Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
Science
& Religion:
- Dr. Gerald L.
Schroeder:
-
- Existence:
- What the meaning
of the word "is" is
- "...so the smallest unit of matter may be pure thought. We've
made a series of experiments that suggest that the world around us may quite literally be
a construction of our thought. We've discovered a particle-like unit which we call the imajon."
Richard Bach
There are any number of unanswerable,
uncomfortable questions a person can ask, but the first one, the question from which all
other questions are descended, is "Why is there an 'is'?"
Why is there existence in the first place? In our
fascination with life's origin and evolution, we bypass this most fundamental of
conundrums.
Does the very fact of existence in itself provide
proof that some metaphysical non-thing, perhaps even the Godly, some undefined
whatever-it-is, produced the physical by transcending it?
If we consider the finite aspects of the world we
see around us, the limited nature of the time, space and matter from which we are
constructed, the answer is certainly yes.
- Some non-thing, above or outside
of the physical, must have preceded our universe or has our universe imbedded in it.
But what is the material world, that which frames
the puzzle of our existence? Why even bother with the existence of empty space, or even
time?
- The basic enigma is not whether we
evolved from apes or not, but why is there "being" in the first place?
The very existence of existence is mind boggling.
Yet we are so much a part of existence that we take it for granted—it's a
"given," to use a scientific term. But step back from the subjectivity and think
about it. What caused the Big Bang?
- What caused existence? What is
existence?
In his introduction to The Guide For The
Perplexed, Moses Maimonides, the great 12th-century Jewish philosopher and codifier,
laid the basis for probing these questions:
"We must form a conception of the existence
of the Creator according to our capacities; that is, we must have a knowledge of
metaphysics (the science of God), which can only be acquired after the study of physics;
for the science of physics is closely connected with metaphysics and must even precede it
in the course of studies. Therefore, the Almighty commenced the Bible with the description
of the creation, that is, with physical science."
One might conceive of a science without religion,
but it is an oxymoron to conceive of religion without science. Revelation and nature are
the two aspects of one creation. Yet in Maimonides' time, the idea that science might have
something to add to our understanding of spirituality was so anathema to the religious
establishments that his book was burned by Jews and Christians alike.
Some 250 years ago, a great Jewish saint and
mystic, the Gaon of Vilna, taught that when the light of Torah came into the world it
split into two parts. Only one part was revealed directly, the prophetic experience The
other part was hidden in the wisdoms of nature and the time will come, he said, when those
hidden wisdoms will be discovered. revealing aspects of the Torah never before understood.
That time has come.
The hidden wisdoms of nature and science are
being discovered. At the turn of the century, a physics professor would have lost tenure
on the spot if caught teaching the concept that matter in all its forms of solids, liquids
and gases was actually condensed energy. What hokum it would have seemed!
Then came Einstein, relativity and E = mc^2,
the theory that matter, m, intrinsically represents a specific amount of energy, E.
And the type of matter was immaterial. As bizarre as it seems, a gram of rose petals and a
gram of uranium contain identical amounts of energy. The constant in the equation, c^2
is the speed of light squared or multiplied by itself. It is a massive value, telling us
that even a tiny amount of matter contains a huge quantity of latent energy.
Having personally witnessed the detonation of six
nuclear weapons. I suggest that we pray for peace. The fractions of a gram of matter
converted into energy during those tests turned the mountain on which I stood into a
quivering Jello-like substance.
In 1923, almost a decade after Einstein published
his general relativity theory (no longer a theory, of course: now it is a law), the French
physicist Louis de Broglie introduced an idea that was even more bizarre in its assertions
than Einstein's claim that matter really was a form of energy.
- De Broglie claimed that all matter
has related to it a wave length and a frequency of that wave, a certain number of wave
cycles per second.
Not only had humanity learned that matter was not
matter, we now had to believe that everything is a wave. Everything—you and I
included. Seventy years of experiments have sustained both Einstein's and de Broglie's
preposterous, counterintuitive claims.
The floor upon which you stand and the bedrock
that supports a skyscraper are 99.999% empty space. What we perceive as solid matter is
actually de Broglie's waves separated by open space, made impermeable by invisible,
immaterial fields of force that somehow pervade the space.
- The world simply is not as it
seems.
A superficial reading of nature finds
differentiation and disparate entities — stars and stones and bottled water and even
life and death. Reading that same nature at a deeper level reveals that it's all a
manifestation of a single underlying unity. I'm on our balcony. The afternoon Jerusalem
sun is filtering through the yellow-green finger leaves of a eucalyptus tree planted a
century ago to mark the property line. De Broglie tells me the leaves and the light are
one. Not poetically — though that also — but physically, they are one.
- It took humanity millennia before
an Einstein discovered that, as bizarre as it may seem, matter is actually condensed
energy. It may take a while longer for us to discover that there is some non-thing even
more fundamental than energy that forms the basis of energy.
In the words of John Archibald Wheeler, the
renowned former president of the American Physical Society, recipient of the Einstein
Award and Princeton professor of physics, underlying all existence is an idea, the
"bit" of information that gives rise to the "it" of matter.
- The substructure of all existence,
we suddenly realize, is totally ethereal, an idea, wisdom. Or in Hebrew emet
— an all encompassing reality.
Emet is the ultimate building block from
which all we see and feel is constructed. Just as the secondary substructure of all matter
is something as ethereal as energy, as per Einstein's fantastic insight, so, the primary
substructure of energy is still more elusive.
- Existence is the expression of an
idea, an eternal consciousness made tangible. We are the idea of God.
If we can discover that idea, we will have
ascertained not only the basis for the unity that underlies all existence, but most
important, the source of that unity.
- We will have encountered the soul
of God.
-
- Editor's note:
-
- After writing the article, "Truth" as Ultimate
Reality, I was struck by the thought that the Hebrew "amen," mentioned
in that essay, might be etymologically related to the Hebrew "emet" referred to
above in Dr. Schroeder's writing. This proved to be correct; the two terms are part of the
same Hebrew word-family, each sharing the same core-meaning. The following is a further
exposition of "emet" from the Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament:
-
- emet. Truth, faithfulness, verity... This
word carries underlying sense of certainty, dependability. We find it used in several
categories of contexts, all of which relate to God directly or indirectly.
First, it is frequently applied to God as a characteristic of his nature. In Gen 24:27,
for example, it describes God who leads Abraham's servant to the right wife for Isaac. In
Ex 34:6, it is given as one of the verbal descriptions of God which constitute God's
goodness. Other examples are Ps 25:5; 31:5; Jer 4:2; 10:10.
It is a term fittingly applied to God's words (Ps 119:142, 151, 160; Dan 10:21). As a
characteristic of God revealed to men, it therefore becomes the means by which men know
and serve God as their savior (Josh 24:14; I Kgs 2:4; Ps 26:3; 86:11; Ps 91:4; Isa 38:3),
and then, as a characteristic to be found in those who have indeed come to God (Ex 18:21;
Neh 7:2; Ps 15:2; Zech 8:16).
Because it is an attribute of God which is manifest in man's salvation and life of service
as God's child, the word is often coupled with another attribute of God related to our
salvation, "mercy" or "love" (hesed, Gen 24:27; Ps 61:7;
85:10; 115:1; Prov 14:22; 16:6; 20:28). And because these attributes of God's truth and
mercy lead to God's peace toward sinful men, saved by God's grace, the word is also often
coupled with peace (Isa 39:8; Jer 33:6).
As we study its various contexts, it becomes
manifestly clear that there is no truth in the biblical sense, i.e. valid truth, outside
God. All truth comes from God and is truth because it is related to God.
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