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Thursday, May 08, 2008

Science & Torah Point to Ponder

Why is it that if you assert that nature has changed (nishtana ha'teva), you're frum, but if you say that nature has evolved, you are an apikores?

7 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. Hmmm, good question. I suppose that the idea of nature evolving might lead one to assume that God is out of the picture and nature is evolving on its own, or perhaps one could think that the nature God created wasn't perfect and so it had to evolve into something else. But you could say the same about nature changing, can't you?

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  3. Also, 'nishtana ha'teva' is nif'al, passive - 'nature was changed' by someone else - presumably God. Nature evolving is active on nature's part, not necessarily pointing to a driving force behind that evolution.

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  4. Nevertheless, it's still contradictory. It shows that people are more comfortable with the idea of miracles which they can't explain than ideas which they can understand but were not in their original frame of thought. Sad.

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  5. What's in a name? (What's in a word?) A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. (Evolving or changing, the end result is that things aren't the way they were in the beginning.)Erachet is right though that it is to what to give the credit for that change that presents the problems, not that the change has happened.

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  6. Actually, it IS an issue of semantics. There is no ban on the word 'evolve.' It is the theory of evolution that is contested. Not the evolution of nature itself, but of organisms being derivative of other organisms.

    Nice try though.

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  7. Now, now. Didn't you ever learn the eleventh commandment: "Thou shalt talk the talk"?

    Seriously, though, I'm with anonymous. It's darwinian evolution that gives people problems; no one (that I know of, anyway) can deny that nature has evolved, and nothing about that is contradictory to Torah beliefs (it's when they start getting into the hows and whys that scientists clash)

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