New fundies should behave like old fundies

This week, the newspapers introduced Ida, a 40-million year old fossil, that may provide us with a better understanding of simian and prosimian ancestors. Though not a missing link - there is no such thing - Ida is still good evidence in support of many of the things modern fundies deny, such as evolution, common descent, and the old earth.

One modern fundie - Chaim Bray - enjoys the revocable privilege of posting on this blog, and true to form, he responded to the Ida announcement with fear and foolishness. Instead of acting like a thinking person, and attempting to work out ways to reconcile his thinking with the facts Ida represents, he subjected us all to an elaborate rant about the sitra achra and the hope that some as yet undiscovered Jewsh text might give solutions to all the mysteries (An ironic hope. Would such a book be accepted by his fundamentalist community? Un-bloody-likely)

To me, saying that evolution is a tool of the sitra achra is the same as saying that math is a tool of the sitra achra. To deny that the earth is very old, is to deny the facts.

To your 21st century ears, my view might sound like the view of a secularist or a modern Jew who's moved away from traditional Jewish thought. This is a mistake.

Before Orthodoxy lost its mind and decided to dig in its heels in defense of the indefensible, there were great Orthodox Jewish sages who did what I tell Bray to do. Instead of a throwing a Bray-like orgy of fear and foolishness, these great Orthodox Jewish sages responded to new facts with new thinking. Rather than deny facts, they reinterpreted their received tradition.

The most famous example of this approach is the Tifferes Yisroel, or Rabbi Yisroel Lipshutz, a 19th century who responded to the discovery of a woolly mammoth skeleton with a celebration. His view is recorded in his Drush Ohr HaChaim where he says the the discovery of fossils proves the earth is very olk, a view he subsequently substantiated from the writing of Ramban, Ibn Ezra, famous kabalists and others. Note his response: Faced with the undeniable fact of a very old fossil, Rabbi Lipshutz did not seek to defend the received wisdom. He did not go to war in defense of the young earth. Instead, he adjusted his thinking and reinterpreted the tradition.

There are other examples of mistaken Jewish thinking that was corrected after new facts were accepted. For centuries, Jewish received wisdom said that the earth stood at the center of the universe and insisted the space travel was imposible because the yesod haesh prevented going beyond the atmosphere. Once new facts were established the verses that had supported the erroneous received wisdom were reinterpreted. And there are still other examples.

Has the time has come to follow the Tiferes Yisroel's example and reinterpret verses that seem to indicate a Young Universe or deny Common Descent? Yes. To do otherwise is foolishness informed by fear.

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