Torah & Scientific theory
The First
Six Days
Dr Nathan Robertson
First Published 2007
Published by Pneuma Springs Publishing
The First Six Days
Copyright © 2007 Nathan Robertson
Author reserve moral rights
ISBN: 978-1-905809-27-1
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Acknowledgements
I have many people to thank and acknowledge for their support, encouragement and inspiration in helping to write down these ideas. Firstly my wife Rachel although not much of a scientist has supported me and patiently listened to my ramblings over the last few years, and kept my feet on the ground.
My best friend Martyn Niman has not only been such a close friend but has encouraged me to follow my own path that I feel I should be pursuing. Martyn is a constant inspiration through his actions and thoughtful words and has cleared my head a number of times to allow me to focus on important matters in life.
Solomon Abrahams is not only a caring and close friend but also a guide to my thoughts and me. Solly is a man who is in touch with everyone around him, who is as clear as crystal and follows his thoughts with truth. I am glad to have such friends as these.
My parents David and Hannah have brought me up with pride and a sense of purpose and I owe them everything. Lastly but not least Benjamin should be mentioned as friend and brother.
Table of Contents
Quotations
Introduction/Prologue
Scientific development in the 17th to 21st centuries
Introduction to Ramban and commentators
Time
Day 1
Day 1 Summary
Day 2
Day 2 Summary
Day 3
Day 3 Summary
Day 4
Day 4 Summary
Day 5
Day 5 Summary
Day 6
Day 6 Summary
Lurianic Kabbalah and cosmology
Synopsis
Table of Figures
Index
Quotations
“If a Jew who believes in the Torah thinks that the world was created from primeval matter, and that many worlds, made from the same primeval matter, existed before this one, this would not be considered a flaw in his faith.” Yehuda Halevi. Kuzari 1:67
“I had the intention of becoming a theologian...but now I see how God is, by my endeavours, also glorified in astronomy, for ‘the heavens declare the glory of God.’” Johannes Kepler [1571-1630]. Astronomy/Laws of Planetary Motion
“There are more sure marks of authenticity in the Bible than in any profane history.” “This thing (a scale model of our solar system) is but a puny imitation of a much grander system whose laws you know, and I am not able to convince you that this mere toy is without a designer and maker; yet you, as an atheist, profess to believe that the great original from which the design is taken has come into being without either designer or maker! Now tell me by what sort of reasoning do you reach such an incongruous conclusion?” Sir Isaac Newton [1642-1727]. Mathematician, Physicist.
“All human discoveries seem to be made only for the purpose of confirming more and more the Truths contained in the Sacred Scriptures. The undevout astronomer must be mad.” Sir William Herschel [1738-1822]. Astronomer.
“The Bible is true and science is true, and therefore each, if truly read, but proves the truth of the other.” Matthew Maury [1806-1873] The "Father" of oceanography.
“It is evident that an acquaintance with natural laws means no less than an acquaintance with the mind of God therein expressed. Order is manifestly maintained in the universe, governed by the sovereign will of God. After the knowledge of, and obedience to, the will of God, the next aim must be to know something of His attributes of wisdom, power, and goodness as evidenced by His handiwork.” James Prescott Joule [1818-1889] Described the First Law of Thermodynamics.
“The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator. Science brings men nearer to God.” Louis Pasteur [1822-1895] Father of Microbiology.
“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” Albert Einstein [1879-1955] Physicist, founder of relativity.
Introduction/Prologue
I have been a practising orthodox Jew since I began to learn about Torah and our traditions in my late teens. I was raised in Grimsby and there has only ever been a tiny Jewish community there since the late 19th century, when many Jews arrived from Russia and Europe to better their lives, or were even told that they had arrived in America!
When I began my search into Judaism at the same time I began my masters degree in Chemical physics at Bristol University. I then went on to study for a PhD in the Biophysics group at Imperial College London. Throughout this time of study of Torah and science I was questioned many times how I could believe in Genesis (Bereshis) and Science since they contradicted each other.
But do they? Do we really fully understand the world around us? Are not new theories cropping up all the time? Are not old ideas being replaced by better ones? I would say Science has revealed more questions than answers, but has broadened and opened the minds of humanity to very sophisticated and incredible ideas that should not be ignored. Our science has bettered our lives in so many ways on a physical level; in the west at least we are generally healthier, living longer, surviving conditions that would have been fatal previously. We can travel around the globe within a day, contact friends around the world, we have never been so connected before. There are always negative sides to science: weapons, bombs, biological agents, but these are due to our own evils, not of science. All science is the search for the truth and nothing more; if we use this knowledge wrongly then the blame solely lies with us.
With the Torah, can we say we understand such a mystical and deep passage of Hebrew such as Bereshis “Genesis”? Even the greatest Rabbis acknowledge we cannot say too much about Bereshis due to such deep and hidden mysteries involved in creation. The Torah is the truth, someone who studies the Torah is also searching for the truth. A famous Jewish principle is that you can study the world and derive the Torah or you can study Torah and derive the world: you can go both ways.
Since we have incomplete knowledge in both of these directions how can we be sure we know they conflict?
I struggled with the ideas of cosmology, evolution and the account in Torah. I remember my mind swapping back and forth between science and Torah many times. However over time I realised that although the languages of Bereshis and science are very different, if you look beyond the words you can see the very same ideas and themes. I am an observant Jew and many may find this already a bias to show that the Torah is correct. But I have scrutinised these ideas and parallels and I am not only convinced but know that the words of the Torah are being reflected in modern scientific thinking.
This is why I have written this book; the more one studies modern science the more one realises that the same themes run through Bereshis. The order of creation from modern science can be mirrored very closely to the order of creation in the Torah. As one studies Science to deeper levels and also tries to study Beresh
is to deeper levels, both principles begin to converge on each other.
This is not a book on mysticism, or religious thought, nor am I trying to prove the Torah. The Torah is the truth and requires no proof, but importantly does follow and require logic. I do want to try and show that modern science does not contradict the Torah and that no one should disbelieve Torah because science tells us otherwise, it does not. Nor can science tell us anything beyond the physical world, which is where religion generally starts. Science impinges on Torah in only a few very select cases; the most obvious of these is the account of creation in Bereshis. Science is an extremely important discipline that I believe in recent history has began to mirror the words of the Torah very closely.
To help the readers along with this book I have separated out the essential scientific background that is in the main text from a more complex scientific description, which is subtitled “advanced”. These “advanced” sections are not essential for understanding or comparisons but I have included them to allow more scientifically-minded readers a deeper comparison of Torah and current thought in science. Therefore one can skip over these sections, or if the reader is feeling up to either a challenge (or a headache!), I can say it is worth the effort and perseverance.
I hope that this book will just allow readers to gain a deeper appreciation of Torah and logical truths in Bereshis and also the world of science.
Scientific development
in the 17th to 21st centuries
Scientific enquiry began very early in history with the ancient Greeks and some very famous thinkers such as Archimedes, Pythagoras and Aristotle. Science did not advance much in its concepts until the rise of Newton in the seventeenth century. Since Newton, science has rapidly gathered pace and many insights into the structure of our universe have penetrated our knowledge.
The birth of modern science began with the scientific revolution in Europe and the re-discovery of Aristotle. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries were a period of great upheaval which presaged large social and political changes. The works of Ptolemy (astronomy), Galen (medicine), and Aristotle (physics) were not always found to match everyday observations.
The Scientific Revolution is held by most historians to have begun in 1543 when De Revolutionibus by the astronomer and monk Nicolaus Copernicus was first printed. The Scientific Revolution is a convenient boundary between ancient thought and classical physics. Copernicus revived the heliocentric (sun-centred) model of the solar system first devised by Aristarchus of Samos, a Greek mathematician and astronomer. Aristarchus is celebrated as the exponent of the theory of a sun-centred universe and for his pioneering attempt to determine the sizes and distances of the Sun and Moon. The period culminated with Isaac Newton’s publication of the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687.
Other significant scientific advances were made during this time by Galileo Galilei, whose achievements included improvements to the telescope and a variety of astronomical observations, which strongly supported the Copernicus model of the solar system. Galileo pioneered the use of experiment to validate physical theories, a key idea in scientific method. The basics of the scientific method ushered in a new way of thinking, emphasizing experimentation and reason over traditional considerations. This was closely followed by the first known model of planetary motion given by Kepler in the early seventeenth century. Kepler proposed that the planets follow elliptical orbits, with the Sun at one focus of the ellipse.
In 1687, Isaac Newton published the Principia Mathematica, providing two groundbreaking physical theories: Newton's laws of motion, which lead to classical mechanics, and Newton's Law of Gravitation, which describes the fundamental force of gravity. The behaviour of electricity and magnetism was studied by Faraday and Ohm amongst others during the early unification of the two phenomena into a single theory of electromagnetism by Maxwell.
The beginning of the twentieth century hailed the start of a revolution in physics. The long-held theories of Newton were shown to be incorrect in a number of cases. In 1900, Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr and others developed quantum theories to explain anomalous experimental results in atomic theory by introducing discrete energy levels. Not only did quantum mechanics show that the laws of motion were broken on atomic scales, but the theory of general relativity, proposed by Einstein in 1915, showed that the fixed background of spacetime, on which both Newtonian mechanics and special relativity depended, could not exist. In 1925, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger formulated quantum mechanics, which provided a deeper understanding of the preceding quantum theories.
The observation by Edwin Hubble in 1929 that the speed at which galaxies recede positively correlates with their distance led to the understanding that the universe is expanding. A metaphor for this expansion would be blowing up a balloon with dots drawn on the surface; when one blows into the balloon increasing its size, the dots recede from each other with speeds proportional to their distance from each other. This led to the formulation of the Big Bang theory by George Gamow.
One of the more challenging and profound theories developed around this time was the theory of evolution by natural selection put forward by the British naturalist Charles Darwin in his On the Origin of Species in 1859. Darwin's theory proposed that all differences in animals were formed by natural processes, found to be caused by genetic mutations over long periods of time. The rediscovery in the early twentieth century of the laws of inheritance developed by the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel in 1866 led to the study of heredity. Mendel's laws provided the basic principles of the study of genetics, which became a major field of research in recent history. By 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick clarified the basic structure of DNA, the genetic material for expressing life in all its forms. In the late twentieth century, genetic engineering became practical for the first time, and a massive international effort was begun in 1990 to map out an entire human genetic code. “The Human Genome Project” has opened many scientific doors and may potentially provide many benefits for medicine.
Introduction to Ramban
and commentators
It is important to explain that many of the sources for understanding the written Torah (five books of Moses) are from some of the greatest Rabbis of our past. The first chapter of Genesis (Bereshis) is probably one of the most deep, profound and difficult pieces of Hebrew text to decipher. It can easily be misunderstood and the greatest of the Rabbis admit that one cannot truly understand Bereshis through a literal reading of the text. One really needs a guiding hand from the famous Torah commentators such as Ramban and Rashi to glean some understanding of such a deceptively simple yet complex text.
An accurate explanation and commentary of the Torah is from the ‘Oral Law’ (Mishnah). The Oral Law was revealed to Moses at Mount Sinai along with the written Torah and passed down through the generations verbally. Moses passed this down to Joshua then to the Prophets and then to the ‘Men of the Great Assembly’.
There are known to be four levels of Torah understanding, each deeper and more esoteric than the next. The four levels are Pshat (simple), the literal meaning of the text. Remez (hint) a deeper level of those elements hinted at by the text; an example is gematriyah (the numerical values of the letters to teach us a meaning). Drush, which is a still deeper level of learning, deriving basic principles and
meanings from logical commentaries and traditions. Sod (secret) the deepest level of all, which involves the most
esoteric meanings and beliefs; Kabbalah is an aspect of this level.
The first letters of these four levels of Torah study together make up the word "pardes" (orchard).
To gain some understanding of Bereshis one needs to delve beyond the literal reading of the text into Remez and Drush. The literal reading of Bereshis has to be true also and does inform a very basic understanding of the act of creation. However, science delves into a much deeper understanding of the physical world, much of which is beyond our vision and experience. Therefore o
ne should decipher the deeper meanings of Bereshis, which are also beyond our vision and experience for a true comparison of science and Torah to be made.
Ramban
In this book I will refer to the Ramban’s commentary on Bereshis many times. Ramban, otherwise known as Nahmanides, was born in Girona in 1194 and died in Israel about 1270. Ramban was the grandson of Isaac ben Reuben of Barcelona. Among his teachers in Talmud were Judah ben Yakkar and Meïr ben Nathan of Trinquetaille, and he is said to have been instructed in Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism) by the famous Azriel.
Nahmanides studied medicine and became a practising physician. He also studied philosophy. Even during his teens he began to get a reputation as a learned Jewish scholar. Ramban began his writings on Jewish law while still only sixteen.
Ramban believed that the wisdom of the rabbis of the Mishnah and Talmud, as well as the Geonim (rabbis of the early medieval era), was unquestionable. He stated that their words were to be neither doubted nor criticized; "We bow before them, and even when the reason for their words is not quite evident to us, we submit to them" (Aseifat Zekkenim, commentary on Ketubot).
Onkelos
Onkelos is the name of a famous convert to Judaism in Talmudic times (35-120 b.c.), and is considered to be the author of the famous Targum Onkelos (110 b.c.).
According to the traditional Talmudic sources, Onkelos was a prominent Roman nobleman, a nephew of the Roman emperor Titus. His conversion is the subject of a story wherein he first consulted with the spirits of three deceased enemies of Israel to see how Israel fared in the next world (Talmud Gittin 56b).
Rav
Abba Arika was a Babylonian amora (Jewish scholar) from the 3rd century AD. Rav established the systematic study of the rabbinic traditions at Sura using the Mishnah as text. This led to the compilation of the Talmud, and therefore he is commonly known as teacher ‘Rav’.
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