A few years ago, in an Orthodox Jewish school in New Jersey, a teacher told his students that dinosaurs never existed. When a student told the teacher that he and his family had recently visited the Museum of Natural History in New York City and had seen dinosaur bones, the teacher replied: “What you saw were not dinosaur bones, what you saw were dog bones that swelled up in the flood at the time of Noah.”

The literal interpretation of biblical texts leads, in the case of ultra-Orthodox Jewish movements, to deny obvious truths that science has proven. Do we have to deny the existence of dinosaurs because they are not mentioned in Breishit? The Rambam thought quite the opposite. If science has proven beyond a doubt that dinosaurs existed millions of years ago, we have to discard the literal interpretation that insists that the universe is less than six thousand years old. There are scientifically sound and religiously valid interpretations that explain the age of the universe. One of them holds that the six days of creation were not 24-hour periods. Even if we want to be consistent, God created the stars, starting with the Sun, on the fourth day. How can we explain that the first three days of creation had sunrise and sunset if there was no Sun? We have to understand that those periods – days of creation – lasted much longer, perhaps billions of years. This explanation gives enough time for dinosaurs to have existed and become extinct before Adam and Eve were created by God.

Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan recently discovered in the writings of Rabbi Yitzhak of Akko, a 13th-century Kabbalist and student and colleague of Nachmanides, that Rabbi Yitzhak had calculated that the Universe was 15.3 billion years old, based on interpretations of biblical and rabbinical texts. A figure quite close to the 15 billion that scientists attribute to the Big Bang.

Just as it is a mistake to deny scientific discoveries, it is also a mistake to think that science can explain absolutely everything about life and its meaning. Scientists themselves recognize that the more doubts they resolve, the more doubts arise. We know that dinosaurs existed, but until now we do not know the real reason why they disappeared. Only God knows.

By Marcos Gojman

Bibliography: Maimonides, Spinoza and Us, by Rabbi Marc D. Angel.