Jewish Orthodoxy and the Cosmos

Rabbi Yosef Bitton, Awesome Creation: A Study of the Thirst Three Verses of the Torah; Gefen Publishing House (2013). ISBN-10: 9652295566. Price: $24. 26. Rating: 3 stars out of 5.

By Rabbi Michael Leo Samuel

CHULA VISTA, California — As someone who has written on the first three chapters of Genesis, I was interested in seeing how a fellow rabbinical interpreter expounded the Genesis text.

Rabbi Yosef Bitton’s on Genesis, Awesome Creation: A Study of the Thirst Three Verses of the Torah explores just the first three verses of Genesis. The book spans 226 pages and the author wishes to present how the cosmology of science is compatible with the cosmology intimated by Genesis’s first three verses. I found his book to be interesting and important for people interested in seeing how science and faith interact with one another.

Rabbi Yosef Bitton was the former Chief Rabbi of Uruguay and today he is the head of a Syrian community in Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn. Awesome Creation is an apologetic work in the classical sense and seeks to make the world of science more palatable for Orthodox Jews.

Does he succeed in his objective?

The answer depends upon the kind of audience he is appealing to convince.

Age of the World and Universe

For non-Orthodox readers—and even some Modern Orthodox scholars—his statement that God really created the universe in six literal days, but the appearance of the world would give someone the impression that the world—and cosmos—are “billions of years old” (p. 57). Thus for Rabbi Bitton, when  scientists analyze and examine the world, they do not taken into consideration the religious claim championed by the Torah.

But who is to say that “day” means a 24-hour period? This is a point the author never sets out to prove. Briefly defined, yom is simply a measure of time. Context defines what that term might mean. It could refer to an indefinite period of time; or it can refer to an age in human or cosmic history.

Rabbi Bitton’s Interpretation of Maimonides

In his chapter entitled, “Verse One” Rabbi Bitton immediately makes it clear that Maimonides did not subscribe to Aristotle’s premise that the universe has always existed and that it did not derive from nothing.

• Among those who defended Biblical Creation was Maimonides (Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon,  1135-1204), a worthy champion for advancing a well-reasoned explanation of what the Scriptures’ concept of a beginning was all about. For Maimonides, creation of the world is the essence of the Hebrew Scripture, and whoever believes in the eternity of the world does not belong at all in the congregation of Moses and Abraham.

Rabbi Bitton sets forth an important point for the Orthodox world he is trying to convince: Anyone who believes in the eternal existence of the cosmos subscribes to a view that is not theologically “Jewish.” This is a bold—even a provocative—statement.  In his exposition of the verb bara, (create), Rabbi Bitton mentions that the verb denotes, “creatio ex nihilo” and this view enjoys a special place among several great Jewish theologians, such as Philo of Alexandria, Saadia Gaon, Maimonides, Nachmanides, And R. Shlomo ben Melech (1480- 1548) and several other scholars. However, there are an equally impressive list of Jewish thinkers who rejected this notion and argued that bara does not necessarily mean “creation from nothing.” Ibn Ezra and even Maimonides both felt that creatio ex nihilo need not necessarily be implied by the verb bara. The 15^th-16^th century Jewish philosopher, R. Josef Albo admitted that creatio ex nihilo is not a fundamental principle of the Torah[[1]]

The Polydox World of  Jewish Tradition

One cannot speak of “Jewish tradition” with regards to one school of thought in Jewish theology while marginalizing contrarian perspectives.

However, Rabbi Bitton neglects to mention the views of other Judaic scholars who have historically argued the exact opposite! With the help of the Google library, I wanted to see whether Bitton mentioned the complexity of Gersonides’ contrarian view, for Gersonides firmly believed that the universe was eternal. However, there is also considerable textual evidence that Maimonides also believed that the universe has always existed. He does not consider the possibility that the eternity of the universe might suggest that the cosmos has always existed as a thought of God, which by definition is eternal since God is not bound by the reality of time.

In another interesting passage, Rabbi Bitton cites the famous physicist and astronomer Fred Hoyle, who advocated the Steady State Theory, a view that purports that new matter is continuously created as the universe expands, ad infinitum, thus filling the universe with new stars and galaxies.[[2]]  Rabbi Bitton correctly points out that the Steady State theory has been largely discredited by the discovery of quasars and discovery of cosmic background radiation, which is consistent with the science taught by the Big Bang theory but not by the steady state theory. Among medieval rabbinic theologians, it is worth noting that Hasdai Crescas believed that time and space had infinite extension. Jewish mystics explain the entire cosmos as existing as a thought of God—and the thoughts of God are eternal.

Rabbi Bitton and Astronomer Fred Hoyle

Rabbi Bitton’s citation struck me as especially curious. Although he categorizes him as an atheistic physicist and astronomer, Hoyle was certainly not a hardcore atheist—not by a long shot.  Strange but true, Rabbi Bitton considered one Hoyle’s most remarkable statements:

• Suppose I told you there was an explosion the other day at a junkyard, and all the bits and pieces of debris just happened to fall together by accident to produce my automobile. Or suppose I told you I had set a monkey at my typewriter, and by sheer accident he had created a brilliant play. Well, the universe is billions of times more complex than an automobile or a play. What makes us think it could possibly have fallen into place by accident? Dr. Fred Hoyle once said that nothing had shaken his faith in his atheism as much as his discoveries involving the complexity of the carbon atom. He began to suspect that “some supercalculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom, otherwise the chance of my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be utterly minuscule. . . . A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”[[3]]

Now that’s an awesome description of God’s creation!

Hoyle was also one of the early scientific advocates of Intelligent Design. I would strongly recommend to Rabbi Bitton that he consider rewriting his book and add a special chapter dealing with the importance of Intelligent Design. If anything, he was a soft atheist; I think it is important for writers to define their terms before labeling someone as an “atheist.” Personally, I do not believe in an anthropomorphic God shaped liked human beings; does that make me an “atheist”?

Hardly.

Paul Davies, Professor of mathematical physics and professor of natural philosophy at Adelaide University, Australia, and also winner of the 1995 Templeton Foundation Prize for Progress in Religion, moved from promoting atheism in 1983 to conceding in 1984 that:

“the laws [of physics] … seem themselves to be the product of exceedingly ingenious design.”

to testifying in 1988 that there:

“is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all. The impression of design is overwhelming.”

Quotation from a Scientist/Theologian

“We do not live at the center of the universe, but neither do we live in just ‘any old world.’ Instead we live in a universe whose constitution is precisely adjusted to the narrow limits that alone would make it capable of being our home.”

John Polkinghorne, President of Queens’ College, Cambridge.[^[4]]

Today’s important theorists of the Intelligent Design include other original thinkers e.g., Stephen Meyer’s Signature in a Cell, argues that the biological complexity in a single cell functions much like a computer program. The biological information that is embedded within the DNA was known to prior to the 1950s. Only later did scientists realize the profound implications about how biological information is stored and processed in the cell.

Had Rabbi Bitton referred more to non-rabbinical sources, he might have been far more successful in proving the “awesomeness of Creation.” I hope in his next revision that he considers adding a chapter on the importance of Intelligent Design from a religious perspective.[[5]]

In his next revision of his book, Rabbi Bitton ought to include extensive footnotes or endnotes. Adding an index would also help his readers find relevant information without having to go to Google.

I recommend this book for anyone interested in understanding the Orthodox perspective as articulated by Israel’s Haredi movement in Israel and in Brooklyn today.