The Internet Yated is at it again. In an op-ed entitled Age of the Universe , R' Dovid Kornreich has chosen to scoff at anything that even remotely resembles rational assessment of scientific data. But it isn’t surprising... considering that the Yated is the very medium that first trumpeted the ban on Rabbi Slifkin’s work. In that article, one or two of the Rabbinic figures explained something to the effect that the books contained statements that the world was millions of years old… and that books containing these kinds of thoughts should not be read and certainly not believed.
The standard Charedi view of creation is upheld in this article: The universe was created about six thousand years ago. Rabbi Kornreich says that all evidence pointing to an older universe is due to the fact that during the six days of creation, nature was different and not measurable with natural means. We cannot rely on measurements of nature today to measure what happened during the six days of creation.
But in essence that is almost the same as saying that the six days of creation may not have existed in nature as 24-hour periods. Since nature was different, one could argue that time was different and as such one creation day could equal 3 billion years. But I’m sure that Rabbi Kornreich would not concede that as that would undermine his entire hypothesis.
I have always maintained that to ignore science is to put blinders to reality on. One simply cannot do that and remain intellectually honest. The rational thinker that is a scientist, even a Frum Scientist, must conclude that the evidence of an aged universe is so compelling that it cannot simply be whisked away with the wave of a hand.
It is in that spirit that I always choose to cite Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan. He was an accepted expert in both the world of Torah and science. He clearly believed in a universe that was 15 billion years old. And he spelled it out in a famous paper presented at a meeting of Orthodox Jewish scientists in the seventies.
Does Rabbi Kaplan answer all the perplexing problems posed by science? No, but he goes a long way to show that science is indeed compatible with Torah. No one in the Charedi community with any real standing has addressed Rabbi Kaplan’s paper directly and the views contained there-in.
It isn’t so much that they can refute it. Maybe they can and maybe they can’t. But the fact is that his views clearly contradict the reasons the original banners gave for banning Rabbi Slifkin’s books. It’s “put up or shut-up” time for those who think the way Rabbi Kornreich does. Either they acknowledge that Rabbi Kaplan's views falls well within parameters of a legitimate Torah Haskafa... or they do to him what they did to Rabbi Slifkin and ban his famous paper on the age of the universe and label Rabbis Kaplan's views Kfira.
Look for my response to this op-ed in next week's Jewish Press.
