“The modern Jew doesn’t have to choose.”
That’s because, according to this 56-year-old Orthodox Jew, the Genesis account of creation meshes perfectly with the evidence backing the big bang theory.
“There is no contradiction,” he said.
Aviezer will offer his views Wednesday and Thursday, Feb. 5 and 6 in Oakland at Beth Jacob Congregation and at Patten College. The lecture series, free to the public, is the first event co-sponsored by the Orthodox synagogue and the Christian liberal arts college.
For Aviezer, speaking to both Jews and Christians about the origin of the universe poses no problem.
“It’s not that Jews and Christians view it differently,” said Aviezer, whose local stop is part of an American speaking tour. The division instead is based on whether or not someone takes a “very narrow, literal translation of the Bible.”
Christians who read the Bible literally tend to share the same views about the universe’s beginnings as ultrareligious Jews, he said.
“Many religious people erroneously feel evolution contradicts the Bible. They make fools of themselves doing this,” he said in a recent telephone call from England while serving as a visiting professor at the University of Leeds physics department.
On the other end of the spectrum are modern Jews who accept the evolutionary track, but then find it difficult if not impossible to embrace the biblical story of creation.
To counter this thinking, Aviezer points out the parallels between the two accounts. His first example is found in the opening lines of Genesis, which read: “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. The earth was without form and void; and the darkness was on the face of the deep.”
As Aviezer puts it, God created “something from nothing.”
The big bang, the dominant scientific theory of origin, likewise proposes that the universe started 10 to 20 billion years ago from an instantaneously expanding point.
From nothingness suddenly emerged a burst of energy and matter, or a “primeval light ball.”
“That exactly corresponds to what the Torah says: God said, `Let there be light,'” Aviezer said.
Until the 20th century, this line puzzled Torah scholars because it advances the concept that light existed before God created the sun and the stars. But the big bang offers the answer that light existed before the stars.
Among the most common questions that Aviezer receives is how he explains the six “days” of creation.
“Everyone worries about a `day,'” Aviezer said. “Briefly, the word `day’ in the Torah doesn’t mean 24 hours.”
“Yom” instead refers to a “period of development,” he said. Days are mentioned before God creates the sun, so they have no correspondence to the Earth’s rotation or its relation to the sun. Even the Talmud labels the six days allegorical, he said.
Though his brand of physics, which deals with the electrical properties of materials, doesn’t directly relate to cosmology, Aviezer said he knows enough to speak intelligently on the matter.
“My lectures are a hobby. But the very fact that I’m a scientist is important. It’s not possible for nonscientists to do the sort of things I do. They just don’t understand what the science is all about.”
Born in Switzerland and raised in Detroit, he immigrated to Israel in 1967 and changed his last name from Wiser to Aviezer. He became interested in the relation between Torah and science in the early 1980s when his wife showed him an article that stated modern science proved religion was a farce. But the writer’s examples were scientifically inaccurate, Aviezer said. So he started writing articles and then lecturing on the topic.
Not all Jews, however, especially ultrareligious known as charedim in Israel, want to hear his point of view.
“The charedim…feel they have to attack science. Evolution is a dirty word in their vocabulary.”
Though one of Aviezer’s goals is to encourage modern Jews to observe Jewish law by demonstrating the harmony between the Bible and current knowledge, ultrareligious Jews would rather he stay away from the topic altogether.
“They say: `Who are you to look for scientific confirmation for the Torah? The Torah is the word of God. The very idea of examining whether it’s right or wrong is.’ It seems to them blasphemy.”
But Aviezer said his goal isn’t to confirm the existence of God or the divine origin of the Bible — though he believes in them himself.
“I don’t come to prove there’s a God or that the Torah is correct. That’s a matter of faith,” he said. “But faith isn’t blind and faith isn’t crazy.”