reading of Genesis. Indeed, modern science allows one to understand the "true literal meaning of the Creation narrative." To Schroeder, it is Einstein's relativity, the "distortion of time facing backwards in a forward rushing cosmos", that accounts for the compression of time in a 15-billion year-old universe into six days of creation. To Schroeder, the emergence of modern man can be dated to the beginning of writing. Archeologists date the first writing, he notes, "at five or six thousand years ago, the exact period that the Bible tells us the soul of Adam, the neshama, was created." To Schroeder, who cites the Targum of Onkelos, Adam was the first man who could write, and the creation of Adam from more primitive man was a divine ensoulment. Judah Landa, a physicist and teacher at, among other institutions, the Yeshiva of Flatbush, takes a completely different approach. To Landa, genetic mutation is not a random process, but a divinely guided one that only appears random to humanity. "Evolution was designed and guided, just as the putting together of words and sentences into book forms is accomplished only by design and guidance. A book is designed by its author, evolution was (and continues to be) designed by the laws of nature (which in turn, were designed, we believe, by God). Where Landa differs from Darwin is in his rejection of the Darwinian notion that evolution has no purpose. Landa does not claim that there is proof of a final purpose for life; he merely asserts that science cannot rule one out. He writes, "God may very well have designed the laws of the universe and the earliest forms of matter and energy with particular life-forms as end-products in mind. Evolution and natural selection may be the vehicles he chose and designed to achieve His purposes." Like Aviezar and Schroeder, Landa reconciles science with the biblical account of Genesis, taken literally, but he does so through literary interpretation. Shai Cherry, Professor of Jewish Thought at Vanderbilt University, remarks that these Modern Orthodox scientists have rejected the approach taken by Jewish theologians. Theologians have tended to use later writings, such as Midrash and Kabbalah, to reconcile modern science with Genesis. The Orthodox scientists, by comparison, have largely ignored Jewish theology, in favor of a fundamentalist and literalist interpretation of Genesis. Yet in their writings, each of them seeks to reconcile science with Genesis. Cherry speculates,