Wednesday, February 16, 2011

A Creation Theology for a Post-Darwinian Age

Are you, like me, someone who has difficulty imagining God as the "Old Man in the Sky?" Do the prayers of the siddur not connect with your view of the universe? Do you have trouble reconciling the Creation story with what we know about fossils and Carbon 14 dating?

Click here for a lecture by Rabbi Arthur Green, also available for downloading on iTunes or here.

This talk summarizes the themes of Green's important new book, "Radical Judaism," explaining why religion remains relevant at a time when evolution and Biblical criticism havae been accepted as fact. Religion and modern science need not be seen as enemies. While there are still a few holdouts who believe that the world was actually created 5771 years ago (e.g. the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who said "If you are still troubled by the theory of evolution, I can tell you without fear of contradiction that it has not a shred of evidence to support it"), Green posits a dynamic, new way of looking at Creation and God, enabling us to interpret the narrative of Genesis in a whole new light, taking 20th century theologians like Heschel and Kaplan into our 21st century world of multicultural fusion and universal connectivity. If you are looking for an authentically Jewish vision for the religious skeptic, this one is it.

In December about a dozen of us discussed the first chapter of Green's book, and I quoted from it several times over the High Holidays. At some point over the next several weeks, I hope to continue the conversation.

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