Kabbalah, Evolution and Intelligent Design

BS"D

Chanukah, 5766 - The Israeli Center, Jerusalem

Lecture 1

Transcript of seminar by Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh Shlita

 

The first three ideas we’re going to talk about are: purpose, creation and intelligent design. We have these three evenings of Chanukah to discuss this topic of the integration of Torah and Intelligent Design and evolution. In the next three days, three stages: evolving from day to day. Each day, two sessions.

• Today – introductory concepts.
• Tomorrow it will be establishing in general the Torah perspective of how to envision the inter-relationship and the unity between the various philosophies – the philosophical debate.
• And the third day will be devoted to take one very important specific problem of biological evolutionary theory, which evolutionary biologists consider to be the basic [fossil?] of evolution. It has nothing to do with those questions that are commonly asked against evolution – its something in evolutionary theory itself: the yet unsolved problem and we will try and deal with that specifically on the third evening im yirtzeh Hashem.

First we’ll try to do various introductory topics to get a basic orientation. The way that we will try to proceed is to present models that represent Kabbalistic truths and by seeing the relationship, the parallels between the Kabbalistic model and the related concepts we should immediately sense some deep, let’s call it “pleasure principle” some satisfaction in that there does indeed exist a true parallel between scientific concepts and the basic frames of reference of the Kabbalah and then, even more so, we will see that they enhance and enrich one another, it’s called הפרייה הדדית, that each one produces novelty and new insights into the other and begin to match together. Now the evolutionary scientists, as we just now heard from Prof. Zeiger, do not hold so much by these three concepts that are written on the board: purpose, creation and intelligent design.

1. Does the world have purpose?

We’ll try to quote biologists, but not call them by name, anyone who wants to research can find their names on the Internet. One of the greatest of the evolutionary biologists of our times states that there is no purpose to creation, no purpose to the evolution of man and he says it in the strongest sense - so obviously we don’t believe in that at all. So this is the first thing, even before discussing about creation, and Intelligent Design that we see throughout creation - the first thing is that the first question that a child asks and that anyone of us should ask, is what am I here for? Why did God create the world? Why did God create me? Why did He put me here? All of these questions are questions of purpose. We probably know that in Eastern philosophies there is nothing ultimately purposeful about this realm, this world just get out of here as soon as you can, because there’s no really good purpose in being here. Whereas the first tenet of Judaism is that there is purpose to this world, it’s called “tachlit” that God created the world for some purpose – we don’t know why – some existential desire of His own “to create for Himself a dwelling place below,” that is the phrase used by our sages. And we are the emissaries of God to make that come about. So, the world has purpose, and we have our function, which is our purpose and in order to fulfill God’s purpose He created man in general and the Jewish People in particular, as the pinnacle of creation to bring about His purpose of creation. So that’s number 1 concept - Purpose.

2. Was the world created, or has it always existed?

Now these three concepts are not necessarily dependant upon one another, each of them can be understood and related to and believed in or not believed in independently.  Was the world always here with all of its matter and energy according to the principle of conservation of matter and energy, or was it created at some point a long time ago? So we know that the Greeks and all of the philosophers who followed the Greeks until very recent times, just over fifty years ago, until Gamow, the first person that we did quote, who gave us the Big Bang Theory, which is now generally accepted by almost all scientists no matter what field. [Until then] the world was considered primordial (kadmon) it was always here. Now almost every scientist accepts this theory that there was one moment in very, very ancient history, in primordial times, because according to science it was about fifteen billion years ago, the world was created, all of the energy and the matter that we presently have in our universe,  all came into existence ex-nihilo in one moment, in one split second. The scientific term is the Big Bang but scientists themselves use the term, “ex-nihilo” (in the terms of the Torah yesh meayin). That’s a tremendous advance...

[We’re now celebrating the holiday of Chanukah, the victory over the Greeks and the Hellenist philosophy, but even worse than the Greeks who held that philosophy, that philosophy took hold of a great percentage of the Jewish People who are the mityavnim. This is the basic problem that when there is a cultural scientific consensus, the first people who are caught up in it are the Jewish People. Because we are also the geniuses who help those theories develop. So we are now also celebrating that victory. In all of the classical literature of Kabbalah and Chasidut, that victory is explained to be the victory of hitchadshut, over kadmon, that the world was here for ever, and we believe that the world was created. It even says that the Greeks tried to nullify us from three mitzvoth in particular from all our 613 mitzvoth which are Chodesh, Shabbat and brit milah, which, according to the explanations, these are the three mitzvoth which most reflect hitchadshut more than any of the other mitzvoth:

• Celebrating rosh chodesh is the hitchadshut in the dimension of time,
• Shabbat is the general hitchadshut of the world, of olam, and
• brit milah is representative of the hitchadshut in the soul.

Sefer Yetzirah, the basic first text of Kabbalah and the first text of Hebrew grammar analyzes our reality, our universe, as consisting of three dimensions: olam, shannah and nefesh, world and year and soul, which are basically space, time and “value” we’ll call it, because the coordinate of soul as defined in Sefer Yetzirah, is the coordinate of good versus evil so that’s why we call it the “value” coordinate. Each one of these three dimensions is created anew. The mitzvah that reflects our belief in the creation of the world, of space and the universe in general is Shabbat,that God created the world and then He rested on the seventh day.  Of rosh chodesh it says that (even though Shabbat could also be related to time, it’s more general than just time it’s time in the world altogether) the specific renewal of time, the cycle, that renews itself every month that we experience – an empirical time cycle – the weekly cycle we can’t experience but the monthly cycle we do experience, because it’s the moon, and that’s our experience of the renewal of time. Brit milah, the essence of our people being circumcised and God giving Abraham, the first Jew, the mitzvah of circumcision, is brit milah, and it is a definition of a Jew, whether male or female, all non-Jews, whether they are physically circumcised or not are considered to be not circumcised, they are called arelim, whereas a Jew, whether circumcised or not are called in essence they are defined as mehulim, that’s the way our sages teach us. So that essence is our ability to experience renewal in “soul” psychologically all the time. These were the three mitzvoth that the Greeks tried to uproot from our consciousness and our psyches and we were victorious. That’s what we are commemorating.]

So the first thing is to realize that now in our present thoughts of Torah and science, that science has come to some recognition that creation did happen and about the same time in the fifties, when evidence came up of the Big Bang, (any new theory when it is first suggested, nobody accepts it, but then, gradually as evidence builds up it becomes commonly accepted, and that’s what happened in this theory). There is another theory, Hoyle’s theory, which is even more dramatically related to the Torah, that we will presently explain. A theory that is based on continuous creation, not just one creation of the world fifteen billion years ago. The fact that in outer space, in the vacuum (we’ll call it the vacuum), there is, even now at this very moment,  continuous creation ex-nihilo of elementary particles. That theory is a common theory, it’s not so well accepted as the Big Bang Theory, but the common denominator for us is that they both acknowledge the act of creation, that there is a possibility, a reality, a necessity that the world, in some way was or is being created ex-nihilo. That is tenet number 2 after purpose.

3. Intelligent Design

Tenet number three is another very ancient philosophical understanding of reality. When we look around us and we see the wonders of creation and we see that the beauty and the complexity of the wonders of creation is so great that there must have been Someone, some conscious Psyche that designed it. If there is a work of art there must have been an artist who created this magnificent work of art. This is called Intelligent Design. This is an ancient philosophical question that is being renewed from time to time, becoming much more sophisticated as we now know exactly what design is. Because we know not just about beautiful scenery and human anatomy, we now know about human DNA and all sorts of things that are going on in the microscopic world and these things are so amazing that a person who begins to observe them and to contemplate them, but for many people, not all of them but many, many of them, brings them to the profound realization that the world is not like if you take a bottle of ink and spill it on a canvas, that it results in a beautiful picture, but that there is definitely an Intelligent Design that is making all this happen. Once more, this has tremendous ramifications and sophistication to it in our present age.

So, once more, if we think about these three independent concepts, that there is purpose, and there is creation and there is Intelligent Design. Why do the scientists find it hard to acknowledge these principles? What do they do to blind their eyes to these three realizations? They have the easy way out which is “fifteen billion years.” And a common quotation from many top scientists is that, “In fifteen billion years – anything could happen...”! There’s no proof, we can’t prove anything because fifteen billion years is enough for random occurrences to come up with anything. Of course, now, the disproof of this neo-Darwinism is that even fifteen billion years is not enough. According to modern statistics and understandings of the microscopic workings of the DNA is one of the basic problems, the disproofs of the neo-Darwinism.

We’ll just say a nice thing about fifteen billion years, just to make it a “friendly” concept. We’re trying to be “user friendly.” Fifteen billion years – it says b’yud-kei hivatzru haolamim. The universe was created, according to the scientists, fifteen billion years ago, the solar system was created five billion years ago, the earth, again, one of the amazing things is that life began almost immediately with the creation of the earth, five billion years ago. It says that Hashem created the higher worlds, the heavens, with a yud and the lower worlds with a hei, b’yud-kei hivatzru haolamim so we have ten billion years for the creation of the universe and another five billion years for our solar system, until our present state now after fifteen billion years. So we should definitely not be afraid of fifteen billion years.

As we said, each of these three principles is something by itself. We said that the most headway in hard science is actually the second principle, creation, without of course thinking about whether there is a Creator, it just happened to come out of nothing. That is definitely a point of advance. How can we give a simple order to these three and to explain why the common, hard, stubborn scientist, materialistic scientist, finds it hard to swallow these ideas and certainly to acknowledge even say in public, that “I believe in purpose,” or “I believe in creation” – let’s say in creation they believe but “I believe in a Creator.” “I believe in Intelligent Design” is no so hard. So the first thing is that the world was created in six days and the six days of the creation correspond to the six attributes of the heart, “ששת ימים עשה ה' את השמים ואת הארץ”. and it is very hard to relate to what was before because the Torah existed two thousand years, which is two “days” of Hashem, before the six days. The six days also correspond to the six thousand years, the six millennia of this common order that we are in and to many other things but before the six, there are two or three above that because there are the two intellectual sefirot, which are chochmah and binah and there’s then the crown, the superconscious. People who are totally involved in reality which is within the confines of the six “days,” so it is very difficult for them to break out of that mitzrayim, each of us being within some confines, and to reach up and to conceive of what was before the six days, These concepts are actually the three sefirot that are before the six days of creation. Purpose is keter – now we’ll give some simple Kabbalistic parallels – Purpose is will that Hashem , that the Creator has some will in creation, and will is the purpose. He willed it for some mysterious, hidden reason of His own that we cannot fathom, nonetheless we believe, and we feel in some way, - someone that is in tune, the Jewish soul especially is in tune with the Creator to his Creator - feels purpose. Feeling purpose is connection to the crown, which is, once more, three “days” above creation. The experience of creation itself ex-nihilo, something from nothing (of course, to say that the world was created ex-nihilo and yet to deny or not to envision that there is a Creator behind the scenes of creation, that’s just pure fog or darkness), the light יהי אור that light of creation is the experience of wisdom, that’s the second sefirah. כולם בחכמה עשית, והחכמה מאין תמצא, that wisdom is found from nothing is the concept of ex-nihilo, of something coming from nothing, that’s wisdom in Kabbalah.

Design is form. Intelligent design is like what happens in the womb of the mother, that’s the mother principle. Mother is Intelligence, it has both concepts to it, is both intelligence and it is also design, that is form. Even way before God created the world it says that He created the diagram of the world, the blueprint of the world, שיער בעצמו בכוח כל מה שעתיד להיות בפועל. The word for that blueprint is called shiur, which in Hebrew is from the same word as sha’ar, which means “a gate” - also to the gates of understanding. (I’m using here the Chassidic terminology that I hope that most of us are familiar with a little bit at least). The Mother Principle which is understanding, the second intellectual [form] is what gives form even before, way, way before creation Hashem planned creation that’s the Mother Principle. Which means that, actually, if Hashem is planning it, then at some level of reality, way above even the four worlds, that follow the initial contraction of Hashem’s infinite light, it’s called before the צמצום, before the contraction, Hashem is already seeing and planning all of the worlds to be created. That is where Intelligent Design comes from, because if we see, if we experience, intelligent design in our world, so we are seeing a reflection... If we see the wonders of nature and the experience of Godliness in the wonders of nature – this, by the way, is the most basic meditation of Maimonides, the Rambam. It says that ma’ase bereishit is a science and what is a science for? It’s for experiencing the wonders of creation. And through experiencing the wonders of creation, to come to love and fear Hashem. Loving and fearing Hashem are the offspring, the two basic children of the Mother. The meditation, the experience of the wonder, which is the concept of intelligent design, it’s not the act of creation – Maimonides is not talking about experiencing creation, he only talks about meditating on the intelligent design. He says that that meditation upon intelligent design gives birth in the psyche, in the soul, to the two basic children which are loving God and fearing God. So in short, what we are see is that these three basic principles correspond to the ג"ר, the three first sefirot which are keter and chochmah and binah. They all should go together, but each one has it’s own independent unique idea to it.

How do these three principles nonetheless reflect themselves in reality? Because what we just now said is that the reason why it is hard for the materialistic scientist to talk in these terms is because the origin of these three things is really above reality. Reality is in the six days of creation and all three of these are above that, so a person who is not able to break out of the confines of the six days of creation can never acknowledge these. Nonetheless – these are called mochin in Kabbalah – the mochin do indeed permeate creation in a certain way and when they permeate creation they descend and manifest in the World of Creation. So this is now going to be the second continuation of thought.

The Four Worlds
World of Emanation
World of Creation
World of Formation
World of Action

We have here the four worlds, spoken of in Kabbalah and Chasidut. The first is the World of Emanation which is the Divine world, in which there is no separate self-consciousness only consciousness of God. It’s like the first day of creation where it says yom echad, there was no other consciousness other than the consciousness of One. Then come the next three worlds which, relative to the World of Emanation are called the three lower worlds, creation, formation and action. They are different levels of self/separate consciousness from the Divine.

The World of Creation is a mental world, that experiences creation, as it’s name suggests, the second principle that we discussed before.

The World of Formation, as its name indicates, is a world that has to do with forms, sometimes it’s even alluded to that at some external dimension of this world exist what Plato used to call in Greek “Platonic Forms.”

The World of Action is the universe that we live in. Our experience of reality is all concentrated within the World of Action.

Now, above all of these worlds is the crown. The crown also has another name to it that we are not yet relating to, we will relate to that in the continuation. It’s called Adam Kadmon, Primordial Man, in relation to the four worlds it is called Primordial Man (which obviously doesn’t mean that it’s a human being, it’s something way above all of the four worlds of creation). For the time-being, let’s just call it the crown and as we have said, the crown is the purpose behind creation, the will that also has behind it pleasure.

The sefirah of chochmah, wisdom is usually just identified with the World of Atzilut , what we have here is a slight shift in relation to what we said before. The principle that we identified with chochmah, wisdom, now shines or permeates, not only the world that corresponds to wisdom per-se, which is the world of atzilut, but also to the next world below it which usually, I would think, corresponds to binah, because binah, understanding, as we said before, is the Intelligent Design principle, but now we’re going to see that the creation principle as we said before, even in modern science there are two theories of creation. There is the Big Bang theory that creation took place, was just a one-time occurrence, חד פעמי it took place fifteen billion years ago, but, definitely there was creation ex-nihilo. Or Hoyle’s theory which is the theory of continuous creation every split second, right now also. Now, as we said, the problem with both of them is that they don’t talk about the Creator, just about creation itself. They’re looking at creation just from our side of the picture, from the yesh side, and not from the ayin side. Whereas where they’re coming from, just that all of a sudden - this is also a very important idiom in evolutionary biology “sudden appearance”. There was a sudden appearance of something, before there was nothing. So the only thing that strikes our eye is “sudden appearance”. We don’t know where it is coming from and we have even no desire to think about where it is coming from it’s just that one moment there was a sudden appearance of matter and energy (which is equivalent to matter, according to Einstein) or according to Hoyle there is continuous new creation ex-nihilo.

The experience of the World of Creation, once more, the world of creation and down is allowing one to look at things “objectively” retaining his own ego, without the need to nullify his ego. So if we put creation way back fifteen billion years ago, it’s nice that you believe in creation, at least, but definitely, as we said before, you put it so far back that it’s no longer threatening your existence and it’s no longer even threatening your mind to believe in God. Because you can think that it was so long ago, fifteen billion years, that it could all just have happened by random occurrence. So, it’s creation but it’s creation of the past. Now in the religious non-Jewish world, there are what they call the “Young Earth Creationists”, they believe in the literal meaning of the Bible that the world is only 5,700 years old, which is also, le’havdil, the opinion of many great sages, and we will iy”H address this later on. And this is also the opinion of the Rebbe, that he says that if you can’t prove that the world is fifteen billion years old, if you could really prove it then it would be a different story altogether, but since you can’t prove it, then why can’t you just take the reading literally? (This is our “age of the world” problem which we will have to address in the continuation)The common denominator is that the world was created a long time ago, or a short time ago, but it was created “ago”. Is it now being created every second or was it created “ago”. That consciousness of being created “ago” is the consciousness of the World of Creation. It in no way negates my self-consciousness, my ego because I am looking at it from far away. I can definitely say that the earlier, the longer ago that creation was, the more external is the place at which I am standing in the World of Beriah. The younger that the universe is, so maybe I’m standing at a more inner place in the World of Creation. But it doesn’t really matter so much because as long as it was created “ago,” it is not now “hamechadesh betuvo bechol yom tamid  ma’aseh bereishit”, that at every split second the world is being created. So my general concept is in the World of Beriah. The hitpa’alut, as we said before, that the Rambam says that greatest arousal of emotion is when you see the beauty and wonders of creation-the love and the fear in the soul. Before we said that the love and the fear are coming from the origin of design-which is in the Mother. But the physical experience of the design, the beautiful forms in the world that we see around us, that is in the intellectual powers, the mochin of the World of yetzira, because that is what is giving birth to the midot of ahavah and yirah, that are identified with the World of yetzirah, which as we said before comes from the word for form, it is a world of form and design, it is not something from nothing it is something from something.

Almost all of the commentaries on the creation in the Book of Genesis agree that of the three times that the root for beriyah is used in the story, that beriyah is ex-nihilo-creation. All of the other verbs, asiyah “make”, or even when Hashem says “yehi” let there be!” it’s not something from nothing, it’s something from something. So even “yehi or” “let there be light” according to most commentaries, is not beriyah, it’s not yesh meayin.

Just for general knowledge, the Malbim is the commentary that deals mostly with scientific issues from a strictly Torah point of view, the deepest understanding both of nigleh and nistar the most important peirush to learn on the story of creation, he explains every phase of the six days of creation, and for instance he states strongly that yehi or is yesh miyesh as is every other verb in the story of creation, except  for the three times that the verb beriyah appears explicitly in the text. The most important asmachta that he gives for that is in the Book of Isaiah it says “yotzer or” that Hashem “forms light” it doesn’t say that He created light, it says that He created darkness and He formed light and the difference, once again, between creating and forming is that creation is something from nothing and forming is something from something. So we find explicitly that even light itself was a formation and it exists in, it is experienced in, the world of yetzirah. That means that if you are standing in the world of yetzirah, you can experience yotzer or, that Hashem is forming light. And if you are in the world of beriyah, the reshimu, the “impression” of the creation of the past, whether it is more distant or less distant. If you are in the world of atzilut – it’s actually a sign, that all the souls of the great tzadikim, the souls of the Rebbeim are all souls from the world of Atzilut – one of the simplest indications, that you can test yourself if you are a soul from Atzilut or not, do you experience continual re-creation, not just say “hamechadesh betuvo bechol yom tamid ma’aseh bereishit” it’s usually an experience that children have. How do you know that this child has a soul from the World of Atzilut from the World of Emanation? Because an actual empirical...

We’ll make another important point here, many of the books will say, the books that discuss the “controversy” between science and religion, which are usually goyisher books and not yiddisher books, many of the goyisher books will say that you can’t mix religion with science, for some very good reasons. One of the reasons is that science is purely empirical – that’s the definition of science – and religion is about God which is not an empirical quality, or quantity, so it just has no meaning. So that idea is a total fallacy and misconception, because for a sensitive soul, and all souls are sensitive, God is empirical, miracles are empirical. The books will tell you, “you can’t talk about miracles”, because a miracle is not an empirical commodity. Something that is not empirical, that you can’t experience, is not a topic for science, it’s a different drama altogether so don’t mix the two together. What is wrong with that is saying that supernatural phenomena are not empirical. For us they’re just as empricial as physical phenomena, they are sensory empirical, a person is supposed to experience miracles every day in his own life, to see them and hear them, to taste them and smell them and feel them! A miracle is just as empirical as what people call nature, it’s just a question, like you say can a blind person see – a blind person can’t see, it’s just a question of how attuned and how sensitive your senses are. So as we have said, someone whose soul, his psyche is from a higher world, a higher domain, so obviously he’s sensitive – what for him is empirical is different than for a soul from a lower realm calls empirical reality. So, once more, a sign for a soul from the world of Atzilut is the experience of continual re-creation. Just like the Alter Rebbe in the Tanya begins with explaining the meditation, that the purpose of meditation is to come to the experience. It says al yotzi adam et atzmo min haklal that when a person contemplates, first you meditate on Hashem’s continual re-creation of all of reality ex-nihilo every split second, meaning that, in truth, one is above time. To truly experience continuous creation lifts you above time and space. If we will deal in depth with the problem of the age of the universe - one of the greatest problems - according to Kabbalah, one of the keys to understanding that problem is which world you are in. Because it says that a person who is in the world of Asiyah, in our world, this is a classic example, something that here takes fifteen years to transpire, if your consciousness, your psyche would be in the world of Yetzirah, then those fifteen years would take place in one split second. This is the Tzemach Tzedek... the story of the Ba’al Shem Tov. The Ba’al Shem Tov wrote a letter to his brother-in-law, Rabbi Gershon miKitov, who was here in Israel and he told him of some event that happened to him when he was in Acco, he described the whole story that the Ba’al Shem Tov had seen in his ruach hakodesh. So his brother-in-law replied and he said that the fact that you have ruach hakodesh, to see what happens, is no chidush, no novelty for me, but the problem is that you wrote me the letter before it happened! You saw this in the past, but all this had not yet happened to me! So the explanation in Chasidut is that his present vision. Vision is an eye-wink, an eye-wink is one seventy-sixth of a cheilek of a minute, a cheilek of a minute is three and a third seconds. So you can figure out how much a rega is, that is called a rega in the Torah. So a rega is approximately 1/25 of what we call a second. In that period of time he sees, just in the world of Yetzirah, nothing any higher than that. Just one world up, so in that period of time we see fifteen years. So that in Chasidut is the interpretation of  the story. So we can figure out what the ratio is, that is how a day in the world of Yetzirah how long is it according to that ratio in our world of Asiyah. Now that is just one world up. If we go another world up so again the same ratio takes place, it is like a pyramid, it comes to a point at the top of the World of Beriah, but to take a quantum leap from the top of the world of Beriah to the world of Atzilut, you are transcending time altogether. There is Seder Zmanim but there’s no time any more. A soul at that level is continuously experiencing creation every split second. Once more, this can be a young child that has this empirical experience, its like a residue of this very, very high level that he experiences “hamechadesh betuvo bechol yom tamid ma’aseh bereishit”, “ve’al yotzi adam et atzmo min haklal”, a person should not take himself out of the klal, it is possible, that I am being created now ex-nihilo, my body, my soul, everything.

So now, we’ve said like this, we’ve said that the purpose principle remains – we’re talking about how these three principles that we discussed before permeate the world and permeate these souls that exist at different levels – purpose remains at keter. Creation, divides [into two]: the experience of creation in the past is in the world of Creation, but the experience of creation in the present is an experience of Atzilut – thatis the proper place of wisdom. The experience of beauty – design is beauty – it’s so beautiful as we said, that we couldn’t have spilled the ink on the parchment and it came out as this beautiful picture; it’s so magnificent and beautiful that this is God at work this is the Craftsman, the Artist Himself, as we will explain. What does that arouse? It arouses love and fear, the two primary emotions of the world of yetzirah which is called the world of emotions. The central emotion is tiferet which s experiencing beauty, but the two first emotions that are aroused by that – it’s called hitpaalut hanefesh – are ahavah and yirah.

So what have we now done? We have brought ID down from above creation, into creation, because the world of Yetzirah is itself the six days of creation, it’s not malchut – malchut is the world of asiyah - because it’s already into the realm of the six days of creation. That’s why even the goyisher people are involved in this debate, the debate between the evolutionists and the ID people, that’s the basic debate. So they even play down creation. Let’s forget about creation and just work on the “wedge” of upwedging or uprooting the evolutionists by proving Design. It just couldn’t have happened by chance, by random occurrence. So they’re working in the world of formation, which is already part and parcel of the revealed world. והנגלות לנו the two lower worlds are the vav-hei of Hashem’s name which is the revealed light. The disbelieving evolutionists are in the world of asiyah which is our reality. Because, as we are going to explain, evolution is not false. The basic thing that we are trying to get across in these three evenings, is that evolution is not false, it just has to be understood in the proper way. To see evolutionary processes taking place in reality is the sensitivity of the world of Asiyah, that’s all. If it causes you to disbelieve in God, then that is bad, because it is definitely not necessary. The reason why there is a tendency to this is that you get so involved in the materialism of this world and the evolutionary processes that it tends to split you off from Divine consciousness. That is very strongly pronounced in the most important verse in the Bible that discusses the worlds and the hishtalshelut haolamot, which is, “kol hanikra bishmi velichvodi” God says and Isaiah says in God’s Name, “everything that is called in My Name and for My Glory,” that’s still at the level of Atzilut, “berativ, yetzartiv af asitiv,” “I have created it, I have formed it I have even made it.”  The two stages of “I have created it and I have formed it” correspond to the two worlds of Beriah and Yetzirah, directly “evolve” out of Atzilut, “kol hanikra bishmi velichvodi berativ, yetzartiv” no problem but before the final stage which is this world of asiyah, there is a problem, because it says “af asitiv” that word “af” which literally means “even”, “I have even made it” but it implies af vechaimah, which is a very harsh sense to it, anger, wrath, there is some wrath that separates between all of the higher three worlds and the lowest world. Because of that separation, it is possible to become so ingrained in the lower reality of asiyah, that one forgets or even denies all higher levels of reality, that is the word af asitiv. But we are taught in Chasidut that that word af itself can be transformed into good. The Magid of Mezeritch, the follower and successor of the Ba’al Shem Tov, said that the world of Atzilut appears all the way below in this physical world of Asiyah, in Yiddish he says, “Atzilus ist aich don” in Hebrew it’s “atzilut po” it’s initial letters are af it’s one of the allusions of this word “af.” On the one hand “af” separates all of the worlds beginning with Atzilut, from Asiyah, making it possible in this world to disbelieve, based upon rational considerations, but at the same time, that very word af has the potential to draw down a sense of continual re-creation into the very lowest world of materialism, which is evolution. If you take an evolution text book, like the one I’m holding here, it’s neutral, the guy doesn’t say he doesn’t believe in God, but obviously, he is not going to mention God even once. A thousand pages, a lot of words a lot of diagrams, all kinds of equations and a lot of other things. In the index, certainly, God does not appear, I doubt if He appears here even once, unless he starts talking about the philosophical implications of evolution. What does appear throughout this book? Nature. It’s all about nature and natural selection. It’s all about what nature likes and what nature does not like. Usually nature prefers things because they reproduce better, meaning that the species survives better. So things which survive, nature selects and things which are detrimental to the survival of the species, nature doesn’t like, so that’s the whole thing in a nutshell. What would happen if on my computer, every time that the word “nature” appeared I would just change it to “God” throughout the whole book? The book would read exactly the same, there would be absolutely no change in this book whatsoever. Just instead of “nature” it would read “God”. Does that make sense? Is that heresy to say that? For many goyisher religious people, that verges on heresy, because they don’t understand, they don’t know Kabbalah and Chasidut at all. But for us that is great, that is fine, it doesn’t verge on heresy at all, because we are taught, “Elokim bigimatria, hateva”, that God created the world with the Name Elokim and “Elokim” equals “nature” so you can definitely substitute “nature” by “Elokim”. Whether you can substitute “nature” for the Name Havayah, the unique Name of God, Shem Haetzem, that’s another question. To substitute “nature” by the Name “Elokim” is not only fine, it’s even lechatchila, lechatchila ariber.

One of our most important topics tomorrow is going to be how God works both within nature, that’s the principle of mutation, within the individual species, and controls the whole thing from above, that’s the natural selection principle. The same commentary that I mentioned before, the Malbim, he makes it very clear that what happens in nature is just Shem Elokim, which is the soul of nature, and he talks about evolutionary processes, where it’s all Shem Elokim. The sages say that God to the world is like the soul in the body. That idiom or metaphor of God being the soul of the body, is not Shem Havayah, which is transcendent, it is Shem Elokim, which is immanent. The body has a soul, the body is nature as a whole, the universe as a whole, and it is also every species of nature and the inanimate parts of nature – it all has a soul to it. So now we have a more total picture than we had before: before we had three general principles, but we didn’t have evolution there at all now we already have a much greater picture of the story we are trying to build but evolution is an indivisible part of the whole story, it is the consciousness of the world of Asiyah – which is our world, it’s just that there are other worlds – there is the consciousness of the world of Yetzirah which is the awareness of ID, those two go together, because they are vav-hei. There is a very famous sichah of the Rebbe that all of the four worlds something that divides them at every possible juncture. The four worlds themselves correspond to the four general “kingdoms” which are the mineral kingdom, the vegetable kingdom, the animal kingdom and man and there is something that divides the inanimate from all of the three above it, there is something that divides the vegetable and the mineral kingdoms go together whereas the animal and man go together, and there is also another thing that puts all of the three lower kingdoms together and man separate. This is one of the most important sichot which is the very first sichah of the Rebbe that it is recommended to learn: the way to see and to understand the divisions of the worlds which are also the divisions in nature of the inanimate, the mineral kingdom and the vegetable and the animal and man, that at every juncture there is a division, but the gap can also be bridged. That is another very important thing, that the Arizal himself, makes a point and this point comes straight out of evolution theory, that between even the greatest kingdoms of reality there are intermediate beings meaning that there is something inbetween the mineral kingdom and the vegetable kingdom that connects them – the  very basis of evolutionary logic. On the one hand its like a quantum leap, but on the other hand, there do exist intermediates. The most important one is the one that the Arizal postulates to be the intermediate between the animal kingdom and man. What is the intermediate? The monkey, that’s what he says – kof. In the same way he says the intermediate between animal and vegetable he says that there is a - now extinct - species called adnei hasadeh, it’s a vegetable that grows out of the ground but it moves around and even catches like an animal and that’s the intermediate between – it’s obviously an extinct species – we’ll talk a lot about extinction in the continuation because just as new forms is a vital part of evolution, extinction is also a vital part of evolution.

Kohelet begins his twenty-eight “times” with et laledet and et lamut, “a time to be born and a time to die, which for a species means a time to appear and a time to disappear. One of the basic problems with those who grapple with the six days of creation, how can it be explained, if not literally as six actual days, is what is the meaning of vayehi erev, vayehi boker? In long periods of times what meaning can you give to “evening” and “morning”? if they are six days as we know them then we understand what is evening and what is morning, but if a person thinks that these are long periods of time, so what is evening and morning? One of the deepest explanations is that evening means the extinction of previous forms, the disappearance of previous forms and morning means the appearance of new forms on that particular day of creation. So once more, extinction and appearance, one of the things that puzzles evolutionary biologists, that species appear suddenly, we don’t find the missing links and fossils. In the large, that is the greatest problem with evolutionary biology. We find a lot of mutations and natural selection in individual species. That’s where evolutionary biology works, in the laboratory, but we find no evolution whatsoever in nature between species, or orders, or classes or larger taxonomic divisions.

So once more, things disappear, and they appear. The lights go out and then they go on and obviously this process, this is the real way that true evolution works. Just like things appear suddenly, without any fossil records whatsoever for the stages that evolution would require. In the same way things disappear suddenly. It would be really cute to have a few dinosaurs walking around outside on Rechov Keren Hayesod, but they just all disappeared suddenly for some mysterious reason. According to some of the greatest non-believing scientists, the ones that are not so for the total evolutionary premise, this is called the University of Chicago theory, that many, many species and even more than species, disappeared suddenly, not over thousands and billions of years from one to ten years a whole species disappeared. How so? Its called Impact Theory – it’s all because meteors hit the earth and because of the impact, so it caused species to just disappear all at once. So this seems to contradict the principle that everything depends on simple, natural selection. The most important book on this topic is called “Good Genes, or Good Luck?” what does it really depend upon? Does it depend on genes, which is evolution, or is does it depend on luck whether you survive? Of course, the answer is that it’s more luck than genes. That is one of the most important counter-forces and counter-arguments – purely scientifically – against evolution because of sudden disappearance. This is also part of af asitiv, because the world of Asiyah, which is our world... af is harshness we have a lot of harshness in this world, there’s suffering in this world, survival of the fittest, there’s always fighting going on, it’s hard, schver, schver tezeiner a creation in this world, kol shekein schver tezeiner Yid in this world it’s the highest of all in creation. the higher you are the harder it is to get at it. That’s all because of af asitiv. It’s true that it’s schver, it’s not a fallacy. Because of evolutionary processes that do indeed exist in some form or another, we have said that there are many, many limitations, but in some form or manner, evolution does exist in the world of Asiyah. So what we did now is that we did these two visions. Now we will conclude this session with one more short thing.

Physics, chemistry and biology – binah, tevunah aleph, tevunah bet.

Let’s give an example of how evolutionary biologists think. They think about it all and then they decide to prove it. First they think it out, “why does a giraffe have such a long neck?” so the answer is simple, very obvious, that a giraffe at the beginning didn’t have such a long neck, it just had a normal neck but he wanted to get a leaf that was on a high branch of a tree and he couldn’t get it, so he stretched his neck and he stretched it so much that he was able to get it and that caused a mutation and that mutation was inherited in the next generation. But there is no limit to desire, yesh meiah rotzeh matayim, the next generation giraffe was not satisfied with that leaf, he wanted a higher one so he stretched his neck even more and again, there was another mutation and these neck was elongated so this continued from generation to generation, this is called an evolutionary advantage. In evolution there are advantages and disadvantages. So even though having a long neck has loads of disadvantages to it, because lions are after giraffes and giraffe has to drink water so it has to bend his head down to the lake to drink the water and it can’t really see what is going on and it’s hard for him to get up and run away, so even though for survival purposes, having a long neck is a definite disadvantage. For inner purposes, to get to the higher leaves on the trees, so it is an advantage, so a long neck, for a giraffe has its plusses and its minuses. This is a classic example of how these people think. How do they really think? These people are fantasists. All biologists are, but especially evolutionary biologists. Evolutionary biologist could have been a film writer if he chose a different field, because, once more, to be in evolution is to give voice to fantasies of the imagination and then to try  to prove them so actually it’s a lot of fun if you get into it. The story of the giraffe is perfect for a drama script. You see this giraffe that doesn’t yet have a long neck then little by little, over the generations, his neck grows. It’s a great story for kids because it has tons of imagination to it; it’s full of fantasy! Just once more, they take it seriously of course, they believe in it they prove it at least they think they prove it. They think that this is the way nature works, i.e. God Shem Elokim, maybe He does work in this way.

Just one more point in this session, what’s called the hard sciences, there are three basic levels that correspond to three partzufim (this is something that we won’t explain, but mathematics corresponds to mochin of abba, tefillin of Rabeinu Tam, whereas all of the natural sciences correspond to mochin de’imma). Mochin de’imma has three partzufim, three personae or figures in the terminology of Kabbalah. The more mathematical that the science is, the more exact it is. Biology is the least mathematical of all the sciences it is mathematics but that is not its “thing”. It is more literary. It has philosophy to it and it has imagination to it – physics is obviously the closest to mathematics, then comes chemistry and then comes biology. In this order, these three disciplines correspond to the three partzufim that Kabbalah describes of binah, the three mother partzufim. Binah ila’ah is physics – we’re not going to explain this too much – and there are two levels of tevunah. In the Torah, in Hebrew there are two words for understanding, binah and tevunah. The simple differentiation between the two is that binah means “to grasp” a lightening flash of wisdom, and tevunah is the ability to integrate it. In Hebrew its called tfisah and klitah. To grasp the idea is to catch it, to “get” it, that’s binah, and then to bring it down into my psyche, into my heart, that is tevunah, integration, klitah. But in tevunah itself there are two levels, called tevunah alef and tevunah bet. The essence of binah corresponds to the discipline of physics, the first tevunah corresponds to the discipline of chemistry and the second tevunah, the lower tevunah, corresponds to biology. Now, why is this so important? Because in Chassidut it is explained that from the malchut of that lower binah comes what is called in the terminology of Torah and Chassidut koach hamedameh, the power of imagination is identified with the lower tevunah. Meaning that according to this analysis,  biology as a mental endeavor is very closely related, to koach hamedameh. Koach hamedameh can become the yetzer hara, Rebbe Nachman of Breslav makes a big point about it, for him the yetzer hara is the finest koach hamedameh. On the other hand, if the koach hamedameh is rectified, it becomes the source of prophecy uveyad haneviim adameh. So really what true biology is all about is rectifying the koach hamedameh. And that’s why there is so much imaginary and fantasy energy. What did biologists do before Darwin? They had a real hard time, they were really miskenim, because they could only classify species, it was really boring. Before Darwin, biology was the most boring subject that you could find, because it was pure classification, it’s called taxonomy, which itself has seven levels, which correspond to the seven lower sefirot – we’ll talk about that. Something had to come about to whet the imagination to make it become a little bit more interesting than classifying animals and species, that’s why evolution is the most beloved domain in science, because more than any other scientific theory – it doesn’t matter whether it is true or false, because in imagination it’s not really so important whether it is true or false – it’s the most inviting and inspiring theory to the sense of imagination in the mind. On the one hand, that is the whole problem that these scientists are so stubborn that they won’t take real evidence of falsification, they just won’t accept it, on the other hand, what we are trying to do in these three days, is to explain that there is something to evolution, it’s not just all false, because fantasy is also not just all false. Fantasy requires beirur, that’s why, more than any other science, this science requires beirur. This beirur is the beirur of our world of Asiyah of the af asitiv. That’s what we are trying to do. That’s what we’ll see, especially after the third day iy”H, the day after tomorrow, when we get to real evolutionary theory, we will see this point very, very strongly. We will see how imagination works – it’s very profound - it’s like the greatest genius film maker in the world. How that genius works and how that can be rectified and how that can be used in kedushah.