By the Grace of G-d
8th Day of Chanukah, 5726
Brooklyn, N.Y
Mr. ...
Silver Springs, Md. 20901
Greeting and Blessing:
I am in receipt of your letter in which you ask a number of questions having to do with the Torah, “evolution,” etc.
Needless to say, it is impossible in a single letter to go into all those questions, nor is correspondence altogether the best medium to discuss such matters. As a matter of fact it is not even necessary inasmuch as there are many printed seforim wherein some of the questions are discussed. Among them I suggest you read Dr. S.B. Ullman’s book mentioned below.
In order not to leave you without any answer at all, I can give you here a general principle which can basically answer all your questions. I put it to you on the basis of my study at the University of Berlin and subsequently at Paris. I am referring to the empirical approach which is the basis of all branches of modern science. What I mean by referring to my university studies is that I merely wanted to verify this principle insofar as the professors are concerned, and I found them unanimously agreed on the following:
All deductions made on the basis of experiments in order to predict the behavior of things under certain circumstances are only a matter of probability and are not considered as absolutely certain. Moreover, if on the basis of deductions relating to conditions as we now find them we wish to infer what conditions might have been hundreds of years or more in the past, the results must be considered even with a lesser degree of probability. Therefore, inferences made from conditions today as to conditions that might have existed thousands of years ago have no scientific value and cannot be scientifically verified to have actually existed that way. All such theories must be regarded from what they are, namely working theories, or some hypothetical explanations in the absence of better ones. By way of example, if you want to find oil deposits in the soil, we look for likely places on the basis of a hypothesis which suggests how oil deposits were formed in the soil. Without this explanation, it would be impossible to make even the first start. Incidentally, this method is not always a sure guarantee of success, as is well known.
A further point. It is significant, and this too contains an answer to your questions, that direct historical evidence, either in the form of writing or pottery and the like, which can be dated with certainty, which has been unearthed so far, has never been older than six thousand years. In other words, nothing has been found which definitely points to human civilization beyond this said date approximately. At the same time we have massive evidence which is younger. All the so-called evidence which you cite, which are purported to be ten thousand years old or more, are derived from calculations based on various theories or hypotheses, which in themselves are not accepted as absolute truth, and are used only as working theories in the absence of better ones. I say in the absence of better ones because the scientists do not wish to accept the Biblical explanations by reason of it being too simple...
