Editor’s note: This is the first of five columns by Jeremy England. England is an American-born physicist noted for his argument that the spontaneous emergence of life may be explained by the extra energy absorbed and dissipated during the formation of exceptionally organized arrangements of molecules. He is also a rabbi. In this series, he will teach modern readers how to understand the Torah, one book at a time. First up is Genesis, a book that, according to England, establishes a specific truth—one that many of us, under the sway of the Enlightenment’s caricature of biblical thinking, misunderstand: “God is not a claim about the facts of the world to be proved or disproved, but rather is the focus for a method we are meant to use to interpret the events of our lives and the world.” —The Editors
Here are a few tips for how to read Genesis. Assume the book’s account of God is absolutely correct, which means He wrote it, as well as all other books and your genome. Assume God knows everything you know, everything you could know, and more. Assume God is the unfettered author of your life, world history, and the universe. Infer, therefore, that the Hebrew Bible—“Tanakh”—is unique not because its existence expresses the Creator’s will (since that’s true of everything there is) but rather because its content serves as the Creator’s official autobiography and a job description for His willing servants. Given all this, note that trying to prove its statements to be factually true or false is about as confused as trying to reach someone on the phone by dialing the license plate number on his car.
You don’t have to be an Albert Einstein or a Richard Feynman to know that plants need sun to grow. So when plants make their first appearance in Genesis “before” the sun does, even the most skeptical student of the text might conclude that he is not, in fact, perusing a simple chronology. If he manages, just for a moment, to forget how our post-biblical culture expects us to read biblical text, he might even notice that a basic message of the seven days of creation is that true statements about God are guaranteed to sound enigmatic in some way.
While this is an evident enough point to discuss with an interested 7-year-old Jewish day school student, it was lost on a great many Jewish atheist theoretical physicists during the last hundred years. Never has so much intelligence done so little to justify arrogance as when Feynman or Steve Weinberg mouthed off about theology. For all their genius, these Wicked Sons were never taught to read, and so, sadly, when it came to the subject of Eden or Abraham they applied their intellects to bludgeoning straw men and sniping at a heritage they did not even try to understand.
I too was once a Jewish atheist theoretical physicist, who, like many others, grew up worshipfully reading Feynman’s memoirs, hoping to understand “the universe” as profoundly as he and Weinberg and a dozen other Torah-rein 20th-century yidden had. However, through a series of providentially happy accidents, I managed eventually to get a glimpse past the smokescreen. Imagine my shock to discover that the most profound and free-ranging intellectual pursuit I had ever experienced—Torah study—had been distorted or even deliberately obscured from view by the pontifications of my childhood heroes. Weinberg once said, “[Scientific education] is corrosive of religious belief, and it’s a good thing, too!” Today I can retort that quantum field theory may be fun and useful, but it only ever amounts to playing around in one little sandbox according to a stultifyingly narrow set of mathematical rules. Maybe one day I will forgive Weinberg and Feynman for the way they stunted my understanding of the world and mankind’s condition in it, but I’ll have to avenge myself on them first.
The best revenge I can think of is to turn the eye of a physicist to righting the false trail laid out by Weinberg and others. Proper scientific education is favorable to proper religious belief, and vice versa, and it’s a good thing, too.
So let’s begin.
