Age of the World

There are some opinions that believe evolution had something to do with Briyas Holam. Like one day in the eyes of Hashem is like 1000 and all those fossils they dig up and date back to millions and gazillions of years ago, can be older than the amount of year that passed in the Jewish calendar. Or, the idea that the continents fitted together works because before Dor Enosh there was an equal amount of land and water...ideas like these are becoming popular now.

There is a similar thought expressed by the Tiferes Yisroel. It's a controversial idea. Other Rabbonim have said this is actually Kefirah.

But two things: One, we're not talking about evolution itself. The idea is that each of the 6 days of creation could really have taken like millions of years, since nobody says that a "day" has to be 24 hours, and therefore the world could really be millions of years old.

The others hold that we have no right to concoct new definitions of a "Day", and that with such logic - that we can re-define terms - we can change a lot of the Torah c"v.

In any case, the whole idea is totally unnecessary. When Hashem created the world, He created it as a full-blown, fully developed world. Adam was created an adult; trees were already grown. The light of the stars, which take gazillions of years to reach earth, were already shining on the earth.

So if you would have looked at the world right after creation, you would have had "proof" that the world is much more than 6 days old, because for instance, Adam was obviously not just 6 days old, but a full grown man!

But the answer is that Hashem created a mature, adult, functioning world all at once, so even though the world was created 5761 years ago, it has the characteristics of a world much, much older.

So if you find let's say a tree with 8,000 rings in it, and you now a tree grows one ring each year, it doesn’t contradict the Torah 'cause the tree was created with 2,000 rings from the beginning.

Same thing with fossils and all other seemingly very old parts of the world. They were here from the beginning, already created "old" with all symptoms of being here maybe millions of years already.

So there's no need to say that the 6 days were anything but regular 24 hour days. The fossils and everything else can be adequately explained as is.

It is also true that the dating systems are highly inaccurate and subject to great controversy.

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The Torah says the world was created in 6 days. And Rashi says explicitly that when the Torah says Vayehi Erev Vayehi Voker Yom Echad it means 24 hours.

And if someone tells you a day isn’t really a day, please thank them for agreeing with you that evolution never happened. Because when they say they believe evolution did happen, tell them that according to your interpretation of their words, when they say "evolution" they don't really mean "evolution", and maybe even when they say "did" it doesn't really mean "did". And if they say you’re wrong, tell them that "wrong" doesn't really mean wrong.

The 6 days of creation were in fact 24 hours. How could they not be? Aren't days 24 hours now? So when did this change? Where does it indicate in the slightest that the first Sunday after creation (or the first Shabbos???) was suddenly shorter than previous days??

And if the days were 24 hours, would you understand why Hashem took that long? And not 2.4 seconds?? We don’t know why Hashem decided to take as long as he took, but whether it was 24 hours or 24 million hours, he could have done it in less.

When we say 1 day is like a million years, we don’t mean that Hashem is living within time. It means that the word "day" does not mean intrinsically 24 hours and could randomly mean anything.

The sun, which measures time, was created the 4th day, but time was created at the first second of creation.

It’s clear that on the fourth day Hashem said the sun should shine during the time-period that was called "day" and the stars/darkness should rule during the time-period called "night". Since then, that hasn’t changed, and obviously, as we can see today, the sun and the stars have decided that the time period called day plus the time period called night, are 24 hours.

The Gemora says this explicitly. It describes 10 things that were created on the first day of creation, one of which is the "length of the day and night" - as it says, "vayehi erev vayehi voke yom echad". So the time span of the day was created on the first day of creation. And, as Rashi states, it means "[the day and night together] - i.e. 24 hours between them".

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The world "yom" has 2 different meanings - (a) daytime, as in Yomam Valylah - in which case the Yom" is longer in the summer than the winter, using shaos zemanios; and (b) a day - an entire day, i.e. the sum total of the daytime and nightime, as in "vayehi erev vayehi voker yom sheni". That "yom" is always 24 hours, no matter what the season, shaos zemanios notwithstanding.

And so there is no reason to believe that the length of the days changed on the 4th day from what they were on the first 3.

Please note that among the Meforshim that I quoted, who address the issue of natural phenomena that need more than 6,000 years to happen - the Yaaros Devash, Divrei Chaim, Divrei Yoekl, and the unnamed Godol in "in the days of the Arizal and perhaps even earlier" - none of them saw fit to accept that the tens of thousands of years needed for that star to fulfill its orbit actually occurred. Although that answer was sitting there "on a silver platter" for them, it was not an option.

And, because of what they say, there is no reason to even want it to be an option. You gain nothing.

And the Gemora says the world is (nearly) 6,000 years old.

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Regarding answering scientists and those who have blind faith in them about the age of the world, first, just like the flaw in their "vestigial organ" logic, the entire concept of measuring the age of the world the way the scientists do is based on the assumption that the world was not created by a Creator. But if you say that the world was created the way the Torah tells us it was, that is, a full-blown world, complete with starts visible in the sky, full-grown trees and animals (and a human), a totally, fully developed and mature world, then their logic falls apart.

Because when the world was created, it already had an age. In other words, when Adam for instance was created, he was an adult, even though he was one day old; there were fully grown trees; the sun's light already reached the earth; an entire world existed, full-blown and OLD. How old was the world at the moment it was created? I don’t know -- it doesn’t say. But we do know that it didn’t start from scratch. And so lets say a "scientist" would chop down a tree 1 week after it was created and find maybe 50 rings inside - would that prove that the tree was 50 years old? To the scientists it would, and the "tree ring" concept is used as one of their "proofs" that the world is over 6,000 years old. But the truth is it proves no such thing, because when the tree was created it was created as an adult, 50 year old tree.

So even if dating would be accurate, it still doesn’t prove that the world was not created 6,000 years ago - because when it was created, it already could have been thousands or millions of quadrillions of years old.

That is the first thing to understand when dealing with the "true believers" of science. But even if they will come up with something that cannot be explained by the above, there is a Torah principle that you must know that has been used long before any of today's scientists or their grandparents were born, that tells us that although the world was in fact created 6,000 years ago, we know that it possesses all and every characteristic of a world that is much, much older. The Torah actually expects scientific measurements of the age of the universe to return an age of much, much more than 6,000 years. And we have known this for centuries.

Says the Divrei Chaim (Chanuka p.45 col. 4), “The scientists found a star whose orbit takes 36,000 years, yet the world is only 6,000 years old, as is stated in Avodah Zorah (9a) – so did He create [this star] for nothing? So the scientists ask... However, I found in a sefer of a great man, who was of the holy ones in the days of the Arizal and perhaps even much earlier than that, who brings this question and answers: It is known that the universe was once in its most perfect state, but Adam corrupted it and caused a weakness in all of creation. And therefore, at the time of creation, if not for the sin of Adam our father, the movement (orbits) would have been fast; but now, because of the flaw caused by the Sin, the orbit has to wait 36,000 years. A similar idea is expressed by the Yaaros Dvash.”

The Divrei Chaim does not tell us the location of the Yaaros Dvash. But the Divrei Yoel (Simchas Torah p.613) identifies it as being in 2 places: Vol. I, Drush 1 and Drush 15. There, it quotes a Medrash (Rabbah 10:4) that before the Sin of Adam the Mazalos operated much more rapidly. After the Sin, the Mazalos operated much slower and longer. With this Medrash, he explains the fact that we pasken that both the opinion that the world was created in Nisan, and the opinion that the world was created in Tishri, are true. Says the Yaaros Dvash: because the Mazalos operated much more rapidly before the sin, between the time the Mazalos were created on the 4th day, and the time Adam was created, on the 6th day, the Mazalos had already run their course from Nisan to Tishri.

So there you have it - the world was created only 6,000 years ago as it says in the Gemora, but according to Chazal’s statement about the pre-chet rapidity of the Mazalos, we would a measure of history to have transpired during the 6 days of creation that would currently take much, much longer than 6,000 years.

So of course the scientists are going to think the world is much older than 6,000 years. We expected they would “discover” that, long before these scientists were ever born. All the scientists are doing, if indeed their dating methods are accurate, is picking up the billions of years worth of events that transpired before the sin of Adam. But we know that all took a few days.
The mistake in their system is that they are not measuring the amount of time itself that occurred. They are identifying various events that already happened and are saying:

1) We measured the amount of time it would take this event to occur
2) And this event has already occurred
3) Therefore, the amount of time it would take to make it occur has already elapsed.

The flaw on that logic is that they only measured how much time it would take if those events would happen NOW, in the post-chet world. But since those events took place before the Chet, they took much less time, and so the occurrence of those events does not indicate the elapse of nearly as much time as the scientists think.
If they would find a way to measure time itself, meaning the amount of moments that transpired during the course of history, they would come up with 6,000 years.

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The Rishonim state explicitly that the fact that there was no sun or moon does not present a problem regarding the hours of the day, since (a) as I mentioned above, you can have a length of a day without the luminaries, and (b) the sun and stars were actually created on the first day but merely put in place on the fourth.

In any case, the fact that there was no sun or starts during the first three days does not indicate in the slightest that the days were anything other than 24 hours days.

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Carbon-14 dating rests on two assumptions. (a) that the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere has always been constant, and (b) its rate of decay has always been constant.

Neither of those assumptions has been proven or close to proven. And since the world was created in six days, who knows how the cosmic radiation in the atmosphere was fluctuating then.

There is another issue that makes the carbon dating useless. When the world was created, it already had an age, as discussed previously. We don't know how old it was when it was created.

So even if dating would be accurate, it still doesn’t prove that the world was not created 6,000 years ago - because when it was created, it already could have been thousands of years old.

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There are no documented civilizations going back hundreds of thousands of years. Recorded history goes back to Egypt about 4,000 years ago, before which things get murky and unknown. On the contrary - this coincides perfectly with the 5760 plus years since the creation of the world, since it would take about that long to develop a civilization like Egypt. The fact that there are NO recorded histories older than this is in itself a marvelous confirmation of the Torah, not that it needs confirmation.

Other dating techniques such as Carbon 14 and other such methods are all based on assumptions and speculative at best. No - they have not yet proven a single civilization or even artifact as being older than 5760 odd years. They won't, of course, but they can keep trying.

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If the word was always here then the sun would have already exploded and destroyed the world. This argument – that if the world is infinitely old then no matter how much time it would need for any event to happen, it already would have happened, since there was an infinite amount of time in the past, is a good argument against kadmu haolam – that opinion that the world was always here. The Ralbag in milchemes hashem uses it, as do others.

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Evolution IV

The scientists who believe in G-d do so because it is clear from nature that there is a Creator.

The scientists who do not, do so because even though it is clear that there was a creator, that conclusion has "undesirable philosophical implications" (that's a quote from an atheist scientist I saw quoted in Time magazine a while ago). Meaning, they will have to be religious, and they have no interest.

Scientists are no better able to resist temptation or to think past vested interests than lawyers or businessmen. The evidence is there, in front of their eyes. It is up to their strength of character - not their scientific abilities - to accept it or not. Unfortunately, their degrees are NOT in strength of character. In that area, they are the same baalei taavah as anyone else.

They still have no answers at all against the proofs to G-d from nature. They just have no interest in bringing those proofs to their logical philosophical conclusion.


There are two different definitions of "scientific": (a) solid, logical, rational, and (b) acceptable by the official self-imposed rules of the scientists.

Scientists have created self-imposed "rules" regarding what proofs they will accept and what they won't. This was done in order to ensure that scientists don't cheat. But it does not mean that those proofs are less correct.

Example: If something cannot be reproduced in a laboratory, it is not acceptable as scientifically "proven". But of course, if 100,000,000 witness a miracle, their testimony is logical proof, even if the scientists cannot officially let it go on record, since miracles cannot be "reproduced."

So in other words, the scientists decided on their own that they will not accept anything supernatural or miraculous into their list of proven items (miracles by definition are not things you can reproduce in a lab) but not because the proof is any less reliable.

In a court of law, you cannot "scientifically" prove someone guilty, since witnesses are not considered scientific proof, and you cannot reproduce the scene in a lab, but still, logically, it is considered "proven beyond a shadow of a doubt."

So the response to the scientists is that not all logical proofs will be considered officially proven by "science", but that is due to the self-imposed rules of the scientists, not because of any problem with the proof.

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It's simple math: the world is either accident or intelligence. If you want to be an atheist, your choice is accident.

If accident, it was either at once or in stages. But that such a highly developed world can accidentally all come at once, like "boom!" there’s people, males and females. Food, water, air, sunlight etc" all suddenly and at the same time is currently inexplicable.

That leaves graduality, which means evolution.

The exact mechanism whereby the graduality supposedly took place - survival of the fittest, sudden mutation, etc - is where the theories come in. But if you’re going to be an atheist, you’re going to have to find some way to validate evolution, because until they find something else, evolution is the only way to explain a G-dless world. That’s why it’s worth spending our time showing what nonsense evolution is, because today, that’s all the atheists have to hang their hats on. Once that’s not an option, there is nothing left for them.

And if they come up with some other silly idea, that too, will be worth spending our time to expose. But right now, this is all they have. And it is nothing.

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Judaism does not commit itself to whether there is such a thing as evolution. The problem with evolution is that it makes no sense.
The fossil record contradicts evolution as does nature itself - put a monkey at a typewriter and see if he randomly comes up with the World Book Encyclopedia. That is more likely to happen - much much more - than a single DNA cell evolving.

There is no device in the evolutionary process that demands a certain amount of time for a species to become another (not that even a million years would accomplish that). Evolution is random, sudden mutations. The odds are whatever they are, but randomness has no time frame. What you're saying is like saying "it takes 100,000 years to win the lottery 10 times". It may be according to averages, but if someone wins 10 times in a row, that is not a contradiction to those statistics.
But that’s all academic - evolution has not produce a new species ever. There is no evidence of such a thing at all. Please understand that the only reason the scientists hold on to this theory (which even they agree is only a "theory") is because no matter how illogical it is, their only other option to how we came here is G-d, and they wont accept that because it means they have to believe.

Evolution III

Even if semi-humanoid life forms existed, it does not prove in the slightest that they were our ancestors. Perhaps they existed, as ape-like mammals, with more similarity to humans that the apes with which we are familiar. Fine. But what says they are our ancestors? Nothing at all.

However, there is no evidence at all that those fossils are indeed of ape-humans. They don’t even have proof that those creatures even existed. Any shred of a fossil that they find that gives them an opportunity to speculate about what kind of creature the fossil came from, they latch on to and built mountains out of molehills, and produce theories about what the creature was. This happens constantly:

Zinjanthropus Man, a humanoid race touted as being 600,000 years old based on "fossil evidence", was not even based on one body, or even an entire skull. They found one skull with the lower jaw missing. The skull was not found in one piece - it consisted of 400 fragments, found distributed among tons of debris, and put together at the discretion of the people who stand to gain the most by such a "discovery". The entire episode was totally biased, and they still have zero evidence that this creature was anything but human, with, at most a perhaps slightly deformed skull.

And how do they know how old this creature was? Because of the fossils that they found in the same strata with his fossils. And how do they know how old those animals were? Because of the theory of evolution which says that such animals should be that old. There is no evidence of anything here - just theory and wishful thinking.

Every such "discovery" has had opposing scientists who declare them to be nothing. Java and Peking Man were declared by the prominent evolutionist Weidenrech to be plain humans, nothing more and nothing less.
E.E. Stanford, ("Man and the Living World") declared that Neanderthal Man lives with us today. In "The Fossil Evidence for Human Evolution". W.E. LeGros Clark declares that Neanderthal Man existed at the same time with regular human beings.

All these types of ape-humans are nothing but apes or humans that can be seen among us today. At the London meeting of the Congress of Zoology it was revealed that the museum exhibits of Neanderthal Man walking hunched over like an ape was a regular human who had arthritis. Only 13 samples of Neanderthal Man have ever been found - ever! - every one of them incomplete, yet the evolutionists built on them an entire mythical "race" of ape-men.

Procunsul Africanus, touted as the ancestor of "both apes and humans" was declared at that same convention to be nothing but a plain ape.

Java Man was represented by a skull cap, a left femur, a small piece of a jaw, and 3 teeth. Nothing more. And they were found not together but about 50 feet apart, over the span of a year, among many, many other bones and debris. Based on this "evidence" they created an entire era in history. Later they found more skulls, more bones, etc. Everything was the same as human remains except for the teeth, and evolutionists claim that those teeth are the teeth of a plain monkey.

Peking Man has nothing that cannot be found in normal men. Cro-Magnon Man was, evolutionists admit, "fully developed" and intelligent as any man today. He was about 6 feet tall, with a regular forehead, full chin and large brain. He is no more proof of evolution than we are.

But do the math: Even according to the most stubborn and irrational evolutionists, for every single fossil of normal humans and apes that they find, they should be finding billions upon billions of in-between fossils. The steps between ape and human included tons of in-between creatures, and mutant creatures which were not fit for survival. Yet no such fossils have been found. Even the little that they desperately squirm to concoct is pitifully useless compared to what should exist out there. Yet fossils of regular men and apes exist in abundance - in abundance! - and only once in a blue moon do they even claim to find an in-between fossil. And incidentally, the fossils of normal men are found in the same strata as those of the "ancient" and prehistoric men. Go figure.

The fossil record is the biggest proof against evolution. Not that proof is needed - the entire idea is a baseless theory, the only reason they cling to it is because they have nothing better to cling to, if they don’t want to admit the obvious - that the world was created by G-d.

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Monkeys are obviously the closest things, intelligence-wise, to humans (and sponges to plants) but monkeys were created completely separately from humans. We are not related at all.

Don't accept it. It's nonsense.

Evolution, by definition, means "slow progress", the opposite of revolution, which means sudden progress. When did this "evolution" supposedly occur?

Besides, there is no viable evidence for evolution. The evidence is evidence only assuming there is no Creator. All the similarities between us and monkeys are, to us, meaningless, because threes no reason to assume that one Creator did not create many of His creations with similar physicality. But if you assume there is no creator, then the question arises: how do you explain the similarities between us and lower species? And besides -- how in the world did such complex "animals" such as humans get here anyway? There are two options" fast or slow. Fast makes no sense if there is no creator.

Or maybe it's just an example of Rav Chaim Brisker's rule (which kind of comes from the SMA) that Daas Baalei Batim is the opposite of Daas Torah. Because in Torah literature it says that people became monkeys, as in the Dor Haflagah ...

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Carbon-14 dating rests on two assumptions. (a) that the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere has always been constant, and (b) its rate of decay has always been constant.

Neither of those assumptions has been proven or close to proven. And since the world was created in six days, who knows how the cosmic radiation in the atmosphere was fluctuating then.

There is another issue that makes the carbon dating useless. When the world was created, it already had an age. In other words, when Adam for instance was created, he was an adult, even though he was one day old; there were fully grown trees; the sun's light already reached the earth; an entire world existed, full-blown and OLD. How old was the world at the moment it was created? I don’t know -- it doesn't say. But we do know that it didn't start from scratch. And so let's say someone would chop down a tree 1 week after it was created and find maybe 50 rings inside - would that prove that the tree was 50 years old? Nope - it would only prove that when it was created it was created as an adult, 50 year old tree.

So even if dating would be accurate, it still doesn't prove that the world was not created 6,000 years ago - because when it was created, it already could have been thousands of years old.

Dinosaurs are no more of an issue than the dodo or any other extinct animal. Also, some say many giant animals perished if they could not fit into the teivah. But there is zero evidence outside of Hollywood science fiction flicks that dinosaurs lived on this world before humans.
Actually, there have been human fossils found on the same level as dinosaur fossils, and even deeper; the fossil evidence itself does not support the evolutionary theory in the slightest. On the contrary, Darwin predicted that it would, and a century of digging has shattered his hopes. The evolutionists have yet to explain why the fossil evidence does NOT support their theory.

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[Part of the following is a response to an article in an obscure tabloidish magazine that claimed that the in-between fossils going from fish to land creatures had been found. The claim was later pretty much quashed, but the response is still important]

Well it's no wonder the world isn't hopping with this discovery, whose news is relegated to places like where you found it.

Read the article again, and separate the hype and the "this may be what were looking for" from the facts. They found a fish that can do some kind of pushup, had a mobile neck and "had lost the bony coverings of the gills that fish use to fan water to maximize their oxygen intake".

No evidence of lungs, nothing. "These suggest that the fish may have been at least partly air-breathing, like modern tetrapods", they say.

It "suggests the fish may have been". They have no evidence, but because this fish has these features, MAYBE this is what it means, they say. "Maybe", meaning why not make it another theory? But evidence that this thing was actually air breathing? Not there.

All he claims to have is a fish with some unusual characteristics. Even he doesn’t claim to have anything more. He says, he "now plans to return to Ellesmere Island to search for a fossil even closer to the moment when vertebrates first stepped onto dry land."

Good luck.

But it doesn't matter, really. Because its not one single fossil they have to find, but tons --- there should be tons of them every step of the way between pond slime and human. It's not impressive to find a duck billed platypus or a dolphin or, well, a monkey, and say this is the missing link. They'll have to do a lot better than this fish. Don't expect this "discovery" to generate a lot of excitement even among evolutionists.

The only reason they make came up with the theory that we came from monkeys is because they refuse to believe that we were created as men - so we had to come from somewhere. The only thing they could come up with is that we came slowly from monkeys - which came from lower life forms - which came from non-life forms - which came from simple molecules. And since this entire process is supposedly random and accident it can only happen after like gazillions of years (scientifically, however, there has not been enough time in the entire universe, even according to them, for life to have developed).

They know that evolution is not a good theory - but it’s the best they got. And they only accept it - even as a mere theory -- because they have no alternative. It’s not as if there’s actually evidence that humans are somehow descendants of monkeys. It’s merely that "Well we had to come from somewhere!"

So they are forced to accept evolution with all its holes and contradictions because they have no choice. Once you do not want to accept the possibility of G-d creating the world, you have to come up with some alternative.

But if you are a bit more open minded and willing to accept the possibility (we know it is a fact) that G-d created man, then why in the world would someone want to accept evolution?

Its like if the Amish people use candles because they refuse for some reason to use electricity (it's just an analogy - they really do use electricity), would any regular person who does use electricity say to himself "Well, if they use candles I can too, so let me throw away my light bulbs and buy some candles."?

It's not as if there's evidence for evolution and we need to reconcile that evidence with what we know; on the contrary - there's no evidence to evolution and they are constantly trying to reconcile it with what they know are facts. The only reason they believe in evolution is not because of the "evidence" to for but because they have no other choice. We did come somehow, right? And that is the evolutionists' big problem.

And not all scientists believe in evolution. It’s inaccurate to make this a "science vs. religion:" issue – many, many scientists have said that evolution makes no sense, but since the alternative to evolution is only creation, they will stick to it anyway.

It's simply an issue of closed-mindedness, in the form of unwillingness to accept the possibility (which we know as fact) of creation.

Once should never confuse science with scientists. Science is knowledge; scientists are people, complete with their own agendas, weaknesses, and dishonesties. Their PhD’s do not make them any more moral or honest or objective than truck drivers.

And so, the “proof” cited for evolution by scientists, from so-called “vestigial” organs, that is organs in the human body (and animals bodies) that have no purpose, but are similar in design to a organ in an animal that does have a purpose, shows that our bodies are later versions of those animal bodies, and those organs are kind of “left overs” from the olden days when we needed them.

Here is an example of how scientists like to make believe that their own words, even if unsubstantiated and unverified, constitute “science”.

Of course, there is no scientific evidence that any organ has no purpose.
The most scientists can say is that they have not found a purpose. As if the fact that they haven’t found a purpose means that there is none. As in the above example, they have been wrong many times, even when they were so sure of themselves. This is why, not long ago, they would cut out your tonsils if they got inflamed with tonsillitis. They were so sure that because they could not find a use for the tonsils, that means there is no use, that they would actually remove hundreds of thousands of them from the human body as if they were, well, useless organs. The scientists have made several other mistakes in this area as well, relying on their arrogance to conclude that “Since WE don’t know of a purpose for this organ, therefore, it has no purpose”

How arrogant, and how ridiculous!

Here is where the Torah’s view of science diverges from that of the scientists.

Says the Rambam: “How does one come to love and fear Him? When one ponders His actions and His creations, and sees in them intelligence that has no measure and no end.” (Hilchos Yesodei HaTorah 2:2)

The wisdom of Hashem Himself is manifest in the wonderful world we live in, and since His wisdom is infinite, the wisdom contained in the world is infinite.

And so, no matter how much wisdom scientists discover in the universe, it is nothing compared to what they have not yet discovered. Therefore, the idea that “if we big shot scientists, with our great knowledge of the universe, cannot find a purpose for this organ, it must have no purpose”

Scientists may understand a lot, but compared to what there is to understand, they know nothing. The scientist – not science, but the scientist, in his arrogance – has no idea how much more he has yet to discover, how wonderful and immeasurable and boundless are the wonders of Hashem’s world.

And the fact that these organs “are similar” in structure to organs in other animals does not constitute any evidence of one organ “descending” from the other. The real reason why organs are similar in different species is because they were made by the same Designer. A nickel is similar to a quarter but it doesn’t mean one evolved form the other. This reasoning of theirs, that similarity in structure and appearance implies a relationship is based on the assumption that there is no single designer for both. Once you take the Designer out of the picture, it is indeed a weird coincidence that two organs in apparently unrelated species, one of which seems not to have a purpose, bears an uncanny similarity to the other. The “logic” of evolution – what of it that can be called logic – is all based on the assumption that there is no Creator. Now the question is: IF there is no creator, how did we get here? IF there is no Creator, then why do these organs seems so similar? The entire nonsense is only assumptions and wishful thinking, not logic or reason.

Science is infinite. Scientists are finite. For scientists to say that because they do not see intelligence in an organ therefore there must be no intelligence is not base on any scientific evidence; it is nothing but the assumption of the scientists, based on the arrogant idea that if they don’t see it, it’s not there.

Such an attitude does not honor science; it reduces science to a discoverable, finite subject matter, whose limits are somehow measurable by the yardstick of what “scientists” have figured out. None of that is the result of any scientific evidence at all – just the arrogance of the scientist.

Evolution II

Take, for example, an apple. Either way you look at it, whether it was made for people or people were made for it, it shows awareness of human needs, and the human body shows awareness of what the apple offers. No matter which "adapted" to which, the question is: the ability to adapt, the fact that the body knew exactly how to digest those apples, how to grow in order to reach the apples, what limbs it needed to reach the apples, etc -- was that accident or intelligence?
That is the issue here - there are only two possibilities: (a) accident or (b) intelligence.
To say that it adapted or evolved just evades the question: adaptation and evolution are either accident or intelligence. Either a string of billions and trillions of perfectly aligned accidents or there is something in the organism that knows what direction it needs to evolve.
And don't forget - the organism needs the ability to be able to "evolve" to begin with. If we were all made of stone we couldn’t "evolve" lungs, etc.
So the proof still remains: the perfectly designed and aligned natural phenomenon could not have, by any reasonable odds, accidentally ended up this way.
And the only alternative to accident is intelligence.
It doesn't matter if the apple "adapted" for people or people "adapted" for the apple. Either way, accident is beyond believable odds.
What is referred to as "likelihood" of life evolving, still amounts to staggering odds. The numbers are too large to describe (please see the Proofs to the Torah forum where the math is done).
The fact that elements got together and life came from them is itself ridiculous by accident.
And the fact that life "knows" how to evolve is also impossible by accident.
You may not realize the level of coincidence that is needed to do this. Did your stomach "evolve" before the lining that protects it from the acids? If so, it would have been destroyed after the first meal. If the lining evolved before the acids, then nature must also be endowed with prophecy, because it was burdened for millions of years with some useless lining, until the acid evolved.
The chicken egg needed to be the right thickness - not too thick and not too thin - to allow the development and hatching of the chicken, from the start. Or else even one generation of chicken would not have been able to survive.
And even if, theoretically, all this did evolve, the fossil evidence would have to show the billions and billions of species that did not survive - the "non fittest" that fell by the wayside. For every survivable species, you are talking about countless non-survivors. The odds are ridiculous. And the fossil record so far has ONLY COME UP WITH VIABLE LIFE FORMS.
We still have no answer to the question: How does anyone account for the staggering odds of life forming by accident?
What the scientists are saying in essence is, "Yes, but it could happen."
Well, that is of course true, but then you would be unable to prove anything at all, because similarly, "It could always happen."
If G-d Himself would come and reveal Himself to the entire world an say "I am Hashem", that, too, by atheist standard wouldn't prove anything because a happy string of coincidences could account for natural sounds and sights that happened to have coincidentally united at the right time and place to cause such a phenomenon.
It could happen.
Proof, in any other context other than atheists talking about G-d, is not expected to reach the level of absolute impossibility. There is no such thing as absolute impossibility. Anything "could" happen, as long as it is not an absurd concept that cannot exist (such as a triangle that is round).
You would send someone to the electric chair if you were a juror and the defendant’s fingerprints were found on the strangled victim's neck. A video of the murder, and perhaps 20 witnesses would make the verdict a no brainier.
But witnesses could lie, a video could be forged - one may even go so far as to claim that some technology exists out there that we are as yet unaware of that synthesized such a realistic video.
And please note, that there is no proof anywhere that says two people cannot have the same fingerprints. In fact, there is absolutely nothing in nature at all that precludes duplicate fingerprints. How in the world would my fingers know, when I am born, the patterns of fingerprints that have already been "placed" on the fingers of every other human being? How do my fingers know which fingerprints are "used" already so as to avoid duplicating them?
The only reason that we assume - yes, assume! - that two sets of fingerprints cannot be alike, or that two snowflakes cannot be alike, is because there are so many billions of possible fingerprint patterns, and snowflake patterns, that the odds of two like patterns existing are so staggering that we don’t even consider it a possibility.
Even though it could happen.
So if you are a juror and the defense attorney claims that nobody "proved" that the fingerprints on the victim's neck were really the defendants - because it could happen that by coincidence two identical sets exist, and that you can't "prove" that the 20 witnesses told the truth (they could have all lied and coincidentally made up the same exact details in the story), and that you can't "prove" that the video cannot be faked, he would be laughed out of the courtroom.
Even though it all "could happen".
And you would send the defendant to his death, because you saw proof "beyond a reasonable doubt" or "beyond a shadow of a doubt" that this man is guilty.
You have no proof that your dessert is not poisoned, but you would take the chance of eating it anyway.
Once the odds reach a certain point, we don't consider the alternative as viable.
Even though your dessert could be poisoned.
And so, the amount of "coincidence" and lucky accidents needed to create life are so ridiculously beyond reason, that you’re talking about a universe of people with duplicate fingerprints and continents of totally identical snowflakes.
You're talking about a monkey typing away at a keyboard and producing the Works of Shakespeare. Or, more like, the entire stock of the library of congress.
It could happen.
We live our lives laughing at such claims. We would call the ambulance at someone who really believes those things.
Except for the atheist discussing G-d.
It's amazing how, on that level of reasonableness, a person would risk his life and send others to their death, but to avoid eating pork, for that, he needs "absolute proof".
The question is not "can we prove G-d?" The question is, given the proof that we do have, why in the world would anybody NOT believe in G-d???
And to that, so far, no atheist has come up with anything close to a sensible answer.

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If the chances of getting heads in a coin flip is 1/2, if you throw the dice twice, or even 100 times, each time you’ll still get a 50-50 chance of getting heads.
If you throw a die, you have a 1/6 chance of rolling a 1. If you throw it 6 times, you still have a 1/6 chance each of those times of rolling a 1. It doesn’t change. Dice have no memory. And if you do roll a 1 lets say on the 3rd try, and not the first two, that was totally random.
No matter how many times you throw the dice, they will have to overcome the 1/6 odds to come up with any given number. Even if you roll them a million times, each throw still has to overcome the 1/6 odds.
Now 1/6 odds is not so hard to overcome, and if it happens, it's totally random, unrelated to the number of times you threw the dice.
And no matter how many universes there are, in order for life to accidentally arise, it would have to overcome, on its own, without the help of any of the gazillions of other universes, the 1/innumerable chances. And that doesn't happen.
And besides all this, life doesn't spring up at once - it takes time, and each of the gazillions of happy accidents have to have time to happen, on their own, independently, and even if one would be missing, the whole organism would fail.
In fact, even according to the most conservative estimate of the age of the world according to evolutionists, there hasn't been enough time since the beginning for life to develop, by any reasonable standard. You would need so many happy accidents, numbers beyond anything we can imagine, to have happened precisely in the right place and time, one after the other, with some kind of maintaining device existent all the while to ensure the continued life of the organisms while they were developing but only partly developed.
The whole thing is logically absurd. I don’t see how anybody can even entertain such a remote possibility.
The only people who do, I would imagine, are those with such unhealthy psyches that they would be afraid to go out on a sunny day lest they get hit by lightning, the odds of which are infinitely greater than life developing anywhere, ever; or those paranoid people who live in bomb shelters because they're worried lest a meteorite smash their homes into dust, which is much more likely than them having evolved from monkeys, who evolved from pond slime completely by accident.
It's very strange, and explainable only by way of the irrational inside all of us, that people actually believe the world exists with no Creator.
Anything is possible even given one try. It is not the amount of tries that makes something "possible", it is your definition of "possible", which is useless in the real world, and dishonestly applied to nothing in life except religion.
Naive people are naive even though what they believe is "possible"; foolish people are foolish even though what they think is "possible"; paranoid people are paranoid even though it is "possible;" that the whole world is indeed after them.
"Proof" does not mean negating an impossibility. No scientific or other type of proof negates all possibility of something being untrue. "Possibility" by this definition is a meaningless philosophical term that has no relevance in the real world.
All "proof" has to do in order to motivate you to act upon it is remove doubt, not remove impossibility. Removing impossibility in this sense is, well, impossible.
It is probably less possible for you to be abducted by aliens every day of your life - time after time.
And so if you are not worried about taking a stroll around your block, lest the aliens get you, you certainly do not have to worry about Judaism being false.
And it is probably less likely to be false than every one of your deserts poisoned by your enemies who, although you do not know it, want to kill you. It could happen, you know.
And so, if you eat your dessert without fear for your life, then it would be dishonest to eat a cheeseburger without fearing for your soul.
And it is possible that if you jump off the roof, you will fly. But you have to be an idiot to take that chance.
It is even more of a risk that eating that cheeseburger will not send you to Gehinnom. So if you are not ready to jump off the roof based on the possibility of flying, it would be dishonest of you to eat that cheeseburger based on the possibility of Judaism being false.
The issue is black and white simple.

Evolution I

It’s often asked, if Hashem really wants me to believe, why can't He just do a major miracle, or bring malachim down, or something similar?
He did. Not the malachim, but the something. He created a world which simply could not have come without a creator any more than a malach can. If you were on the moon, and you found a CD player, what would you think? Obviously, that someone was here already.
Now what if someone told you that the CD player came by accident - billions of years of accidental natural upheavals caused the glass to be formed out of sand, the wires out of copper, the body out of raw aluminum that melded with other metals, that it all accidentally came together, including the logo and the letters on the front, the hinged cover, the playing mechanism, the machinery, the batteries, everything - that it came not through design but through accident --
-- what would you say?
You'd say he's out of his mind. The odds of a CD player coming by accident are psycho.
There are only two ways anything happens in this world: (a) accident or (b) intelligence. If the CD player could not have come by accident, that automatically means it was deigned by intelligence. There is no third alternative.
If that is what we would say, conclusively and without any room for doubt, about a camcorder, what, then, shall one say about the human eye, which demonstrates plan and purpose compared to which a CD player is no more primitive than a rock.
Light enters your eye, and these cone sensor tools fine tune the color contrast and detail of the image, based on the lighting conditions.
There are seven million of these color sensors in your eye. Seven. Million. All of them work together to give you a realistic color image.
Seven million.
If there's not enough light for them to create color, like in a shadowy place, the color tools give the job over to a different group of black and white image enhancers. There are about 127 million of them.
Meanwhile, at the same time, a computer in your optic nerve receives signals from those 127 million sensors, changes them into code and sends them, translated, through a few hundred thousand nerve fibers that lead to your brain.
How do these millions and millions of tools know how to do all this?
Accident or intelligence?
Why doesn't your eye send the signals to your stomach or foot? How does it know which direction the brain is? How did the optic nerve in your brain know where to create a connection?
But we're not finished yet. While all this is happening inside your eye, the pupil, that black hole on the outside of your eye, is measuring the amount of light it needs to let inside the eye, and it opens and closes, like a lens, to accommodate the exact right amount. A stereo focusing system is busy maintaining maximum image sharpness and a sophisticated image enhancer is clarifying tiny blurs in your vision caused by motion or darkness.
But that's nothing. The image then gets sent to your brain.
Your brain has about ten BILLION nerve cells. Each of these ten billion cells grows between 10,000 - 100,000 fibers in order to connect to other nerve cells in the brain. The total number of these connections, which totally work in tandem with each other, equals one quadrillion. That is: 1,000,000,000,000,000.
If you want to know how much that is, here's an example:
Imagine a forest half the size of the entire United States - one million square miles. A thick forest, with 10,000 trees per square mile. If each of these trees had 100,000 leaves, the total amount of tress in the entire forest would equal one quadrillion - the amount of nerve fiber connections in your brain.

This is just the beginning. There are no two ways about it. Rationally, G-d created the world beyond a shadow of a doubt.
I would suggest reading the books of Rabbi Avigdor Miller - they are by far the best works on this topic, and many other topics as well. They are truly invaluable.

The First Cause

There is a law of physics called "causation." It means, in a nutshell, that everything in the world must a cause. Even accidents have reasons why they ended up the way they did. If someone throws the dice and they land on 9, there were reasons why that happened. The force of the throw, the angle, etc. There is a reason for everything.

And there are reasons for the reasons, too. And reasons for those reasons. Nothing happens without a cause.

Now we have a question: If everything has a cause, and the causes also have a cause, and the causes of the cause also have a cause, etc – are the amount of causes in the chain of causes going all the way back infinite or finite?

Finite. Because it would be impossible that there were an infinite chain of causes without a beginning, for, as we learned, an infinite amount of things cannot happen - infinity is not the "biggest number"; rather, it is a number that can never be reached. Therefore, you can never have an infinite number of anything in this world.

And if so, if we cannot have a chain of causes without any beginning, there had to be a beginning - a First Cause, which itself had no cause at all.

This means, that this first cause has no reason or reasons for why it is; nothing created it, nothing makes it what it is. This First Cause is what we refer to as “Hashem”.