One God of Israel
The Jewish Credo is short but not simple and comes from Deuteronomy 6:4.שׁמע ישׂראל יהוה אלהינו יהוה אחד
Shema Israel, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Ehad
Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.
The is the cornerstone of Monotheism, the faith that there is only one God and not many as in Polytheism. The three great Monotheistic religions are all from the same root, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
The Jewish Credo is also a powerful and difficult to understand statement about the "essence" of the God of Israel, that He actively is One (and not many).
In Judaism, any teaching that "breaks the unity of God" is rejected outright but the definitions and conclusions are often quite subtle.
The One is also an important subject in theoretical Philosophy.
The Hebrew language in the expression in Shema Israel might also be taken in a more understandable and simple sense: the Lord is our God, only the Lord (and nobody else).
Theory of Evolution
When Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882) revolutionised biology with his Origin of the Species (1848) the Theory of Evolution was initially met with strong opposition from scientific and also from religious circles.
The two main points of difficulty were
uniformity principle of Geology established some years earlier by Sir Charles Lyell (1797 - 1875) that his close friend Darwin and other scientists used in dating the history of life. The geological sequences in which key fossils were found demonstrated previously unimagined age of the surface of our planet and the presence of life on it.
There are still today religious Jews and Christians for whom the Biblical genealogies are the only correct chronological tool for dating the history of the universe. Based on calculating years from Adam on by the generations, the religious Christian year 2011 A.D. is year 5762 in the religious Jewish calendar which starts from the Creation of the world.
unique creation of man was shaken by the evolving scientific study of living organisms and species. Not only religious people were deeply offended by the suggestion that humans, the image of God according to the Bible and Koran, could have evolved from apes.
Modern biology does not claim that humans have evolved from apes. It is more accurate to say that humans are apes.
The scientific truth has conquered as it should have conquered and science has a tendency to fix its own errors - sooner or later.
One Life
However, why be so negative and deny facts of Creation?
Let us use the theory of Evolution to defend our faith in God.
For it provides a truly startling viewpoint to the entire history of life that has grown into the fabulous biodiversity of Mesozoic life and to such Cenozoic wonders as one of the largest mammals ever to live on land, the lazy Megatherium that lived some six million years ago slurping the leaves from its victim tree - six meters tall when standing - about the height of three tall men standing on shoulders. (Charles Darwin discovered its skull from the shores of Argentina while on his famous trip on HMS Beagle 1831-1836.)
Wonderful blue planet on orbit around its middle sized star in the big universe, the only place we know to have life. So full of life in fact that even today after five million years we humans have used the powers of domination given to us by God of Israel there still survive many species (yes, I am trying to be sarcastic.)
Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth."
Genesis 1:26
Genesis 1:26
The startling thing suggested to us by modern evolutionary biology is that LIFE IS ONE.
Without going into the details, research on the history of life assumes as the fundamental principle that there was one single point of living something from which all life upon planet earth derives in unbroken succession.
(Of course, this is been discussed. Perhaps there were several starts, as for example, the pansperma model could include: if life first came upon earth on meteorites from space... there may be more than one meteorite bringing life ... perhaps even today! But this only moves the question of single origins back in time to where and when in the hostile early Universe life mysteriously began.)
Yes, the basset, the boa, the birch, the banana, the bird, the bee, the baboon, the baby of a human mother... all from the same single ONE point of origins. One tiny seed of life, so to say.
One universe
The Original Atom theory originally suggested by the Catholic priest and scientist Georges Lemaître (1894 -1966) and called Big Bang by the atheist (?) astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) is one point - if there ever was one!
According to modern Cosmogony the entire Universe, every cloud of dust, every cluster of galaxies, every star with or without planets ... all from the same single ONE point of origins.
One God of Israel
Let us keep all this in mind - one life, one cosmos - when we worship the One God of Israel, and His one and only son, Jesus Christ, Messiah, through whom everything that has existed, exists or will exist has been made!
including you and me.
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P.S.
If you believe that Father is God and Jesus is God and Holy Spirit is God so where is your One God of Israel?
Trinity in One is such a paradoxical claim - solely based on the divine revelation in the Bible - that it must be true!
We could claim that New Testament gives a closer look at the God of Israel than the Old Testament, bringing the Three Persons more visible through the words of Jesus of Nazareth.
While Jews are sticking to the old and do not have a concept of divine Son, we might claim that Islam has a doze of rationalism in the rejection of the ridiculous and even blasphemous idea that God could have a son with a woman.
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