Part VI : The Universe as a Thought in the Mind of God
Does science state unequivocally that there exists a physical universe 'outside' our minds? Can science make definite statements about the past states of this 'physical universe'? What parts of our general scientific belief system is actually metaphysics as opposed to science?
Chapter 21a: Solipsism, Existence and Occam's Razor: It may be that the most scientifically correct description of the universe would be as a mental construct. Within such a perspective, free will becomes a more natural concept, and the accounts in Genesis aquire a new interpretation. 6 pages
Chapter 21b: Dreams of Existence: The Universe as Thought: It is not quite so obvious that the universe is fundamentally physical, in fact many scientists have expressed an opposite opinion, as have many mystics. Two thousand years ago a Jewish philosopher understood the creation account in this spirit. 5 pages
Ch 21a: Solipsism, Existence, and Occam's Razor
Introduction
Although it seems quite mad to deny the existence of the physical universe, or the reality of the existence of minds other than our own, modern physics has shown that we cannot always allow our intuition to guide us when presuming to make statements about the ultimate reality of the universe.
There may be also a difference between accepting something as fact, based on intutition, and the expectation that this 'fact' should somehow be demonstrably true, provable.
As is the case in mathematics and logic, where Godel showed that in any formal system there are intuitively true statements which cannot be proven, so analogously we may state that such is the case for reality as a whole - not all statements about reality which are intuitively true are provably true. Furthermore, the quintessential self-referential statements 'the universe exists', 'I exist' are the basis of all further knowledge, yet are themselves known without proof, as shown by Descartes.
That is, some things are obviously true, and one who denies them might be termed mad, yet nevertheless there is no way to actually prove that they are true, such as for example, that the physical universe exists rather than simply being an element of consciousness.
This does not mean that one need reject the truth of such assumptions, but rather one should be aware that although reality is such that all provably true statements about it are consistent, the introduction of unprovable assumptions may introduce the possibility of paradox. Indeed, as we shall see in this chapter, if one limits oneself only to that which can be proven, many of the intractable problems of philosophy disappear. However, this is achieved at the cost of leaving the concepts of existence, time, free will, and their origins - topics fundamental to the creatrion and Eden accounts - undefined scientifically.
Knowledge and Existence
Not all of what people claim to know is actually known directly, and many basic conflicts in philosophy and science arise due to the acceptance of the validity of certain basic assumptions regarding what is known, or even what is 'obviously true'. These problems disappear if we reject these assumptions and work only with that which is directly known.
Much of what people catgorize as knowledge is actually deduction, intuition, inferral and even assumption. What we seem to know of most surely is that we exist, that we are conscious, and that we are not machines acting out a program, but rather that we have a free will (the three topics also forming the underlying theme of the creation and Eden accounts).
To say that we do not exist or that we are not conscious seems meaningless to us, however we can conceive of our feeling of free will as being an illusion, so that we can perhaps imagine restricting our statement of what we know to simply the word 'I', which implies both 'I exist' and 'I am conscious' (reminiscient of, but different than, the formulation of Descartes: "I think therefore I am") without necessarily "I have a free will".
Operationalism
The operational view considers as meaningless any distinctions which cannot in principle be humanly measured or detected, and limits itself to a consideration only of those phenomena which are objectively existent and given to observation or measurement.
For example if God is by definition not physically detectable, operationalism does not include within it any mention of God. Furthermore, since even physical entities such as electrons are detectable only via measuring instruments (because they are so small), operationalism deals more with these measurements than with the electrons themselves.
By formulating everything in terms of what can be directly observed, operationalists hope to avoid the mistakes of scientists and philosophers of the past who made incorrect assumptions without even realizing that they made assumptions at all.
However, in the final analysis of course, all that we measure or observe is filtered via our brain to our consciousness, so that not only do we not see God or electrons, even that which we do see or measure is not directly experienced, but is rather a sensory impression in our minds. As a result, the existence of the physical universe itself is not a matter of direct observation, but rather is inferred or assumed or intuited as a result of events in one's mind.
Consciousness, Sensory Perceptions, and the Physical Universe
Not everything that we are conscious of is an element of the external physical universe. When we dream, our brain originates within itself electrical signals which are interpreted by our minds as sensory impressions, and thus we can experience events which never really occurred. Similarly, the brains of subjects undergoing brain surgery have been electrically stimulated in a way which gave rise to hallucinations in the subjects' minds. In theory, a disembodied brain kept alive by machines could be stimulated electrically to induce in its mind the hallucination that it inhabits an ordinary body, and lives a normal life.
There is therefore no way that we can prove that we are not actually disembodied brains. Indeed, we cannot even prove that there exists a physical universe at all - we may be purely mental beings who are experiencing a dream/hallucination [ for example the hallucination that we are physical brains in a jar, or that we are physical beings possessing a physical brain]. Nevertheless, we generally make the assumption that indeed we do exist within a physical universe, that there exists a universe ''outside us''. This outside universe is however somehow dependent on us for its reality.
In the words of the great physicist Erwin Schrodinger (1958):
"The world is a construct of our sensations, perceptions, memories. It is convenient to regard it as existing objectively on its own. But certainly it does not become manifest by its mere existence. Its becoming manifest is conditional on very special goings on in very special parts of this very world, namely, on certain events that happen in a brain."
All that we experience can be classified as either sensory impressions, emotions, beliefs, thoughts, acts of will, or the like. Of these, we assume that the sensory impressions are responses of our body to actual events in the postulated outside universe. The others we agree are purely mental events. They may arise in response to events in the outside universe, but they are not correlates of events there - they could however be correlates of events in our physical brain. However, at the most basic level, all that we know of, is known via our consciousness.
The great astrophysicist and General Relativist Sir Arthur Eddington expressed this almost poetically:
"Not once in the dim past, but continuously by conscious mind is the miracle of the Creation wrought.
"All through the physical world runs that unknown content, which must surely be the stuff of our consciousness. . . . Where science has progressed the farthest, the mind has but regained from nature that which the mind has put into nature.
"We have found a strange foot-print on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origin. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the foot-print. And Lo! it is our own."
In sum, that which we know of directly is our consciousness and all that it contains, sensory impressions, thoughts, emotions and so on. We have a feeling that some of this content of consciousness is due to an external universe which we are aware of via various senses, and we call these elements of our consciousness "sensory perceptions". Essentially the physical universe is simply our term for what we feel to be the source of these sensory impressions, but our feeling regarding the existence of such an external physical universe can well be an illusion.
Science as an Ordering of Perceptions in Consciousness
Science can seemingly not deal with the mind itself which is experiencing the ''events" it studies, nor with the mental processes which led to the very construction of science. Further, exact science does not deal with those mental events such as emotions, beliefs, and thoughts which are not correlates of outside physical events.
Science is the study of regularities in the events of the outside universe, and therefore it is actually the study of regularities in that subset of our conscious experience which we term "sensory impressions". Science therefore is a study of relations between certain elements in our consciousness, but as we have seen it does not yet deal with all such elements, and it cannot (yet) deal with consciousness itself.
Further, science is not something that is fed to us by the sensory impressions themselves. Rather science is a construct of our minds based on our intellectual interpretation of the regularities of the sensory impressions. Or equivalently, science is constructed from our interpretation of the regularities of the alleged events of the postulated outside universe supposedly causing these impressions.
In the words of the eminent physicist Eugence P. Wigner on the occasion of his acceptance of the Nobel Prize for physics in 1963:
" Physics does not endeavor to explain nature. In fact, the great success of physics is due to a restriction of its objectives: it only endeavors to explain the regularities in the behavior of objects. This renunciation of the broader aim, and the specification of the domain for which an explanation can be sought, now appears to us an obvious necessity. . . .
"The regularities in the phenomena which physical science endeavors to uncover are called the laws of nature. The name is actually very appropriate. Just as legal laws regulate actions and behavior under certain conditions but do not try to regulate all action and behavior, the laws of physics also determine the behavior of its objects of interest under certain well-defined conditions but leave much freedom otherwise."
Idealism, Materialism and Dualism
It is possible to consistently classify all entities in the universe into two categories: the mental and the physical. Emotions, thoughts, sensations, "mind" and so on are mental, while atoms and tables and brains are physical. The relationship between the two categories has historically been seen in three different ways: the idealistic, the materialistic, and the dualistic.
The idealist considers an "atom" to be a concept invented by the human mind in order to easily categorize and summarize certain ideas and conclusions obtained after much thought; "table" is a word used to signify a certain set of sensations; and so on. To the idealist, only the mental exists - the "physical" is a collection of concepts within the mind.
Since one is conscious only of one's own consciousness, it is impossible to prove to another the existence of one's consciousness, and thus one has no conclusive proof that anyone else exists other than as one's conscious experience of them. This is called "the problem of other minds".
The idealist position which does not accept the existence of other minds is called solipsism, so that the solipsist position is essentially that all that exists is 'my consciousness'.
At the other extreme, the materialist considers the "mental" to be a physical aspect of the physical universe - no less physical than atoms, tables, and brains. "Mind" is physical in the same way that a computer program is physical. However, most people find it impossible to understand how mind can be matter.
To the dualist, both mental and physical exist, and they interact in some as yet not understood manner. How it can be that they interact is the essence of the 'mind body problem' of philosophy, one of the most intractable of difficulties, which has puzzled thousands of philosophers and scientists for thousands of years.
Occam's Razor and the Exernal Physical Universe
One of the most useful of principles guiding the development of physical theory is that of simplicity and economy ("Occam's razor"). Assumptions which cannot be proven, and are not needed to explain facts, are excised from physical theory.
Some of the greatest problems of philosophy and science derive from a number of basic assumptions which are unprovable. Without these assumptions, these problems do not exist, and this may be sufficient reason to disgard these assumptions. However, the assumptions are assumed to be so evidently true by most people that very few are willing to relinquish them, even at the cost of incurring so many intractable problems in philosophy and physics.
The problems we are referring to are the 'problem of other minds' and the 'mind body problem' in philosophy, while in regard to physics, they are the problems of the nature and origin of consciousness and of its interaction with the physical universe (and 'the measurement problem' involving the 'collapse of the wave function' in quantum physics). The assumptions we speak of are that there is an 'outside physical universe', and that there are consciousnesses other than our own.
If one accepts only what is directly known, and rejects assumptions (that which is not verifiable), then it is clear that there is no need to postulate the independent existence of an outside physical universe, or of other consciousnesses - it is impossible to prove that there exists a universe 'out there', it is impossible for anyone to prove to us that they are conscious, and no fact of our experience is rendered inexplicable if we leave out these assumptions. Since these are unnecessary assumptions (not needed to explain observed facts), and they are unprovable, and they complicate matters by introducing complex and perhaps unresolvable paradoxes, it is far simpler to reject these assumptions.
Not all problems can be solved in this way, but the problems which remain are present also in the usual model as well, so that the idealistic solipsistic approach does lead to less problematics, even if it is not a perfect system. The great mystery that remains is how our consciousness came to exist, and why it operates as it does, but this is the same mystery we encounter in the ordinary model of reality, the question of how our universe came to exist, and why it operates as it does.
However, even if we accept that only our own consciousness exists, we seem not to be masters of our own fate. This fact need not be taken as an indication that we are not the only existent entity, since it might be that by sufficient development of self we can decide what our experience will be - as many mystics claim. Furthermore, the question of why we seem to feel that we exist in a physical body in a physical universe, and why we experience what we do, is essentially the question of why the univere is as it is, which is unresolved in the ordinary model as well.
Solipsism, the idea that only our consciousness exists, may be considered psychologically unappealing to many, but it is not only logically impeachable, it is in certain instances the simplest assumption which fits the facts, and therefore, by 'Occam's Razor', it should be the preferred explanation.
Indeed, according to Nobel-Prize winning physicist P. W. Bridgman:
"This position, which I suppose is the solipsist position, is often felt to be absurd and contrary to common sense. How it is asked, can there be agreement as to experience unless there are external things which both you and I perceive? Part of the hostility to the solipsist position is, I think, merely due to confusion of thinking, and there is a strong element of the pseudo-problem mixed up here. If I say that an external thing is merely part of my direct experience to which I find that you react in certain ways, what more is there to be said, or indeed what other operational meaning can be attached to the concept of an external thing? It seems to me that as I have stated it, the solipsist position, if this is indeed the solipsist position, is a simple statement of what direct observation gives me, and we have got to adjust our thinking so that it will not seem repugnant."
The various people in a dream event seem to be independent, with individual consciousnesses, and we in our dream have no control over them - sometimes indeed we are victimized by them. Nevertheless, when we awake, it is clear to us that all these 'individuals' were elements of our own consciousness.
The solipsist position maintains that such is the case even when we are awake - only our own consciousness exists, and all other seemingly existent entities and beings are elements of our own consciousness, so that 'reality' is essentially an elaborate 'day dream'.
The Problem of Time, and Solipsism of the Moment
A great source of philosophical and scientific puzzlement derives from our conception of time - for example how time can originate or end, and why the 'passage of time' does not exist in physics.
In relativistic physics, space and time are on an equal footing, and just as space exists without 'flowing', so too all of time can be thought of as existing simultaneously without 'flowing' - in physics in general there is no indication that time 'flows'. The 'flow of time' is an element of our experiance which is not reflected in physical theory, and therefore it can be concluded that the experience of time flow is subjective.
One can know only the present - the past exists only in our memory, and as part of our interpretation of present situations, we assume that they 'developed' from some 'previous time'. As Nobel Prize winning philosopher Bertrand Russel stated:
"It is quite clear that I can have a recollection without the thing remembered having happened; as a matter of logical possibility, I might have begun to exist five minutes ago, complete with all the memories that I then had."
It is certainly not impossible that the universe exists now as you read this, and did not exist any time in the past, so that although you have a memory of having read the previous paragraph, this never actually happened. Or that the universe exists only now, as you read this next sentence, or.... In the words of Stephen Hawking, one of the world's leading physicists and cosmologists:
"One could still imagine that Gd created the universe at the instant of the big bang, or even afterwards in just such a way as to make it look as though there had been a big bang."
Indeed, if we do not make the assumption of the reality of moments of which we are not directly conscious, a simplification of many philosophical and physical problems is arrived at.
If one rejects what is not directly known, in this case the assumption that there is a flow of time, or that time exists at all, all the scientific and philosophical difficulties associated with time disappear. Science then becomes a method of ordering our perceptions and our memory of prior perceptions, rather than a description of an external physical universe possessing a history.
This is not to imply that we accept that the universe exists only for an instant or that solipsism is an accurate reflection of the 'underlying reality'. Instead, what is being suggested is that since science is a relation between elements of consciousness, excess fundamental assumptions going beyond what is directly known to consciousness can introduce contradictions or paradoxes. There is no way we can scientifically or philosophically know of the actual nature of 'the underlying reality', and any such elements introduced into scientific discourse - such as the assumption of an external universe, the existence of other minds, the existence of more than just one moment of time or that the universe necessarily emerged into existence at some specific point - may well lead to inconsistency in scientific theory or philosophical discourse.
The scientific solipsistic position proposed here is however one of epistemology rather than ontology: rather than making statements about what the universe is really like, one speaks about what one can know of the universe, and concludes that there is no way to distinguish between a 'real' universe and a solipsistic one, and that therefore the distinction between the two is meaningless. More importantly, one concludes that any statement which relies on the assumption that the universe is 'real' as opposed to solipsistic is potentially misleading or simply incorrect.
Conclusion
The validity of the basic truths, "I exist, I am conscious" cannot be questioned, however the postulate "there is an external universe" is not provable, and is indeed not necessary in the construction of science. The conviction that we are free willed is one of the most basic that we possess, however it cannot be proven - at least at this juncture. Indeed, from some perspectives it is difficult to see how free will can exist if there exists a physical universe outside our minds. However, the postulation of the existence of an external universe is as much of a speculative assumption as the postulation of the existence of free will, and a clash between the two certainly need not invalidate one or the other.
From the Biblical perspective, there exists a spiritual realm separate from the physical: God is in some sense 'outside' of the universe, 'beyond' spacetime, perhaps beyond the concepts of human thought. God is a spiritual entity which originated the physical universe of matterenergy-spacetime, and is outside of it yet intimately connected, active all the while in directing historical events. In a similar manner, each human is imbued with a soul, infused in them "by the breath of God", a soul which is spiritual yet interacts with the body in some way. Similarly, humanity is created 'in the image of God' and possesses a free will, independent of the causal workings of the physical universe, a self-causative phenomenon reflective of the original creative act, which is both beyong causality and physicality, yet nevertheless is intimately involved in human physical activity.
The question of the actual physical existence of the universe is not decideable by science, and it actually irrelevant to the pursuit of science - it is instead correctly considered an issue of metaphysics. Whatever the actual nature of existence, the introduction of assumptions about it which are not provable may lead to paradoxes. Therefore without taking a stand on the metaphysical question of the existence of a 'physical universe', it can be seen that science as such offers no reason to conclude that free will is not a fundamental feature of reality.
Indeed from the perspective of the creation and Eden accounts, free will is intimately linked to creation and the purpose of creation, and the mind/body paradox is hinted at in the phrases "and the spirit of God hovered on the waters...", "and God breathed into him the spirit of life".
Moreso, the contradictory natures of the creation and Eden accounts, highlighted by their juxtaposition, can be seen to mirror the two basic contradictory human conceptions, that of the existence of a physical universe and of the reality of free will: the creation account detailing the construction of a physical universe, and the Eden account relating the emergence of free will, are incompatible at the literary level as a mirror of their fundamental metaphysical paradoxicality. Ch 21b: Dreams of Existence:
the Universe as Thought
Introduction
Over the years, a number of physicists have come to the conclusion that the universe is actually something to the effect of "an idea in a mind".
The anthropic principle presents the idea that the big bang can be described as that set of conditions which would be necessary to eventually produce a moral being. It therefore raises the possibility that the universe is the product of design, of the deliberate planned creation by an intelligent conscious being; an act of will.
In order to create a big bang which would indeed eventually produce a moral being, the desired form of the moral being would have to be considered, and a blueprint drawn up for the required big bang. One can imagine the creating mind as deliberating over the desired form of the moral being and of the big bang prior to actually creating the physical universe. Indeed, one could define the creation of the universe as the assembling within this mind of a complete outline of the desired universe.
In this chapter we will look at various sources for this idea from ancient to modern times.
God as Mathematician
Even prior to the formulation of the anthropic principle and of quantum metaphysics, Sir James Jeans, the eminent astrophysicist, wrote [c]:
". . . Today there is a wide measure of agreement, which on the physical side of science approaches almost to unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.
. . . We discover that the universe shows evidence of a designing or controlling power that has something in common with our own individual minds - not, so far as we have discovered, emotion, morality, or aesthetic appreciation, but the tendency to think in the way which, for want of a better word, we describe as mathematical.
. . . And the concepts which now prove to be fundamental to our understanding of nature . . . all these concepts seem to my mind to be structures of pure thought, incapable of realization in any sense which would properly be described as material.
. . . To my mind, the laws which nature obeys are less suggestive of those which a machine obeys in its motion than of those which a musician obeys in writing a fugue, or a poet in composing a sonnet.
. . . If all this is so, then the universe can be best pictured, although still very imperfectly and inadequately, as consisting of pure thought, the thought of what, for want of a wider word, we must describe as a mathematical thinker. Again, we may think of the laws to which phenomena conform in our waking hours, the laws of nature, as the laws of thought of a universal mind. The uniformity of nature proclaims the self-consistency of this mind."
Recently, Davies writes:
According to Barrow...
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The idea of the universe existing as a thought in a mind is not new, and indeed some of the earliest Biblical commentators have seen the creation account in Genesis as referring to a mental creation - creation of the universe not as a physical entity but rather as a thought or dream in the mind of God. Philo, writing in Alexandria of 1,800 years ago, felt that prior to the emergence of the material universe there was an incorporeal universe which existed in the mind of God, just as the design of a city exists in the mind of its designer prior to ita actual physical construction.
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Emergence of the Universe into Existence
Sir James Jeans also raised the idea that the initial creation was actually an act of thought:
". . . if the universe is a universe of thought, then its creation must have been an act of thought. Indeed the finiteness of time and space almost compel us of themselves, to picture the creation as an act of thought."
The results of science and of scientific speculation picturing the universe as having emerged as a product of deliberate design, and seeing the universe itself as a mental construct in the mind of the intelligence which designed and created it, can allow us to better understand the creation accounts, and the way in which the creation was pictured by many traditional Jewish sources.
According to the midrash.......
And, the Zohar....
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One Talmudic source can be interpreted to imply that the universe existed for a period of time as a mental construct prior to its actual creation[d]:
"Why do some say the universe was created in Tishrei and some say it was created in Nisan? Because there arose in [Gd's Mind the] thought to create the universe in Tishrei but it was actually created in Nisan".
In the Biblical perspective, the universe is the creation of a conscious mind, freely choosing to create, deciding what and how to create. The entire universe is a product of deliberate design, and the creation account relates to the mental design of this universe by a free-willed consciousness. Following it is the Garden of Eden account, referring to the bestowal of the divine image on the created being, granting it the ability to transcend the physical constraints of the universe about it via the exercise of its own independent free-willed consciousness.
Creation of the Laws of Nature
Physics and cosmology teach that the universe began with the big bang, and that at that time the laws of physics we know of today were operating. That which may have been beyond this beginning is not necessarily within the realm of science, since the ultimate origins of the universe involve the onset of time, and it is not clear that there can be scientific meaning to 'the origin of time'. Similarly, if science is the study of the laws of nature, it is not necessarily within the purview of science to deal with the origins of these laws, since the laws of nature could not have originated according to laws of nature without involving paradox and infinite regress. However, much research today involves pushing back the border of the unknown in this direction.
In the context of the anthropic principle, one is led to the idea that the big bang and laws of nature were designed 'prior' to their actual creation. During this planning process of course, the laws of nature being designed were not yet operative.
Creation would then involve very separate types of activity; the planning of the big bang and laws of nature so as to produce a moral being, and then the actual creation of the big bang and the laws of nature.
According to many traditional sources, the creation account deals with a period during which the laws of nature were not yet applicable. Thus, in the context of the big bang theory and anthropic principle, the creation account deals with the period preceding the actual physical creation of the big bang and laws of nature, the period during which the form of the laws of nature and the character of the big bang were being established.
As Rambam states [a], not only do the 'six days of creation' in the creation account refer to a period prior to the establishment of laws of nature, but in addition:
"the creation of Eve from Adam, the tree of life, the tree of knowledge, the history of the serpent and the events connected therewith....All our sages agree that this took place on the sixth day, and that nothing new was created after the close of the six days....the laws of Nature were then not yet permanently fixed."
According to Sforno:
"On that day Gd set in order, from heaven, the permanent natural laws of the earth and of its 'offspring'. This was after the six days of creation.... by setting this order, Gd made its existence permanent."
Aristotle believed the universe to be eternal and unchanging, and felt that any laws of nature currently operating were always in force, but according to Rambam, in the spirit of the anthropic principle, the 'laws of nature' observed to be in effect now were designed, and were therefore not always in effect (see later, part VII.,for a more extensive discussion of these issues). Rambam writes [b]:
"It is quite impossible to infer from the qualities which a thing possesses after having passed through all the states of its development what its condition was at the moment when this process commenced; nor does the condition of a thing at that moment show what its previous condition had been.
"The Aristotelians oppose us, and found their objections on the properties which the things in the universe possess when in actual existence and fully developed. We admit the existence of these properties, but hold that these properties themselves have come into existence from absolute non-existence. The arguments of our opponents are thus refuted...."
"In short, the properties of things when fully developed contain no clues to what have been the properties of the things before their final form was established. We therefore do not reject as impossible the opinon of those who say that the heavens were produced before the earth, or the reverse, or that the heavens have existed without stars.........other forces than those the universe has at present were acting at its creation..."
That is, according to Rambam, the universe was not necessarily created in accordance with the manner and order dictate by the laws of nature. It was not the laws we now have discovered which governed how the universe developed; rather it was the final structure of the universe which determined which system of laws would come into being.
However, rather than following Rambam's view that the creation of the laws of nature followed the initial creation of some elements of the physical universe, we can follow the insights of the big bang theory and anthropic principle to understand the creation account as referring to a period 'prior' to the actual creation of the physical universe, with the actual creation being that of a set of natural laws and a carefully designed big bang.
Indeed, according to tradition, the universe was created from a carefully designed blueprint, and this blueprint was the Bible itself. Thus, inasmuch as the creation account is part of this blueprint, rather than being a description of events accompanying the creation of the universe itself, it refers to the period during which the moral-being-producing big bang and laws of nature were being designed.
Creation from a Blueprint and
the Creation Account
The Zohar and Midrash [k] state that "Gd looked in the Torah and created the world (from it)".
Philo, possibly repeating an ancient tradition, also states that the first creation account - or part of it - is a description of the construction of the blueprint for creation.
If the Torah is the blueprint of creation one can perhaps say that the mental blueprint for the design of the universe was written into the Torah as the creation account, and then this served as the blueprint for the creation of the universe .
R. Chayim Volozhiner, the outstanding disciple of the Gaon of Vilna, was the author of a mystical treatise entitled "Nefesh HaChayim". In this work he states that the Torah is in a manner of speaking 'of Gd'. It is a 'part' of the Creator, the aspect called "Chokhma" ["Wisdom"]. A such it is on a level higher than that of any of the Emanations of Gd which form the strata of the cosmos, including all spiritual and physical creations [l]. Consequently it can serve as a blueprint for the spiritual as well as the physical cosmos. Being the aspect of Wisdom, the Torah can perhaps be considered as the Mental blueprint of the universe.
Of course since the Torah preceeded the creation of space-time-matter-energy, it could not be a physical entity. Also, since it is a spiritual aspect of Gd, it cannot be 'written', certainly not written in human language. Thus, R. Chayim states, the Torah which we possess is a translation into physicality and into human terms of the beyond-human-comprehension actual Torah [m].
Nevertheless, says R. Khayim, the Torah which was the blueprint for creation was the Torah as we know it. When we are told that Gd created the universe by looking into the Torah, what is meant is that Gd looked at the words "Bereisheet bara Elokim et hashamayim ve'et ha'aretz" ["In the beginning Gd created heaven and earth"], and then Gd created heaven and earth. Gd looked at the words "Yehi ohr" - "Let there be light[ohr]" - and then created ohr.
Thus, the first creation account is the actual blueprint of creation.
It would perhaps follow that there must be two creation accounts: the first being the creation account into which Gd looked to create the universe, and the second being an account of the actual creation, that is, an account of Gd's looking into the first account and creating the universe. There is indeed a second "mini creation account", following the Eden account, containing a short reference to the creation of the universe.
In the above approach, this second account can be relating that when all was mentally designed - physical universe, natural law, and moral being - as laid out in the first creation account, the universe was created, emerging into reality with the emergence within it of conscious free-willed moral humanity .
Reality and Imagination
What can possibly distinguish a real from an imagined existence? If a universe exists in God's mind, does this universe enjoy the same reality status as one which actually exists physically?
There is one criteria which does seem to provide an arbiter of reality, and that is the existence of free will in the universe whose reality status is being weighed. If there is free willed consciousness present, which by definition is free only if it is not a direct consequence of the will of the creator, then the universe by definition possesses an independent existence.
It is free willed consciousness which serves as the model for the universal blueprint in a purposive universe. free willed consciousness is the active ingredient which defines independent existence, and according to quantum metaphysics it is free-willed consciousness which initiates the universe into true physical reality.
Within the context of the above discussion, the creation account is a description of the construction of the mental blueprint, designed about the requirement of the moral being whose emergence is described in the Eden account. Consciousness, free will, and moral choice provide the bridge between the existence of the universe as a mental blueprint, a cosmos of spiritual forms, a semi-real quantum superposition whose description is more appropriately provided by the imagery of the creation and Eden accounts, and the full physical reality of the universe inherited by the children of Adam and Eve.
APPENDIX
Design and Creation of the Universe as an Act of Divine Thought: Traditional Sources
The Midrash asks: Why does it say "In the beginning Gd created Heaven and Earth" rather than "and Gd said 'let there be Heaven and Earth '"? The Midrash answers that each "let there be" was accompanied by - or is in itself - an angel. Therefore, people might have assumed that the initial creation was done in partnership with an angel. In order to prevent this most serious error, the initial creation was done via thought rather than via word.
Another source, in the Talmud [e], states that 974 generations of man were to have preceded Adam. Rashi explains that these generations were 'uncreated'. According to R. Bakhya, these generations were destroyed in thought, in Gd's 'Mind". This of course implies that they had previously existed in Gd's Mind.
Furthermore, according to Ramban [f] where the words "and Gd said" appear in the creation account it actually means "and Gd thought". This "thought" was a creation in of itself, and occurred during the day (boker) while the actual physical creation took place at night (erev). Similarly, according to Ibn Ezra, "vayomer" ["and Gd 'said' "] means a creation in Gd's mind , and "va'yar" - "and Gd saw (that it was good)" - means "a thought" that it was good [g].
We can see that the idea of Gd creating a Mental picture of the universe prior to creating the universe itself, and of creation as a mental act is found in many sources. We thus can perhaps feel comfortable in considering the creation to have proceded in the manner most logical to us - that is by the creation of a Mental blueprint universe as described in the first creation account.
The Creation Account as Referring to Spiritual Events Accompanying or Preceding Creation
According to various sources, the universe existed initially in a non-physical state, partially or purely on the spiritual plane, until the transgression of Adam. At that point, the universe became a truly physical entity.
After the onset of free will, it was no longer possible for Man to know unequivocally of Gd's existence - it was now a matter of free willed choice to believe or not. Thus the universe was transformed from a Garden of Eden existence in which Gd's presence was a fact, to a rational physical universe where Gd's presence is hidden. In our interpretation, the universe was transformed from an unequivocally created universe to a big bang emergent one.
We can speculate that perhaps the universe was initially created on the spiritual plane as told in the first account , and developed on this plane as detailed in the second account. Then, after the transgression, Man was expelled from the Garden, that is, the universe emerged into physical reality as a big bang emergent universe at the moral stage.
We can then understand the first creation account, the Garden of Eden account, and their juxtaposition, in a new light.
Further Jewish Sources
According to the Zohar, "Be'resheet Bara" should be read as "Be'resh Yeetbara" which we can here interpret as "In Gd's mind, it will have been created" or "In the beginning, it will have been created".
One can interepret the passage at the end of the first creation account as implying that the universe was created in one instant - after being created in thought - as an expression of Gd's (Free) Will:
INSERT Sources in Hebrew:
(near middle)oipr `id dlrzi eil` qgia dxn`py ytp oexkf lke" :`n :`
ivtga epipr ,dyri iytpae iaal xy`k exn`a (hl) epl miiwy itk oevxd
The universe was created via a thought of Gd: [Zohar Gen. 29a]
"`nlr `xae daygnc d`lr `xdifc cg `tehra shrz`c cr"
According to the Zohar, the universe was created in one moment via the thought of Gd. [h]
According to R. S.R. Hirsch, before they "became", heaven and earth were thoughts of Gd. He further states that the word describing the completion of creation in Genesis "Vayekhulu" derives from the root "coloh" which means "cease to exist", or "reach highest state of perfection" [i]. Therefore we can translate "Vayekhulu hashamayim ve'ha'aretz" "the universe was completed" as "the universe underwent a transition from potential to actual".
...
Chapter 22 : Genesis, Tradition, History, and Science
Note: This chapter is intended for those readers who are interested in the issue of the supposed conflict between scientific and traditional readings of Genesis.
It is quite interesting that only 60 links in the chain of Tradition are required to connect Moses, who lived about 3,500 years ago, with a child studying Bible today. In Traditional communities many a child learns from an adult, teacher or grandparent who is 60 years or so older than they are. Sixty links of sixty years gives 3,600 years!
Those who accept the Bible as a divinely revealed text most often do so not due to claims or proofs in the text itself, but rather as a result of a chain of tradition which claims to reach back to the time the Bible was given. One's grandparents relate how their grandparents related...etc ....back along the links in the chain to the time 3,400 years ago that according to tradition the Bible was revealed to man.
Indeed, the Bible does not make outright claims about itself, as a complete book. It does not open with a statement such as "I, God of the universe, am giving the following book to man" or even "These are the words of God as revealed to Moses..". Instead it opens, without introduction, without revealing the identity of the narrator, or even the source of the information supplied. Simply "In the beginning God created the heavens and earth....".
Much later on the book relates that God told Moses to write various things down and present it to the people of Israel, however we are not told explicitly and unambiguously in the text what it was that Moses was told to include in the text. There is also no mention in the text of an intention by God to give an inviolable text to the Jewish people which would contain a creation account, a history of the patriarchs and so on.
Should there not have been some written record of the seminal event of the giving of the entire text of the torah to the people, accompanied by a discussion of the meaning of the text, reasons for giving it, and so on?
Of course one could reason that since a description of the giving of the text must of necessity be composed after the giving itself, it cannot be included in the given text. However, the text does describe the death of Moses, which must have occurred after the giving of the text, if it was Moses who gave the text to the people.
According to tradition it was indeed Moses who gave this book to the Jewish people, and this part of the text was written either by Moses in prophecy, or by Joshua. Similarly, it would not be impossible for the giving of the text to have been mentioned in the text itself - written either by Moses via prophecy, or by Joshua. Nevertheless these seminal events and all-important information about the text were not included.
How is it that the book does not itself relate to its readers what its intended purpose is, and that the author of he book is God? Perhaps because even were the text to make claims about itself, such as “this book was written by God”, these claims would not be accepted simply on the basis of the textual statement itself. And so, the text must in any case be accompanied by an oral tradition in order to be complete. Therefore there is perhaps no logical necessity in including the claims itself in the text. And so the text makes few claims about itself; most of the claims regarding the text are made by the oral tradition accompanying the text.
Instead, the oral tradition can tell us all about the book - where and when it originated, why it was written, even how it is to be understood. For example, the Bible does not specify if it is meant as poetry, history, science, theology, myth, moral homily or literature - this must be left to the oral tradition accompanying it. In some instances a written text by itself without an accompanying oral tradition about it is an orphan, incomplete.
The Bible has been transmitted from generation to generation, in a tradition thousands of years old. Those who transmitted it included a framework within which it was to be understood. The oral framework to the written text, the oral tradition, include not only insight into the purpose and source of the text but also interpretations of the material in the text. It is the framework provided by the oral tradition which gives legitimacy to the written text, not vice versa. Again, the written text is a part of the oral tradition. As such, the traditional understanding of the Bible as understood within this framework - if it has been correctly transmitted to form the present day - has more authenticity than possessed by a seemingly more objectively accurate literal 'translation' of the written text.
Traditional (“Orthodox”) Jews believe in what the tradition says, and believe in the Bible because the Tradition tells them to. It is very important to understand this, that for traditional Jews Judaism is built on the tradition and not on the the Torah. Therfore the meaning of the Torah as a whole and of particular segments, is determined by Tradition, for example as recorded in the Talmud, rather than by philological analysis o f the Torah text itself. To a traditionalist, it is not relevant whther or not a literal translation of the Bible conflicts with something she holds to be true, since the literal apparent meaning is not canonical (religiously accepted) .
The Bible and Science
The Bible is written in the Hebrew language. The words of the Bible can therefore only be properly understood within the context of the cultural-linguistic context of those Hebrew-speaking people to whom it was first given, and within its own internal context. Any translation is necessarily an interpretation, especially translations composed long after the Bible was originally written.
Even an understanding of the text as written in the original Hebrew is an interpretation because the words may have different meanings now than when it was written. And given a text, even if the language is familiar, to understand it properly one must understand the intent of the writer to determine whether it is to be understood as poetry or as science. Scientific texts are meant as literal and complete accounts of the contents they speak of, however this is not necessarily the case with poetry, or other types of texts. For these and all other texts, one must look into the text itself and to the oral tradition accompanying it to decide how it was meant to be understood.
If the Bible is indeed interpreted as a purely literal and complete surface-meaning description of actual physical events, then clearly the Bible and science conflict. However, since from the Traditional perspective the Bible is meaningless without the context provided by its accompanying oral tradition we will interpret it according to the tradition within which it is embedded, rather than as a science text book, or via a translation into English or even modern Hebrew.
Those who transmitted the Bible through the generations have bequeathed a comprehensive, flexible, and even multifaceted attitude toward the meaning of the Bible. As a result, the Bible as interpreted within the framework of approaches taught by Jewish tradition is very different from its literal 'translation'. In particular, the creation account as understood from within many of these approaches is not in conflict with science.
............................
A poem is recited to a loved one: "your eyes are stars, your face shines as the sun...". Is this poem true?
Clearly the question of the truth or falsity of the statement "your eyes are stars" is misplaced here, and knowing that it is a poem is the key. Only if it is presented as a statement of scientific fact rather than as a poem is it false. A culture which had only science and no poetry might well misunderstand the intent of such a statement, and finding it in a book would conclude that the author was proposing a cosmology in which all stars are actually some type of eye, and that some people had eyes which were of this type. They might then conclude that the author had a primitive notion of the universe and disregard the book - another culture upon seeing the book might adopt this belief themselves. Both would be misunderstanding the author's point.
A poem which states that the sky is composed of the breath of one's beloved obviously does not conflict with science. However, for readers to base their cosmology on a literal understanding of the poem may indeed represent a conflict with scientific teachings regarding the nature of the universe. The poetry book in itself, and the words of the book are not in themselves in conflict with science, however it may certainly be the case that the beliefs held by some due to the words of the book may indeed be in conflict with science.
Similarly, the possibility of contradiction between science and the creation and Eden accounts arises not due to the Bible itself - the very existence of the Bible cannot by itself represent a conflict with science - nor even due to its contents, but rather due to various beliefs about its contents. Specifically, the beliefs regarding the universe which some people have as a result of their interpretation or understanding of the words of the Bible may be in conflict with scientific understandings of the universe.
Furthermore, even those traditional views regarding creation which seem to conflict with science do not necessarily involve all of tradition in their conflict, since not all of the ideas regarding matters cosmological expressed in post-Biblical traditional sources are necessarily authoritative. As Rambam states:
"You must not expect that everything our Sages say regarding astronomical matters should agree with observations for mathematics was not fully developed in those days, and their statements were not based on the authority of the Prophets, but on the knowledge which either they themselves possessed or they derived from contemporary men of science."
Regarding cosmological knowledge and its relation to the traditional secret teachings, Rambam stated:
"Know that many branches of science relating to the correct solution of these problems, were once cultivated by our forefathers, but were in the course of time neglected, especially in consequence of the tyranny which barbarous nations exercised over us. Besides, speculative studies were not open to all men, as we have already stated only the subjects taught in the Scriptures were accessible to all.....no portions of the secret teachings of the Torah [were] written down...[they were] orally transmitted....the natural effect of this practice was that our nation lost the knowledge of those important disciplines. Nothing but a few remarks and allusions are to be found in the Talmud and the Midrashim, like a few kernels involved in such a husk, that the reader is generally occupied with the husk, and forgets that it encloses a kernel."
Regarding the metaphysical cosmological ideas current in his time, and the opinion of some that they were in conflict with religious belief, Rambam states:
"...these theories are not opposed to anything taught by our prophets and our Sages....But when wicked barbarians have deprived us of our possessions, put an end to our science and literature, and killed our wise men, we have become ignorant...Having been brought up among persons untrained in philosophy, we are inclined to consider these philosophical opinions as foreign to our religion, just as uneducated persons find them foreign to their own notions. But in fact it is not so."
The Bible without the accompanying oral tradition is just a book rather than a set of beliefs, and therefore there can be no conflict between the Bible itself and science. The Bible plus the traditional belief that the Bible originated with God, word for word, does not in itself give rise to a conflict between the Bible and science. Although it may be that some have beliefs about the content of the Bible, about the words which tradition ascribes to God, which lead these words to conflict with science, Traditional Jewish understandings of the creation accounts are generally not in conflict with scientific teachings.
In the words of Prof. Walter Kaufmann of Princeton University
"The contemporary Jew faces no grim problems in connection with specific scientific statements. He need not choose between dogma and Darwin. Whatever dogmas various Jewish theologians may have thought up from time to time the contemporary Jew can repudiate and still be a pious Jew, even a so-called Orthodox Jew."
The Surface Meaning of the Creation and Eden Accounts
We have no way of knowing from the text itself if the Genesis account and most of the other sections were part of the writings which God told Moses to write down and give to the people. Even if the text began with a claim to the effect that the creation account was part of that, we would have no means of knowing if that claim were true and so we search for the origins of the Book in that which people know of it - that is, in tradition.
We are not told by the text if the creation account is an actual or poetic description of physical events. We are not even told in the text why the story is told, whether the fact that it is told means that we must read it, study it, know it; we are not even instructed as to whether we must believe that the creation account is an actual description of physical events.
Certainly anyone can see that on the surface it contains many inconsistencies, so that it could not have been meant as a purely literal surface-meaning account of actual physical events. Furthermore, the anthropomorphisms in the creation account such as “God said” or “God saw”, or “”God rested” are inconsistent with Traditional religious belief itself that God is not corporeal (God is a spiritual rather than physical entity and therefore does not have a physical body) . Clearly, proponents of Tradition cannot accept the account as totally literal. Clearly then, one cannot legitimately assume that Traditional belief necessarily considers every word of Fthe creation and Garden of Eden accounts as literal. However, what these accounts do mean, and why they were included in the Bible, and how we must relate to them are not in the text, and cannot reliably form part of the text - for this context we turn to the tradition which accompanies the text.
As stated above, many of the statements regarding the creation and the creation account in the Talmud, Midrash, Zohar, and in the classical Jewish Bible commentators seemingly conflict not only with each other, but also with the Biblical creation account itself. Because they contradict each other at the level of their surface meaning, it is not possible to claim that the creation account and the statements about creation in traditional sources are all meant literally.
In addition, many of these statements speak of processes which are not mentioned in the creation account, so that they can be true only if the creation account is not a complete account of all the events which took place at creation, and in the Garden of Eden. Many of the statements are also somewhat vague, and are therefore amenable to a wide range of interpretation.
Whereas a dogmatic religious fundamentalist makes the claim that every word in the Torah was meant totally literally, and as a description of actual physical events unless religious tradition unequivocally states otherwise, many - perhaps most - traditional Jewish sources imply that the creation account is not meant as a totally literal description of actual physical events.
The most authoritative voice of Jewish Traditional philosophical beliefs has been that of Maimonides, whose views have reigned for the last eight hundred years. Seven hundred years before Darwin, Maimonides wrote:
"..the account given in Scripture of the creation is not, as is generally believed, intended to be in all its parts literal." "The literal meaning of the words might lead us to conceive corrupt ideas and to form false opinions about God, or even to entirely abandon and reject the principles of our Faith."
He states categorically that according to Tradition, the Garden of Eden account is allegorical. Of course that they are meant allegorically does not mean that they are trivial stories. R. Crescas, in his commentary on Rambam's statement that the creation account is at least partially allegory, states:
" Allegories....means that the mention in Scripture of the Garden of Eden, the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge, the description of Adam, his initial condition and what he later became, the serpent, Eve, the naming of Adam's sons Cain and Abel, and all that long narrative, all refer to extremely deep matters which are inaccessible to the common run of humanity and were therefore given in the form of allegory." .
Even the very idea of a creation ex-nihilo (from nothing), which is seen by some as one of the central points in the creation account, was included by Maimonides as possibly in this category. In a discussion of Aristotle's belief that the universe is eternal rather than created, Maimonides states that just as the anthropomorphisms in the Torah are not meant literally, it is theoretically possible that the idea of creation ex-nihilo presented in Genesis is also meant allegorically.
Other great Traditional Biblical commentators and philosopher such as Rashi and Ramban (Nachmanides) have intimated that the initial chapters of Genesis should not even be seen as a 'creation account', since the Divine actions leading to the creation of the universe are beyond man's comprehension. Instead, these accounts are meant to teach humanity certain basic truths - and in this book we shall indeed look at these accounts in this light rather than as cosmogonies.
Origins
Speculations on the origin of the universe have fascinated man for thousands of years. During the last few thousand years one of the most widely accepted answers - and one considered quite authoritative - was provided by the book of Genesis. In recent centuries however, this source has seemed to be somewhat in conflict with the results of careful observations of the universe about us, and with the deductions from these observations. To many readers, the origin theory of science and the origin model described in Genesis seem quite incompatible with each other, and this has led many to feel that one could not accept both - painful though such a choice might be. Einstein writes:
"I had attained a deep religiosity by the age of twelve. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking."
However, the conviction that one is faced with an inescapable contradiction can be founded on misconceptions. Darwin for example
"revealed his lack of expertise in biblical matters by replying to the information that the notorious 4,004 B.C. date for the creation of the world was Archbishop Ussher's and not Moses' by laughing, 'How curious about the Bible. I declare I had fancied that the date was somehow in the Bible'."
Many of the traditional Jewish interpretations of Genesis might well have astounded Darwin. Quite a few do not consider the creation account to be that of a standard cosmogony at all. Furthermore, many of those which do so consider it, contradict the plain meaning of Genesis, and do so rather more than does the theory of evolution.
The following, which on the face of it bears virtually no resemblance to Genesis, is a composite of traditional understandings of the creation referred to in Genesis:
"Before all was created
God reigned
and after all ended
God reigned
Time emerged from no time,
and there passed 17 1/2 billion years
Then,
in the beginning,
nine hundred and seventy four generations
prior to that of Adam,
God was to have created the universe
but didn't.
God contracted Herself
and emanated a number of emanations from Himself
in descending order of contact with the Divine.
God looked then into that part of Himself which is the Torah,
and created the universe from a black fire.
God then created and destroyed several universes.
Then God created a universe in one day,
containing among other things
a two-headed male-female creature
with scales, webbed fingers and a tail,
whose height was such that
it could see from one end of the world to the next.
[At first God wanted to create a female and a male separately, but then God decided not to.]
In the heavens, God created two suns,
but changed one into a moon later on........
There is virtually no similarity between the above 'creation account' and that given by the Bible. In fact they 'contradict' each other no less than the origin theory 'contradicts' the Biblical creation account, yet every idea in the above derives from traditional sources hundreds or thousands of years old.
One can say that an elephant is gray, or that it is huge, or that it has a certain odor, or that it has four legs or that it is a mammal, or that it is noble. Each description can indeed be that of an elephant, and each is very different, yet it is clear that none of them contradict any other - unless they are offered as being the exclusive truth about the elephant as perceived from any possible perspective. The differences in the descriptions derive from the differing perspectives or senses which are being used in order to compose the description.
Science, the Kabbalah, and the Midrash, are all systems which provide explanations regarding certain aspects of reality, and do so from differing perspectives. They see things differently, and are interested in answering different types of questions. Thus, each system describes the origin of the universe from the point of view of its concerns, leading the unwary to the impression that this difference implies a contradiction and a conflict.
Just as traditional sources like the Midrash and Zohar are explanations of the Torah rather than contradictions to it, so too the scientific origin theory is an explanation of the creation account rather than a contradiction to it. Discovering how the two are related is one of the subjects of both this book and its companion volume entitled "A Garden of Edens: the Many Faces of Genesis".
Whatever one's approach to the Bible, the text itself implies that the creation and Eden accounts refer to many of the same events. However, even the casual reader easily notices that the two accounts portray these events in widely divergent fashion, with the surface meaning of the two texts often being in direct contradiction.
Indeed, by presenting in the creation and Eden accounts two very different and conflicting descriptions of what are seemingly the same events, and by juxtaposing these two accounts, the Torah itself makes unmistakably the point that the creation and Eden accounts are not to be interpreted naively according to a straight 'literal' understanding.
Jewish tradition, which indeed sees the two accounts as referring to the same subject, does not see the surface meaning of the texts as the level from which its meaning can be gleaned.
The Bible as Moral History
History is not monolithic. The past may be objectively existent, but history is not, as it is merely a subjective and selective human view of the past.
Some history books begin with the ancient empires of the near east, and contain accounts of various wars and political struggles. Others mention wars not at all, but focus instead on the artistic achievements of humanity, beginning perhaps with cave-drawings found in southern France - subjects entirely absent in the previously mentioned history books. The careful reader of a 'history of the world' must understand the context of the work, and the intent of the author in order to correctly integrate this 'history of the world' into a coherent understanding of the world's complete and objective history, its 'past'.
According to the greatest of the traditional Biblical commentators, Rashi, the creation account is not really a chronological account of the creation of the universe, but is instead a teleological account. That is, the very first few words of the creation account usually translated as "in the beginning God created", actually mean something quite different, more on the line of "The reason that God created the universe was for [and Rashi specifies]......".
Since in these traditional views the creation account is not a chronological description of the creation and evolution of the physical and organic universe, and its focus is upon the moral dimension, tradition may feel no need of searching it for mention of the big bang or of stellar evolution or the extinction of the dinosaurs.
As some of the greatest of traditional Biblical commentators have pointed out many hundreds of years ago, the so-called creation accounts cannot be that, since creation ex-nihilo is beyond the reach of ordinary human comprehension. Instead of being a description of divine creation therefore, these accounts serve a different purpose, including setting the stage for the subsequent commandments and narratives.
Rather than being fundamentally chronological, the creation account refers to the underlying purpose of creation.