A nuclear physicist clarifies some of the most commonly asked questions about the Jewish approach to science.
As the author of three books on cosmology and Bible, I've been a frequent guest on radio and TV programs -- Jewish, Christian and secular. Most questions relate to the perceived conflict between science and the Bible.
Here are the most frequently asked questions, and the answers I give "while standing on one foot." For the two-footed answers, refer to my books, "Genesis and the Big Bang" (Bantam Doubleday), "The Science of God" (Free Press) and "The Hidden Face of God" (Free Press).
- Was there a beginning to our universe?
In a 1959 survey among leading American scientists, two thirds believed that the universe had no beginning. It was eternal, they said, repeating the 2,400-year-old teachings of Plato and Aristotle.
Only in 1965, with Penzias and Wilson's discovery of the radiation remnant of the Big Bang, did that basic premise change. Science had discovered the echo of our creation, and in so doing had validated the opening phrase of the Bible.
Yes, there was an "In the beginning" (Genesis 1:1) to our universe. The overwhelming scientific evidence is that some 15 billion years ago, time/space/matter and the laws of nature that make up our universe came into being from what appears to be absolute nothingness.
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- How could the world be created in six days?
The first chapter of Genesis recounts, day by day, the key events of the six days of creation. But the sun does not appear until day number four. All the Sages say that the term "day" refers to a duration of time, and that duration was 24 hours, regardless of whether or not there was a sun.
Those first six days, the Sages say, "were no longer than the six days of our work week, but they contained all the ages and all the secrets of the universe."
Days containing "ages" sounds strange. Nevertheless, that is what we twice read in Genesis: "These are the generation of the heavens and the earth, when they were created, in the day that God made heaven and earth" (Genesis 2:4). And again "This is the book of the generations of Adam, in the day that God created Adam" (Genesis 5:1).
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| It took an Einstein to discover how "ages" could be squeezed into a day. | |
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It took an Einstein to discover how "ages" could be squeezed into a day. The laws of relativity taught the world that the passage of time and the perception of time's flow varies from place to place in our most amazing universe. One minute on the sun passes more slowly. The duration -- between the ticks of a clock, the beats of a heart, the time to ripen oranges -- stretches and shrinks.
Wherever you are, time seems normal, because your body is in tune with your local environment. Only when looking across boundaries from one location relative to another very different location can we observe the relativity of time.
If you cannot understand how this can be, do not despair. Most of the 5 billion inhabitants of planet Earth are in a similar quandary.
We look back in time, studying the history of the universe. From our vantage we find, correctly, that billions of years have passed. But the Sages told us that the Bible sees the six days of Genesis looking forward from the beginning.
Viewing the six days from that beginning holds the answer to how our generations fit into those days.
The universe we live in is not static. It is expanding. The space of the universe is actually stretching. If we took a mental trip back in time, sending our information back to the moment from which Genesis views time, the effect of our mental trip would be to pass to a time when the universe was vastly smaller, in fact a million-million times smaller than it is today. Space would have shrunk a million-millionfold.
This huge compression of space would equally compress the perception of time for any series of events. That's because as the string of information that described those events traveled back in time, the space through which it was passing was shrinking, squeezing the data ever closer together.
To calculate the effect of that million-million compression, divide the 15 billion years we observe looking back in time by the million-million.
You get six days. Which of course is just what the first chapter of Genesis has been claiming for the past 3,300 years. Genesis and science tell the same account, but seen from vastly different perspectives.
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- Has the Bible missed on evolution?
The Bible is well aware of evolution, although it is not very interested in the details of the process. All of animal evolution gets a mere seven sentences (Genesis 1:20-26). Genesis tells us that simple aquatic animals were followed by land animals, mammals, and finally humans.
That is also what the fossil record tells us, albeit with much more detail than these few biblical verses provide. The Bible makes no claims as to what drove the development of life, and science has yet to provide the answer.
In paleontology's record of evolution, first came the discovery that life appeared on Earth almost 4 billion years ago, immediately after the molten globe had cooled sufficiently for liquid water to form. This contradicted totally the theory of gradual evolution over billions of years in some nutrient-rich pool. The rapid origin of life remains a mystery.
Then we learned that some 550 million years ago, in what is known as the Cambrian explosion, animals with optically perfect eyes, gills, limbs with joints, mouths and intestines burst upon the fossil scene with not a clue in older fossils as to how they evolved. It is no wonder that Darwin, in his "Origin of the Species," repeatedly implored his readers (seven times by my count) to ignore the fossil record if they were to understand his theory.
The overwhelming weight of evidence tells us that something exotic certainly happened to produce life as we know it.
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- If God is omnipotent and merciful as the Bible claims, why do bad things happen to good people?
It is true, notwithstanding the bad we occasionally see around us, that the God of the Bible is described as merciful and long-suffering, filled with righteousness and truth (Exodus 34:6). Equally confounding, at the end of the Six Days of Creation, we are told that God saw all that was done and "behold it was very good" (Genesis 1:31). Not just good, but very good.
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| The same God that streaks the sky with a rainbow must be connected to these horrors. | |
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Still, young children get multiple sclerosis and earthquakes cause buildings to topple and crush the innocent. The same God that streaks the sky with a rainbow of red at sunrise and produces the beauty of a flower must also be connected to these horrors.
Although we may see it as unfortunate, bad things happening to good people is consistent with the biblical description of God's role in the world. By chapter four, Cain has murdered Abel. According to the Bible, Abel was the good guy. God had accepted his special offering while rejecting Cain's run-of-the-mill sacrifice. God had the power to prevent Abel's murder but chose not to.
Isaiah hints at why: "I am the Eternal, there is no other. I make light and create darkness. I make peace and create evil" (Isaiah 45:6,7). God, the infinite source of light, creates darkness by withdrawing some of the light. Similarly God, the infinite source of peace, creates evil by shielding a portion of the peace. The biblical definition of creation is the partial withdrawal of God's presence. God pulls back, and in so doing creates the universe with its laws of nature. For the most part, nature takes its natural course.
Only when events get way off course does the Bible recount that God steps in and overrides nature. A natural-looking world is an essential part of the biblical game plan of life, namely the exercising of our free will. "I call to you witness today the heavens and the earth, I have placed life and death before you, the blessing and the curse. Therefore choose life so that you may live, you and your progeny" (Deut. 30:19).
If humans are to have the will to choose freely, the world must look natural. A natural world has radiation which produces crippling mutations and earthquakes which crush the innocent.
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- If God is omniscient and knows the future, how can we have free will?
God knows the end already. God knows the future, but not as a future. Having created time, God is outside of time. In such a dimension, future, past and present are meaningless. They are all simultaneous. The four-lettered Hebrew name of God, Y/H/V/H, is composed of the letters that spell in Hebrew "I was, I am, I will be." The three tenses fold into one eternal "now."
We, however, live in time. So for us, the future has not yet occurred.
Nature gives a hint of what it means to be outside of time. The laws of relativity have shown us that at the speed of light, time stands still.
To our perception, light travels for eight minutes as it moves from sun to Earth. But if we could move along with the light in its journey, we would record that zero time passed during the flight from sun to Earth.
Here on Earth, being inside of time, those eight minutes afford us the opportunity to choose among a variety of activities. Yet their beginnings and endings would appear as occurring simultaneously from the perspective of the light.
In this sense, although totally outside of human experience and so difficult to comprehend, God knows the ending even at the beginning.