Category: Talmud and Telepathy
wherein I read Talmud telepathically: that is, I try to decipher “What were they thinking?”
Entanglement, Chesed, and the Quantum Theology of Incense
Every Sabbath, Jews recite a curious prayer, a recipe taken from the Talmud (Kereisos 6b) for a kind of incense that was used in the Temple. It required eleven ingredients in specific measures, including “galbanum,” a terpentine-smelling extract of gum plants, and “Carshina lye,” which is toxic. It sounds altogether foul (although if you knew the ingredients of the most expensive perfumes out of Paris, you’d turn up your nose, too). Furthermore, the mixture was so sacred, if a priest violated the formula by one jot, he could be put to death. In fact, one of the most mysterious passages in the Bible is the only recorded instance of the punishment: Aaron’s sons, Nadav and Abihu, (Lev 10:1-2), get it wrong, even though their intention seemed to be zealous, and G-d takes their souls by fire instead of the incense.
Why is incense such a closely guarded bit of esoterica that it accounts for one of the most confounding events in Scripture and we recite its formula 3000 years later, even in the absence of the Temple, for fear we’ll forget it? What is so precious and dangerous that it has to be guarded by the threat of capital punishment? Does it harbor some key to the nature of the connection between the physical and metaphysical?
The esoteric formula is insistently technical, earthy, materialistic and sensory but it has spiritual consequences. Together the eleven substances produce a divine smell, the incense is the last most mystical offering of all, and the spreading of smoky incense comes at the climax of the service.
This extreme contrast between technicality and spirituality begs for closer inspection. Is there more than materialistic, sensory explanations for the stagecraft of incense? Why is it such a closely guarded bit of esoterica? Is it possible the ritual harbors some key to the nature of the connection between the physical and metaphysical that is so precious and dangerous it is guarded by the threat of capital punishment, we recite the formula 3000 years later even in the absence of the Temple for fear we’ll forget it, and it accounts for one of the most confounding events in Scripture?
Kabbalists connect ketores to the kabbalistic aspect (sefira) of G-d called chesed, usually translated as “kindness,” but meaning much more. [1] The ketores produces a transformative scent. It influences all who smell it. Of all the senses, and of all the kinds of worship – singing, praying, hearing – smell lingers and suffuses. It creates and alters the ecology of a room. Sharing a scent in the air binds people together and it’s the most memorable. The kabbalistic analogy is clear: like acts of kindness, ketores emanates and spreads throughout the congregation and out into the world in unforeseen ways. It binds humanity together and elevates them, entangling their consciousness with each other and the metaphysical. In what follows, I will suggest the incense experience is related to newly-discovered aspects of nature, specifically quantum entanglement, and this relationship not merely metaphorically, but in substantive physics. Ok, that’s weird. Let me try to explain.
Quantum Biology Breaches the Walls Between Reality and Consciousness
For the last century, most physicists treated the troubling and enigmatic implications of quantum mechanics as something to be banished to the realms of philosophy and metaphysics. Physics still largely quarantines the absurdity of subatomic shenanigans from the observable macroscopic world we live in by claiming the two realities are unconnected. The world we experience continues to behave in an orderly, Newtonian, commonsensical fashion. Things don’t change each other by magic. Stuff can’t be in two places at once and no where at all. And most important, reality is there whether someone’s looking at it or not. But quantum mechanics put the nose of the camel of consciousness into the tent of scientific cosmology: a conscious observer had to watch events in order to make them real.
In the last decades, this quarantine has become increasingly difficult to maintain. Experiments in the 1960s through 1980s s that two objects separated by any conceivable connection, even at other ends of the universe, are entangled and somehow affect each other instantaneously. Science itself has stormed its own articles of faith with experimental results that show consciousness, human or at least intelligent consciousness, is implicated in making reality. Until recently, the last of these walls, between the macroscopic and the sub-atomic, held. What happened down there didn’t affect what happened up here in real reality. Still, physics had a whole armory of ways to wall off these disturbing phenomena from commonsense reality. saying that when the quantum world interacted with a macroscopic phenomenon, that macroscopic entity “observed” the probabilistic quantum, collapsing it into a stable realism. Its formal name is “Decoherence.”
But in the last ten years, quantum biology has shown that behaviors in our familiar world of nature are directly connected to and reliant on quantum processes. The orientation of migrating birds. The operation of genes. Photosynthesis. The comfortable quarantine that has kept our sense of reality simple and free from philosophy and metaphysics has now collapsed. And that collapse is utter and complete. It can’t be confined, because it is now likely to be shown that the whole universe interacts at all levels with quantum weirdness.
Entanglement suggests the cosmos is interactive
One of those quantum phenomena that is impossible to ignore at the macroscopic level is entanglement: spooky coordination between the behavior of objects that have no material, physical or any other possible connection either invisible or theoretical. Even objects – photons – that are traveling apart at the speed of light or are separated by vast distances instantaneously coordinate their reality. When one is tickled, its entangled twin across the universe laughs.
Perhaps we can get comfortable with the way this betrays our commonsense notions of reality for photons, because they are weird little buggers to begin with, both wave and particle, expressions of a probability formula that ineluctably shows they don’t even really exist in any proper sense of the word until they are observed. But entanglement isn’t confined to photons and other sub-atomic particles. As two physicists explain in a recent book:
“We talk in terms of twin-state photons because that situation is readily described and subject to experiment. In principle, however, any two objects that have ever interacted are forever entangled. The behavior of one instantaneously influences the other. An entanglement exists even if the interaction is through each of the objects having interacted with a third object. In principle, our world has a universal connectedness.“Quantum entanglement for large objects [like chairs or people] is generally too complex to notice. But not always.”
Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, QUANTUM ENIGMA: PHYSICS ENCOUNTERS CONSCIOUSNESS (Oxford UP, 2006)
This wasn’t written by tripped-out tree-hugging hippies, but by two well-respected tenured physicists at UC (admittedly, it is Santa Cruz, but nonetheless…). They chronicle how orthodox physics has suppressed these enigmatic but unavoidable conclusions of quantum mechanics. And the most disturbing of these enigmas is the relationship between human consciousness and the spookiness of the quantum level. Once things, including human things, interact with quantum weirdness they are entangled with it. And, by the way, everything in the universe interacts.
These aren’t just mystic metaphors They are the serious and real consequences of quantum physics. They troubled Einstein and generations of physicists since, but experimental evidence shows they are incontrovertible.
The science that studies how quantum mechanics breaches the wall of classical biology is called quantum biology. Birds navigate using quantum processing in their nervous system. In order for photosynthesis to convert sunlight into plant food at 90% + efficiency, it uses quantum mechanics. Enzymatic reactions transform one organic substance into another, like milk into cheese via rennet, or juice into wine via yeast, or flour and water into bread, also via yeast. Those enzymes also require quantum mechanics to achieve the speed of reactions needed to perform this magic. Many cultures recognize the transformation of these three foods as magical, spiritual, metaphysical, and even worship or at least pay tribute to them through rituals of sanctification. But Judaism hints at the complex intertwining of metaphysics of their physics (or organic chemistry), if we read it through the lens of the traditions and rituals attached to cheese, wine, and bread.
Another event that relies on quantum biology, and all the metaphysical implication it brings, is smell. [2]
I always wondered why ketores is recited after the end of the Musaf amidah. It seems like such an odd and specific intrusion in the climax of the service. But connecting the incense with chesed brings it all together. When we recite these technical instructions for making the incense as a prayer, we are reminded of the elaborate instructions for building the mishkan, the Sanctuary of the Temple, from which these verses are taken. We both remember and look forward to rebuilding it.
Ketores is designed to create the most beautiful, pungent, memorable, unique, and transporting scent, wafted on smoke to fill the Temple. We’re supposed to remember that Divine smell – or rehearse the rabbis’ memory of it – and also remember their pain at its loss. As Proust knew, no sense evokes memory more than smell. We are supposed to long for that smell as we long for the Temple, with the curious admixture of ache and inspiration, in the hope of the time when we can smell that smell again in the rebuilt Temple. This is an ultimate nostalgia, nostos algia, pain for home.
Metaphysics in the physics (and chemistry) of incense
The recipe for ketores specified in the Talmud, specifically the part of the formula that will produce an emanating smell is an enzymatic reaction produced by lye, which relies on quantum mechanics. Lye, which is highly alkaline, catalyses and binds all the other ingredients into an active, dynamic new compound that transcends the sum of its parts. The prayer about it specifies that urine could be substituted for lye to produce the same outcome, but it is undignified for use in the Temple. Chemically if not ritually, urine makes sense: it would introduce the same highly alkaline catalysis, depending on the diet of the donor. (At the risk of boring you, lye is produced by a membrane cell chloralkali process, which is itself also a quantum biological process.)
When we learn that ketores means chesed because it spreads out and connects all of us in unseen and ineffable ways, it is not just metaphorical. It is literally true at the level of physics.
The Quantum G- Hypothesis
From the viewpoint of orthodox science, the ultimate heretical implication of quantum mechanics is what we could call the “Quantum G-Hypothesis.”
THE QUANTUM G- HYPOTHESIS
The universe is sustained by an unimaginably dynamic and omniscient Universal Consciousness.
It (or properly, Who) observes every one of the infinite number of infinitesimal quantum events occurring everywhere in every sub-nanosecond.
This continuous observation by a Universal Consciousness enables reality to unfold.
The Quantum G-Hypothesis actually does away with some fairly absurd and, so far, unprovable assertions. The Many Worlds Hypothesis, String Theory, A Universal Robot Consciousness; Decoherence; Random Collapses of the Wavefunction, and some other gyrations too technical to delve here. They seem more like contortions designed to preserve logic in the face of experimental and mathematical proofs that show logic’s limitations. These still dominate the way orthodox physics is taught today. I predict they will be short-lived.
On the other hand, embracing the G-theory explains scientific mysteries without introducing any idea inconsistent with science. It explains the “Unreasonable Efficacy of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” as Eugene Wigner described it in his 1960 paper. It explains the otherwise unreasonably, inexplicable, and statistically far-fetched coincidence of constants in the universe that have enabled life to arise: Planck’s Constant, the strength of electromagnetic, gravity, and weak forces, among others. It solves philosophical problems, too. It explains how Free Will and Determinism can both exist without contradiction. And it explains how consciousness arises from matter.
At the same time, this vision – or scent – of a Quantum-Mechanical, Reality-Unfolding, All-Observing God moves in the opposite direction, from science to an appreciation of spiritual matters. It gives us a pretty good understanding of what Jewish mystics see in God: an Unfolding Ever-Present Consciousness observing every infinitesimal event in the universe, even at the ineffable and impossibly infinite quantum level.
Finally, it explains the inner meaning of incense. The ritual appears to be a symbol of the entire enterprise of the mishkan and Temple, to provide a place on Earth for G-d to abide. The sacrifices were offered in order to negotiate the boundary and open a portal between Earth and Heaven summoning G-d Himself to make a personal house call. The organic chemistry and quantum biology of incense suggest it was exemplary of, an avatar and instantiation of, an entangled process that goes on everywhere all the time in the universe between Divine attention and ur experience of material reality.
ENDNOTE
[1] This blog was inspired by a Shabbat drash (2016), by R. Yitzchok Feldman of Emek Beracha in Palo Alto in which he expounded on the mitzvah of the incense used in the Temple.
[2] See “Quantum mechanics may explain how humans smell,” PhysOrg (Nov 2007)
Tim Folger, “How Quantum Mechanics Lets Us See, Smell and Touch,” Discover (Oct 23, 2018)
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Literature, Letterature, Liturgy
I’m telling you this ’cause you’re one of my friends. My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends!” – Dr. Seuss, On Beyond Zebra
Imagine a new alphabet on beyond zebra where every letter allows different ways of pronouncing it.
Now imagine reading a poem written in this crazy alphabet. Such a text would invite the reader into a mad tango of endless interpretation. Unfathomable depths would beckon us into an embrace. Every line would lure us to transcendence. It would be like taking a sacred psychotropic drug. Call this supreme hyperpoem, one that provides no certainty and leaves everything to the imagination, not literature but letterature.
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The Origins of the Alphabet: Part 3
We’ve seen (in Part 1 and Part 2) that the Bible tells the story of the origin of the alphabet as a gift from God to Moses on Mount Sinai. God instructs Moses to teach this new disruptive communication technology to the Children of Israel and use it to liberate them from slavery in Egypt. He and his brother Aaron then stage a contest of scripts in the court of Pharaoh. Pharaoh summons his hieroglyphic scribes to show that the new writing system is not so special. The war of demos takes the form of magical-seeming transformations and “signs” (the Hebrew word for “thing” “plague” and “word” are the same). Water turn to blood. Frogs crawl out of the slime. But on the third contest, when Moses strikes the “dust of the earth” and summons “lice” all over Egypt, the Egyptian scribes are defeated. They throw up their hands and exclaim, “This is the finger of God!”
But why do the Egyptians give up now after having no trouble matching the transformation of water into blood or summoning frogs from the mud? A clue is in the nature of the transformation. Hieroglyphic signs for frogs and blood are well-known. What are hieroglyphs for dust and lice?
In Egyptian, the spoken word for lice is “tiny” or “diminutive” (the same word used for little girls). But they didn’t have a glyph for it in the older hieroglyphics in use at the time of Moses, nor are there glyphs for any adjective, because they are abstractions, a quality attached to a thing and enormously hard to represent by itself (you could color a tunic or show a small person, but how what is the picture for “smallness”?) Nor does there seem to be a hieroglyph for “dust.” Lice, like dust, are ubiquitous but nearly invisible little nothings. They are like the finger of a ubiquitous but invisible Deity stirring the pot of the universe and history. Kinim [כנם], the Hebrew word here translated as “lice,” is used in Israel to refer also to those tiny gnats that make a buzzing sound but which can’t be seen. In the American South, we call them “noseeums.”
Furthermore, the Hebrew letters for plague are D-B-R [דבר]. By supplying different vowels from those in traditional interpretations, these letters can also signify words or things or statements or even commandments, as in the Ten Commandments. As a word, DBR דבר is, like EHT את, a one-word demonstration of the power and facility of this new script to add abstraction and multiply layers of meanings. Hebrew without vowels, the Hebrew of the Bible, intrinsically adds complexity and even poetry to even simple texts.
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The Origins of the Alphabet: Part 2
Re-reading the Hebrew Bible as the story of the phonetic alphabet
I am the…The alphabet and the universal literacy it enabled was the ultimate disruptive new tech of its age, especially in its environment of hegemonic empires and nomadic oral (illiterate) cultures. Because it was simple and made literacy universal, anyone could broadcast their expressions to a much wider audience. It was like every citizen suddenly got a private printing press, just as anybody in the early years of radio and Internet could create their own channel or webpage and now everyone has a blog. It could represent any language well enough. It was more abstract and enabled new cognitive powers to blossom. It invited self-reflection and self-empowerment and self-affirmation. It enabled the writing of any concept, emotion or abstraction that could be said or thought in words, and therefore opened up the interior lives of people to each other. It created a new kind of intimacy.
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The Origin of the Alphabet: Part 1
We all swim in the alphabet like fish in water or birds in air, so it is hard to appreciate what an astounding communications technology it still is even after thousands of years of use. So imagine what this new flexible technology must have seemed like when humanity first discovered it around 1500 BCE. The easy literacy the alphabet enabled must have been at least as powerful and transformative in its time as the printing press, the telephone, the atom bomb, or the computer. These inventions produced rapid, breathtaking transformations of culture, shifts in power and wealth, disruptions of society, and creation of new ways for humans to relate to the universe and to each other.
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When the brain was simple
Mind to mind metaphysics in alphabet and cyberspace
The brain is a sur-rational machine for bringing worlds into collision, a metaphor device, a translation circuit for closing and opening the loop between incommensurate and mutually incomprehensible universes. In my view, it is already “meta-physical.”
Nature was finished when it invented the human brain
What is the brain? At its very simplest it is an entity that takes impressions from out there in the form of energy striking different nerve endings in the organs of the body (eyes, skin, ears, nose, mouth/tongue), converts the energy into information, shuttles the information to a central processor, a black box homuncular body without organs sitting in an ecology of incomprehensibly frothing and turbulent hormones, and somehow translates them into wholly different things in here – sensations, thoughts, flocks of birds, schools of fish, swarming, buzzing. The brain is intrinsically a sur-rational machine for bringing worlds into collision, a metaphor device, a translation circuit for closing and opening the loop between incommensurate and mutually incomprehensible universes. It is already “meta-physical.”
Before we were homo sapiens and the brain was simple, there was a neat Kantian fit between animal and environment: The rules of the world out there, its physics, were not challenged by the rules of the world in here; there was a nice match. But then through some urgency that it is just as easy to talk about metaphysically or teleologically as in terms of some deterministic chaotic evolution, the brain exploded, human-like hominids started walking upright about 100,000 years ago, looking forward, using tools, colonizing the world, creating new social structures. The brain, like some imperial culture exploding off a remote island, started projecting itself onto the world, terraforming the Earth in its own image and leaving in its wake a trail of non-bio-degradable tools and waste. Nature was finished. It was finished in the sense that it reached a fulfillment and a culmination, but it had also committed suicide, finished itself off. Not only did humans begin to massively alter the environment, but the brain also started talking, depicting, enacting versions of its experience in cave paintings, ritual dances, gestures, and a grammar of grunts. It became self-conscious. It recognized a mismatch between the world out there and the world in here: Hey! The world persists; we die! Self-consciousness and the idea of death were born in one fatal stroke. Finally, the brain framed everything it looked at: nature became a pastoral scene in the cognitive museum. The cosmos seen through human eyes was an artifice, always already available for use.
The C3 Loop
On the flip side, the human brain is a prisoner of the loop of cognition, culture and communication, caught in its virtuous cycle. We call the cybernetic device that initiated and grew in this loop language or symbolizing. Frances Hellige in his book on cognition and the brain, Hemispheric Asymmetry, describes this loop initiated by the development of language, with feed-forward and feedback components, as a sort of “snowball effect,” a cycle of ever-widening gyres that eventually embraces and creates everything between the poles of culture and the biology of the brain itself, including physiological changes in structure and size of different regions.2
In cybernetic terms, we call this a positive feedback loop. The cybernetic system (in this case, human brain) sends information out into the world-culture-environment, which feed newly intensified signals back into the (brain) system to destabilize the system anew, which in turn re-amplifies its message, like an over-sensitive microphone, and again re-broadcasts this message back onto the world until the universe screeches with the noise of the human brain echoed back to it, in it, a cyborg rock concert. It also changes the brain itself. Another researcher, Charles Lumsden, calls this process “the selective stabilization of the synapses” as a result of continuous exposure to cultural effects or stimulation, a collaboration between cultural invention and inherited genetic characteristics,” or “Gene-Culture Coevolution.”3
Neurophysiologists and cognitive scientists who study the alphabet note that its effects on the brain can even be seen in the lifetime development of individual people. The use of language reshapes the brain from womb to tomb. A whole new discipline of neural plasticity has emerged in the last few decades, showing that the brain is not the static, genetically-determined machine we once thought it to be. In other words, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny in culture-gene co-evolution as well. Studies of aphasics and dyslexics show that the brain changes physiologically and progressively after injury, suggesting that parts of the brain grow even in the lifetime of individual humans.
Fun with your new brain: the rise of the alphabet
Using different alphabets (or losing the capacity to read the alphabet), even within the lifetime of an individual, is a bit like growing a new brain. Trying a new alphabet must have been (and still is) tantamount to an ongoing progressive hallucination. It lets you think things that you couldn’t have thought before, makes connections that simply didn’t exist physiologically – for which your brain wasn’t wired – and forces your brain into different information processing patterns, which presumably involve different mental events or experiences (as physiological-cognitive research overwhelmingly shows). It’s like having a whole new brain, or at least, a brain with whole new faculties, new circuits, new wetware. Now imagine the mass hallucination of an entire culture learning how to use an alphabet for the first time. Whole tribes of people, or important segments of them, put on this new cybernetic headgear, or what I have been calling a new form of telepathy, virtually all at once. We can imagine this mass cybernetic experiment would be accompanied by social, epistemological, and metaphysical revolutions, apocalyptic prophesies, and re-definitions of the self in relation to body, mind, others, and the invisible. In short, it might provoke the emergence of a new religion.
With this perhaps absurd hypothesis in our minds, let’s take a look at the advent of writing itself. Take (in our imaginations) a time-lapse photograph of the Nile Valley before and just after the advent of hieroglyphics, or (even earlier), the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia before and just after the very first invention of writing, Sumerian pictographs around 3200 B.C. These time-lapsed films would show millions of years of desultory animal activity, including the hunting gathering and low-level agricultural activity of upright hominids after 35,000 BC. As we approach 10,000 BC, activity begins to pick up pace and organization. Clusters of hominids show tool use, primitive mound building, expressive cave painting, and cultivation of the earth, though in indifferent and almost-random-seeming patterns. Then, suddenly, around 3200 BCE, BANG! Something leaps across the chaotic bifurcation into a new order of frantic self-organization. Compressed into a few frames is an almost instantaneous transformation; blink and you’ll miss the instant. These fertile regions undergo massive terraforming along rectilinear plots. Rivers are diverted into rectangular irrigation systems. Cities emerge, themselves rectilinear. Zoom in with me now into the square-ish walls of the cities, and into the very square-ish rooms of the city, and we will find the intimate source of this sudden change. There, a row of hard stone benches, arranged regularly. It is a schoolroom for scribes! Hundreds of boys, mostly the sons of privileged nobility, sit for hours hunched over clay tablets, learning to scrawl in regular lines. Indeed, if we superimpose the scratching of these lines they look like the lines of irrigation written on the face of the earth itself, as seen from an orbiting satellite. The harsh discipline of the schoolchildren being tutored in script “canalizes” their thought processes, reinforcing certain pathways. It is hard not to imagine that what’s written on the brain gets projected onto the world, which is literally “canalized,” too.
Looking at a picture of the ancient Sumerian classroom for scribes found in Shuruppak (from ca. 3200 BC),
we see familiar rows of benches and the headmasters desk up front. Then we are seized with a horrible and giddy vertigo, a terrible recognition: Five thousand years later, and we’re still canalizing the brains of our children in the same way, enforcing the discipline of writing in virtually the same methods and with not so dissimilar effects as did these ancient Sumerians, “that gifted and practical people” (as Edward Chiera calls them in his groundbreaking study, They Wrote on Clay). Sumerians invented cuneiform as a perfectly portable means to effect commerce, extend the authority of their kings, preserve metaphysical and transcendent information, and secure the stability of caste and rank.
The invention of pictographic writing by the Sumerians was “a secret treasure’ or mystery which the laymen could not be expected to understand and which was therefore the peculiar possession of a professional class of clerks or scribes,” Chiera writes. Furthermore, the metaphysics associated with this new telepathic technology becomes clear in the priestly functions these scribes served. Neo-Babylonian texts used the same ideogram for priest and scribe. Along with the script came a new mythology that, predictably, placed the power of language in the center of its metaphysics: “As for the creating technique attributed to these [new] deities, Sumerian philosophers developed a doctrine which became dogma throughout the Near East — the doctrine of the creative power of the divine word. All that the creating deity had to do, according to this doctrine, was to lay his plans, utter the word, and pronounce the name.
In fact, everywhere pictographic writing makes its advent, we find the sudden emergence of what we can think of as “tech writing empires”: civilizations geometrically akin in their compulsive rectilinearity to the hexagonal hive structures of bees. In China, among the Aztecs of Mexico or Incas in Peru, in Babylon, Sumeria, and Egypt, we see the same pattern of social, epistemological, and metaphysical organization. Along with these scripts come other inventions so predictably similar that they seem to derive directly from imperatives in the nervous system itself amplified or newly grown by use of the new cyborg device of writing: centralized authority in god/kings; monumental ziggurat-like or pyramidal architecture; hierarchies of priest-scribes; complex, self-perpetuating bureaucracies; fluid but clearly demarcated social/economic classes; trade or craft guilds; imperialism; slavery; “canalizing” educational systems; confederations of tribes into nations; standardized monetary systems and trade; taxes; and so on. Almost every conceivable aspect of empire, in its gross forms, was entailed in pictographic writing. Even the alphabet, with its greater efficiency and fidelity to speech, only seems to add abstraction and speed to what McLuhan described as the “exteriorization of the nerve net”
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What is Quantum Theology? – or – “You see that synagogue on the right? That’s the one I won’t go to.”
So a Jewish carpenter gets stranded on a desert island for 20 years. He is finally rescued, but before he’s taken off the island, he insists on taking the captain on a tour of his handiwork. He’s built a whole town by hand, you see: homes, a butcher, a baker, a tailor. The captain is amazed, and then he sees two magnificent structures on the hill overlooking the town,
“What are those two buildings?” he asks .
“Oh, those?” the carpenter says dismissively. “They’re two synagogues.”
“Two synagogues?” asks the captain in amazement. “Why’d you build two synagogues?”
“See the one on the right? That’s the one I won’t go to.”
Does science invoke God?
If you’ve ever been a member of a congregation that is about to split over irreconcilable differences of theological opinion, you know how true the joke feels. But I tell it to mock the division between two faiths, science and religion. As the rift between the two has calcified, it’s looking more ridiculous and dispensable, like two old enemies who need to conjure each other in order to keep some militant vitality alive in their feud, Big Endians and Little Endians.
If we wouldn’t get excommunicated either from the Church of Science or the Academy of Belief, would we ask, “Is science a proper way to worship God?” If we wouldn’t be declared a heretic, would our church permit us to grant truth to all of science’s glory?
In the twenty-first century, an alert and dispassionate science should be able to admit that physics requires a metaphysical assumption about the way the universe works. Logic is a faith in its own, and believing in a universe that can be completely explained by logic requires a spiritual leap and even a certain blindness, especially after Kurt Gödel proved the limits of logic. On the other side of the limitations of reason lies the inexplicably unreasonable efficacy of mathematics in explaining the world (as Eugene Wigner noted in 1960), the crazy serendipity of, for instance, Planck’s Constant.
At the same time, to just say science explains what it can and let God be responsible for the rest – let God take the hindmost – is a losing gambit. It protects apparently shrinking territory.
I propose here that God has positive explanatory power in both science and religion. Quantum mechanics as we increasingly understand it almost demands the invention of some God-like Consciousness. And a vital faith, especially an organized and systematic monotheistic faith in God, should embrace our evolving, unfolding, scientific knowledge of the universe as Divine.
Yes, we risk falling into the trap laid by the fact that mysticisms end up looking like each other. The oceanic currents that course through prophets during their seizures of revelation show remarkable consistency across ages and cultures. There might even be a neural pathway in the brain that maps the mystical feeling of oneness with the universe and divine insight. (See my essay “Finding God in the Three-Pound Universe: The Neuroscience of Transcendence,” Omni Magazine 16, 70-80 (1993). Sometimes, inimical faiths have at their most transcendent depths remarkable similarities that can’t be explained by direct influence. As Steven Schwartz writes in “Islamic Sufism and Jewish Kabbalah: Shining a Light on Their Hidden History,”
Muslims and Jews further possess mystical customs — Islamic Sufism and Jewish Kabbalah — that are so close to one another that the presumption of mutual influence is inescapable. Yet the transmission of these spiritual doctrines and practices between them is still historically mysterious.
The moral of the story is that anyone who is tempted to see support for theological constructions of the universe in quantum physics should tread carefully. That hasn’t stopped speculations by amateur physicists but professional mystics, and professional physicists but amateur theologians, to leap to the hope that quantum cosmology proves there is a God. Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics (1984), Atoms, Snowflakes and God: The Convergence of Science and Religion (J.L. Hitchcock, 1982), The Science of God (G. Schroeder, 1998) are just three of many. There’s even an ideological rant with the title Quantum Theology (Diarmuid O’Murchu, 1987).
The God I mean isn’t a Christian God. He isn’t a Newtonian God. He isn’t a Cartesian God. He’s not the Great Clockmaker in the sky. The cartoon Western concept of God as static, perfectly rational, immutable, unitary, immortally consistent and knowable is inherited from overly-idealistic Greeks, from Plato and before him Pythagoras. They had a brilliant fetish for order and a gift for making sense. This Platonic ideal has had its splendid multi-millenial run. It gave us mathematics in all its elegance and the beautiful, aspirational dream of a rational universe that was smooth and simple and explicable and could be reduced to a Unified Answer.
Postmodern science, by contrast, calls for the non-Sense God of the Hebrews that Moses saw in the Non-burning Bush, the Dynamic Essence, forever unknowable, sometimes contradictory, receding, transcendental, yet mutable. Not One and Done, but always Becoming, involved in every aspect of the universe all the time. The grand project of our minds, the systematic quest for truth, is an expression of Divinity. A God needing interpretation as best we can by sixty-three volumes and centuries of commentary in the Talmud and the billions of words He has invited in the 1500 years since. The God that can be worshiped through science is an inconceivable God of Infinite Complexity, Abstraction, and Attentiveness Whom we can only strive to but never quite comprehend fully. This is the God who gave us the primitive alphabet for language in all its untranslatable ambiguity, not a reductive idolatrous god who gave us algebra and geometry and golden triangles and code as if the dazzling universe could be disambiguated in a cubicle. This God left clues as to the inter-connected nature of everything in everything waiting for us to enliven them with our gaze and imagination. In short, this is the God of Language, of a Holy Tongue, not Binary Code, an Author, not a programmer.
Metaphysics of the church of physics
Woody Allen said, “Love may be the answer. But while you’re waiting for the answer, sex poses some pretty good questions.” A Grand Unified Theory of Everything may be the answer, but while we’re waiting, quantum physics poses some pretty good questions, theological questions about the origin of life, the nature of mind, and the possibility that the universe collapses into this reality because Someone Impossibly Infinite to Imagine is observing every quantum event in the universe. The alternative is an equally inconceivable explanation: that every time a quantum probability wave collapses into reality, another universe is created, the so-called Multiverse Hypothesis.
There is now a serious discussion about the way quantum mechanics may be implicated with the biology of consciousness as well with the fabric of the universe. For instance, in an otherwise brilliant and lucid book, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology (2014) Johnjoe McFadden and Jim Al-Khalidi show that quantum physics drives the biochemistry of photosynthesis, genetics, enzymes, smell, and perhaps even consciousness. This is transcendence, requiring the collapse of epistemological boundaries between macroscopic biology and sub-atomic quantum events. Yet, when the authors consider the possible role of quantum biology in how the mind arises from the brain or life from inorganic matter, they are quick to protest their orthodoxy by bracketing out any whiff of theology:
Can our new understanding of life [as having its source in quantum mechanics] replace the soul with a quantum vital spark? Many will regard the very posing of this question as suspect, pushing the bounds of conventional science beyond respectability and into the realms of pseudoscience and spirituality. That is not what we’re proposing here. Instead, we want to offer what we hope is an idea that might replace mystical and metaphyscial speculations with at least the grain of a scientific theory.” (p. 310)
It never occurs to these authors to consider the middle they have excluded, that the very “grain of a scientific theory” they are exploring in quantum biology is the essence of the mysticism they loathe. Of course, they can’t. They’d be excommunicated. Or at least, denied tenure. But let’s linger on this excluded middle. At the slippery, frothing interface between mind and matter, serious physicists who are quick to disavow any theology in their science end up sounding defensive, but not convincing. If we wouldn’t get kicked out of Church of Science, would we pose that pretty good theological question: Is life, the soul, a quantum process?
NEXT: The Quantum Theology of Matzah.
(1) Philip Clayton writes, “In this brief sketch of the history of Western metaphysics, we have seen that the problem of matter remains an unsolved conundrum. Although the problem was continually reformulated and redefined, every attempt to understand matter ends up focusing on the active principle of the intellect– that which makes understanding possible – rather than what was supposed to be understood, which was matter as qua [exactly that which is] non-mental. Again it is as if matter continually recedes from our grasp. One even wonders: could it be that matter is in essence that which cannot be understood, that which inevitably recedes from us as we approach it? Here one thinks of the notion of the transcendental signified” in the work of the influential French philosopher, Jacques Derrida. [1995b, 1998]. If the parallel indeed holds, matter is another name for what Derrida called la differánce, that which is always different from our formulations and which is always deferred into the future whenever we seek to understand it.” P. Clayton,”Unsolved Dilemmas,” in Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics. ed by Paul Davies and Niels Henrik Gregerson (Cambridge UP, 2010: pp. 50-51).
Of course, I believe that Derrida was an anti-theological Jewish mystic and prophet, who erected an entire philosophical system, preserved Jewish ways of knowing and discoursing, and even in part Jewish ethics, by substituting a very Jewish understanding of God with the idea of differánce, but that is another long story.
(2) Thomas Pynchon, that great epistemological jokester, quipped, “…excluded middles, they’re bad shit.” (The Crying of Lot 49). Oedipa Maas is hung up between the poles of deterministic logic and transcendence: “She had heard all about excluded middles; they were bad shit, to be avoided; and how had it ever happened here, with the chances once so good for diversity? For it was now like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.”
See also an exploration of the philosophy of excluded middles since Pythagoras and its role throughout Pynchon’s fiction in “Pynchon and the Law of the Excluded Middle” by F. Collado-Rodriguez)).
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“Dear Telepath: I Just Want to Be a Letter, Preferably a Vowel” – or – How I learned to stop worrying and love the apocalypse
Dear Telepath,
I am 16 years old and I am going to go crazy. I can’t stop thinking about the Apocalypse. I keep seeing and hearing things, and they all add up to one fact: It’s coming. I feel like it is pointless to even do things because I know it is all going to end soon, either by mass starvation with the death of bees, an asteroid hitting our planet, or by nuclear bomb, global warming, bird flu, or human flu, or AIDS, whatever. I am trying to cut high fructose corn syrup out of my diet and every time I think I have triumphed I realize that it’s in everything!!!!!! Splenda causes lesions to the brain, meat causes heart attacks, organic foods are twice the cost of non-organic, yet non-organic foods have pesticides and toxins.
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Divine Telepathy: Reading Talmud
Reading is Telepathy
Writing and reading are acts of telepathy. The author tells me what’s in his mind. I try to decipher it. It can be an ecstatic communion, or dull. But assuming there’s another mind may help us out of the postmodern moral abyss.
Yes, the author’s story is just a version. The characters are just representations. The author tries to reduce the arbitrariness of selecting these few signs out of an infinity of possible others through force of will and practice and erasure. If we resonate with what we read, we respect and admire and can be pleasured by word art. But who is to say what is right or wrong in anything?
Welcome to the postmodern abyss, where morals throw themselves off the cliff to die. Where ethics are a matter of local taste. Where the world is anything you make it. Chacun á son goût. Or a “Negative Theology,” what Charles Taylor saw in Derrida’s philosophy.
When you open a book, are you already judging the author against some ideological test? Or do you try to know the author’s mind first before deciding he had failed your personal litmus test?
Reading the Talmud is good training for suspending your judgments.
The Talmud is a hypertextual text of a symposium among hundreds of rabbis and scholars spread across continents over the first five centuries after the Destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem.
The Mishnah plus Gemarah that make up the canonical Talmud, along with inclusions of sanctioned commenatries by Rashi and others, are at least 6000 pages long. But the Talmud project has never stopped growing and promises to keep growing as commentators comment on commentators to adapt the Torah to an evolving reality. Easily millions of pages have been written about it. Not only is it a cryptic attempt at capturing a convoluted conversation, the conversation itself is an attempt to reconstruct a text that was never supposed to be written down, the Oral Law of the Jews. In short, the mere act of learning to read the Talmud requires years of study just to give it a fair hearing, to try to understand what the sages were trying to say before deciding if what they said had any merit.
Anyone can dip into this sea of interpretations and stories and pronouncements and duels among rabbis and extract something out of context to prove a point. But just to learn the names of the “authors,” the eras and cultures in which they lived, the assumptions underlying their discourse, and the pretexts for that discourse, requires a lifetime. It’s good practice for suspending your self-interested interpretations when reading a mere 300-page novel by a single author.
Continue reading “Divine Telepathy: Reading Talmud”
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