9 An Alternative Hypothesis

In the beginning, G-d created the heavens and the earth. In six days.

However, the world at that time, was different in many aspects to the way it is now, although at the same time, many other aspects were similar to today’s reality. As a complete list of the differences would be quite long, and since not all of them are directly related to evolution, I will try to incorporate most of the relevant differences into the general framework.

To create a general framework, I started by looking at the evidence for events present in the historical record that could be understood as mirroring the events recorded by the Torah. At this stage, I will disregard the dates usually attributed to these events, and I will come back and address them at a later stage.

I will tentatively associate the creation of the animals which occurred on the fifth and sixth days, with the fossils found in the layers dating to the late Ediacaran and Cambrian periods (including the Cambrian explosion); the flood during the times of Enosh, mentioned in the Midrash (Sifri, Midrash Rabbah, Mechilta, Tanchuma) to the Permian - Triassic (P-Tr) extinction event; the flood of Noach to the Cretaceous - Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction event; and the spreading of the human population to the different continents around the world, to the evidence of that occurring usually dated to 40,000 years ago.

Based on those associations, and assuming that the level of radioactive decay remained constant during the time before Noach’s flood (although there is no reason why that must be true), then one can calculate that the rate of decay then was many, many times faster than it is today: that for roughly every 300 of our regular years, the record would show around 100 million years. (I recognize that there are major problems with saying that, but again, I will deal with those problems in their proper place.)

I end up with that ratio by assigning the Cambrian explosion, which occurred roughly 600 million years ago, to the Biblical year 1, and the K-Pg extinction event, which occurred about 65 mya, to the year attributed to it in Jewish sources, in year 1656 – which results in (600 – 65) ÷ 1656 x 300 = 96.9 million years. Accordingly, the P-Tr extinction event, which occurred around 250 mya, fits into the lifetime of Enosh, as this date would correspond to around the Biblical year of 1100, and Enosh lived between the years 235 and 1140 according to the Torah. This would also explain why the evidence for the dispersion of the world’s population is found in a period that can no longer be dated by using the argon-argon dating method (or similar methods), which is used to date the earlier events, and is therefore dated to 40,000 years ago by using C-14 dating: since this event occurred according to Jewish sources, over 350 years after Noach’s flood, in the year 1996, the rate of decay had normalized to the current levels that are present today, as it would only take 200 years, more or less, for the 65 million years-worth of radioactive material to decay, given the different conditions that existed in the times before the Mabul which lingered on (likely, to a lesser degree), for some time afterwards.

With the above in mind, it is now possible to reinterpret the Cambrian explosion: when one factors in that people (and animals) lived about 10 times longer than they do currently, which can be inferred from Bereishis chapter 5, and then combines that with the calculation mentioned above, where the rate of radioactive decay in 300 years in those times and those conditions, corresponds to the rate of decay that would take 100 million years in our conditions, one then understands why all of these fossils are found in layers dating between 600 and 500 million years ago. This is not because one organism developed from another through an evolutionary process, as is currently understood. Rather, since for instance, a lion, which currently lives for about 30 years, lived in those times 10 times longer, or 300 years, therefore its fossil is found in a layer that is dated 100 million years after the tiny organisms that are found in the earliest layers of the late Ediacaran (for even if insects lived ten times longer than they live today, their lifespan would still last only a few months or years).

But it gets more complicated.

Besides for the Midrash’s statement that the phenomenon of organisms decaying after their death only started during the times of Enosh, (which in itself, throws a monkey-wrench into the standard understanding that the fossils found in the geological record only represent a tiny fraction of the animals that actually existed, due to the rare conditions needed for fossils to remain preserved), one can argue from the fossil record’s clear indication that animals such as dinosaurs once existed, that when the Midrash recounts that the land animals were interbreeding during those times, that such mixing used to produce viable offspring, unlike in our times. This, firstly, would explain why there are so many fossils found before the K-Pg boundary, as will be explained shortly, as well as allow for a different interpretation for “transitional” fossils, such as the Archaeopteryx: rather than viewing this fossil, which has features similar to both dinosaurs and birds, as the ancestor of the modern-day bird and ancient dinosaurs, it can be seen as the descendant of an even more ancient bird and dinosaur.

But things get even more complicated.

When the Torah describes the Mabul, it uses a very unusual word to describe what precisely was erased: ‘יקום’. The word ‘yekum’ (perhaps translated as ‘existence’?) is a very hard word to translate, and there are Meforshim, such as the Abarbanel, that explain that the intention here is that not only were the people and animals destroyed, but even the houses and other objects were also dissolved into water.

There is a Midrash (Bereishis Rabbah 28), perhaps the source of the Abarbanel's explanation, which echoes a very similar sentiment: on the verse ‘ויאמר ה' אמחה את האדם’ (Bereishis 6:7), Rabbi Yochanan explains that during the Mabul, G-d erased ‘even the dust of Adam (from his grave)’. He learns this from the words ‘אמחה את האדם אשר בראתי – I will erase the man that I created’ i.e. Adam. Now although he doesn’t take things further, I wonder if it is possible to apply that idea to the animals as well, as after all, the continuation of the verse is ‘מאדם עד בהמה עד רמש ועד עוף השמים – from man until animal until crawling creatures until the fowl of the heavens’. Even if I would take that to mean that G-d destroyed even the remains of the animals that had already died, similar to Adam, since however, as Rabbi Yochanan learned it, the stress is on the words ‘אשר בראתי – that I created’, that would only apply to the land animals that were originally created in the first days of creation, and their descendants that came from a “pure” lineage, but not those animals that came from interbreeding, or a “mixed” lineage, as they do not fall under the category of 'that I created'.

This would then explain a number of things – why the first fossils that are found which are similar to the land animals that exist today, are only after the K-Pg boundary; why there are virtually no fossils of land animals in until around 420 mya (the Cambrian exhibits marine fossils); and why the fossils of such animals like the dinosaurs do not cross the K-Pg threshold.

The mammalian fossils found after the K-Pg boundary are similar to the animals that exist today, as they were the animals, or the descendants of the animals, that survived the flood aboard Noach’s ark. They are not found beforehand, even though they existed in earlier times, as all of their remains were destroyed during the Mabul.

The fact that there are virtually no fossils from land organisms that are found until 420 mya, much after the Ediacaran and Cambrian layers, is not because land animals evolved from marine ones – rather, the Silurian and Devonian periods marks the beginning of the period where animals started interbreeding. Therefore, the remains of all of the animals from before that time, which were solely of “pure” lineage, were erased during the Mabul, and the fossil record of marine organisms remained unaffected, as the decree of the Mabul did not apply to them, as clarified by the Meforshim.

And this is also why we find that although dinosaurs existed before Noach’s flood, we do not find them afterwards: since the point of the ark was not to preserve the kinds of every animal that existed in Noach’s generation, but rather to preserve the kinds that were originally created in the six days of creation, therefore, all of the other animals that were from “mixed” lineage were never brought into the ark, and were not preserved. And the sheer abundance of fossils before the K-Pg boundary suggests that the offspring born from interbreeding in those times, were viable, and were able to have further offspring.

Even if one does not accept the way how I’ve applied Rabbi Yochanan’s statement to the animals as well, one can still derive that one has to be very, very cautious when trying to reach conclusions based on the fossil record, as according to Rabbi Yochanan, G-d “tampered” with the evidence.

There are many problems that arise from such an approach, and I will try to address them in the coming pages. I will encourage the reader to look through the answers provided, as there are many ideas mentioned there that provide fuller detail to the general framework laid out here.