[Continuing the final chapter of Neil Gillman’s book The Death of Death: Resurrection and Immortality in Jewish Thought; this is an ebook downloadable on the kindle app from amazon.com; reformatted for posting.–Admin1]

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The Theological Argument:  God is more powerful than Death

Ask the typical Jew to describe the nature of God and he or she will immediately tell you that God is omnipotent. No doctrine is more central to popular Jewish religion.  Of course, God can do whatever God wants to do.  That is what makes God, God!  But even a brief glance at the image of God as it emerges in our classic texts will reveal that our ancestors understood God’s omnipotence to be far from absolute.

Read the Bible carefully and the overwhelming impression is of God’s dismal failure in accomplishing God’s central purpose:  The creation of a sacred people who will be unquestioningly loyal to God’s will.  God’s very first interaction with human beings, with Adam and Eve in Eden, is a paradigmatic narrative since Adam and Eve are everybody.  They disobey God’s command with tragic results.  The Bible recapitulates that pattern again and again with the role of Adam and Eve taken up by the people of Israel.  Israel, too, rebels, with equally tragic results.  God tries to re-establish a relationship with Israel, is challenged yet again, and the cycle continues.  The whole is a poignant record of frustration suffused with hope and infinite yearning.

In much of the Bible, the main impediment to the full manifestation of God’s power is human freedom.  That God created human beings free even to rebel against God is never questioned.  Adam and Eve were free to eat the forbidden fruit; Cain to kill his brother; the Israelites to build a golden calf.  God had to live with the fruits of that freedom.  The only significant exception to that rule is Pharaoh.  God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, we are told, so that God’s eventual redemption of Israel would be a striking manifestation of God’s power:

 I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, that I may multiply my signs and marvels in the land of Egypt.  When Pharaoh does not heed you, I will lay My Hand upon Egypt and deliver My ranks, My people the Israelites, from the land of Egypt with extraordinary chastisements.  And the Egyptians will know that I am the Lord . . . .(Exodus 7:3-5)

The Bible goes out of its way to show that God deprived Pharaoh of his freedom to choose to release the Israelites.  That is a clear signal that Pharaoh’s inability to act freely is the exception that proves the rule.

Sometimes God’s power is limited by God’s own commitments.  When God threatens to destroy the Israelites for having built the golden calf, Moses intercedes, pleading that God remember the covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob:

You swore to them by Your Self and said to them:  “I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven, and I will give to your offspring this holy land of which I spoke, to possess forever.” And the Lord renounced the punishment He had planned to bring upon His people.  (Exodus 32:13-14)

In this instance, the limitations on God’s power are not intrinsic, but rather result from God’s decisions about the destiny of Israel.  There is no question that God has ultimate power.  There is also no question that God chose not to exercise that power.

In other texts, the reasons for God’s impotence are far more mysterious.  The author of Psalm 44 has been told (by his ancestors) that in days of old, God had led Israel to victory over its enemies, but in his own day, 

You have rejected and disgraced us; You do not go with our armies, You make us retreat before our foe; our enemies plunder us at will.  You let them devour us like sheep; You disperse us among the nations . . . . You make us a byword among the nations, a laughingstock among the peoples . . . .

The psalmist would understand God’s abandonment of Israel if it had been disloyal to God.  But this is not the case now:  

All this has come upon us, yet we have not forgotten You, or been false to Your covenant . . . . 

Indeed, the very opposite is the case:  

It is for Your sake that we are slain all day long, that we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.  

It is precisely for Israel’s loyalty that it has been persecuted.  Finally, the coda to the psalm:  

Rouse Yourself, why do You sleep, O Lord?  Awaken, do not reject us forever! . . . . Arise and help us, redeem us, as befits Your faithfulness. (44L10ff)

Is Israel’s vulnerability before its enemies a commentary on God’s lack of power?  Or is it a matter of God’s will? There is not explicit answer to this question in the text.  It may be the result of a deliberate decision by God.  But it may also be the result of intrinsic divine impotence, some inherent limitation on God’s power.  That conclusion is certainly the implication of the psalmist’s claim that Israel has not been unfaithful to God.  Why then would God choose to abandon God’s people?  The psalmist is left to wonder, as is the author of Psalm 13:

 How long, O Lord, will You ignore me forever?  How long will You hide Your face from me?  How long will I have cares on my mind, grief in my heart all day?  How long will my enemy have the upper hand? (Psalm 13:2-3)

The setting of this psalm is personal not communal as in Psalm 44.  But the experience of God’s withdrawal is the same.  In neither case is God’s absence a form of punishment.  Indeed, in the first of these, the author insists that Israel suffers not only despite, but paradoxically because of its loyalty to God.

However limited God’s power may be in historical time, it is Judaism’s overwhelming testimony that these limitations will vanish in the Age to Come. The central thrust of Jewish eschatology is that this Age will mark the ultimate manifestation of God’s sovereignty over all creation.  That promise forms the climax of one of the earliest Jewish eschatological visions on record:

 In all of My sacred mount Nothing evil or vile shall be done; For the land shall be filled with devotion to the Lord As water covers the sea. (Isaiah II:9)

A far more elaborate statement of that vision is the concluding paragraph of the Aleinu liturgy which dates from the 2nd century of our era and now is the concluding prayer of every Jewish service of worship.

We therefore hope, Lord our God, soon to behold Your majestic glory, when the abominations will be removed fom the earth and the false gods exterminated; when the world will be perfected under the reign of the Almighty, and all mankind will call upon Your name, and all the wicked of the earth will be turned to You.  May all the inhabitants of the world realize and know that to You every knee must bend, every tongue vow allegiance . . . May they all accept the yoke of Your kingdom and reign over them speedily forever and ever.

It is also expressed in the High Holiday Amidah.

Now, Lord our God, put Your awe upon all that You have created . . . . Grant honor to your people, glory to those who revere You, hope to those who seek You . . . . May the righteous see this and rejoice, the upright exult, and the godly delight.  Iniquity shall shut its mouth, wickedness will vanish like smoke, when You will abolish the rule o tyranny from the earth.  You will reign over all whom You have made, You alone, O Lord, on Mount Zion the abode of Your majesty, in Jerusalem Your holy city, as it is written in Your Holy Scriptures, “The Lord will reign forever, Your God O Zion, for all generations.” (Psalm 146:10)

This is the very same impulse that leads the tradition to forecast God’s eschatological triumph over death as well.

The expectation that death itself will eventually die assumes that death was perceived to challenge God’s power manifest in history.  How we understand that expectation depends on how we deal with Judaism’s differing accounts of the origins of death.

Earlier, we reviewed four biblical explanations for the presence of death in the world.  Death may be part of God’s original creation, it may be retribution for Adam and Eve’s disobedience, it may be a trade-off for human self-awareness and our powers of discrimination; or it may represent a remnant of a pagan notion of death as a power that God did not or could not subdue at creation and that persists independently of God’s will and power.

In reverse order, if death is a power that resisted God’s ordering work of creation, it will banish in an age when God’s sovereignty will be complete.  If death is understood as the fruit of the full flowering of our humanity, it becomes one of the many tensions that mark the nature of human life within this age of history, and which will be abolished when history has come to a close.  If death is retribution for sin, it will disappear in an age when loyalty to God will be intuitive on the part of all humanity.

But if death is part of God’s creation from the outset, we find ourselves in more difficulty.  If from the outset, God created us to die, why then the eschatological promise to banish death?

The clue to understanding this paradox lies in the message of Psalm 44 and 13.  Their authors despair at God’s mysterious abandonment of Israel or of the psalmist.  Where is God’s power now? But history is replete with instances of God’s apparent withdrawal, both in the communal sphere and also in the life of individuals.  The psalmists make no attempt to account for God’s withdrawal; they bemoan it and plead for God’s renewed engagement.  The psalms end with a pleas that God’s presence and protection be manifest once again, but also with no explicit assurance that this will, indeed, take place.

That God’s presence is sometimes inexplicably eclipsed is the central paradox of the life of faith.  this is what led Martin Buber to suggest the notion of “moment gods,” and Rabbi Irving Greenberg to write of “moment faiths.”  The immediate context of Greenberg’s discussion is our theological response to the Holocaust.

After Auschwitz, faith means there are times when faith is overcome.  Buber has spoken of “moment gods”; God is known only at the moment when presence and awareness are fused in vital life. This knowledge is interspersed with moments when only natural, self-contained, routine existence is present.  We now have to speak of ‘moment faiths,” moments when the Redeemer and vision of redemption are present, interspersed with times when the flames and smoke of burning children blot out faith—though it flickers again.

For Greenberg, in the light of the Holocaust, the dichotomy of theist and atheist is impossible to maintain.  Instead, faith exists in a dialectic, it is a life response of the whole person to the Presence in life and history.  Like life, this response ebbs and flows.  The difference between the skeptic and the believer is frequency of faith, and not certitude of position.

It is not the Holocaust alone that challenges faith.  History is replete with holocausts, communal and personal.  They represent an enduring challenge to God’s power.  But the believer’s response to that challenge is nourished by the assurance that the dialectic of faith is endemic to our historical situation alone, and that it will be resolved in an age when, in the words of the High Holiday liturgy:

Iniquity shall shut its mouth, wickedness shall vanish like smoke, when You will abolish the rule of tyranny on earth.  You shall reign over all whom You have made, You alone O Lord . . . .

Death may well be an inexplicable part of God’s created world, as inexplicable as the other manifestations of anarchy we see about us.  But if Jewish eschatology views history as moving from chaos to cosmos, then God’s victory over death is part of that broader mythic pattern.

On theological grounds, then, Judaism demands the death of death.  If God is truly God, if God’s will and power are absolute, then God must triumph over death as well.  The death of death marks the final step in the triumph of the monotheistic God.

Next:  The Argument from Anthropology:  I. My Body, II. My Soul

[Continuing the final chapter of Neil Gillman’s book The Death of Death: Resurrection and Immortality in Jewish Thought; this is an ebook downloadable on the kindle app from amazon.com; reformatted for posting; highlights ours.—Admin1].

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Religion and the Afterlife

The impulse to create that broader structure, to knit together the discrete moments of a human life into a pattern of meaning is precisely the function of religion.  Religion, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz reminds us, formulates “conceptions of a general order of existence.”  The operative word here is “order.”  Religion orders our world, discerns patterns in what appears to be anarchy, wrests cosmos out of chaos, sense out of senselessness.

To claim that death is final is to subvert the order that religion imposes on our experience.  And that, too, is our existential claim, one which cannot be supported by rational or empirical data, yet one that even a Sherwin Nuland would agree with.  His entire book, How We Die, attempts to show that death is an indispensable part of the natural order.  But in the light of what we referred to above as the paradox of human experience, to accept the finality of death is to revert to chaos.  Death is the ultimate absurdity, the total annihilation of everything that human life distinctively represents.  That is the basis for John Hick‘s insistence that “any religious understanding of human existence—not merely of one’s own existence but of the life of humanity as a whole—positively requires some kind of immortality belief and would be radically incoherent without it.”

It is not only the fact of death that is incoherent. If death is an integral part of our broader life experience, then it also subverts that as well.  To insist on the finality of death is to condemn the totality of human life to meaninglessness.  Human life cannot be fulfilled here on earth.  We are born and grow into adulthood with hopes and visions, goals and ideals, yet most of us prepare to die with a haunting sense of potentials unfulfilled, aspirations unrealized, relationships unresolved, accounts still not balanced.  Our life-experience is inevitably fragmented.  That pattern lends human life as a whole what Hick calls “a tragic character,” and it leads him to recognize that “if the human potential is to be fulfilled in the lives of individual men and women, those lives must be prolonged far beyond the limits of our present bodily existence.”

This is a singularly modern extension of the impulse which led the author of Daniel to insist that it is the need for retribution that demands a doctrine of resurrection.  In Daniel, retribution was a moral issue:  God had to reward the martyrs of that age for their loyalty and punish the evil-doers for their treachery, if not in their lifetime then in an afterlife.  For us today, retribution is more than a moral issue.  It represents the intuitive sense that since humans are born with an impulse to lead fulfilled lives, God must provide a setting for that fulfillment to be achieved, if not now, then in an afterlife.

The Language of Eschatology

The surest way to trivialize any eschatological doctrine is to understand it as literal truth, as a prediction of events that will take place just as they are described in some eventual future.  That is the fatal flaw in the arguments, both of modern traditionalist and modern liberal Jews.  The former accept it as literally true; the latter reject it because they understand it in the same way.  But is there a middle ground?

I believe there is.  I believe that the most fruitful way of making sense of these teachings is to understand them as part of Judaism’s classic religious myth.

In the first chapter, I suggested several possible definitions of the term “myth.”  I will not recapitulate that discussion here.  Suffice it to say that a myth is a way of connecting discrete experiences so that they form a coherent pattern and acquire meaning.  Myths, then, are not objectively literal descriptions of some reality “out there” beyond the individual.  But neither are they total fictions.  Rather, they are subjective, somewhat imaginative portraits that make it possible for our experience of the world to hang together, to be ordered, and thus, to make sense.

Mythic thinking becomes progressively indispensable the more our experience eludes immediate sense-perception, the further we get from what we can directly perceive.  That is why scientists who investigate the origins of the world, or the ultimate make-up of the material world, or the dynamics of the human psyche revert to myth.  Each of these deals with events or realities that exist “beyond” the range of direct human perception.  It is this elusive “beyondness” of some data that makes it inaccessible to our senses and that demands a different way of thinking and talking that can fulfill our need to understand our world.

Dealing with the “beyond” is intrinsic to religious language.  All religions speak voluminously of God, a reality that, certainly in Judaism, is beyond direct human apprehension.  The same can be said for doctrines of creation, or narratives that describe the founding events of that religion.  That God descended upon a mountaintop and spoke to Moses and the children of Israel is classic myth.  So is the doctrine that God revealed God’s self in the person of Jesus of Nazareth in the first century of the Common Era, that this man was crucified for the sins of humankind, was resurrected on the third day, and will return to judge all humanity.

These are mythic statements precisely because they speak of the “beyond.”  To understand them as literal truths is to trivialize them.  To believe, for example, that God literally came down on Sinai and literally spoke to our ancestors is to commit the sin of idolatry, which, in its purest form, reduces God to a natural/human phenomenon.  People descend and speak, God does not—except in a mythic way.

All eschatology deals with the “beyond,” with events that will take place beyond the range of time, in some other “age” or “world.”  It is simply impossible for human beings to comprehend what this world will look like “after time.”  The very phrase is oxymoronic; there simply is no “after” to time.  Every “after” remains within time.

Eschatology complements our thinking about creation. Together they deal with the beginnings and endings of all things, with the “beyond” before and after.  Thus they provide a frame for the “in between,” which, in classic Jewish religious thinking, is understood as the age of history, the age in which we are now located.  They also provide the broad structure which Jews use to make sense of how everything came to be and how all things will eventually end.  With this pattern in place, we know “where we are” within the broadest perspective of time.  Creation and eschatology provide the frame which gives the portrait integrity. They are properly indispensable.

This book has focused on only one of the many themes that compose Jewish eschatology, the one that deals with the ultimate destiny of the individual human being.  We have seen that during its richest phrase, in the Talmudic era, Judaism proffered two doctrines on this theme.  One taught that, at the end of time, our bodies will be resurrected; the other maintained that a part of us, our “soul,” never dies, but continues in some other sphere under the loving protection of God.  Eventually, these two doctrines were conflated so that, at the end, God will restore our immortal souls to our resurrected bodies.  From the age of the Talmud to the dawn of modernity, most Jews accepted some form of this conflated version.

Both doctrines share the classic characteristics of myth.  We have no direct apprehension of what constitutes a “soul,” nor can anyone speak in literal terms of what will happen to our bodies after they become dust.  Both doctrines take us “beyond” the boundaries of human experience; both strain our normal conceptual faculties and our language.  But the alternatives are not simply uncritical literalism or silence. Our task is to understand how the doctrines function as a way of completing the frame which lends coherence to our life experience here on earth.

There are two core arguments for the indispensability of a doctrine of the afterlife.  

• One is theological, 
  • The theological argument stems from the Jewish understanding of God;
• the other is anthropological.  
  •  the anthropological, from its understanding of the nature of the human being.

[Continued in The Theological Argument:  God is More Powerful than Death]

Image from What If?

[First posted in 2012, part of a series from one book.

This is the final chapter of the MUST READ book earlier recommended, entitled The Death of Death by Neil Gillman. When you read this concluding chapter, you will be curious enough to wish to read more, and hopefully you will secure a copy of this book, it is worth the buy! A post linked to this:

• Revisit: Must Read: The Death of Death
• Revisit: The Afterlife – A Sober Look – 2
• Revisit: The Afterlife – A Sober Look – 3
• Revisit: The Afterlife – A Sober Look – 4

Reformatted for posting; highlighting ours.—Admin1]

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Chapter X:  What do I believe?

MOST OF THIS book has reviewed Jewish teachings on the afterlife from the Bible to our own day.  The tone was deliberately dispassionate; our goal was to study the most significant Jewish statements on the afterlife, to come as close as possible to unearthing their literal meaning, and to trace the evolution of the doctrine through the centuries.

That part of our task has been accomplished.  What remains is a very different kind of inquiry.  We now must ask:

• What does all of this mean for us today?
• How are we to understand it?
• What are we to believe?

These questions demand not dispassionate objectivity, but existential testimony.  The believing Jew must present his or her own beliefs about the afterlife as clearly and coherently as possible and argue for their validity.  Others must then determine whether this personal statement works for them as well.

My Data

One of the unexpected results of my delving into this issue has been my growing awareness that the theological and philosophical literature on the afterlife by Jews and non-Jews in the past two decades is simply overwhelming.  No single volume can encompass it all.  Before I proceed to discuss my own conclusions, the reader deserves to know what data I have chosen to ignore—and why.

• First, I have chosen to ignore many of the arguments for and against human immortality that are couched in the language of academic philosophy and psychology.  These arguments deal with an analysis of how moderns can speak meaningfully of the human soul, its possible relationship or non-relationship with the human body, its origins and its ultimate destiny, and the implications of all of this for notions of bodily resurrection and spiritual immortality.  This kind of argumentation, however interesting it may be in a scholarly setting, assumes a grounding in classical philosophical literature and is difficult to convey to readers without such a background.  It is primarily the intelligent and concerned lay reader that this volume hopes to reach.
• Second, I have chosen, with a much greater sense of guilt, to ignore the literature that finds convincing arguments for immortality in the wide range of experiences commonly denoted as “New Age.”  I concede the value of being open to the entire range of human experience, yet I remain unconvinced by the evidence of parapsychology, near-death experiences, and alleged communications between the dead and the living.  I acknowledge the bias that leads me to be skeptical of these claims. But fortunately for the reader who does not share this skepticism, there is a wealth of easily accessible published material that does take this data seriously.
• Third, I tend to minimize the popular notion that one’s immortality rests in the memories one leaves behind, in the impact of one’s life on friends, family and community, in children and grandchildren, in the institutions one helped build, the students one taught or the books one published.
  • I am fully aware that my identity has been shaped by biological factors that predate me by millennia.  I know that my more immediate ancestors had a decisive impact on my psychological make-up.  I also share a Jewish communal memory that dates back, at least, to the biblical Abraham and Sarah.  Some of those who succeed me on earth will in turn be shaped by who I was, by the life I lived and the values I affirmed.  This is a kind of immortality, and for many, it is quite sufficient.
  • It is not sufficient for me, however, largely because this view does not acknowledge my concrete individuality as I experience during my life here on earth.  According to the view that my immortality is fulfilled through succeeding generations, my immortality merges with that of the countless others who share in shaping the identity of those who follow us.  Judaism, on the other hand provides me with a doctrine of the afterlife that affirms that despite the influence on me of countless others, I remain a totally distinct and individualized human being.  It is precisely this individualized existence that is most precious to God and that God will preserve for eternity.  We shall quote below, the claim of the Mishnah that though we are all shaped in the image of the single person that God created at the outset, each of us is different from the other.  Each of us can say:  “For my sake was the world created.”  Moreover, when that individual person dies, he or she dies, and there will never be another precisely like him or her.  The burning question remains:  Is that death the final word on the destiny of that individual?  Judaism argues that it is not, and I agree.
  • I will reconstruct a Jewish understanding of the afterlife out of our classical sources, but one that is also congruent with our contemporary understanding of religious thinking and language.  Also, in much of what follows, I will be drawing on the work of the contemporary thinkers that I discussed in the previous chapter.

The Reality of Death

To deal with the question of the afterlife means, first of all, to accept the reality of death.  This may appear incongruous because, at least in the popular imagination, notions of an afterlife seem to be designed precisely to challenge the reality fo death.  Not so!  The very opposite is the case.  What doctrines of the afterlife do challenge is the finality of death, the view that death represents the end point of our individual destiny and of our individual relationship with God, not its reality.  The distinction between the reality of death and its finality may be subtle, but it is crucial.  It may even be argued that until we have fully accepted the fact that our death is real, there is no reason for us to even consider whether or not we have an afterlife.

Note that even scientists such as Dr. Sherwin Nuland (whose thinking we discussed in the first chapter) accept the reality of death, while rejecting its finality.  They believe that, like plants and animals, all humans live on in the broader ecosystem:  We die . . . so that others may live.  The tragedy of a single individual becomes, in the balance of natural things, the triumph of ongoing life.

I will never appreciate the full power of what Judaism says about my afterlife until I fully accept the fact if my death.  Not simply death in the abstract, not my all-too-human mortality, not simply the acknowledgement that all living things must eventually die, but precisely my death in all its painful concreteness.  If I never really die why worry about an afterlife?  It is precisely because I live daily with an impending awareness that I will soon live no more that the question of what will happen to me after I die presses upon me.  And that it does so with increasing urgency the closer I come to the end of my days.

All living things eventually die, but only human beings live with the awareness of their death.  This is the terrifying paradox at the heart of human existence:  We are animals who are yet conscious of our animal nature.  We live an animal-like existence:  We eat, drink and mate.  Yet, we have self-consciousness.  We are aware of our bodily functions and can control them.  And we think, value and feel.  We are capable of love and generosity, guilt and despair.  We can search the mysteries of nature and create great art.  We can even spin theories about our afterlife (as I am doing right now).  Yet we die the death of animals.

William James calls death “the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight.”  The fact that we can die, that we can be ill at all, is what perplexes us . . . . We need a life not correlated with death, a health not liable to illness, a kind of good that will not perish, a good that flies beyond the Goods of nature.

To live with the constant awareness of that paradox is well nigh impossible, which is why most of us work desperately to deny it.  But such denial is increasingly difficult to maintain, as we age or become mortally ill.

How i deal with my death is crucial to how I deal with my life.  That is what lends the issue of my afterlife even greater urgency.  Discussing the afterlife is not simply determining what will happen to me in some indefinite future; it affects how I live today.  If my death is an integral part of the larger reality which constitutes my life, then to deal with my life demands that I deal with my death.  Of course, I can also avoid the larger issue of my life’s meaning; most of us do.  But one who is not satisfied with simply living day by day without a broader purpose, without a sense of what it means to live as a human being, or of how a human life-experience coheres and acquires significance, will eventually have to confront his or her death and integrate that fact into the broader structure that constitutes the life that one is living.

No more than any other human being do I know what will happen to me after I die.  But what I believe will happen to me after I die affects how I lead my life today.  That is why the issue of my afterlife presses upon me now.

[Next:  Religion and the Afterlife]

Image from www.pinterest.com

[First posted 2012, reposted 2015.

“The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom” —Admin1]

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If there is one book that encourages the narrow-minded to expand his mental horizons, this is one such.  Scientists usually turn atheist but not Gerald Schroeder who has authored other books that reinforce man’s belief in Intelligent Design through the mind-boggling marvels of the Designer’s created universe:

• Genesis and the Big Bang: The Discovery of Harmony Between Modern Science and the Bible; 
• The Hidden Face of God:  How Science Reveals the Ultimate Truth; 
• God According to God: A Physicist Proves We’ve Been Wrong About God All Along.

Through his books, we view God’s creation through a scientist’s eyes; it’s like changing our myopic reading glasses into the Hubble space telescope, or is that an already antiquated viewing instrument these days of google earth?  Best of all, even if our minds cannot fully grasp the concepts, we get a tutorial on how the Divine creative process might have progressed according to scientific research, with a better understanding of the Genesis 6 days.  To Schroeder, Science validates the biblical account.

The author’s dedication:  

“To my wife and children, 

who asked the many hard questions,

and to those rare scientists and theologians

who admit that the questions exist.”

He opens with 2 quotations that set the tone, specifically what to expect from this book:

 The heavens speak of the Creator’s glory

and the sky proclaims God’s handiwork.

—Psalms 19:2

The only path to knowing God is through the study of science—for that reason the Bible opens with a description of the creation. -Maimonides, GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED (1190)

Image from amazon.com

Book Description/Publication Date: June 16, 2009

For the readers of The Language of God, another instant classic from “a sophisticated and original scholar” (Kirkus Reviews) that disputes the idea that science is contrary to religion.

 

In The Science of God, distinguished physicist and Biblical scholar Gerald L. Schroeder demonstrates the surprising parallels between a variety of Biblical teachings and the findings of biochemists, paleontologists, astrophysicists, and quantum physicists.

 

In a brilliant and wide-ranging discussion of key topics that have divided science and religion—

• free will, 
• the development of the universe, 
• the origin of life, 
• and the origin of man

—Schroeder argues that the latest science and a close reading of the Bible are not just compatible but interdependent.

 

This timely reissue of The Science of God features a brand-new preface by Schroeder and a compelling appendix that addresses the highly publicized experiment in 2008 in which scientists attempted to re-create the chemical composition of the cosmos immediately after the Big Bang. It also details Schroeder’s lucid explanations of complex scientific and religious concepts, such as—

• the theory of relativity, 
• the passage of time, 
• and the definitions of crucial Hebrew words in the Bible. 

Religious skeptics, Biblical literalists, scientists, students, and physicists alike will be riveted by Schroeder’s remarkable contribution to the raging debate between science and religion.

 

CONTENTS

• Has Science replaced the Bible? The Great Debate
• The New Convergence:  Science, Scientists, and the Bible
• The Age of our Universe:  Six Days and Fifteen Billion Years
• The Six Days of Genesis
• The Nature of God:  Biblical Expectations for an Infinite yet Immanent Creator
• Life:  Its Origins and Its Evolution
• Evolution:  Statistics Versus Random Mutations
• The Watchmaker and the Watch
• The Origin of Humankind
• The Science of Free Will]
• Why Band (and Good) Things Happen
• Bread from the Earth:  A Universe Tuned for Life
• Epilogue:  Well, What about Dinosaurs?

 

Even the Appendix is inviting:

• Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) as a Universal Clock
• Problems in Estimating the Age of the Universe
• The Logic of Having a Biblical Calendar
• The Long Life Spans at the Time of Adam and Eve
• Genesis Day Three
• The Flood at the Time of Noah
• A Letter and a Reply:  Why God and the God Particles are NOT at Odds
• What is the Wisdom of Creation?

 

While we’d like to type out the whole book, we will only share the PREFACE and hope your curiosity is piqued enough to get a copy, it is worth the read.  [Kindle edition downloadable from amazon.com]

 

P R E F A C E

 

In Moses Maimonides’ seminal work, Guide for the Perplexed (1190), the philosopher-theologian summarized what in his opinion was the only path to understanding God’s actions in this world. “We need to form a conception of the existence of the Creator according to our abilities. That is we must have knowledge of madah Elokut (madah meaning ‘the science of’ and Elokut meaning God), the Science of God, which can only be acquired after a study of madah teva (teva being the Hebrew word for nature), the science of nature. For the science of nature is closely related to the science of God and must precede it in the course of study. For that reason God commenced the Bible with a description of creation.”

 

The science of God is what we seek in this book. We’ll study nature, especially as it coincides with the Bible—primarily Genesis, chapter one. Both nature and the inner meanings of the biblical story are multifaceted and complex, but two sources of knowledge will suffice: the discoveries of modern science and the commentaries of the ancient sages who reached beyond the superficial meanings of the text. Limiting ourselves to ancient commentators eliminates the possibility of text deliberately bent to match today’s scientific understanding of the world.

 

To understand in depth the significance of any one passage of the Bible, it is assumed that the reader knows the entire Bible thoroughly. In the context of this book, it means being acquainted with all 187 chapters of the Five Books of Moses, the Torah. The often misunderstood demand for “an eye for an eye” (Ex. 21:24) sounds brutal or at least highly primitive. When read in context with later elaborations (Lev. 24:17 and Num. 35:30, 31), however, eye for an eye, tooth for tooth, and burn for burn describe monetary compensations in accord with the context of the wound. Only  for murder is there no compensation since all life is of supreme value. The revolution in this very ancient code is that the law was the same for citizen and for stranger (Lev. 24:22). In fact, this passage signifies that dawn had broken over the darkness of the pagan world.

 

Similarly, when Genesis chapter one, the “creation” chapter, records a six-day period from the creation of the universe to the creation of the soul of Adam (Gen. 1:27), this seems a totally naïve understanding of the universe and its age, let alone the origin of humans. As we will discover, the ancient scholars were anything but naïve. Commentators’ rigorous study of the wording of Genesis’s opening chapters neatly folds the multiple of billions of years into six twenty-four-hour days, even as the days remain twenty-four hours long and the years remain 365 days long.

 

A simplistic reading of the Torah places our human origins at less than six thousand years in the past. Yet fossils of Homo sapiens extend back sixty thousand years. Neither source of knowledge need alter its view. Nahmanides, seven hundred years ago, Maimonides over eight hundred years ago, and the Talmud, dating back some sixteen hundred years, discuss the existence of beings living before and alongside Adam. They were described as human in shape and intelligence but lacking the soul, the neshama, to make them human. There is no trickery here.

 

The problem that so many of us have with a host of issues that touch on both the Bible and science—dinosaurs, prehuman humans or hominids, the age of the universe—is that our understanding of the Bible is often one gained as children. Yet our scientific understanding grows—even if we only get that science from newspapers of the Web. Obviously when the Bible is juxtaposed with science, it seems simplistic. We intend, at least in part, to correct that error.

 

Why would God have described our cosmic history in the Bible in terms that seem to contradict the workings of the universe? The Bible was as accountable to its earliest audience, a largely uneducated population of recently freed slaves, as it would be to scholars through the ages. So it works on a number of levels and is filled with subtle hints of much deeper truths confirmed by the underlying truths of nature.

 

When we look at the vast variety of life we wonder why a Creator would bother: who needs this fantastic web of life? The earth’s ecology would balance just as well without multicolored fish off the coasts of Eilat Akaba. It’s almost as if God had given nature the opportunity to invent itself. This is very nearly the case.

 

God, speaking through the prophet Isaiah, informs us that in the act of creation, He willingly withdraws a portion of Divine control and allows events to proceed unhindered. Humans call it free will. When events veer too far off the desired course, God steps in and redirects the way.

 

Noah’s flood is a classic biblical example of God pressing the reset button on society. Was the demise of the dinosaurs, 65 million years before Adam in our time perspective, a Divine resetting of the earth’s ecology?

 

God runs this world, our world, as the Divine perspective sees fit. Hence we are told explicitly,

 I will be that which I will be . . .

 (Ex. 3:14).  

 

The God of the Bible is a dynamic Force, known by Its acts, not the static God described by the erroneous translation of King James, I am that I am. We cannot pigeonhole God, as God told Job. There are aspects of the Divine that we can never rationalize.

 

These limits not withstanding, the opening word of Genesis, Be’rai’sheet, the very first word of the Bible, contains meaning far beyond the simplistic “In the beginning” or “With a beginning” or “From a beginning.” In 1090, Rashi, commentator par excellence, gave us the actual meaning of that evocative opening. Based on the Jerusalem translation of the Bible from Hebrew to Aramaic, some two millennia ago, Rashi quotes from Proverbs 8:

 

“I am wisdom….

God made me as the beginning of his way,

the first of his works of old.”

 

Image from www.theencouragementhaven.com

The first of the creations was not the big bang creation of our universe. The first Divine creation was wisdom. And from that Divine source, the physical universe emerged. The evocative opening sentence of Genesis is best translated.

 

“With wisdom of God created the heavens and the earth.”

 

Wisdom is the substrate of all existence and is found in its every aspect.

 

Let’s use what we can of the wisdom to explore the workings of God in our magnificent universe. That is the science of God.

 

GERALD SCHROEDER, AUGUST 2008