Judaism is simplistic and absurdly materialistic in its teachings. The one area where this is not true is the Kabbalah. The cosmology of the Kabbalah is derived mainly from Greek philosophy, and it is fairly sophisticated. The Kabbalah teaches that the universe arose from "primal swirlings" in the "endless nothingness." This nothingness was God, because there is nothing that is outside of God or beyond God, not even nothingness. So God, for some reason that the Jewish Kabbalists do not presume to know, suddenly began to contract his own nothingness and concentrate it down to a single point of light. However, Kabbalists do not say that this point expanded into the universe -- they say that this primal point, which is sometimes referred to as the White Head, contains in itself the entire universe in a potential state. The universe was then articulated by a successive series of emanations from this smooth point, until the world of the elements that we know as reality was achieved. But the emanation took place within the smooth point, not outside of it.
"The currently prevailing scientific view of the beginning of the universe is the big bang model. It refers to the idea that the universe has expanded from a primordial hot and dense initial condition at some finite time in the past. According to this cosmological model the entire universe was compressed and compacted in a microscopic “ball”, which at a given moment exploded. The unimaginable colossal energy that was released by the explosion created all the galaxies including our solar system.
This model, in principle, is compatible with Judaism. All Rabbis agree that the beginning of the universe was a creation from nothing. ..
Judaism accepts all experimentally proven facts and observations of the theory of evolution. Judaism accepts some of the assumptions and interpretations embedded in the theory of evolution, but rejects other assumptions and speculations which contradict fundamental Jewish beliefs...Judaism strongly rejects all the extensions of the theory of evolution beyond natural sciences, which endorse the biological assumption of the “survival of the fittest” in commerce and human societies as a whole by justifying claims of social inequality, sexism, racism, Nazism, eugenics, and other moral-social deviations as “laws of nature”."
"The currently prevailing scientific view of the beginning of the universe is the big bang model. It refers to the idea that the universe has expanded from a primordial hot and dense initial condition at some finite time in the past. According to this cosmological model the entire universe was compressed and compacted in a microscopic “ball”, which at a given moment exploded. The unimaginable colossal energy that was released by the explosion created all the galaxies including our solar system.
This model, in principle, is compatible with Judaism. All Rabbis agree that the beginning of the universe was a creation from nothing. ..
Judaism accepts all experimentally proven facts and observations of the theory of evolution. Judaism accepts some of the assumptions and interpretations embedded in the theory of evolution, but rejects other assumptions and speculations which contradict fundamental Jewish beliefs...Judaism strongly rejects all the extensions of the theory of evolution beyond natural sciences, which endorse the biological assumption of the “survival of the fittest” in commerce and human societies as a whole by justifying claims of social inequality, sexism, racism, Nazism, eugenics, and other moral-social deviations as “laws of nature”."
Judaism is simplistic and absurdly materialistic in its teachings. The one area where this is not true is the Kabbalah. The cosmology of the Kabbalah is derived mainly from Greek philosophy, and it is fairly sophisticated. The Kabbalah teaches that the universe arose from "primal swirlings" in the "endless nothingness." This nothingness was God, because there is nothing that is outside of God or beyond God, not even nothingness. So God, for some reason that the Jewish Kabbalists do not presume to know, suddenly began to contract his own nothingness and concentrate it down to a single point of light. However, Kabbalists do not say that this point expanded into the universe -- they say that this primal point, which is sometimes referred to as the White Head, *contains in itself* the entire universe in a potential state. The universe was then articulated by a successive series of emanations from this smooth point, until the world of the elements that we know as reality was achieved. But the emanation took place within the smooth point, not outside of it.
(post is archived)