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Sorry, Sarah, and sorry Larry, faulty premise to this piece. Why not just stick to the basic naarative and let time and science work out the kinks?

Kushner’s question is - How could God create light on the first day, but the sources of light on the fourth day? Even human of thousands of years ago wouldn’t make that mistake! Right? Wrong! The Midrash and Zohar and all that are very cool, but REAL SCIENTISTS have confirmed the literal meaning of the biblical creation account. The original universe was bathed in an even light independant of any point sources.

A NASA satellite called the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) has been probing and analyzing background microwave radiation for the last five years. Almost immediately it produced this announcement of the earliest light in the universe which lasted for 380 million years, lapsing into a 20 million years Dark Age until the formation of the first stars at 400 million years after the Big Bang. The data have been fine-tuned and corrected for the last five years, and there is a nice diagram here. The site contains animations and simulations too.

Before the WMAP project, only fundamentalist fanatics trusted the Biblical account.

Light (and the wider continuum of the electro-magnetic spectrum) can be defined as organized energy. Every say we begin the morning prayer service with the words “Be worshipped [etc.] fashioner of light and creator of darkness, maker of peace and creator of all.” Leaving the analogy aside for now, this prayer corresponds to the known entities and relationships in the physical universe.

Comment by Ben Plonie on 10/26/08 at 2:32 am

He’s Rabbi Kushner to you, Mr. Ben Phony.

And increasingly know-nothing, pietistic, right-wing Orthodoxy, in which crude ‘creationism’ (a Baptist or at best chassidishe literalism which you could hardly have found in an Orthodox shul twenty years ago) is making serious inroads into much more sophisticated traditional Jewish ideas about how to understand Bereishis; and in which a domineering rabbinism is once more in the ascendant.

http://www.jewcy.com/post/brisket_king

Comment by The Web Guy on 10/26/08 at 3:36 am

No engagement on the point of my post, how disappointing.

My actual point was that while biblical truth is and has always been multilayered, it is unneccessary and spiritually hypocritical to stretch it past the point of breaking with the literal meaning of things. The literal meaning may indeed be more sophisticated or metaphorical than we know at a given time, but that is a defect in our own knowledge and you may call the ‘faith’ aspect just patience and humility. Thus the midrashic and kabbalistic view of primordial light as consciousness are fine as the cherry on top of the creation account but not as an alternative interpretation, and the authors of those works would not have had it any other way. The discovery of actual primordial light ought to be pleasant and satisfying to you ather than threatening.

In the same way, the themes of two centuries of biblical literary criticism and scientific snobbery crash like Saddam Hussein’s statue with amusing regularity to the interested observer.

I don’t believe I have to defend ‘an increasingly know-nothing pietistic right wing Orthodoxy’ any more than you have to defend an increasingly rootless simplistic rejectionist spiritually bigoted left wing anti-Orthodoxy. Why don’t we just say what we think?

Comment by Ben Plonie on 10/26/08 at 4:43 am

And btw The God Blog expesses elsewhere

There was a bit of discussion about just what I heard Rabbi Sharon Brous say ... I found a complete copy of Brous’ sermon ...

Why, I myself have left the honorific off of Rabbi Kahane’s name but I don’t recall you getting excited about it.

Comment by Ben Plonie on 10/26/08 at 4:48 am

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