Darwin vs. Creation

Apparently, many people don't see the true "battle lines" in the debate over "creation" vs. Darwin.

There are many, but not all, religious groups who insist on reading the Bible literally, they say that they believe the world is only 5767 years old and that a God created the world in six days (starting on a Sunday, stopping Friday afternoon, just before the onset of Shabbat).
However, in the Jewish world, the modern Jewish world, so unfamiliar to many, the majority understands that the bible should not be taken literally. No serious Jewish researcher would deny the existence of dinosaurs, or question that Darwin’s findings represent the truth.

Because the debate about so called “intelligent design” (a clever but transparent new label for creationism) is so prevalent currently, it is not surprising that books on the topic are created as if they were cars on an assembly line in Detroit.

The overall Jewish stand point in many issues is founded on this basic realization: Read the book, not as if it was another issue of National Geographic but as a story with lessons to be learned, with historic grains of truth but not as a super-human document. It is well established that the Torah/Bible was written by four groups of people, roughly between 1,000 BCE and 400 BCE and then redacted by Ezra into what we today know as the Pentateuch. In his book “Who Wrote the Bible”, Richard Elliot Friedman addresses the question of the authorship of the Bible, particularly the Five Books of Moses.

Richard Elliott Friedman, a world-renowned biblical scholar, is Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of The Hidden Face of God and the bestselling Who Wrote the Bible?

More to follow.