large part of the difficulties from the discussion.

The second kind is a contradiction between science and the Torah itself, the word of God. Here the problem is real: God knows reality, and he is not supposed to be mistaken about it. So if there is a real contradiction, one that cannot be interpreted away, only two possibilities remain: give up the scientific fact (“we probably misunderstood it”), or doubt that the Torah is from God. It is clear why this is troubling. And whoever does not believe in the Torah, or whoever does not believe in science, is not troubled at all. The conflict exists only for someone who accepts both.

The starting point: honesty in both directions

And whoever accepts both must be honest toward both. Here is a parable. You know the law of gravity well. Suddenly you see an airplane standing in the air, and you have no idea about aerodynamics. Will you give up the law of gravity at once? Certainly not. You will assume there is an explanation you do not know. And so too in faith: whoever believes on a good basis does not have to give up his faith because of one difficulty. But the reverse is also true: if dozens of such “airplanes” appear, everywhere, without any explanation, you will eventually have to rethink the law of gravity. So one must not ignore difficulties, or dismiss them with empty excuses. Enough serious difficulties can require rethinking. That is the difference between someone who believes, and someone who believes with his eyes closed.

Two tools

The first tool: symbolic interpretation. The Torah is “instruction”: it deals mainly with what to do, not with describing facts. So a factual description that seems implausible can sometimes be interpreted as a parable. The commentators did this in several places.

The second tool: later additions. It may be that some verses were added to the Torah at a later period. We will discuss this below, in the part on biblical criticism.

And it is worth remembering: there is a difference between a contradiction with the natural sciences (physics, biology) and a contradiction with the humanities (history, archaeology). The natural sciences are usually based on experiments that can be repeated, and so trust in them is higher. In the humanities, findings are usually more partial and interpreted in different ways. The degree of trust in each field affects how we will handle the contradiction.

The method: five steps

When one encounters a contradiction, it is worth going through five steps, in order.

Step one: is there really a contradiction? Does science contradict the Torah itself, or only the interpretation of a sage, or a popular tradition? Sometimes the contradiction disappears already here.

Step two: can it be interpreted differently? Perhaps the verse can be understood differently, even in a strained way. How much strain is permitted? That depends on two things: how severe the difficulty is, and how much we trust the tradition as a whole. Whoever trusts it greatly will be willing to accept a more strained interpretation.

Step three: what exactly does science say? Is it a solid finding, or an unnecessary interpretation of findings? Do most scientists agree? And here an important warning: it is not enough to say “science can be wrong.” That is true, but tradition and our interpretations can be wrong too. Whoever says “science can be wrong” about everything that does not suit him empties the discussion of content.

Step four: if there is a head-on contradiction, what does it mean? Can one live with it, and what should be given up?

Step five: the overall view. Do all the difficulties together create a “crisis,” like the dozens of airplanes in the parable, or can one go on living with them and looking for solutions?

Examples

The existence of God. Some claim that science proves there is only matter. But that is not a scientific conclusion. It is a philosophical assumption, and in the previous article we saw that the scientific picture actually strengthens faith.

Providence and miracles. If God is not a body, how can he move an electron without breaking the laws of physics? This is a real difficulty, and it has no full solution. But the difficulties of the position that there is only matter are incomparably greater, and so one can live with this difficulty.

Free will. In brain research today there is broad agreement that there is no free will. But this too is not a scientific conclusion, but a philosophical interpretation of the findings. The findings themselves show that there is a connection between processes in the brain and our decisions, not that the decisions are determined in advance.

The age of the world. According to tradition, the world was created about 5,780 years ago. According to science, about 14 billion years ago. This is perhaps the most famous contradiction, and seven ways have been proposed for it. Not all are equal, and each person will choose according to the degree of his trust in the tradition:
1. A “day” in the creation story is a long period, not 24 hours. After all, in the first days there were not yet a sun and moon, by which a day is measured.
2. The world was created “mature,” with a history that looks long. As the midrash says that Adam was created as a grown man, and not as a baby.
3. There were earlier worlds. The midrash says that God “builds worlds and destroys them,” and the fossils belong to worlds that preceded ours.
4. The creation story is a late addition to the Torah, influenced by stories of other peoples.
5. The creation story is a parable, which comes to teach values and not to describe what happened.
6. At the beginning of creation, time flowed at a different rate. According to the theory of relativity, the rate of time depends on one’s situation, and it may be that “six days” from one point of view are billions of years from another.
7. Scientific dating methods assume that the laws of nature were always the same. But science has existed only a few hundred years, and it generalizes from them to billions of years. That is an enormous generalization.

Why bring strained proposals too? Because that is exactly step two of the method: the greater a person’s trust in the tradition, the more strained a proposal he will be willing to accept.

Evolution and the Big Bang. Here there is actually a rather good parallel between science and the Torah. The order of evolution resembles the order of the six days of creation: first the inanimate world, then plants, then animals, and finally the human being. And above all: there is no contradiction between evolution and faith. God created the world, and he may well have done so by means of evolution. As we saw in the previous article, evolution works within laws that someone wrote.

The summary: most of the problems of “Torah and science” stem from two mistakes. One is unreasonable assumptions about science: that it is always right, and that there is no difference between a finding and its interpretation. The other is unreasonable assumptions about the Torah: that it is a book of science, and that every detail in it describes a fact.

The relationship between Torah and science: a drama in five acts

One can describe the history of the relationship between Torah and science as a play in five acts. The order is not necessarily chronological: all the positions exist today too.

Act one: no distinction. Before the modern era, no distinction was made between science and Torah. Aristotle’s science was considered part of religious truth, and there was no conflict.

Act two: confrontation. The new science, from Galileo onward, began to contradict what was considered tradition. A confrontation arose, and each side tried to defeat the other.

Act three: two planes. To end the confrontation, a division was proposed: science deals with the “what” and the “how,” and Torah deals with the “why.” For the same rain there is a meteorological explanation, and an explanation of reward and punishment, and both are true, each on its own plane. This sounds nice, but we have already seen that it does not work: if the meteorological explanation is a complete cause of the rain, there is no room for another complete cause. Two complete explanations of the same phenomenon contradict each other.

Act four: “it’s all a story.” The postmodern approach says: science too is only a “story,” an arbitrary choice, and so one may choose the religious story. This is convenient, because it exempts one from any confrontation. But the price is heavy: if God is only a story I chose, that is surrender to atheism. In Rav Kook’s words: “There is a faith that is like heresy.” And a God who is only a creation of the believer is exactly what atheists claim: “the opium of the masses.”

Act five: integration. This is the position proposed here. Science does not contradict tradition, it has positive value, and it can be used as part of Torah study itself.

To understand how this integration works, it is worth knowing two features of scientific thinking. The first: science deals with “form” and not with “essence.” It describes how things behave, but does not say what they are in themselves. And so it leaves room for questions it does not ask. A nice example: the Greek philosopher Anaximander proposed that the world arose from “matter without form,” which split into opposites: hot and cold, positive and negative. This fits remarkably with modern physics, in which a particle and an “antiparticle” arise together, and also with the “infinite light” of Kabbalah, which has no properties at all. The second feature: science takes apart. It distinguishes, separates and analyzes. Torah study must also connect and unify. So in the integrated picture there are two stages. In the first, academic research brings the facts, as objectively as possible. In the second, Torah study asks “why,” and connects the picture.

One example is the “rules of exegesis” (middot hadrash). These are the rules by which the Sages derived laws from the verses of the Torah: for example “kal va-chomer” (if something is forbidden in the lenient case, all the more so in the strict case), or “gezerah shavah” (when two identical words appear in two places in the Torah, one learns from one to the other). Academic research can show that these rules did not arise all at once. It can show how they developed over the generations, and how different schools used them in different ways: there were sages who interpreted every word and every letter, and there were those who said “the Torah spoke in human language,” and did not interpret every detail. That is the first stage, description.

And here a head-on contradiction seems to arise. Scholars show that the rules of exegesis developed gradually: Hillel the Elder had seven rules. After him, Rabbi Yishmael had thirteen. Rabbi Akiva arranged them differently. In the following generation appears the baraita of Rabbi Eliezer son of Rabbi Yosei HaGelili, with thirty-two rules. And Rav Sherira Gaon already counts many dozens of rules. From this it seems we are dealing with a long historical development, and not with something given at Sinai. And on the other side, all the Rishonim and Acharonim agree that the rules of exegesis, at least in halakhic exegesis, are a tradition from Sinai.

But when one looks again, both sides are right. The ways of exegesis were given to Moses at Sinai in “raw” form: as an intuition, a way of thinking, and not as an organized list of rules. And then, over the generations, they went through a process of formulation and arrangement: the Sages gave them names, defined them, and cast them into fixed molds. The historical development scholars describe is a development of the formulation, not of the rules themselves. And this is a process that characterizes the development of all of halakha: from an intuition received from one’s teacher, to organized rules that each generation formulates in order to preserve what it received.

But that is not the end of the inquiry. In the second stage, the believing learner asks: what does this whole development tell us? What is the logic that connects all the approaches? And how do all the shades that research separated form together one complete picture? Here the learner performs “harmonization,” that is, he connects what research took apart.

And a second example, even more striking: Rabbi Mordechai Breuer, one of the great believing Bible scholars, took the analysis of the Bible critics, who divided the Torah into several different sources, and accepted it. But he argued that all these sources are the word of God, and that God himself wrote the Torah in several “voices,” to express several aspects of the truth. That is, he used the tool of research, and reached a religious conclusion with it.

And by the way, yeshiva study in recent generations is already very close to the analytical thinking of the academy. In the Lithuanian yeshivas a method of study was developed called “chakirot” (investigations): one asks what exactly the definition of a certain law is. For example, is the prohibition on the person or on the object? And there is a concept called “shnei dinim” (two laws): when there is a contradiction between two sources, one shows that there are really two different laws, and each source deals with one of them. That is exactly analytical thinking: taking one thing apart into components, and distinguishing between them. That is, the connection between Torah study and scientific thinking is already happening, even if it is not always called that.

And what about biblical criticism?

What is at risk and what is not. First of all, the question must be clarified. In the previous article we saw that there was a revelation at Sinai. Without it, there is no basis for religious commitment. Some have proposed “giving up” the giving of the Torah as a historical event, and seeing the Torah as a collection of spiritual insights or of private revelations to different prophets. But then our commitment depends only on our trust in certain people, and full religious commitment cannot be built on that. The strength of the Jewish tradition is that it was transmitted publicly, in an entire people. So one cannot give up the revelation itself.

But beyond that, another question remains: what exactly was given at Sinai? Maimonides’ eighth principle says that “this entire Torah in our hands” was given to Moses. The question is not only whether this is factually true, but also whether it is a binding principle. Perhaps it too can be put on the “diet”? And this question becomes urgent because of biblical criticism, which raises questions about this principle that are not simple. And such questions, whoever respects science cannot ignore.

What does biblical criticism claim? The claims can be described on three planes. The first: difficulties in the text of the Bible itself. The second: mismatch between the content and historical and archaeological findings. And the third: other difficulties in the content. All these together lead many scholars to conclude that the Bible is made up of several different works, called “documents.” And from this the theological implication: the documents were written at different times, by different authors, and were not given at Sinai.

Four approaches of believers. In the traditional world there are several ways of dealing with this. The conservative approach attacks the research itself: it argues that the findings are presented as agreed truth, but in practice many of them are disputed even among scholars, and it resolves the difficulties according to tradition. A second approach accepts the difficulties in the text, but interprets them differently. Like Rabbi Mordechai Breuer, who accepted the division into documents and argued that God himself wrote the Torah in several “voices.” A third approach also accepts that there were later additions, but argues that they are the result of later editing: the content was given at Sinai, passed down in different traditions, and later editors added connecting passages and wording. And a fourth approach accepts everything, including that the documents were written late, and still argues that this has no theological significance: for example, that the giving of the Torah “extended” over generations, or that parts of the Torah were given to later prophets, and it is all still the word of God.

The difficulties in the text. The traditional approach sees the Torah as a single piece given to Moses. But there are two separate claims here: that the text is uniform, and that it is ancient, from the time of Moses. And one can doubt each separately. One can think the Torah is uniform but was written late, and one can think it is made up of several works, but all from the time of Moses.

On antiquity: there are verses that seem to have been written after Moses. Some of the arguments are weak, like “And the man Moses was very humble,” where it is argued that “Moses would not have written that about himself.” But there are more serious difficulties, like “And the Canaanite was then in the land” (Genesis 12), which implies that at the time of writing the Canaanite was no longer in the land. And it is worth knowing that traditional commentators also noticed this: Ibn Ezra hinted that there are verses written after Moses, and Rabbi Yehuda HaChasid wrote that later verses were added. That is, the claim that there are later verses in the Torah is not an invention of modern scholars.

On uniformity: there are four kinds of difficulties. Doublets: the same commandment, or the same story, repeats in several places, without one referring to the other. Contradictions: in Parashat Behar, a Hebrew servant goes free at the Jubilee, and in Parashat Mishpatim he serves “forever.” The Sages reconciled: “forever, that is, until the eternity of the Jubilee.” Breaks in continuity: sudden transitions in the story. And differences of language: different writing styles in different parts. It is important to say that not every repetition is a problem. The repetition of the Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy is part of a speech by Moses, recalling what happened. And the repetition of the building of the Tabernacle is once a command and once its execution. But there are cases in which the doublet is hard to understand, if the text was written all at once.

The documentary hypothesis. Because of these difficulties, scholars proposed the “documentary hypothesis”: that the Torah was edited from four sources, each written at a different time and place. According to the accepted picture, some of them were written in the First Temple period, in the kingdom of Judah and in the kingdom of Israel. Deuteronomy was edited, according to the hypothesis, in the days of King Josiah, perhaps when the book of the Torah “was found” in the Temple. And the overall editing, which united all the parts, was done by the days of Ezra and Nehemiah. But it should be known: in today’s research, many have abandoned the hypothesis in its simple form. For example, it has been noted that the parts before the giving of the Torah, such as the stories of the patriarchs and of Joseph, do not split into different documents, and this may indicate that they are ancient and were preserved as they were. Most scholars today speak of more complex models, with documents and also layers of editing. And there are believers who wrote comprehensive critiques, showing how far the hypothesis is from being proven.

The text down to our day. And what happened after the editing? From a certain point, even before the middle of the Second Temple period, the text of the Torah was fixed, and underwent no further editing. But small copying errors surely occurred. Some are documented in the Talmud and the Rishonim, and there are tiny textual differences between Torah scrolls of different communities, for example between Yemenites and Ashkenazim. In such a long tradition, without printing, it is not plausible that no errors crept in.

And what is the theological significance? And now the main point. One can argue about the assumptions of the research and its conclusions, but at least some of them have a not insignificant degree of plausibility. The documentary hypothesis, at least at its base, rests on real difficulties in the text, and rejecting it requires strained interpretations. So it is right to accept it in principle, and to check: does it contradict the “thin” theology? And as an exercise, it is worth checking this precisely against its most extreme version. And the answer is no, for four reasons.

First, the documentary hypothesis actually strengthens something important: if there are several different sources, from different places and times, and all of them tell of the patriarchs and of the giving of the Torah with commandments, that is a sign that there was a very ancient tradition about these events, which preceded all the sources.

Second, the editors preserved the different wordings, and did not even try to reconcile the contradictions. That is a sign that the editing was not tendentious: they passed on what they received, faithfully.

Third, the thin theology needs only one thing: that there was the event at Mount Sinai, and in it some kind of encounter between the people and God. It does not need every letter to have been handed to Moses. At Sinai a certain core was given, and probably also most of the commandments in the Torah. And on this there is no real contradiction, even if one accepts the documentary hypothesis. And the “holiness of the text,” the law that a Torah scroll must be written exactly letter by letter, is mainly a halakhic decision about what counts as a Torah scroll, not a historical claim about what was given at Sinai.

Fourth, the commitment to the commandments does not depend on every detail having been given at Sinai. The commandments bind by virtue of the authority of the halakhic system, and the historical authenticity of each detail is not a condition of commitment to it.

And what about the interpretations of every letter? The Sages interpreted every letter, and even the crowns, the small ornaments on the letters. If the text was not all given at Sinai, how does this fit? There are three answers. If the writing of the sources and the editing were done by prophecy, there is still room to interpret every letter. Rabbi Yishmael, one of the great Tannaim, disagreed with Rabbi Akiva and did not interpret every letter, because “the Torah spoke in human language,” and one can follow his approach. And the script we have is not the script in which the Torah was given either: according to the Gemara (Sanhedrin 21b-22a), the Torah was given in ancient Hebrew script, and Ezra replaced it with Assyrian script, our script today. And this did not harm its holiness.

The conclusion. Biblical criticism is not a theological “death blow.” The right way to deal with it is not to argue about every claim, but to ask: even if the claims are correct, do they harm the minimal skeleton? Only for that must one fight. Everything beyond it can be examined calmly, without fear, whether it is true or not.