We live on a planet in a solar system with seven other planets and have discovered thousands of. “Man’s unique identity is in his spiritual soul, not in his physical body and most certainly not in his physical origin. Earths formation remains a strange, scientific mystery. “Classical Judaism has long maintained that man is not qualitatively different from animals in his physical aspects,” the rabbi noted. Genesis describes man’s creation twice, and Rabbi Slifkin emphasized the version in the first chapter of Genesis.Īnd God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him male and female created He them. Then Hashem God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul. We all know that there are those who believe the earth is billions of years old, and there are those who believe the earth is 6000 years old, or so. How old is the Earth Scientists think that the Earth is 4.54 billion years old. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters (Genesis 1:2). It is partly for this reason that creationists reject evolutionary theory. This article comes from the Universe Today archive, but was updated with this spiffy video. Creationism holds that man is distinct from animals, owing to the separate description of his being “formed”. To calculate the date one must first employ the genealogical data given in Genesis, I & II Chronicles, the Gospels, and elsewhere. Torah Judaism also differs from Bible-based Christian creationism on the point of the nature of man. The largest figure Ive ever seen from a trustworthy scholar is approximately 15,000 years, but even this seems to stretch the Biblical data too far. “All these descriptions were interpreted literally by the Sages of old, and yet almost all recent Torah scholars interpret them non-literally.” This is why it makes no difference if the neo-Darwinian explanation of the mechanism for evolution is true or not,” Rabbi Slifkin explained. “God can work through meteorology, through medicine, through history, and through developmental biology. Rabbi Natan Slifkin, General Director of the Biblical Museum of Natural History, in Beit Shemesh, on March 4, 2015.