In a 1992 lecture on Genesis 1, the night of the LA Riots, Dennis Prager makes these points:
“Torah means teacher. The purpose of Biblical text is to teach. The way you understand life will be affected by how you understand Genesis 1. Virtually every theme in life is covered — male-female relations, the way we should look at our parents, the purpose of life, how should we treat nature, is there a God — it is all there.”
“Science versus religion. I begin with the premise that there can not be a controversy between science and religion. If something is true, then religion can not deny it or it is a false religion.”
“The purpose of Genesis is not to teach science, but to teach the purpose of God.”
“The purpose of Genesis is not to teach you how the world was created.”
“There’s a famous Jewish teaching that the signature of God is truth. You can not suspend your intellect when you come to God.”
“The first sentence teaches us that everything came about by God. Therefore everything has a purpose.”
“God created time.”
“The Jewish people are an ad hoc people. They were formed for a task — bringing the world to God and His moral will.”
“Creationists wish to posit six 24-hour days in God’s creation of the universe because there was day and night before the sun. But it is the sun that gives us days and nights. No sun, no day. It is a divine day, a metaphor, a period, an eon, but it can’t be a 24-hour period. You can’t have a 24-hour day with no sun. It obviously does not mean the day as we know it.”
“I am troubled by creationists because they are fighting the correct battle with the wrong weapons.”
