Back Pain and Toothache

Is evolution heresy or a boon to theology?

Recently I received an email from someone who wanted help with responding to a kid (not his) with problematic theological views. The kid had told him that his back pain was because of his evolutionary origins. The person asked the kid if he thinks that we came from monkeys and the kid said yes. Yet the Torah, this person pointed out, says that God created man, not monkeys!

I think that the person was a little dismayed when I responded by saying that the kid was correct.

When we say a bracha on bread, we say Hamotzi lechem min ha-aretz, that “Hashem took the bread out of the ground.” That doesn’t mean that Hashem plucked a loaf of bread out of the ground. It means that He made a world that could produce bread. The same goes for the description of the creation of man.

Furthermore, note how in the Torah, man is created on the same day as animals. Why can’t we get our own day? The Rishonim explain that the point is that man began as an animal, with the potential to rise above that status.

But it’s not just that the Torah can be reconciled with man having evolved from an ancestor in the monkey family. It’s that evolution actually solves a serious theological difficulty.

Back pain is not just a medical problem, it’s a theological problem. Lower back pain is the leading cause of disability worldwide. Over 80% of people experience it during their lifetime. It causes more people to leave the workforce than any other chronic condition.

Now, if you believe that God designed man from scratch with Infinite Wisdom and a perfect design, how do you account for this very widespread defect? It’s a problem.

But if God used a different system for creating life, then it’s not a defect; it’s merely an inherent limitation of an extraordinary system of “creative wisdom,” as Rav Hirsch refers to evolution. It would be just like Lego models have little bumps all over them and can break - this does not detract from them, but rather is an inherent limitation of the wonder of creating things from Lego.

So, too, when you have extraordinary laws of nature that can transform energy into matter and into life and into the incredible diversity of species on this planet, the inherent limitation is that creatures are bound by the forms from which they developed. A land mammal can evolve into a whale, but it will have to come back to the surface to breathe. And a quadruped can evolve into a biped, but there will eventually be strain on the lower back.

Over the last few days I’ve been suffering from terrible toothache. Today I’m off to have an impacted wisdom tooth removed, which my dentist suspects to be the cause of my pain. When I told my 89-year-old mother, bless her, she asked me why God made us with wisdom teeth, which have no benefit and cause so much pain. I replied, “Because we evolved from ape-men with much larger jaws, for whom wisdom teeth were functional.”

“Oh,“ she replied.

She wasn’t happy with my answer. I remember when at the launch of my book on this topic, The Challenge of Creation: Judaism’s Encounter with Science, Cosmology, and Evolution, my mother was absolutely horrified to discover that the book was about accepting evolution. Eventually, she decided that she would have to find a way to not let it get in the way of her love for her son:

“Natan,” she said, “If you want to believe that you are descended from monkeys, fine. But don’t tell me that I am.”

My book The Challenge Of Creation is currently on sale from the museum website - click here for US/international shipping and here for Israel shipping.