G O D According to G O D A Physicist Proves We’ve Been Wrong About God All Along Gerald L. Schroeder Contents Introduction 1 on e A Few Words About What God Is Not 7 two The Origins of Life 25 One Reason I Know There Is a God thr ee The Unlikely Planet Earth 55 Finding a Friendly Home in a Challenging Universe fou r Nature Rebels 83 God Grants Nature a Mind of Its Own f ive A Repentant God? 107 How to Understand a God That Has Regrets si x Arguing with God 117 We Are Partners with God and Partners Can Disagree se v e n In Defense of God 133 Understanding God Through the Book of Job eigh t Life and Death 145 Two Perspectives on One Reality iv Contents nine The Desert Tabernacle 159 A Model for a Universe Built of Love ten Knowing Truth in Your Heart 173 A Tale of Love eleven Understanding the Merciful God of the Bible 183 Golden Apples in a Silver Dish twelve Partners with God 201 Working with a God That Will Be Appendix 219 Acknowledgments 229 Notes 231 Scripture Index 237 Subject Index 241 About the Author Credits Cover Copyright About the Publisher Introduction Shortly before sunrise, I stand outside my home in Jerusalem and watch the last moments of night give way to the coming of day. In those early morning hours, with the air spiced with scents from the eucalyptus trees and bushes of thyme that border our courtyard, the sky embraces the f leeting black of night. Pins of starlight mark the grandeur of space. The sun rises and begins to paint the sky blue as the shortest visible wavelengths of the in- coming sunlight are scattered across the heavens. The glow of the sky signals the call for prayer. Jerusalem rests on several hills, and each hillside acts as a re- f lector, echoing the diverse calls for prayer out again over the city. Today marks the Hebrew month of Elul, the biblical month that precedes the biblical New Year, the holiday of Rosh HaShanah (literally, “the head of the year”). By pleasant coincidence, this year the Muslim month of Ramadan coincides with Elul. Both Elul and Ramadan have special prayers, and that makes this 2 god according to god morning’s music especially pleasant. Hebrew from a town crier and the blowing of a ram’s horn, the shofar, call for Jews to rise and thank God for the magnificent munificence of the day. This mixes with the Arabic from the muezzin asking Muslims to do the same. And then not to be left out of this Divine melody, the bells of the many Jerusalem churches literally chime in, blending perfectly with the voices in Hebrew and Arabic. Each of our three local cultures yearns to address the one God, Creator of the universe. We may use different languages, but the sense of an underlying Unity remains. This spiritual Oneness, though expressed differently in the three religions, mirrors, as a near replica in the metaphysical realm, the physical unity upon which rest all aspects of the material world. Much of the four decades of my career as an M.I.T.-trained sci- entist and, in parallel, the three decades of my study of the Bible has been devoted to probing this physical and spiritual unity. At times the two realms blend, and yet at times they seemed totally and hopelessly at odds. The deeper truth I discovered is that, when we get beyond a superficial understanding of the tangible, material world, we find that the physical and the metaphysical make up a single reality, one world viewed from two vastly dif- ferent perspectives. It is this that I teach in my classes on science and the Bible. Albert Einstein discovered that matter is actually pure con- gealed or condensed energy, energy in the form of solid matter. Everything from our bodies to boulders on a mountain is made of the energy of the big-bang creation. The scientific discoveries of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have gone a step far- ther in closing ranks with the creation, finding that matter and the energy from which matter formed are made of something totally ethereal. In physics we call it information or, more ex- treme, mind. In the words of the knighted mathematician James Introduction 3 Jeans, the world looks more like a great thought than a great machine. Biblical theology agrees totally, telling us, as we will learn, that God used a substrate of wisdom with which to build the world. This Divine wisdom or mind is present in every iota of the world’s being. It explains how the energy of the creation, essentially superpowerful light beams, could become alive and sentient, able to feel love and joy and wonder. Divine wisdom was and is present, guiding and forming the way. The secular world of course takes a different stance. If we can get past the question of what created the universe from nothing (was it God?), we then let the laws of nature take the credit for producing, in some as yet unknown way, the magnificence of life from the big-bang burst of pure, exquisitely hot energy. All this by random chance. It takes a stretch of the imagination, but that is all that is available to a secular explanation of our cosmic genesis. Though in my books and with my students I present our gen- esis from a very different view, that of a creating God that is pres- ent and active, I too face a dilemma, and my questioning students do not let me ignore the problem. There is something very basic missing in the simplistic view of the God of the Bible operating and controlling the workings of the world. Most obviously, if God is in control, why isn’t the world perfect? Not just from our hu- manly limited view of perfection, but even in a biblical account- ing there are multiple examples by which we learn that the world has its faults. Most blatantly, God brought the biblical Flood at the time of Noah to revamp a misdirected world. Couldn’t God have foreseen this potential for disaster and nipped it in the bud before it blossomed into a worldwide debacle? Are we dealing with an absentee God, a God that only once in a while pays attention to the world It created to see if things are going according to some Divine schedule? A superficial read- ing of the Bible might give that impression. A detailed study of 4 god according to god God as described in the Bible, however, presents a very different picture. For example, as the Israelites are about to enter Canaan, God promises to fight for their victory, but then tells any indi- viduals who have a new home or are recently engaged to marry to return home, lest they die in battle. God promises to fight alongside the Israelites to help gain victory for the army, but there is no guarantee of survival given to any particular individual. In another incident, God promises to send hornets ahead of the Israelite army to drive out the enemy snipers, but not to drive the enemy out too quickly lest the beasts of the field multiply. God could also have controlled the beasts just as God controlled the hornets, but refused to do so. The biblical message is that God is there to help, but steps back, in biblical language hides His face, and insists that we do our part in the job. God has chosen us to be partners. With the Divine hiding of face, God’s presence becomes masked, at times even unpredictable and certainly not always controlling events. This is a dynamic Force, not some static entity able to be pigeonholed into how we think a God should act within Its creation. The overwhelming goodness of the world is so extreme that every sorrow stands out as an unnecessary trag- edy. In simplistic terms, God could and should stop every form of undeserved trouble. But that is not the God of the Bible, as the book of Job so blatantly reveals. The God of the Bible, by the very act of creating the universe, has relinquished a portion of control. With this act, God imbued and empowered humankind with the task of getting a partly perfect world to become fully perfect. This is a tremendous vote of confidence by God in our ability, notwithstanding the fact that God has let us know that we are a stiff-necked and rebellious people. It is as if God has said, “This is what I have to work with, so let’s make do with what we’ve got.” Introduction 5 The problem so many people, believers as well as skeptics, have with God really isn’t with God. It’s with the stunted percep- tion of the biblical God that we imbibe in our youthful years. As children we yearn for a larger-than-life figure who can guide and protect us. Our parents fulfill part of that mission. But the paren- tlike image of an infinite, error-free God is even more assuring to our young minds. So we grow up retaining this childhood notion of an all-powerful, ever present, ever involved, never erring Cre- ator. Unfortunately, that image fails when as adults we discover that the facts of life are often brutally at odds with this popular, though misguided, piece of wisdom. It’s no wonder that atheists chortle at the naiveté of the idea of such a God. We are about to correct that misperception, and in doing so we’ll develop an un- derstanding of the Divine as made manifest in our world. What is the God of the Bible? What can I expect from Him—or Her—or It? What can I demand? Does God want me to make demands? Why did the God of the Bible tell Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, his and Sarah’s only child? Does God want us to argue when we confront what appears to be Divine injustice, or are we merely to accept the slap and turn the other cheek? When I feel the surge of emotion at the beauty of a star-studded sky or the joy of a baby’s smile, is that a part of the same tran- scendent God that created a less than perfect world? And if there really is a God, why so often is God’s presence so fully hidden that even in the Bible people wonder, “Is there a God among us?” An obvious and predictable God would be so much easier to understand. By abandoning preconceived notions of the Author of creation and replacing them with the Bible’s description and nature’s dis- play of God—we will learn about God according to God. The surprise is that the many episodes brought in the Bible mirror with alarming fidelity life as we experience it.