Physicist Gerald Schroeder explains the connection of Bereshit to science.
By GERALD SCHROEDERbig bang 88(photo credit: )
Nobel laureate professor of biology, Harvard University, the late George Wald may have provided us with the answer to the wonder of life in an essay he wrote entitled "Life and Mind in the Universe" for the 1984 Quantum Biology Symposium:
"It has occurred to me lately - I must confess with some shock at first to my scientific sensibilities - that both questions [the origin of consciousness in humans and of life from non-living matter] might be brought into some degree of congruence. This is with the assumption that mind, rather than emerging as a late outgrowth in the evolution of life, has existed always as the matrix, the source and condition of physical reality - the stuff of which physical reality is composed is mind-stuff. It is mind that has composed a physical universe that breeds life and so eventually evolves creatures that know and create: science-, art- and technology-making animals. In them the universe begins to know itself."
This is science, not theology, speaking.
But it is also theology.
In the beginning was the logos [logos the Greek word for "logic," "intellect," "word"] (John 1:1).
A few hundred years before John, "With the word of God the heavens were made" (Psalm 33:6).
And a few hundred years before that, we find the opening sentence of the Bible, Genesis chapter one, verse one. A traditional translation of that crucial verse is "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."
That is the traditional reading. But there is a problem here. Bereshit in its simple sense translates as "In the beginning of." But there is no object in the Hebrew text for the preposition "of." We would read "In the beginning of God created the heavens and the earth."
In the beginning of what?
So the Greek and the Latin merely deleted the "of," which of course is ridiculous, as if these ancient translators felt they could better state the facts than did the Bible. And that error or variations of it have been carried through to today. Introduced by the Septuagint 2,200 years ago, it was carried through to the Latin Vulgate and finally the King James English translations.
The preeminent theologian Rashi 1,000 years ago elucidated this truth in his commentary on the word "Bereshit." The compound nature of "Bereshit" holds the clue to the meaning of the word. Every (every) Torah scroll has the "B" of "Bereshit" written twice the size of the remaining letters of the word.
A more accurate rendering of the verse is "(B')With (reshit)a first cause God created the heavens and the earth."
And what was that "reshit," that first cause of Bereshit? The 2,100-year-old Jerusalem translation of the Bible into Aramaic brings the answer: "With a first cause of wisdom God created the heavens and the earth.
That the "first cause" is defined as "wisdom," as Rashi pointed out, is shown in Proverbs (8:12, 22 -24): "I am wisdom.... God acquired me [wisdom] as the beginning of His way, the first of His works of old. I [wisdom] was established from everlasting, from the beginning, from before there ever was an earth. When there were no depths, I [wisdom] was brought forth."
Wisdom, the totally metaphysical emanation from the Creator, yielded the Big Bang creation of the physical universe within which we dwell.
With wisdom (Proverbs) and logic (John) and mind (Wald), or in the language of quantum mechanics, information (J.A. Wheeler), as the essence of existence, the puzzle of the origin of sentient life able to be aware of the wonder of its own existence is solved. Wisdom is ubiquitous, the substrate of every particle of the world and most evident in the brains and minds of humans as we puzzle over our cosmic origins. The success of life is written into the fabric of the universe.
Our cosmic genesis in a nutshell: God -wisdom -Big Bang creation of energy -matter -life -brain -mind and sentience
Concisely stated, the wisdom of God embedded in the energy of the Big Bang creation laid the basis for that seemingly inert energy to metamorphose and become alive. And not merely alive, but even more than that: to become alive and brimming with the sentient awareness of being alive.
As Prof Wald stated, "It is mind that has composed a physical universe that breeds life and so eventually evolves creatures that know and create: science-, art- and technology-making animals. In them the universe begins to know itself."
Within every piece and aspect of the world, there exists at its foundation the essence of wisdom, or mind, an emanation of the Force that brought it into being. As bizarre as it may seem, the world in a very real sense has a "mind of its own."
This article is an extract from Gerald Schroeder's upcoming book God According to God (HarperCollins), to be published in the spring.
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