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Now it seems that science has discovered that even worms have free will. If offered a delicious smell, for example, a roundworm will usually stop its wandering to investigate the source, but sometimes it won't. Just as with humans, the same stimulus does not always provoke the same response, even from the same individual.
New research at Rockefeller University, published online in Cell, offers a new neurological explanation for this variability, derived by studying a simple three-cell network within the roundworm brain. "We found that the collective state of the three neurons at the exact moment an odor arrives determines the likelihood that the worm will move toward the smell. So, in essence, what the worm is thinking about at the time determines how it responds," says study author Cori Bargmann. "It goes to show that nervous systems aren't passively waiting for signals from outside, they have their own internal patterns of activity that are as important as any external signal when it comes to generating a behavior."
The researchers went a step deeper to tease out the dynamics within the network. By changing the activity of the neurons individually and in combination, they could pinpoint each neuron's role in generating variability in both brain activity and the behavior associated with it. This is almost impossible to do for humans because the human brain has 86 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses, or connections, among them.
But the brain of the microscopic roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, by comparison, has only 302 neurons and 7,000 synapses. So while the worm's brain cannot replicate the complexity of the human brain, scientists can use it to address tricky neurological questions that would be nearly impossible to broach in our own brains.
Worms spend their time wandering, looking for decomposing matter to eat. And when they smell it, they usually stop making random turns and travel straight toward the source. This change in behavior is initially triggered by a sensory neuron that perceives the smell and feeds that information to the network the researchers studied.
As the worms pick up the alluring fruity smell of isoamyl alcohol, the neurons in the network transition into a low activity state that allows them to approach the odor. But sometimes the neurons remain highly active, and the worm continues to wander around — even though its sensory neuron has detected the odor.
Scaled up to account for the more nuanced behaviors of humans, the research may suggest ways in which our brains process competing motivations. "For humans, a hungry state might lead to you walk across the street to a delicious smelling restaurant." However, if a person finds out that the wonderful smelling food in forbidden by his or her religious or moral commitments it may not be eaten. Thus, a mental state of belief offsets the biological cause and leads to a different behavioral outcome.
There is plenty of evidence suggesting network states have a similar impact on animals with much larger and more complex brains like humans. "In a mammalian nervous system, millions of neurons are active all the time. Traditionally, we think of them as acting individually, but that is changing. Our understanding has evolved toward seeing important functions in terms of collective activity states within the brain." says Bargmann.
Or as Moses said over 3,200 years ago: "I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live (Deut.30:19).
Rabbi Allen S. Maller is the Rabbi Emeritus of Temple Akiba in Culver City, California. His website is: www.rabbimaller.com. Earlier versions of this article may have appeared elsewhere.
The views expressed by Rabbi Maller are his own and not necessarily those of the Blogmaster. They are published in order to promote this blog's mission to provide information and foster discussion about matters of faith and science. The Blogmaster thanks Rabbi Maller for his contribution to this forum.
As he acknowledged at the outset, however, the "size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding." So, to try to make such an enormous quantity understandable, he said that "the total number of stars in the universe is larger than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth." (Watch here; see also, Sagan, Cosmos (Random House 1980) at 4, 196.) It was a wonderful reference.
We may sense that there are a lot of stars in the sky, but with the naked eye it is hard to pinpoint and count them, even or maybe especially on a clear night. Sand is somewhat different. We can take a fistful of it at a beach, survey the area, think about the coast lines of the various continents, and then factor in countless interior beaches. Sagan says that our hand will hold about 10,000 grains of sand. (Cosmos, at 196.) Without help, we may not be able to do the math or know the result of the equation, but we can understand that the beaches hold an enormous number of grains of sand.
What Sagan did not say is that his two subjects, stars and sand, were invoked long ago in the Hebrew Bible as metaphors for abundance. They appear first in the book of Genesis, each separately and once together.
In the very first instance, God is assuring Abram that although he is of advanced age and without heirs, he will, nevertheless, have many descendants. "Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them. . . . So shall your offspring be." (See Gen. 15:5.) Shortly later, we are told that Abram's concubine Hagar has borne him a son, Ishmael, and not long after that Abram, now called Abraham, and his wife Sarah become the parents of Isaac. (See Gen. 16:1-16, 21:1-3.)
The second reference — the joint reference — follows Abraham's test on the mountain where he goes with Isaac to present a burnt offering for God. According to the story, an angel of God calls to Abraham, stops the proceedings before the sacrifice of Isaac and relates God's declaration: "I will bestow My blessing upon you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars of heaven and the sands on the seashore . . . ." (See Gen. 22:17.)
The third mention in Genesis arises in the context of Jacob meeting with his estranged brother Esau after many years. Here Jacob expresses his fear that Esau may kill him and his family and prays that God remember his prior promise which Jacob casts as follows: "Yet You have said, 'I will deal bountifully with you and make your offspring as the sands of the sea, which are too numerous to count.'" (See Gen. 32:4-13.)
Of course, the authors of these biblical passages were exercising poetic license to make a point, partly social, partly political, partly theological. Each had seen the evening sky dotted with distant lights. Even if they could see no more than a few thousand points, such lights must have seemed to be beyond measure. The authors may even have been familiar with the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea along the north coast of Egypt or the western areas of Canaan. The numbers of grains of sand would also surely have seemed limitless. So the authors and the final editors of the text made sure to stress that each of the three prime patriarchs of the Jewish People was present to witness a divine promise of fertility and demographic strength.
Not surprisingly, the metaphors had rhetorical legs, especially at times of great social stress, as can be seen in other biblical invocations.
These words, must have been encouraging, as well as comforting, to those who first heard and later read them, and understood their roots in the tales of the patriarchs.
The authors of the Hebrew Bible would have be shocked to learn that today there are about six million Jews in modern Israel. To them, 6,000,000 would seem to fulfill the ancient promises. Imagine their surprise if they learned that there are almost six million more Jews in a place called the United States of America, across a sea even greater than the great sea with which they may have been somewhat familiar. Add to those communities other Jews in North America, South America, Africa, Asia, Australia and Europe and you have a world population of Jews totaling just under 14,000,000.
Perspective is important, however, and those 14,000,000 collectively do not exceed two-tenths of one per-cent of the planet's more than 7,000,000,000 human inhabitants. Even if each and every person on Earth were Jewish, they still would not be as numerous as the stars in heaven or the grains of sand on the seashore.
The biblical authors did not know, and could not have known, how far their metaphor really reached. Nor could they reasonably have anticipated that even though those grains and stars are too numerous to count, there would be efforts later to estimate the numbers involved.
Let's start with sand. Conceptually, the problem is not too difficult, especially if you stick with the biblical formulation and exclude inland beaches. All you need to know is the volume of sand on the world's coastal beaches and divide that number by the volume of an average grain of sand.
Sand particles, like the quartz grains that permeate the Mediterranean coast of Israel today, range between 0.05 and 2mm in diameter. For purposes of our calculation, a cubic millimeter of sand will serve as the volume of an average grain of sand.
The volume of sand on the world's coastal beaches is a product of the length, width and depth of those beaches. The length of coasts can be determined reasonably well by modern technology, but not all coasts have beaches. Most estimates of the fraction of beach shore to coast range from about one-fifth to two-fifths. The length but especially the width of a beach varies throughout the day as tides ebb and flow. Naturally, the depth of the beach will then vary as well. One good effort to solve this problem was developed by physics professor Howard McAllister of the University of Hawaii, based on work done by Judaism and Science contributor Ludwik Kowalski. Prof. McAllister calculated the total length of the earth's beach shores at around 50,000 kilometers (about 31,000 miles) and set the average width at 30 meters (just under 100 feet) and the average depth at 5 meters (just over 16 feet).
If you accept these parameters, then the number of grains of sand on the beaches of the seashores of the world total 7.5 x 1018, or 7.5 billion billion. Vary the coastal length, the percentage of beach shore, or the average width or the average depth and the estimated volume of sand will change. Of course, while this is educated conjecture, it is still conjecture. Another approach puts the number of grains at 5 billion billion, including those on inland beaches. Either way, the result is more than a few sextillion (a billion billion) grains of sand.
Calculating the number of stars in the sky presents different challenges than counting the grains of sand on the Earth's seashores. Instead of having a reasonably fixed parameter with which to work, like the number of miles of seashore, the stars are set in a universe which is not only expanding, but expanding at an accelerated rate.
On the other hand, we are not concerned with the size of an average star, in the way we were with an average grain of sand. We will include the yellow stars like our Sun, but also all of the stars along the spectrum from red to blue, and even brown and white stars, too. And we will include stars smaller than our Sun, the dwarfs and the neutron stars, and stars larger, the giants, and much larger, the supergiants.
The practical problem is that we can only include stars that we can see and we can only see a star if the radiation it emits, in the form of visible light or other electromagnetic waves, reaches our measuring devices. Even with NASA's relatively new Hubble Space Telescope and the other, newer space observatories, our vision is limited to a discrete portion of the universe.
Moreover, some of what we do and do not detect presents a false picture. Our universe is about 13.7 billion years old. A few years ago, Hubble received light from a galaxy 13.2 billion light years way. We do not know, of course, and cannot know, if that star system has survived. We may be seeing stars that no longer exist. Conversely, stars are being born all the time. The light from some of these young stars may not have had time to reach us yet. If it takes 5 billion more years to get here, we will never see it as our Sun will die by then, and take us with it.
What we can say is that our Sun is one of over one hundred billion stars in its galaxy, the Milky Way. The star count is made by estimating the mass of the galaxy. Adjustments are then made to account for the fact that most of the stars in our galaxy are red dwarfs, each of which is smaller than one solar mass, the mass of our Sun. Some estimate the total number of stars in our galaxy to be 400 billion.
As Hubble and other observatories probe deeper and deeper into space, they see farther and farther back in time. Astronomers now believe that there may be 100 to 500 billion galaxies in the known universe. The majority of these galaxies, including the Andromeda galaxy located only 2.5 light years (15 trillion miles) from us, are shaped in a spiral like the Milky Way. But not all are. Some, like the much more distant M13 galaxy found in the constellation Hercules, are rounder and are known as globular clusters. The most massive galaxies, the largest known one of which is the IC 1101, may be flat or round but are more elliptical.
Similarly, the number of stars may vary greatly from galaxy to galaxy. For instance, according to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Andromeda may contain a trillion stars. It is far from the largest galaxy, however. IC 1101, a billion light years away, may hold a hundred trillion stars. Conversely, dwarf galaxy may hold just one to ten million stars. Consequently, a reasonable range of the possible number of stars in the known universe is quite large and extends from 10 billion billion to 200 billion billion.
Even at the low end of the estimated range, the number of stars seems to exceed the number of sands of grain on the seashores of the Earth, and the inland beaches, too. (For a different set of numbers, but with the same relative results, see here.) So Carl Sagan was right.
Now some folks may conclude from all of this that the Hebrew Bible has been proven, once again, to be a faulty guide. The reported promise from God that the number of descendants of the Jewish patriarchs would exceed the number of stars in heaven or grains of sand on the seashore has not come true. Moreover, science through Sagan and others has shown definitively that the promise will never be fulfilled.
The literalists would be literally correct, of course. But, as they often do, they miss the greater messages of biblical literature. First, the recorders of the patriarchal legends and the prophets cited above were not seeking to make a scientific point, or a mathematical statement about demography. They were, rather, expressing their faith in their social and political future. They were asserting, even as Americans echoed a similar assertion over two millennia later, a mixture of confidence and hope in a doctrine of manifest destiny, a conviction that the descendants of Abraham, as a people and a nation, had a mission to fulfill and would, in time, fulfill it. The belief was surely related to a belief in God, but it was grounded in quite natural human concerns and desires.
Second, in focusing on the number of stars or grains, the literalists would, to mix the metaphor, miss the forest for the trees. The biblical authors were not concerned with tallying the precise number of stars or grains. They did not care whether the sums were in the millions or billions or, as it turns out, the sextillions. Indeed, they had no concept of such numbers. What they thought, and correctly so at the time and to a considerable degree even today, was that the numbers were so huge as to be uncountable. And they were expressing their awe at the wonder of it all.
Here Sagan and the authors of biblical authors are on the same page. For all of his disdain at the mythology of religion, and especially in instances which he saw as the intrusion of religion on the turf of science, in 1990 Sagan joined in an open letter which acknowledged: "As scientists, many of us have had profound experiences of awe and reverence before the universe." Five years later, and just one year before he died, Sagan contended that "science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality." Summarizing Sagan's approach to the sacred, Dartmouth religion professor Nancy Frankenberry has written that he was "utterly imbued with . . . a marvelous sense of belonging to a planet, a galaxy, a cosmos that inspires devotion as much as discovery." (See Frankenberry, The Faith of Scientists (Princeton 2008), at 222-24.)
So we should not be surprised to learn that Sagan, like the author of the second creation story in Genesis, addressed the same, age old questions asking who we are, where we came from (and when) and what our place is in the universe. That biblical author described the first human as being fashioned out of the dust of the ground. In the Hebrew text, the connection of humanity to the soil is made starkly clear by the use of a pun: "ha-adam" (the human) is formed from "ha-adamah" (the ground). (See Gen. 2:7.)
What that author did not realize was that the dust of the Earth was stardust, forged in the furnaces of untold stars, spewed into space, moved along with intersteller winds and, ultimately, bound together on our home planet. Sagan, with such knowledge, wrote that humankind is "the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness." We are, he said, "starstuff pondering stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering he evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose." (See Cosmos, above, at 345.)
The late poet Aaron Zeitlin once wrote:
Praise Me, says God, and I will know that you love Me.
Curse Me, says God, and I will know that you love Me.
Praise Me or curse Me, and I will know that you love Me. . . .
But if you sit fenced off in your apathy, says God,
If you sit entrenched in, "I couldn't care less," says God,
If you look at the stars and yawn, . . .
Then I created you in vain, says God.
Both Carl Sagan and the authors of the Hebrew Bible would ask the same question: How can you look at the stars and yawn?
Previously, to explore this idea, we have taken the text of the Torah as we have it today and looked at issues of content, language and script. We have already found that the Torah we have not only makes no claim as to its original content, but that internal evidence from the Tanakh strongly suggests that whatever Moses may have written and conveyed at the end of his life was limited in scope. Moreover, external evidence from archeological and other sources indicates that Moses's sefer haTorah was not written in either the language or the script that a contemporary Torah is. In this post, we look at the transmission of a presumed original Torah, focusing on security for the object and textual variations.
Securing the transmission of the originally inscribed text
Let's start with the medium of Moses's inscription of the sefer haTorah that our Torah says Moses wrote just before he died (see Deut. 31:9, 24-26) and the security afforded the resulting work. Our Torah does not say precisely whether Moses chiseled the words into stone, wrote them with a stylus in wet clay or used a quill on parchment or papyrus. If the entire Torah as we know it was inscribed on stone or clay tablets, there must have been many of them to include almost 80,000 words containing over 300,000 letters. If one or more scrolls were used, the material involved must have been sizable as well. In any event, it is certainly hard to imagine the 120 year old Moses chiseling, pressing or writing that much text as he was about to die.
Professor Rachel Dulin has noted that the word sefer is used in the Hebrew Bible over 185 times and with meanings that change depending on the context of the usage, but that include "letter" and "legal document." While the material on which Moses wrote was not bound on a side edge like the books of our day, as the binding of paper into books did not begin much before the beginning of the Common Era, the word sefer seems more suggestive of writing on parchment, or similar material, than it is of chiseling in stone or impressing in clay. In other words, sefer haTorah here appears to indicate a scroll.
That conclusion is buttressed by a consideration of how the sefer haTorah was to be handled for the journey into Canaan. Our Torah states that Moses directed the Levites to take the sefer haTorah and place it by the Ark of the Covenant, there to remain as a witness. (See Deut. 31:26.) Later commentators speculated about this placement. Each assumed that the item consisted of a single scroll. Under Rabbi Judah's theory, that scroll was placed near the outside wall of the Ark on a shelf or ledge projecting from and attached to the Ark, while Rabbi Meir thought that it was placed inside the Ark between the tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments and the inner wall of the Ark. (See Talmud Bava Batra 14b.) Both explanations are problematical and even the great commentator Rashi had difficulty with them. For present purposes, though, the main point is the general consensus among early rabbis that the sefer haTorah was a scroll. Contemporary biblical scholar Prof. Richard Elliott Friedman agrees and translates sefer haTorah as a "scroll of instruction" in his translation of the Torah. (See Friedman, Commentary on the Torah (Harper 2001), at 664.)
Whether the sefer haTorah was, in fact, a scroll or not, its subsequent history is quite mysterious. As the Hebrew Bible relates, after Moses's death, the Ark, with the scroll presumably either inside or on a protruding ledge, was taken on a long and difficult journey. Taking the story as true for present purposes, over the course of over two hundred years, the Ark was, among other things, carried across the Jordan River, paraded around Jericho, set in a tabernacle in Shiloh, brought into the field during battles with the Philistines, captured by the Philistines and taken to various cities, returned to the Israelites, moved by King David to a private house and later put in a tabernacle and, then, placed by King Solomon in the Temple in Jerusalem. There is no further mention of the Ark in the historical narrative of the Hebrew Bible, except for a report in Chronicles that several hundred years after Solomon, King Josiah ordered the Levites to place the Ark back in the Temple. (See 2 Chron. 35:1-3.)This report is not corroborated by any similar statement in the story of Josiah as told in 2 Kings, but if given credence certainly raises the question of when the Ark had been removed from the Temple and where it was in the interim.
In any event, biblical history as related in Kings (and Chronicles) is rather clear in its description of what the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar took as his army destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem around 586 BCE. The Hebrew Bible relates that the Babylonians carried off valuables that they did not otherwise destroy or burn. (See 2 Kings 24:8-13, 2 Chron. 36:18-19.) There is, however, no specific mention of the Ark being confiscated. Nor is there any claim or even hint expressed that the royal family or any priest or anyone either took with them into exile or hid or otherwise protected or preserved the safer haTorah that was, at Moses's direction, to be located by the side of the Ark. This does not mean that those transported to Babylon did not take any documents or records, merely that a specific ancient treasure was not specified in the national record, as one might have expected it to be had the object actually been (1) extant and (2) moved.
Is it reasonable to believe that throughout all this time, almost seven hundred years, a scroll exposed to the enemy in battle and to the elements in peace could have survived intact? Given its importance as a sacred writing by Moses himself, the fact that the historical sections of the Hebrew Bible after the Book of Joshua, with one exception, do not mention the sefer haTorah is telling. And that exception, the story of King Josiah's surprise at a newly discovered scroll by the priest Hilkiah, seems to confirm at the very least that control over and protection of sacred scrolls was not well managed. (See 2 Kings 22:3-20.)
Further, as an object, the existence of the scroll on which Moses wrote God's words seems to have been of no concern to the authors of the Prophets (the Nevi'im) and the Writings (the K'tuvim), not to mention the editors of the Tanakh. The sounds of silence here, as Sherlock Holmes later observed in the short story "Silver Blaze," may well be evidentiary.
Versions and changes from transcription
Given the many problems inherent in the claim of an unsullied transmission of the sefer haTorah authored by Moses, we should not be surprised to learn from Hebrew Bible scholar Professor Marc Zvi Brettler that in the Second Temple period (c 538 BCE – 70 CE) there were a number of versions of the Torah extant. (See Brettler, How to Read the Jewish Bible (Oxford 2007) at 22.) The evidence comes, in part, in the form of pre-Common Era texts like the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Greek Septuagint and the Dead Sea Scrolls, among others, which contain different wording than we find in the Torah we have today.
Rabbi Gil Student argues that, for various reasons, these other documents are not indisputable proof, or even good witnesses, against the assumption that the "text that is agreed upon by the Jewish community – the textus receptus that is claimed to be the Masoretic text – is correct." (See "On the Text of the Torah," at 1/21.) Student is certainly persuasive when discussing a translation like the Septuagint. (See Id. at 7-13/21.) The philosophy, principles and methodology at play in any translation can be quite complex. For instance, did the first translation attempt to be true to the literal nature of the subject text word by word. Did it seek to convey the meaning of that text thought by thought? Did it seek to balance those two approaches? Did it seek to mimic the sound and cadence of the original language or to appeal to certain linguistic or philosophical sensibilities of the readers by using, for instance, colloquial or gender neutral expressions? And was the first translation consistent? The same questions, and more, would apply to any effort to translate the first translation back independently in order to determine an original text. In short, reverse engineering a translated text compounds the inherent complexity of the translation exercise.
Rabbi Student is on considerably less solid ground with variants, like the Samaritan Pentateuch. (See Id., at 2-3/21.) By one count, the Samaritan Pentateuch contains not only over 3,000 differences in spelling when compared to a contemporary Torah, it also contains over 3,000 words and phrases which clarify or change the meaning of the story found in current text.
Sometimes the changes are small, but even those small changes can be important, as when dialogue is added in the Samaritan version of the familiar story of Cain and Abel. The story in Genesis reports that Cain said something to Abel before they went into a field where Cain killed Abel, but it does not disclose what Cain said. (See Gen. 4:8.) The Samaritan version supplies dialog, which indicates that Cain enticed his brother to accompany him and, therefore, supports a determination that Cain's murder of his brother was premeditated.
Then, too, sometimes the changes are substantial. For example, the Samaritan text, in addition to the well-known Ten Commandments, includes an additional commandment to establish an altar on Mt. Gerizim.
Student acknowledges the obvious, which is that there are "many differences" between the Samaritan Torah and the textus receptus we have, but concludes that these differences "can be due to the free hand the Samaritan scribes exhibited in developing their Torah." Consequently, for him, "the Samaritan Torah fails our test of being a reliable witness." (See Student, above, at 2/21.)
The differences, however, individually and collectively, are more probative than Rabbi Student allows. In his argument, Student concedes that he is departing from the approach of modern scholars and admits that he is assuming that today's standard text, his textus receptus, is "correct," unless "categorically disproven" otherwise. (See Id. at 1/21.) But giving something a Latin label does not make it sacrosanct, and placing a thumb on the scale of evidence imposes a burden of proof that will always skew the analysis and never lead to an accurate reading of that evidence. Why, for instance, assert that Samaritan scribes "developed" their holy text with a "free hand" and not allow for the possibility that Judahite scribes did so similarly?
If we want to evaluate the totality of circumstances objectively, as opposed to proving a point, we cannot proceed under any, much less unwarranted, assumptions. More specifically, given what we know today, "we cannot," according to Prof. Brettler, "assume that the text . . . as we now have it is the same as the text . . . when it was originally written." (See Brettler, above, at 22.)
In addition, if there were, once, one text written by Moses, or even one redacted by Ezra, surely that text was modified over the centuries. As another Hebrew Bible scholar Emeritus Professor Jeffrey H. Tigay has discussed, albeit in the context of his analysis of Bible codes from a textual perspective, the ideal of an unchanged Torah text "was not achieved in practice as far back as manuscripts and other evidence enable us to see." (See Textual Perspective, at 5/27.)
According to Prof. Tigay, the "manual copying of texts naturally created variants . . . ." (Id. at 6/27.) In addition, other changes to ancient texts involved the spelling system for those texts, including, specifically, the use or non-use of vowels. Tigay has looked at the limestone tablet known as the Gezer Calendar, discussed here, and noted that the letters which were inscribed on the tablet only represented consonants. At some time in or after the tenth century BCE, Hebrew began to use a limited number of consonants as vowels. The current system of marks placed above and below letters to indicate vowels was not adopted until sometime between the sixth and eighth centuries of the Common Era. (See Textual Perspective, above, at 5-6, 19-20/27.)
Scholars today can trace the changes in biblical manuscripts through the ages. They can identify the sources available and used by different scribes, as well as the editorial choices they made. They can see how a particular manuscript once considered to be definitive was corrected later and supplanted. This was true prior to the advent of machine printing in the fifteenth century of the Common Era and also true after. (See generally, Pentkower, "The Development of the Masoretic Text," in Jewish Study Bible (Oxford 2004), at 2077-84.)
The end result of this textual history is inconsistency in the manuscripts we have and use today. Contemporary Hebrew Bibles are based primarily on thousand year old manuscripts known as the Aleppo Codex (c. 930 CE) and the Leningrad Codex (c. 1010 CE), the latter being the oldest complete Tanakh existing today. Both are part of the Masoretic Text tradition, but agreement among modern works is still lacking. For instance, the well regarded Koren Jerusalem Bible, first published in 1962, is based on the Leningrad Codex, but the text of the Torah contained in it has forty-five (45) more letters than does the Michigan-Claremont Westminster computerized text of the Leningrad codex which is used by most scholars. (See Tigay, above, at 5, 19/27.) Similarly, a text provided to Israeli soldiers is also based on the Leningrad Codex, but reportedly it, too, contains spellings different than those in the Koren. (See "A List of Some Problematic Issues," at 2-5/68.)
The illusive nature of the original Torah has not deterred researchers from seeking to find it. Currently, for instance, there are at least two academic efforts aimed at producing a scholarly edition of the Tanakh, one known as the Hebrew University Bible Project and the other as the Hebrew Bible Critical Edition Project, formerly known as the Oxford Bible Project. Yet, even as one may anxiously wait to read of new developments, perhaps Prof. Brettler is correct in concluding that "(i)t is naïve to believe that we may recover the Bible's original text (what scholars call the 'Urtext'), namely the text as penned by its original authors. " (See Brettler, above, at 22.)
The traditional claim that the Torah we have today is identical to a text authored in the thirteenth century BCE strains credulity. Regardless of whether the author was divine or human, for the traditional view to be valid, not one but a series of improbable events would have had to occur in the creation and multiple transmissions of that text over well more than one hundred generations. The evidence, internal in the Tanakh and external on hard stone and clay and soft manuscripts, says those events did not occur. Analyzing the content, language, script, security and transcription of a proposed original Torah demonstrates why such a document, if it ever existed, must have been different, perhaps considerably so, from the Torah we have today.
There is no reason to stress or strain over either the evidence or the result of our inquiry. The Torah we have might not have come from Moses, and certainly it has not arrived unimpaired from some original manuscript, but it remains a very special document, one that holds appeal to a wide variety of individuals.
Implicitly conceding the lack of historicity for an original thirteenth century BCE Torah from Moses, at least for the purpose of making a greater point, philosophy Prof. Samuel Fleischacker, himself Orthodox, has argued that what is important is the authority rather than the authorship of the Torah, whether the Torah "represents a supremely good ("divine') way for us to live . . . ." It is an interesting and significant argument, one that (perhaps ironically) parallels positions taken by less ritually observant individuals.
Putting aside the problematic issue of "authority," we can agree that the Torah plays and deserves a unique role in the Jewish civilization. Those who appreciate miracles (whether supernatural or not) can marvel at the Torah's continued existence and power. We still have it, and we continue to read and study and even wrestle with it. And atheists like Israeli writer Amoz Oz and his daughter Fania Oz-Sulzberger also can recognize that honor is due the Torah as literature that "transcends scientific dissection and devotional reading." In their words, "no other work of literature so effectively carved a legal codex, so convincingly laid out a social ethic." (See Jews and Words (Yale 2012), at 5-6.)
With its depth, its breadth and its reach, the Torah may well have been intended initially as a vehicle to hold and share the sometimes inconsistent stories, codes and customs of the residents of ancient Judah, perhaps before but certainly after their exile from and return to their homeland. In this light, its role was to bind the people together with a common created history and collective purpose. The Torah that we have today serves a similar function, as trans-national, trans-generational glue for the Jewish People. Against all historical odds, it remains, in words from Proverbs, an etz hayim, a tree of life to those who hold fast to it. (See Proverbs 3:18.)]]>
But the Torah is more than the purported history contained in it. When its contents were reduced to writing, text trumped tradition as the source of both political and religious authority in the Judahite world. (See generally, Schniedewind, How the Bible Became a Book (Cambridge 2004) at 91-117.)The result initiated nothing less than a textual revolution.
Moreover, in the words of Israeli writer Amoz Oz and his daughter historian Fania Oz-Sulzberger, a "lineage of literacy" followed. (See Jews and Words (Yale 2012) at 15.) Transmitted over millennia and eliciting commentary which itself then begot more commentary, the written Torah has bound and continues to bind the Jewish People together over space and across time as they read it, study it, participate in its interpretation and organic growth and act out its lessons. Here, the Torah has served, and continues to serve, as trans-national and trans-generational glue.
Jewish tradition ascribes the highest honor to the Torah. Honoring one's father and mother, performing deeds of kindness, and making peace between one man and another are all deserving of the greatest reward, but, according to the ancient sages, "the study of the Torah is equal to all of them." (Mishnah, Pe'ah 1:1.) Why? In part because the tradition sees Torah as the word of God, and that teaching has been transmitted intact to the present day.
The traditional view has been that the Israelites left Egypt in the Spring of the year 2448 (After Creation), which corresponds to 1312 BCE. The Talmud relates that Moses received the Torah at Sinai, and then gave it over to Joshua. Joshua gave it to the Elders, the Elders to the Prophets, and the Prophets to the Men of the Great Assembly. (See Pirkei Avot.) The latter were understood as a group of 120 prophets and sages who, during the Second Temple period beginning in the fourth century BCE were the final religious authority for the reconstituted Jewish community in Judea.
The notion that contemporary Jews are the inheritors of this transmitted Torah is still expressed widely today. Take a look at a siddur (prayerbook) in any Orthodox, Conservative or Reform (though not Reconstructionist) congregation and turn to the conclusion of the service for the reading of the Torah. At the conclusion of the service, the Torah is lifted and the community joins in reciting the words "V'zot haTorah asher sam Moshe lifnei b'nei Yisrael al pi YHVH b'yad Moshe," that is, "This is the Torah that Moses set before the Israelites, from God's mouth through Moses's hand."
Orthodox Rabbi Gil Student not only defends this position, but expands upon it in an essay titled On the Text of the Torah. Based on passages in the Torah and commentary in the Talmud, Student argues that when God dictated the Torah to Moses, Moses wrote thirteen copies of the text, one for each of the twelve tribes of Israel, plus one which was maintained and safeguarded by the priests and ultimately deposited in the First Temple. Student concedes that what happened to the priests' copy is not clear, but that after the exiled Judahites in Persia were allowed by Cyrus (c. 538 BCE) to return to Judea in the sixth century BCE, they found three Torah scrolls. Ultimately led by the priest and scribe Ezra (c. 458 BCE), where there were differences in the wording, they reconciled the texts by majority vote of the scrolls. The resulting text was then protected by the priests of the Second Temple. (See "On the Text," above, at 4-6/21.)
Of course, the premise of Student's argument – that God dictated the entire Torah to Moses – is a claim that the Torah itself does not make explicitly, as Rabbi Daniel Gordis has recognized in his discussion of revelation in the Conservative movement's edition of the Torah text. (See Etz Hayim (Rabbinical Assembly 2001), at 1394.) Moreover, even if the Torah did make a claim of divine authorship, the problem inherent in a text (self-)serving as its own prooftext is obvious.
Nor are references to statements of Talmudic sages necessarily persuasive to any except those predisposed to accept their authority. The statement at the beginning of Pirke Avot upon which Rabbi Student builds his case was written not by eye witnesses but well over a millennia after the original purported transmission and, further, by men who, however well meaning, had an interest in presenting themselves as the primary interpreters and adjudicators of Jewish law and practice.
A Talmudic debate not referenced by Rabbi Student is, however, instructive. Considering what God gave Moses and when, one rabbi stated that the entire Torah as we know it was given scroll by scroll. Another claimed that it was disclosed in its entirety. Yet another thought that certain passages were revealed before others, as needed. (See Talmud Gittin 60 a-b.) The rabbis, of course, were trying to fill the gaps in the sparse Torah text. Ironically, and no doubt unintentionally, this debate underscores the lack of certainty about what God gave Moses and when.
In addition, recent archeological investigations and new understandings of literature from the Levant strongly suggest (1) that a key story in the text, the exodus from Egypt, did not occur as represented and (2) that some other smaller details are anachronisms which demonstrate that the Torah could not have been written at the turn into the thirteenth century BCE. Thus, the traditional view that a single author, whether directed or inspired, wrote the entire Torah text at that time is undermined by different but consistent streams of evidence which agree that the Torah we have today was written and edited much later and over a number of centuries by several individuals or schools. (For more, see, e.g., The Camel's Nose and Let my People Know.)
Nevertheless, the idea that the Torah we possess today, what Rabbi Student calls the textus receptus, is identical to that given by God to Moses is a powerful one, and, as evidenced by its promotion by Rabbi Student and its acceptance in contemporary prayer texts and elsewhere, persists to this day. So let's revisit the claim, this time taking the contents and physical nature of the Torah we have today as we find them and ask how, if at all, the received text compares to the presumed original Torah text that Moses may have written over three millennia ago. As we proceed, we are faced, analytically, with at least five issues which must be addressed: contents, language, script, security and transmission. This essay will cover the first three. Security and transmission will be discussed subsequently.
The contents of Moses's sefer haTorah
The only mention of sacred writings in our Torah, other than the two sets of tablets on which God and Moses respectively wrote, occurs at the end of Deuteronomy when the story relates that Moses, then one hundred and twenty years old and impaired, wrote down "haTorah." (See Deut. 31:2, 9, 24.) The term Torah could mean "law," but is better understood here as "teaching" or "instruction." (See Jewish Study Bible (Oxford 1985) at 2.) Moses then gave the "sefer haTorah," to the Levitical priests, who were in charge of the Ark of the Covenant. (See Deut. 31:26.) The contents of the sefer haTorah are not expressly delineated.
Other passages surrounding Moses's inscription and conveyance may provide a clue, though. In anticipation of crossing over the Jordan into Canaan, Moses had directed the people previously to erect large stones after their passage and to write on them all the words of "haTorah." (See Deut. 27:3-8.) Subsequently, Joshua reportedly wrote on stones a copy of the "Torat" (sic) that Moses had written. (See Josh. 8:32.) Joshua then read all the words of "haTorah," the blessing and the curse, as written in the "sefer haTorah." (See Josh. 8:34.)
What could Joshua have written? Consider the logistics. If two tablets could hold only ten commandments (see Ex. 20:1-14, 31:18), how many would be necessary to contain all 613 in the Torah we have today, plus the many stories and genealogies? In addition, today a trained scribe requires about a year to write a Torah on parchment. An effort to chisel an entire modern Torah on stone would require even more time. But time was not available as neighboring kings were preparing to attack the invading Israelites. (See Josh. 9:1-2.) All this suggests that the "sefer haTorah" Joshua chiseled was limited in scope, perhaps to the terms of another covenant that we find in Deut. 27:11-28:68. And that, in turn, suggests the same for what Moses may have written in the sefer haTorah he handed to the priests. But we simply cannot know for sure.
The language and the script of Moses's Torah
If we are unsure about the words Moses wrote, what do we know about the language and script he used? The language of the Torah we have is predominantly Hebrew, with some Aramaic phrases included. It is not contemporary Hebrew, however. Rather, most of the language of our Torah is what scholars call Biblical Hebrew, or Classical Biblical Hebrew. Whether Moses and the biblical Israelites actually spoke Hebrew of any sort is, however, doubtful.
According to the biblical story, Moses's writing came at the end of a forty year journey which followed over two hundred years of life in Egypt for the descendants of the patriarch Jacob, much of which was spent in slavery. (See The Chumash (The Stone Ed. – Mesorah (1993)), at 359 n.40.)Taking the story as true for present purposes, what was the likely language Moses used while writing his sefer haTorah? Again, the text we have today is conspicuously silent on the subject, but one fact and one assumption relate to this issue.
First, whatever language Jacob and his immediate family may have spoken, there is no evidence that during the time tradition ascribes to Jacob's life (c. 1653-1506 BCE) that language was Hebrew, as opposed to, for instance, a Canaanite dialect of the time. Second, given the American experience with both slaves and immigrants, it does not seem unreasonable to assume that when Jacob's family arrived in Egypt under the protection of Jacob's son, Joseph, who was acting as Governor of Egypt, the family began to learn the language used by their Egyptian hosts. Further, when Jacob's descendants became enslaved, it is similarly reasonable to assume that they used the language of their overseers. Of course, it is possible that the descendants of Jacob were isolated sufficiently from the Egyptian population so that they could have maintained their original language, whatever it was, but that is just more speculation. The question remains: if Moses intended that the recently freed Israelites understand the words he wrote, did he write it in the language of Egypt or in some other tongue?
Intimately related to the question of the language Moses used is the issue of the script he wrote. As might be expected, the rabbis in the Talmudic period speculated about the script used in the original Torah. And, as might be expected, they disagreed.
The possibilities, for these rabbis, involved two types of lettering and the dispute was about which was used and when. The two candidates, both West Semitic scripts, were Ivri and Ashuri. Ivri, or Paleo-Hebrew, script was an offshoot of Phoenician. Ashuri originated in Aramean kingdoms, evolved, was promoted by the Assyrians, and ultimately became a precursor to the square Hebrew lettering in use today.
One of the rabbis, Rav Elazar HaModal, contended that the script was always Ashuri. Another, either Mar Zutra or Mar Ukva, opined that the original lettering was Ivri, but that in the time of Ezra it changed to Ashuri. A third argued that it was originally in Ashuri, later changed to Ivri and then reverted to Ashuri once again. (See Talmud Sanhedrin 21b and 22a.)
The factual bases, if any, for the rabbis' opinions are unknown. What is known is that they did not have the benefit of recently developed information. What modern archeology and studies of near eastern literature, linguistics and lettering teach us is that the Assyrians encouraged the use of their chosen script in the second half of the eighth century BCE. (See History of Hebrew Aleph-Bet, at 4-5/27.) But that was over five hundred years after Moses reportedly wrote the sefer haTorah.
So what script might he have used? To try to answer that question we have to go back in time, initially to the mid-ninth century BCE and start with the Mesha Stele, also known as the Moabite Stone. Discovered in the last half of the nineteenth century CE, in what is present day Jordan, the Mesha Stele is a basalt slab about a meter tall which contains one of the earliest and clearest examples of writing with some Hebrew characteristics. The stele describes the exploits of King Mesha of Moab, who is also discussed in the Hebrew Bible. (See 2 Kings 3:4-27.) The script here displays no evidence of square letters, however, and would be unrecognizable to any Hebrew school or even rabbinic student. It more resembles Phoenician writing of the same period. Some would characterize the letters as Paleo-Hebrew.
An older inscription, being a record of agricultural events, was found in 1908 in the old biblical city of Gezer, located between Jerusalem and what is now Tel Aviv. Known as the Gezer Calendar, this 11 by 7 centimeter limestone tablet dates to about 925 BCE, the time of the Biblical King Solomon. The script is Canaanite. The structure of the letters is nothing like that of contemporary Hebrew.
Apparently older still is a fragment of a storage jar, discovered in Jerusalem in 2012 at the southern wall of the Temple Mount. The wall in which the fragment was found has been tentatively dated to the tenth century BCE. The fragment itself contains writing in a Proto-Canaanite script which has been dated to the eleventh or tenth century BCE.
From these three bits of evidence, we can draw two tentative conclusions. First, the script used by Moses could not have been Ashuri as Ashuri was not invented until centuries after the Exodus date. Second, even two to three hundred years after the Exodus date, the script used in Canaan was barely, if at all, recognizable as Hebrew. Presumably, therefore, whatever script Moses may have used must have been even further removed from yet unborn Hebrew and closer to the then current script used in Egypt or in international commerce at the beginning of the thirteenth century BCE.
A prime example of the kind of lettering which might have been used can be seen in the El-Amara Tablets, a collection of almost 400 clay tablets first discovered in 1887 in Amara, located between Cairo and Luxor in Egypt. The messages are mostly from kings in communities throughout the Middle East and are dated to 1350-1300 BCE, the traditional time calculated for the Exodus.
Despite the location of their discovery, however, the El-Amara tablets were not written in Egyptian, but in Akkadian infused with various Canaanite dialects. The script was not Egyptian hieroglyphics, but cuneiform wedges. The quantity and origins of these tablets suggest that there was at the time, at least for commercial purposes, a language and a script that was commonly used not only in Egypt and Canaan, but also northeast to Assyria and east to Babylon. If not in the hieroglyphics of their despised Egyptian task masters, and not in as yet uninvented square lettered Hebrew, might Moses have written the sefer haTorah in something like the cuneiform found in the El-Amara Tablets?
In short, even a basic review of the circumstances and evidence related to the content, language and script of Moses's sefer haTorah casts doubt on the statement that our Torah today is identical to anything that Moses may have written. We will consider the issues of security and transmission of the sefer haTorah in the near future.]]>
A brief history of Reform Judaism is presented at the Jewish Virtual Library. Here is a quote, from that reference:
"The 'Oral Law' is not seen as divinely given at Sinai, but rather as a reflection of Judaism's historic development and encounter with God in each succeeding generation. In this, Reform [views] . . . God working through human agents. Reform believes that each generation has produced capable and religiously inspired teachers (this means that Reform rejects the often expressed view that assigns greater holiness to those who lived in the past). Some individuals of our generation may equal or exceed those of the past."
Current attempts to modify this theological doctrine are described here. Here is a quote from that reference:
"The classical approach of Reform Judaism towards halakha [Jewish Law] was based on the views of Rabbi Samuel Holdheim (1806–1860), leader of Reform Judaism in Germany, and other reformers. Holdheim believed that Reform Judaism should be based solely upon monotheism and morality. Almost everything connected with Jewish ritual law and custom was of the ancient past, and thus no longer appropriate for Jews to follow in the modern era.
This approach was the dominant form of Reform Judaism from its creation until the 1940s. Since the 1940s, the American Reform movement has continued to change, sometimes evolving in what appears to be a traditional direction. Many Reform congregations use more Hebrew in their religious services and are incorporating aspects of laws and customs, in a selective fashion, into their lives. This is a departure from the classical Reform position in favor of more traditional Judaism. . . .
Currently, some Reform rabbis promote following elements of halakha, and developed the concept of Progressive Halakhah. For instance, the American Rabbi Walter Jacob, the Israeli Rabbi Moshe Zemer and the British Liberal Rabbi John D. Rayner believe in many parts of traditional Jewish theology, but take present developments and valuations of ethics and law into consideration. Others actively discourage the adoption of more traditional practices or beliefs, because they believe that this is not in the ethos of the Reform movement. Both encouraging or discouraging practices stipulated by halakha are considered acceptable positions within Reform."
Progressive Halakhah has recently been criticized. According to this article, it
"has an impact on how we behave in religious communities. The sociologist Rodney Stark has popularized the thesis that religious groups need a strict theology in order to make serious demands on their adherents and that these demands, in turn, make a religion more compelling. Since a liberal theology leads to an emphasis on the autonomy of the individual, personal choice is inevitably promoted at the expense of the authority of God. In the absence of a strong theological basis for making religious demands, the members lose interest and wander off. This is what has happened in American Reform Judaism and in other non-Orthodox movements as well. . . . Many Reform synagogues have large numbers on the books but few active participants."
This is not a unique Jewish phenomenon, as far as I know. One way to increase participation in collective activities in places of worship is to make these activities intellectually more challenging, for example, by organizing theological debates, based on the content of slowly-and-clearly-read prayers (not in Hebrew). What else can be done to improve participation, without sacrificing traditional appeals?
Here is a prayer we recited recently, during a Shabbat service: "We acknowledge with thanks that you are Adonai, our God and the God of our ancestors forever. You are the Rock of our lives, and the Shield of our salvation in every generation. Let us thank You and praise You–for our lives which are in Your hand, for our souls which are in Your care, for your miracles that we experience every day and for your wondrous deeds and favors at every time of day, morning and noon. O Good One, whose mercies never end, O Compassionate One whose kindness never fails, we forever put our hope in You."
It reminded me about difficulties encountered in trying to accept Spinoza's "God is Nature" definition, as described on page 69 of Rabbi Barry Schwartz's book: "Judaism's Great Debates: Timeless Controversies from Abraham to Herzl." This prayer, like many others, invites theological interpretations. It does not address Spinoza's God; it addresses the personal almighty God of our ancestors. It would be very difficult to modify this prayer, to accommodate people like Einstein, who believed in Spinoza's God.
Can this be accomplished via some kind of metaphorical terminology? Most of us know that words "Shield" and "Rock", in this context," are used as metaphors. But terms: "Your hand," "our souls," "miracles," "mercy," "Compassionate One," and "kindness" suggest literal interpretations. How to avoid this kind of inconsistency? Is the term "metaphor" acceptable? If not, then why not?
Discussing philosophical topics (based on prayers, Torah chapters, webpages, lectures, films, books, etc.) can be very challenging. Do you agree? And how can this be accomplished without sacrificing traditional appeals?
Ludwik Kowalski is a retired nuclear scientist and Professor Emeritus at Montclair State University, Montclair NJ. See more here.
The views expressed by Prof. Kowalski are his own and not necessarily those of the Blogmaster. They are published in order to promote this blog's mission to provide information and foster discussion about matters of faith and science. The Blogmaster thanks Prof. Kowalski for his contribution to this forum.]]>
Congratulations! You have just uncovered a hidden Bible code, one formed by an equidistant letter sequence, or ELS. Skeptics can repeat the exercise, and get the same result, as the beginning of the next book in the Hebrew Bible, the book of Exodus, known in Hebrew as Sh'mot. Find the first tav in the first verse of Sh'mot (it's at the end of the second word) and the next three letters each 50 letters apart. Again, if you are careful, you should find the sequence tav, vav, resh and hey, or Torah.
Too simple? A mere coincidence, you say? Wait, there's more.
This time, start at Exodus 11:9. Find the first letter in the name Moshe (Moses), a mem. Now apply the 50 letter ELS process and you should find the letters shin, nun and hey. If so, you have uncovered the word Mishneh. Next, go back to the mem in Moshe. Skip 613 letters to reach the tav in the third word in Exodus 12:11 and begin the 50 letter ELS process once more. Ending at the second hey in the first word of Ex. 12:13, you should, once again, find the tav-vav-resh-hey sequence, which spells Torah. And there you have it: the great work of the incomparable sage Moses Maimonides, his legal code, the Mishneh Torah, is not only referenced in the Torah itself, the two title words are linked by the exact number of commandments in the Torah, 613.
For any remaining doubters, the first letters in the last four words in Exodus 11:9 are resh-mem-bet-mem, which spell Rambam, the acronym for Maimonides' full Hebrew name, Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon. So, in addition to ELS's, we also have related words in proximity to each other. This is known as a word cluster. And there is even more in Ex. 11:9-12:13 (see here (at 1/27)), but you get the point.
Some argue that these sorts of sequences and clusters and even more complex word associations in the Torah contain hidden messages, messages placed there when God gave the Torah to Moses over three millennia ago. In this view, the placement of Mishneh and Torah, described above, proves not only that the Mishneh Torah encompasses all of Jewish law, but also that the Author of the Torah anticipated and approved of Rambam's commentary.
The general contention is not new. We find the notion expressed in the Babylonian Talmud, a collection of oral commentary on the Torah, reduced to writing beginning around the third century of the Common Era. Consider the very first word of the Ten Commandments, found in Ex. 20:2. In Hebrew, the word anochi ("I am") is formed by the letters aleph, nun, khaf and yud. The Talmud reports that Rabbi Johanan suggested that these letters were an acronym for the phrase "I Myself have written the Script." (See Talmud Shabbat 105a.)
The modern discovery of codes and messages
Until recently, however, there was little effort to discover meanings hidden in the Torah text, to decode encrypted information. At the end of the thirteenth century, Spanish Rabbi Bahya ben Asher is said to have mentioned an ELS when commenting on a verse in B'reishit/Genesis. About two hundred and fifty years later, in Tzfat, Rabbi Moshe Cordovero wrote of secrets revealed through the "skipping of letters." (See here.) The first reported reference in modern times dates to the middle of the nineteenth century, when Prague Rabbi Haim Michael Dov Weissmandl is said to have first noticed the 50 letter ELS's, discussed above, that disclose Torah in B'reishit (Genesis) and Sh'mot (Exodus).
Two major assertions regarding Bible Codes were made in the 1990s. First, Hebrew University Associate Professor of Mathematics Eliyahu Rips and two researchers, Doron Witztum and Yoav Rosenberg, ("WRR") published an article, "Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis," in Statistical Science (1994, Vol. 9, No. 3. 429-38). The article described what has become known as the Famous Rabbis Experiment.
Focusing on the 78,064 Hebrew letters in B'reishit in the Koren edition of the Hebrew Bible, a currently accepted text, WRR looked for the presence of the names of over thirty rabbis and the dates of their birth or death in Genesis. After comparing their results to a control test consisting of a similarly sized Hebrew version of Tolstoy's War and Peace, WRR claimed to have found in Genesis a large number of names formed by ELS's in proximity to related words. The WRR article was significant because the journal in which the findings were published was considered respectable and the authors concluded (at 434) that "this proximity . . . is not due to chance." [Emphasis supplied.]
A few years later, Michael Drosnin authored The Bible Code (Simon and Schuster 1997). Drosnin's pedigree did not include the formal mathematics expertise of Rips. Rather, he was a reporter and bestselling author. But his claims were much more sensational than those of the WRR group. Drosnin purported to disclose previously hidden references not just about past events like World War II, the landing on the Moon, and Watergate, among other events, but also a prediction and reported warning to then Israeli Premier Yitzhak Rabin about an assassination attempt one year before Rabin was gunned down. The Bible, Drosnin argued, was more than an ancient story. It was a computer program! (See, e.g., Id. at 25, 45, 98, 179.) And it needed to be studied and decoded.
Needless to say, The Bible Code became an international best seller. And it begat Bible Code II: The Countdown (Viking 2002), which claimed (at 5-9) that the air assault on the Twin Towers in New York in 2001 was anticipated in the Torah, and predicted (at 4-5, 106-08) an atomic holocaust in 2006, a nuclear world war, precipitated by terrorism in the Middle East. A third book, The Bible Code III (Worldmedia 2010) followed as well, and promoted the notion that Osama bin Laden possessed a nuclear bomb.
The primary lure of the Bible Code books was, of course, the implication that God encrypted messages in the text of the ancient Torah, messages that Drosnin, building on the work of WRR, was able to tease out of the text. Conversely, the messages might be taken as scientific proof that God exists.
Drosnin asserts, repeatedly, that he is a non-believer. (See, e.g., The Bible Code, at 61, 79, 181.) But he also argues that "no human" could have anticipated the events which he claims are referenced in the text. (Id. at 50-51) Rather, "(s)ome intelligence," some "non-human intelligence" designed the code, proving that "we are not alone." (Id. at 90, 97, 179.)
As to the source of the non-human intelligence, Drosnin quotes Rips as confirming that his (Drosnin's) findings are "non-random," and that they were placed in the text by a "higher intelligence," by which Rips, an Orthodox Jew, means God, a deity who acted intentionally in coding the Torah text with hidden messages. (See Id., at 20, 40, 103, 174.) If the reader has missed the point, Drosnin quotes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's father, the late secular historian Benzion Netanhayu, as saying of the code: "If it's real, then I will believe in God, not only God, but the God of Israel, and I will have to become religious." (Id. at 79.) Is it real? Drosnin also quotes Hebrew University game theorist and Nobel Prize winner Robert J. Aumann as concluding that the code has passed the highest, most stringent standard of propriety and acceptability. Said Aumann, the code is "not just Kosher, it's Glatt Kosher." (Id. at 43.)
In Bible Code II, Drosnin dances a similar two step. He continues to make references to the "Lord of the Code" and the "Code of God" and to Rips's belief that the Bible code did not arise on Earth but came from God. (See, e.g, Bible Code II, at 33-34, 148-49, 209-10.) And Drosnin continues to assert his lack of belief in the Deity. (See, e.g., Id. at 5, 28, 93, 181.) Here, though, Drosnin also and more explicitly suggests that the code was the product of alien, that is, extraterrestrial, life. Referencing the claim of Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick, co-discover of the spiral structure of DNA, to the effect that the DNA molecule did not spontaneously develop on Earth, but was, essentially, seeded here by an advanced civilization, Drosnin contends that the Bible code, too, was brought to Earth in a vehicle by an alien, indeed, the same one who brought the DNA molecule. (See Id., at 144-45, 155, 181.)
Today, the interest in and search for Bible codes extends far beyond academics and best-selling authors. Not surprisingly, Bible codes are an active topic on the Internet. A quick Google search for "Bible Codes" recently returned almost 3,800,000 results for potential further exploration.
In fact, the search for and commentary on Bible codes has become something of a cottage industry. In addition to discussing various aspects of the codes, many websites offer for sale computer software advertised as a tool to assist in locating encoded messages. These programs purportedly can rapidly (1) comb through the entire biblical text to search for letter sequences at various static and progressive spacings, as well as in different directions and angles, (2) identify related word clusters, and (3) create grids of letters to display the results.
The assumptions behind the code claims
The idea that there is a code hidden in the Torah, and the further idea that this code revealsl divine messages placed there by God when God dictated the text to Moses, depends, of course, on two independent sets of assumptions. One is secular and primarily based on mathematics, while the other is mostly, but not entirely, grounded on religious beliefs and history.
The first is that hidden messages are exceedingly improbable, not of human origin, and difficult to encode and ascertainable in a plausible manner. The second is that the text of the Torah we have today was originally dictated by God to Moses about 3300 years ago and that the words we see today, and specifically the way they are spelled, are identical to what was written back then. If true, it would mean that the original tablets or scrolls containing these verses, words and letters have been transcribed time and again over 33 centuries and survived intact despite constant movement, vagaries of weather and security measures, wars, exile, possible purposeful editing and plain human negligence. This essay will deal only with the first set of assumptions.
The common occurrence of improbable events
Naturally, the publication of the Famous Rabbi's Experiment drew responses from academicians and skeptics alike. At first, the responses generally challenged the methodology used by WRR, suggesting that the data was manipulated. Some tried to replicate the experiment, and failed to achieve the reported results. But while the secular criticism of Bible codes was initially directed at the Famous Rabbi's Experiment, it extends well beyond that episode.
The WRR paper and Drosnin's Bible Code books repeatedly assert that their findings are highly improbable, that the results cannot be attributed to mere chance. Yet, virtually all respected mathematicians and statisticians who have reviewed their claims have disputed them. Many of the reasons for this professional rejection are technical, based on the idea that code proponents misconceive or misrepresent the nature of mathematical probabilities generally or erred in their calculations specifically. For instance, I.B.M. Professor of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cal Tech Barry Simon contends that the WRR calculations assume an independence of events when no such assumption is warranted. (See Simon, "The Case Against the Codes," 4-5/19.)
Similarly, Jordan Ellenberg, a professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin, likens the results to the classic stockbroker's con, in which a broker send out unsolicited stock tips to a wide swath of potential clients and then narrows the number of recipients over time to those who happen to be that tiny minority of originally solicited investors who receive a string of successful calls. Not knowing of his transmissions of unsuccessful tips sent to others, the members of this smaller group reasonably think that his record proves the broker to be a genius and worthy of hiring. There is an underlying flaw in the con and the codes, however, according to Ellenberg. It is that "(i)mprobable things happen a lot." (See Ellenberg, How Not to be Wrong (Penguin Press 2014), at 98.)
The late Cal State – Fullerton professor of mathematics and statistical mechanics, Mark Perakh, provides another illustration. He notes that while the chance for any one lottery ticket to win may be extremely small, the likelihood that some ticket will win is much larger. And, in fact, winners of lotteries are announced frequently. Likewise, finding a specific ELS in the Torah may be small, but finding some ELS in association with other words is, again, much larger. (See Perakh, "The Rise and Fall of the Bible Code," at 13-14/24.)
Putting the technical difficulties of the Famous Rabbis Experiment aside, one of the core attractive features of the code claims, the finding of an impressive number of seemingly significant letter and word associations in an ancient text (and, for some, a holy one, at that), was negated early on. Mathematics professor Dror Bar-Natan and computer science professor Brendan McKay showed, contrary to WRR, that results similar to those reported by WRR could be achieved by a search of the Hebrew version of Tolstoy's War and Peace. (See final edition here.) Then, responding to a specific challenge from Drosnin to find an encrypted assassination message of a political leader in Moby Dick, McKay found several.
McKay, Bar-Natan and others subsequently drafted a comprehensive rebuttal to the Famous Rabbis Experiment called "Solving the Bible Code Puzzle" and published it, fittingly enough, in Statistical Science. Subsequently, Perakh, not knowing of the work of Bar-Natan and McKay, reviewed several of his own writings, both in Russian and in English, and found numerous ELS's. (See Perakh, above, at 5-6/24.) (For more, see here.)
Presented with the criticism of some of the opponents of the codes, and based on his own new research, Nobel laureate Aumann changed his mind. Not being able to confirm the existence of the Bible codes, in 2004 he concluded that "the codes phenomenon is improbable."
The ease of human creation
The respective assumptions of Rips and Drosnin that God or extraterrestrial aliens must have created all of the ELS's in the Bible have also been deflated by Perakh and others who have shown that ELS's are not so complex as to require a supernatural deity or an extraterrestrial alien to create them. Perakh proved his point in two ways. First, he wrote a short poem, consisting of just 558 letters, in which he quickly found 37 ELS's. Then he purposely encoded ELS's into another writing. So, whether an ELS is created inadvertently or intentionally, the fact remains, as Perakh has written, that a "human mind is quite capable of creating arrays of ELS's not unlike those found in the Bible." (See Perakh, above, at 6-7/24.) Note, he is not arguing that the author(s) of the biblical text in fact encoded messages, only that one need not be other-worldly to do so. Moreover, he has shown that humans can create texts embedded with ELS's with modest efforts.
Theological gooses and ganders
If sometimes there is too little proof for Bible codes, at other times there may be too much, at least for certain tastes. Once the idea of previously hidden messages gained currency, the search was open to all. As could be expected, Christians also combed through the Hebrew Bible. They were looking for hidden messages that Jesus, known in Hebrew as Yehoshua (yud-hay-vav-shin-ayin) or, in shortened form, Yeshua (yud-shin-vav-ayin), is the Messiah. Lo and behold, they found what they sought. The shortened name Yeshua appears frequently as an ELS in the Torah.
Did Professor Rips, an Orthodox Jew, inadvertently uncover a hidden encryption system dictated by God in Hebrew to the Jewish prophet Moses that turns out to confirm that Yeshua/Jesus is the long awaited Moshaich/Messiah? Not quite. First, some of the Hebrew letters involved are among the most frequently found in the Torah. In particular, yud, the first letter in the name, is the letter most frequently found in the Torah.
Moreover, finding Yeshua in the Torah is no more probative than finding the names in the Famous Rabbis Experiment. Perakh searched for Yeshua in a contemporary, thoroughly secular Israeli work and found ELS's and word clusters similar to those found in the Torah for "Jesus is my name", "Jesus is my teacher," "Jesus is able" and "Blood of Jesus." He also found Yeshua in the Hebrew translation of Ernest Hemmingway's The Old Man and the Sea. (See Perakh, above, at 7-10/24.)
The failure of the case for Bible codes
The validity of Bible codes should not rise or fall depending on whose theological ox is being gored, and it does not. It fails for more fundamental, more objective reasons. And it fails decisively.
Whatever the objections may be, the rejection of the WRR paper and Drosnin's code books has been clear and broad. Over fifty mathematicians and statisticians have endorsed the Mathematicians' Statement on the Bible Codes. The signatories to the Statement, having examined the evidence regarding Bible codes, found it "entirely unconvincing." Specifically referencing the WRR paper and Drosnin's books, the scholars stated that word clusters identified by code promoters are an "uncontrolled phenomenon" and expected in texts of "similar length." Moreover, "(a)ll claims of incredible probabilities for such clusters are bogus, since they are computed contrary to standard rules of probability and statistics." (Emphasis supplied.)
"Bogus" is a strong word, but the Statement is noteworthy for more than its strength and clarity. The signatories are highly credentialed scholars from around the world, including ten from Israel who could be expected to have an understanding of the Hebrew text at issue in addition to the mathematics.
Further, a number of the signatories are reportedly frum, that is, religious observant. But instead of seeing Bible codes as proof of God, and a scientific one to boot, at least one appears to be offended by the whole process. Professor Barry Simon describes himself as a "halachic layperson," meaning one who observes Jewish law. He plainly and forcefully objects to the use by some individuals of Bible codes, or Torah codes as he calls them, to enhance the religiosity of others, specifically "to get some non-religious Jews to start thinking seriously about yiddishkeit." To him, it is simply impermissible to "lie to non-religious Jews to get them to keep Shabbos." (See Simon, above, at 1/19.) True that.
The real lessons of the Bible codes story
In the end, the real value of the debate over Bible codes might be not the scholarly shedding of light on yet more pseudoscience, though that effort is exceedingly significant. Rather, two other important principles emerge. The first is that faith and commitment need not and should not depend on pseudoscience, even and maybe especially a pious fraud like the purported Bible codes. The second is that one can be dedicated both to religion and to reason. Not bad results at all for an exercise that began on such shaky ground.]]>
Reconstruction of recent Ashkenazi Jewish history from such genetic segments confirms a recent bottleneck of merely 300-400 individuals living in Central Europe, 25-32 generations ago, in the 13th-15th centuries (1200-1400). This bottleneck was the result of wide spread massacres of Jews in the Rhine Valley during the first three crusades; and additional massacres of Jews who were blamed by European Christians for causing the Bubonic Plague (1328-1351) which killed a third of the population in Europe (and almost half in urban areas).
However, the number of 300-400 Jewish ancestors of today's European Jewish population does not mean that only 300-400 Jews survived the Christian massacres. There were several thousand Jews living in Central Europe even after the massacres, but only 300-400 of them are ancestors of the current Jewish population.
Modeling of ancient histories for Ashkenazi Jews and European populations using their joint allele frequency spectrum determines Ashkenazi Jews to be an almost even admixture of European and people of Middle Eastern origins. Clearly, the large percentage of European genes in the current Ashkenazi Jewish gene pool is the result of the thousands of hush hush conversions by many hundreds of brave rabbis that occurred during the millennium of church domination.
One well known example of the danger is Count Valentine Potocki, a young Polish nobleman who went to Paris to finish his education, There he became close friends with another Polish nobel, Zarembo, Both of them met a Jewish teacher and asked him to teach them Hebrew. After some time each independently decided to become Jewish. Potocki went to Amsterdam where it was safer to convert to Judaism.
Zarembo returned to Poland where he married into the Tishkewitch family. After some years Zarembo took his wife and 5 year old son to Amsterdam where they all became Jewish. Then the family went to Israel as Zarembo's friend Count Potocki had done previously.
The Zarembo family remained in the Land of Israel. However, Count Potoki had grown homesick and took the dangerous step of returning to Poland. He settled in the Vilna district of Belarus posing as a born Jew and spent all his time studying Torah. When the police found out he was a convert he was arrested and sent to Vilna where the bishop tried to save his soul with reason, followed by torture, and then by being burned alive in the center of Vilna in 1749.
Jewish mystical teachings relate that the souls of Jews who were cut off from the Jewish people, without leaving physical descendants to propagate their lineage (like Count Potocki) will reincarnate in later generations in a Gentile body so that they will have the opportunity to convert-revert to Judaism.
Signs of a Jewish soul:
Rabbi Allen S. Maller is the Rabbi Emeritus of Temple Akiba in Culver City, California. His website is: www.rabbimaller.com. Earlier versions of this article may have appeared elsewhere.
The views expressed by Rabbi Maller are his own and not necessarily those of the Blogmaster. They are published in order to promote this blog's mission to provide information and foster discussion about matters of faith and science. The Blogmaster thanks Rabbi Maller for his contribution to this forum.
The study, published in the August 2014 issue of the journal Current Anthropology, found that human skulls changed in ways that indicate a lowering of testosterone levels at around the same time that culture was blossoming. The study's lead author, Robert Cieri, said: The modern human behaviors of technological innovation, making art and rapid cultural exchange probably came at the same time that we developed a more cooperative temperament resulting from having a little less testosterone in action.
Heavy brows were out, rounder heads were in, and those changes can be traced directly to testosterone levels acting on the skeleton, according to Duke University anthropologist Steven Churchill, who supervised Cieri's work. What the bones do not reveal, according to a report in The Telegraph 8/3/14, is whether humans had less testosterone in circulation, or fewer receptors for the hormone.
Dr. Hare of Duke University, who also studies differences between our closest living ape relatives, aggressive chimpanzees and mellow bonobos, said chimps and bonobos develop differently, and they respond to "social stress" differently. Chimpanzee males experience a strong rise in testosterone during puberty, but bonobos do not. When stressed, the bonobos don't produce more testosterone, as chimps do, but they do produce more cortisol, the stress hormone. Thus their social interactions are profoundly different, and their faces are different, too.
Cieri compared the brow ridge, facial shape and interior volume of 13 modern human skulls older than 80,000 years, 41 skulls from 10,000 to 38,000 years ago, and a global sample of 1,367 twentieth century skulls from 30 different ethnic populations. The trend that emerged was toward a reduction in the brow ridge and a shortening of the upper face, traits which generally reflect a reduction in the action of testosterone.
There are a lot of theories about why, after 150,000 years of HS existence, humans suddenly leapt forward in religious activities and technology. Around 40-70,000 years ago, there is widespread evidence of bone and antler tools, heat-treated and flaked flint, projectile weapons, grindstones, fishing and birding equipment, and ritual burials with grave goods.
A significant increase in religious activities in the many millennia prior to that time may have led to increased numbers of people who were able to live together in a band or clan without splitting apart. Small groups that lack a religious incest taboo will be plagued by the ills of inbreeding. Therefore groups with a religious taboo on incest that leads to exogamy in mating will be selected for.
As ancestor worship strengthens kinship ties over more and more generations, it also expands kinship ties over more nomadic bands creating extensive clans and tribes. These clans and tribes can gather periodically at a special place to exchange future mates. They also started exchanging, i.e., trading for desirable objects not found in their usual local. Seashells, obsidian, red ocher and other materials have been found in campsites and graves more than 100-200 miles away from their closest source.
The stronger the attraction of a special place, the greater the effort that distant clans will make to attend, so gathering spots that are turned into sacred sites of pilgrimage through special seasonal rites will enrich human communities. There are scholars who think that HS advanced trade networks helped them out compete Homo Neanderthals in Europe (studies of Neanderthal DNA have shown that they were a distinct species not ancestral to HS).
The need for all the clans to show up about the same time led to fixed seasonal holy days and a religious calendar. The need to mark time for pilgrimage festivals led people to study the cycle of the moon and the movement of the constellations and thus move some of the spirit powers into the sky. Pilgrimage festivals still have major economic impact and serve in most religions as great sources of religious experience and solidarity.
In small groups moral values can be based on utilitarian principles like "do to others as you want them to do to you," or "what goes around comes around." But in larger more complex societies with diverse classes and castes, it may be more effective to root ethics in transcendent terms since there are not enough repeat interactions between individuals to validate utilitarian morality.
As tribes became larger and villages grew, a judge who rewarded good people and punished evil people helped the community to instill its norms in its members. With the exception of a sociopath, the intelligent minds of HS also have a conscious, self-evaluating, purpose driven aspect that needs to be satisfied because groups with a higher percentage of these kinds of minds were more stable and more effective. Guilt arises from many activities and needs to be atoned for. Self-discipline provides many advantages for an individual's survival and success.
Most people, and all societies, need the structure of rules, community and divine discipline to maintain self-control. Hunters needed to kill animals, yet they obviously felt ambivalent about it because almost all human societies have rules either about offering some of the kill to the spirit of the animal killed, or a taboo on killing or eating certain animals. There are much fewer rules relating to eating plants. Spilling blood intentionally is fraught with spiritual ambivalence and tension that needs to be dealt with.
Sex is also never simply a natural act for HS. The mind is always involved. It is not just chance that the first thing HS becomes self-aware of in the Garden of Eden is the shame of being naked. HS is the only living species that thinks it must clothe itself. Evidence of textiles from more than 24,000 years ago has been found in the cold climates of ice age Europe.
However, the origins of clothing in Africa are the not the result of ice age climate, but the result of concepts of modesty. Self-aware intelligent minds became moral minds, which became modest minds. Recent DNA studies of body lice that must lay their eggs in clothing show that these lice evolved from pubic lice that adapted to clothing that covered the pubic area. This genetic adaptation took place 60-100,000 years ago. Thus, HS have been clothing themselves for at least 60-70,000 years. Long before rules about property became important, religious rules of probity were important.
The authors of the study quoted above argue that living together and cooperating put a premium on agreeableness and lowered aggression and that, in turn, led to changed faces and more cultural exchange. I maintain that religious developments helped make that transition possible and effective by enabling larger and larger bands of humans to live and co-operate together.
Rabbi Allen S. Maller is the Rabbi Emeritus of Temple Akiba in Culver City, California. His website is: www.rabbimaller.com. Earlier versions of this article may have appeared elsewhere.
The views expressed by Rabbi Maller are his own and not necessarily those of the Blogmaster. They are published in order to promote this blog's mission to provide information and foster discussion about matters of faith and science. The Blogmaster thanks Rabbi Maller for his contribution to this forum.]]>
If, however, you deny the safety and efficacy of approved medical vaccinations designed to prevent harmful, debilitating, even deadly diseases, such as polio, measles, hepatitis and tetanus, your belief may well make a great deal of difference to you, your family, your community and, indeed, all of humanity.
And yet, there are those who for a variety of reasons refuse to inoculate themselves or their children, or both, even when established governmental authorities require such action. While it is tempting to stereotype all such persons as undereducated or acting out of ignorance, some are not. Aside from the rare situations based on the medical condition of the child, some people object to a particular vaccine or procedure. Others have broader religious, philosophical and personal beliefs that militate against inoculations. (See, e.g., here and here.) Some even may be part of an otherwise socially conscious community.
Jewcology is a website that aims to be a resource for the "entire Jewish-environmental community." One of the blogs that Jewcology hosts is written by Rafael Bratman, and one of Bratman's posts is entitled "Water Fluoridation and Vaccinations are contrary to Torah principles." Bratman's diatribe is filled with so many erroneous statements that one is tempted to let this dog lie and hope that it gets lost in the tangle that is the World Wide Web. The problem, however, is that people visit the Jewcology site and several hundred of them have already indicated that they "like" the anti-vaccination post. While undoubtedly some people get their kicks from clicks, and will "like" anything, one cannot discount the possibility that some readers actually believe the nonsense contained in the piece.
Moreover, Jewish tradition teaches that we may not exploit our neighbors by placing a stumbling block in their path, neither may we stand idly by the blood of our neighbor. (See Lev. 19:14, 16.) To the contrary, we are obligated to remove the impediment, to protect the neighbor. So let's remove this particular stumbling block, piece by piece. Let's set the record straight.
Bratman's post asserts three main arguments in opposition to vaccinations. The first is that they don't work, that the benefits are "unclear and unproven." The second and third relate to Jewish law. Bratman argues that vaccines are treif, that is, they contain ingredients forbidden to observant Jews, and also that their use violates the primary Jewish principle of pikuach nefesh, the preservation of life. None of the arguments is supported by any credible authority. The first is contrary to well established and documented medical science. The second and third thoroughly misstate Jewish tradition, as understood by a broad spectrum of scholars.
Vaccination Programs are Indisputably Safe and Effective
As explained by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ("CDC"), a vaccine is a chemical compound that contains a "killed or weakened infectious organism" that is then administered to a human being in order to prevent a disease. The diseases for which vaccines are administered include measles, mumps, pertussis (whooping cough), hepatitis, and smallpox, among more than a dozen. If you are not familiar with one or more of these diseases, thank a vaccination program.
According to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a part of the U.S. National Institute of Health, vaccines work because they stimulate the human immune system to attack the invading microbes present in the vaccine. That is, they simulate a disease and trick the body into fighting it resulting in immunity to the real disease.
When introduced into a community, vaccination programs have been extraordinarily successful in preventing cases of disease and related consequences. The long view is instructive. In 1900, 53% of the causes of death in the United States were infectious diseases. By 2010, as a result of various vaccination programs, infectious diseases were responsible for only 3% of deaths in the United States.
The data is even more compelling when one looks at the results of introducing a vaccination program for a particular disease. For instance, prior to the wide spread use of measles vaccines in the United States in 1963, the annual number of reported measles cases exceeded 500,000. The drop-off after the introduction of the program was swift and dramatic. In 2009, there were only 71 reported cases, for a decline from base of 99.9%. Diphtheria, with a former base line of 175,000 annual cases, and smallpox with a base line of 48,000 cases, were non-existent in 2009, thanks to vaccination programs. Even where diseases have not been eliminated, e.g., mumps and pertussis, the reduction of cases has been dramatic. (See here.)
Over and over, the demonstrated facts are that vaccines work. Moreover, if enough people in a particular community are vaccinated, a process known as community or herd immunity develops offering protection to the few who, due to special circumstance, cannot be vaccinated.
While Bratman acknowledges that the incidence of polio has declined over the years, he attributes that result to "improvements in sanitation and hygene [sic]." Of course, Bratman fails to cite to a single such improvement, much less one that occurred throughout the United States at exactly the time in 1955 when the newly approved Salk vaccine was first being administered and which would account for a rapid 93% decline in cases of paralytic polio. What hard data shows is that incidents of infectious diseases, including polio, did not decline slowly and steadily over time due to continuous environmental improvements, but dramatically and directly as a consequence of the administration of a vaccine program. Not surprisingly, and despite Bratman's suggestion to the contrary, the savings in direct medical costs and in indirect social costs resulting from fewer cases of infectious disease is substantial. (See here and here.)
Conversely, where participation in a vaccination programs has declined or been refused, we have seen a resurgence of diseases like measles, mumps and whooping cough, that some thought were contained if not eradicated. These outbreaks typically occur in close communities whose members fail to act vigilantly to secure comprehensive compliance with vaccination programs. In 2013, for instance, measles outbreaks were reported in a faith healing megachurch in Texas and the Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Borough Park in Brooklyn, New York. A few years earlier, there was a mumps outbreak in New York and New Jersey. An investigation found that 97% of the case patients were Orthodox Jews.
Even more recently, measles has spread to upper Manhattan and the Bronx and has been reported in other areas around Boston, San Francisco and Los Angeles. What the CDC has found is that more than 80% of the reported cases occurred in persons who were not vaccinated and about four of every five such individuals purposefully chose not to be vaccinated!
The cause and effect relationship between infectious diseases and inoculations against them could not be more clear. When vaccination programs are introduced, the incidence of disease falls sharply. When participation in such programs falters, purposefully or by negligence, disease returns and spreads and not just individuals but whole communities suffer. (See here.)
Accepting a non-oral administration of a vaccine with "treif ingredients" is not prohibited
Referring to certain ingredients found in vaccines, Bratman asserts that for anyone who takes kashrut seriously, "it would seem a no brainer to avoid vaccinations." On analysis, however, this argument fares no better than his first claim.
Vaccines, like other medical preparations, contain a variety of ingredients for a variety of purposes. Some of these ingredients are the active components in the vaccine, necessary for it to perform its task. Others are used as stabilizers for live vaccines or as preservatives.
For vaccines available in the United States, the CDC provides a comprehensive list of ingredients contained in those vaccines, as well as ingredients used in the manufacturing process but removed or remaining only in trace amounts. There is no doubt that some formulations of certain vaccines contain products that, if consumed, would possibly or certainly be considered treif by most authorities. These include not only chick embryo cell cultures and bovine muscle tissue, but such items as Vero (monkey kidney) cells, Madin Darby Canine Kidney (MDCK) cell protein, hydrolyzed porcine gelatin, embryonic guinea pig cell cultures, and human diploid cells such as lung fibroblasts.
For many, whether those items are more or less appetizing than other ingredients like formaldehyde, thimerosal, hexadecyltrimethylammonium bromide and sodium taurodeoxycholate is a matter of, well, taste. But the question here is whether they are treif when received by way of inoculation or spray or some other non-oral application.
Israeli Orthodox Torah scholar Rabbi David Samson summarizes the legal situation as follows: "There is no prohibition in using medicines which contain forbidden ingredients if they are administered by injection, suppository, enema, medicated bandage, and the like, since they are not eaten." Bratman seems to have missed that distinction.
The general principle announced by Rabbi Samson received specific application last year in the United Kingdom, when Fluenz, a new flu vaccine containing a hydrolyzed pork gelatin was introduced. Fluenz is administered as a nasal spray. When asked whether usage was permissible, British kashrut authority Rabbi Abraham Adler from the Kashrus and Medicines Information Service confirmed that there was "no problem" with pork or other animal derived ingredients "in non-oral products." Concurring, Rabbi Yehuda Brodie, registrar of the Manchester Beth Din, noted that the vaccines were not taken orally, were taken for medicinal and not nutritional purposes, that the gelatin was a "denatured product" which was "very far from the original piece of pork it came from," and that it was a "small part of a complex formula," all of which made it "absolutely acceptable." Said Rabbi Brodie, anyone saying otherwise is "acting in the extreme."
Rather than simply conclude that the issue is a "no-brainer" after all, let's just say that some folks with very fine Jewish brains, who actually took the time to study the tradition and apply it to scientifically established facts, uniformly have agreed that the original source or nature of certain ingredients does not render non-oral applications of vaccines as treif.
Jewish Tradition Firmly Supports Compulsory Vaccination Programs
Bratman's final argument is that vaccinations violate the Torah principle of pikuach nefesh. His contention could not be more wrong.
Obviously, there was nothing that we would recognize as resembling medical science in the days of the authors of the Torah or those of the Sages whose interpretations of Torah were collected in the Mishna and the Talmud. The rudimentary understandings of the great twelfth century physician scholar Moses Maimonides (aka Rambam) did not encompass vaccinations, either. Nevertheless, far from condemning vaccinations, the Jewish tradition contains principles that are both well established and almost universally understood to be applicable today and support vaccinations against infectious diseases.
The analysis begins, as it usually does, with the Torah. In addition to the two statements in Leviticus mentioned before, Deuteronomy contains a number of lessons that relate to a person's obligation, his duty, to care for himself and his neighbor. In that last book of Torah, Moses is portrayed as summarizing the history of the Israelite experience from Mt. Sinai to the Jordan river and giving three farewell orations to the assembled people. In the first of these speeches, Moses urges the people to take the "utmost care," to watch themselves scrupulously, to be "most careful." (See Deut. 4:9, 4:15.) Later, in his second discourse, Moses reminds the people that indifference is prohibited, in favor of, for example, an obligation to make a parapet for a roof, so that the owner would not "bring bloodguilt" upon his house should anyone fall. (See Deut. 22:8.)
Subsequently, rabbis interpreted Moses statements as God's commandments to protect one's health, to guard against disease. The Talmudic concern with the well-being of a child was broad and deep. For instance, a parent was obligated to teach his child how to swim, lest the child be in danger if he was traveling by boat and the boat began to sink. (See BT Kiddushin 29a.) The overarching concern was the child's needs.
The rabbinic discussion also considered whether the requirement to protect health was a negative or a positive mandate. The former would only require staying away from danger, but the latter would require affirmative conduct to protect one's health. Rambam, in his summary of Jewish law, the Mishneh Torah, concluded that the duty was a positive one, and required proactive measures to mitigate a foreseeable harm. (See Mishneh Torah, Hilchot De'ot 4:1; Rotzei'ach 1:6, 14.) Similarly, the Shulchan Aruch, Joseph Caro's mid-sixteenth century restatement of Jewish law, reaffirms that there is a religious obligation to take affirmative steps to prevent an anticipated danger to oneself or to others. (See Shulchan Aruch, Chosen Mishpat 427:8.)
The rabbis' teachings were not merely academic, as became clear not long after Edward Jenner introduced the first effective vaccine against smallpox in England in 1796. In Eastern Europe, the Chassidic master Rabbi Nachman of Bratslov, wrote in his Kuntres Hanhagot Yesharot, that one "must be very careful about the health of children . . . (and) inoculate every baby against smallpox before the age of three months, for if he does not do so, he is like one who sheds blood." (See here (14/31).) Sadly, in 1810, Rabbi Nachman died at age 38 of tuberculosis, a century and a half before the development of a TB vaccine.
More recently, the Reform and Conservative movements in the United States have issued formal commentaries on the issue of vaccination. The Reform analysis was published in 1999 by the Responsa Committee of the Central Conference of American Rabbis ("CCAR"), Rabbi Mark Washofsky, Committee Chair. (See generally, "Compulsory Immunization," Reform Responsa for the Twenty-First Century (CCAR 2010 v. 1), at 107-120.)
The Reform responsum on vaccinations was written with respect to a challenge raised by some parents to a congregation's policy that required immunizations as a pre-condition to a student's attendance in the congregational school. Apparently, the parents thought the required vaccinations were "excessively risky" and elected not to immunize their children. (See Id.at 107.)
The CCAR began its analysis by noting the "fundamental fact" that Jewish tradition considers the practice of medicine to be a mitzvah, that is, a religious obligation. Moreover, it is an aspect of the dominant principle of pikuach nefesh (the preservation of human life), the precise principle Bratman thinks prohibits vaccinations. The Committee then reviewed the history of infectious diseases in the United States, including the reduction and even elimination of certain diseases due largely to vaccination programs. The result, it concluded, was "surely one of the great success stories of the twentieth century . . . ." (Id. at 109.)
Without discounting the reality that vaccines are not "completely safe," based on credible scientific evidence, the Committee agreed that any risks posed were "'very much outweighed by the public health benefit of'" vaccination programs. (Id. at 112.) Similarly, such programs generated enormous cost savings "in terms of direct medical costs alone." (Id. at 110.)
Finally, the Committee recognized the benefit of community or herd immunity created when a sufficient percentage of a particular community are immunized. This immunity provided additional protection especially to those who were, for unique reasons, unable to be vaccinated. Conversely, it determined that refusal to vaccinate a child not only created a dangerous situation for the unimmunized child, but also for the community at large. (See Id. at 112-13.)
Concluding that "there are no valid Jewish religious grounds to support refusal to immunize as a general principle," the Committee found the congregation entitled to require immunization of students in their congregational school as a prerequisite to attendance. (See Id. at 113-15.)
The Conservative Movement's view was expressed six years later by the Rabbinical Assembly's Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, also with respect to school immunizations. The Committee's statement "Compulsory Immunization in Jewish Day Schools" (the "Statement") was authored by Rabbi Joseph Prouser. It begins with a review of state immunization mandates and various objections to vaccinations. In its review of Jewish law, not surprisingly, it places a greater emphasis on a larger number and wider variety of traditional sources than did the CCAR. The results were, however, the same.
Prouser's review of halachic literature begins with the telling observation that "(e)nthusiastic halachic support for immunization protocols emerged even before" Jenner's development of a smallpox vaccine, at a time when the best practice, called variolation, consisted of deliberately infecting patients with smallpox or cowpox. While the risk of contracting the disease from that technique was about one in a thousand, at that time such a risk was considered negligible, especially given the potential benefit. (See Statement, at 12/31.)
The analysis also references three contemporary Orthodox authorities, each with a different, though consistent approach. One argues that society has a right to compel "life-sustaining treatment" even when a parent is opposed to it and even when that opposition is religiously motivated. Another supports vaccinations mandated by the state under the principle of Dina d'Malchuta Dina, that is, the law of the land is the law. A third finds that the laws of Shabbat may be set aside in order to avoid a "life-threatening situation." (See Id. at 15/31.)
The conclusion, based on hundreds of years of experience with vaccinations, is clear to Prouser. There is a "well established preference for preventive medicine as a religious mandate." (Id. at 15-16/29.) Consequently, "(u)nless medically contraindicated for specific children, in extraordinary and compelling cases, parents have an unambiguous religious obligation to have their children immunized against infectious disease." By doing so, parents fulfill a "religious obligation to remove hazardous conditions which imperil the public's health and safety." Conversely, failure to do so is "a serious, compound violation of Jewish Law . . . ." (Id. at 29/31.)
And let's not forget the Reconstructionists. Concerning a theoretical decision by parents to avoid vaccinating their children, Rabbi David Teutsch writes succinctly: "Since the duty to heal is communal, this choice is ethical only when parents believe that no one should be vaccinated or when the vaccine poses a grave health risk to a particular child." (See A Guide to Jewish Practice (RRC Press 2011) at 505.)
Needless to say, Bratman does not discuss numerous pertinent passages in the Torah and Talmud, the various codes of Jewish Law, or contemporary commentary from Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist perspectives, each of which leads to or reaches the same conclusions. Vaccinations are not contrary to Torah principles. Indeed, vaccinations are mandated because Jewish tradition places the highest value on preventing foreseeable damage to individuals and the community.
We must protect our community
There are not more than fourteen million Jews on this planet. And we cannot afford to lose a single one to a preventable disease. As Rabbi Prouser reminds us, in prior times, in places where Jewish law governed, those who endangered the health and well being of the community could be lashed or excommunicated. (See Statement, at 22-25/31.) In America today, lashing and excommunication are not likely, or even desirable, remedies to achieve compliance with Jewish norms. But we can still speak, and still insist: For the sake of the children and in the interest of the Jewish People, Mr. Bratman, take down that post!]]>
On other occasions, though, believers will embrace science. They will hear that the initial conditions of the universe, certain laws of nature or the location and chemistry of our planet are set within a limited range that allows for human existence — a proposition sometimes called the Anthropic Principle (i.e., relating to humankind) — and take those conditions and characteristics as proof of a personal god. They will understand a "fine-tuned" universe as demonstrating, or at least strongly implying, the existence of a Fine-Tuner, a Devine Designer.
Drawing a conclusion about the existence of God from certain natural phenomena is not, of course, a new idea. Well over two thousand years ago, the author of Psalm 19 wrote that "the heavens declare the glory of God" and "His handiwork is proclaimed by the firmament." (Psalm 19:1.)
Centuries later, we find an early Jewish version of the Watchmaker argument. Responding to a heretic who asked him who made the universe, Rabbi Akiba reportedly said: "Just as a house attests to its builder, a garment to its weaver or a door to its carpenter, so too does the world attest to the Holy One who created it." (See Midrash Temurah 5.)
Even twentieth century theological rationalists, like Mordecai Kaplan, can be attracted to the argument from nature. Kaplan found evidence for God in "the oneness that spans the fathomless deeps of space" and "the elemental substance of stars and planets, of this our earthly abode and of all it holds." (See Scult, The Radical American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan (Indiana U. Press 2014 ) at 150-51.)
Science has advanced considerably since the day of the psalmists and Akiba, and since Kaplan's time, too. And the argument based on the observation and understanding of natural phenomena has been refined accordingly.
In his popular book, Just Six Numbers (Basic Books 2000), British cosmologist Martin Rees described six constant numbers that "constitute a 'recipe' for a universe." (Id. at 4.) One is the ratio of the strength of the electrical forces which hold atoms together to the force of gravity between them. It is huge, 1036. Were it smaller, however, only a miniature universe could exist and then not for long enough for evolution to take hold. Another number is small, 0.007. While not meant to invoke James Bond, ironically it "defines how firmly atomic nuclei bind together, . . . (and) how stars transmute hydrogen into all of the atoms of the periodic table." If this number were a thousandth larger or smaller, you would not be reading this post. You would not exist. (See Id. at 2.)
Two other numbers relate to the size and texture of the universe. One "measures the amount of material in our universe" and the relationship of gravity and "the expansion energy in the universe." The fourth number "controls the expansion of our universe." Were there even slight deviations in either number, cosmic evolution would not have occurred. (See Id. at 2-3.)
The final two numbers "fix the property of space itself . . . ." One "represents the ratio of two fundamental energies and is about 1/100,000 in value." A smaller number would have meant an inert universe while a larger one would evidence a violent one. The final number is 3, the number of spatial dimensions in the universe. With only two or with four dimensions, life would not exist. (See Id. at 2-3.)
Others have produced different and longer lists. Some years ago, astronomer and devout Christian Dr. Hugh Ross generated a list of over two dozen "parameters" that he contended set the boundaries for life on Earth. Some of these factors relate to the universe as we know it. They include, in addition to the factors discussed by Rees, the age and entropy level of the universe, the energy levels of beryllium, carbon and oxygen, and the distance between and luminosity of stars.
Other parameters apply to the Earth's capacity to be a fit habitat. Some of these concern the Earth's parent star, including the Sun being the only star companion for the Earth, the birth date and age of the Sun, the Sun's distance from the center of the galaxy, as well as the Sun's mass, color and surface gravity. Still others are more Earth specific, including the Earth's period of rotation, gravitational interaction with the Moon, magnetic field, axial tilt and seismic activity, plus the carbon dioxide, water vapor and ozone levels and the oxygen to nitrogen ratio in the atmosphere. According to Ross, each and every condition identified operates within a relatively narrow range beyond which human life would not be possible. Ross updated his list in 2006 to include over ninety values.
The Anthropic Principle has been adopted on occasion by orthodox Jewish scientists such as Gerald Schroeder and Nathan Aviezer, each of whom seeks to promote the notion of a close and harmonic relationship between the Torah and modern science. Schroeder, a physicist now residing in Israel, is best known perhaps for his attempt to conflate the six days of Biblical creation and the fourteen billion years of cosmological evolution into the same time period. (See generally, The Science of God ("TSOG") (Free Press 1997), discussed here, here and here.) After briefly reviewing the eons of evolution, Schroeder writes that we "live on a planet within a galaxy of a universe made for life," a planet he calls a "just-right Earth." (Id. at 191-92; see also, here.)
Rather than review fourteen billion years of cosmological evolution, Aviezer, a physics professor at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, offers a few examples of the Anthropic Principle. He refers to the strength of "the nuclear force" in thermonuclear reactions in the Sun, the presence of water on Earth and the delicate balance of Earth's atmosphere. In addition to these often discussed factors, Aviezer adds that human life would not have been possible except for the highly improbable event of the sudden destruction of all dinosaurs due to a meteor impacting the planet with a force strong enough to cause the extinction of the then dominant life form and yet not so strong as to kill all life on the planet.
Both Schroeder and Aviezer conclude their arguments by discussing the probability that human life would ever arise. Schroeder refers to the work of British mathematician Roger Penrose who, in The Emperor's New Mind (Oxford 1989), calculated the likelihood that we would find ourselves in an environment suited for life at "less than one chance out of ten to the power of ten to the power of 123" (TSOG, at 192-93), that is, "1" followed by 10123 "0"s. One in a billion (109) would seem to be exceptionally small (except perhaps to a university mathematician), but this number is so many zillion times smaller it literally cannot be written out, much less be expressed or understood with any precision.
Aviezer also devotes some space to the issue of calculating probabilities, but instead of revealing a particular number, merely concludes that the events leading to human life on Earth were "extremely unlikely." He adds that the "extreme rarity of the events . . . is well established." Consequently, he claims that "the anthropic principle has become a scientifically established fact."
Well, not quite. There are problems with the Anthropic Principle, some definitional, some philosophical, some empirical.
The first problem with the Anthropic Principle is that there is no agreement on what it is. The term itself was invented relatively recently, apparently by British cosmologist Brendan Carter around 1974. In contrast to the Copernican revolution, which denied that humankind was at the center of the universe, the purpose of the Anthropic Principle (the "AP") is to "portray the cosmos less as an impersonal machine and more as . . . a 'home to Man.'" (Ferris, The Whole Shebang (Simon & Schuster 1997) at 292.)
In the last forty years, others have proposed variations on the theme. For instance, some claim that there is a Weak Anthropic Principle ("WAP") and a Strong Anthropic Principle ("SAP") among other APs. WAP asserts that the laws of nature must be such as to "permit the emergence of life" while SAP asserts that the universe must also allow for "'the creation of observers in it.'" (See Id. at 299.)
In addition, some writers have discussed PAP, the Participatory Anthropic Principle, and FAP, the Final Anthropic Principle. The late, great science writer Martin Gardner called the last of these the Completely Ridiculous Anthropic Principle, or CRAP. (See generally, "WAP, SAP, PAP, and FAP" in The Night is Large (St. Martin's 1996), at 40-49.)
Like Schroeder and Aviezer, most writers do not seem overly concerned with the definitional dilemma. Even well regarded scientists like Hayden Planetarium Director Neil DeGrasse Tyson and University of Michigan Prof. Fred Adams tend to define the Anthropic Principle in a cursory and general manner. According to Tyson and co-author Donald Goldsmith, the argument is that "(b)ecause we exist . . . the parameters that describe the cosmos, and in particular the value of the cosmological constant, must have the values that allow us to exist." (See Origins (Norton 2004), at 102.) Prof. Adams describes the basic idea as restricting the laws of nature in order to "allow for the appearance of living beings capable of studying the laws of nature." (See Origins of Existence (Free Press 2002), at 209.) That is, "our universe had to take its observed form for us to be here to argue about these issues." (Id. at 218.)
Albert Einstein formulated the relationship of energy and matter, a fundamental feature of the entire universe, in a simple and elegant formula, E=mc2. The precision of his formulation has allowed his theory of special relativity to be tested thoroughly over the course of a century leading to greater understanding and new technologies. By contrast, articulation of the AP is neither simple, nor elegant, nor even agreed. Far from being "a scientifically established fact," the Anthropic Principle is confusing and flawed.
For starters, the AP is misnamed. It is not even a principle as that word is commonly understood, that is, a rule or a basic truth, an explanatory fact or law of nature. Tyson and Goldsmith call it an "approach," rather than a principle (see Origins, above, at 104), but even that may be generous. The AP does not really prove anything, nor does it predict anything. Indeed, to assert that the universe must be fine-tuned for life because we are here is simply to make a circular argument. The old children's song "We're here because we're here because we're here because we're here. Etc." makes as much or as little sense.
Nor is it clear that the underlying theme of the AP is, or ought to be, anthropic, that is, of or related to humanity. The argument that the universe was made for humans because we are here could be made with regard to other organisms that have found their niche, like Darwin's finches, or which are long time survivors like turtles or ubiquitous like cockroaches. Under this approach, one might even argue that a hole in a street was designed for the puddle that fills it perfectly.
Physicist Timothy Ferris asserts that the AP "is less scientific than philosophical." (See Ferris, above, at 300.) Even so, the AP fails. Martin Gardner considered himself a philosophical theist, but he had a "dim view" of the AP, and thought that the fine-tuning argument for God was "logically fragile." (See "Proofs of God," in The Night is Large, above, at 539-540, 546.) As Gardner recognized, if the AP is read as proclaiming that "because we exist the universe must be constructed as to allow us to have evolved," then it is nothing more than a "trivial tautology." (See "WAP, SAP, PAP, and FAP," above, at 41.)
More formally, the AP contends that because B (humankind) chronologically follows A (the original conditions for the universe), that A caused B, or in the phrasing of the AP, that A was fine-tuned for B. This backward reasoning is a form of "retrograde analysis" in which observations about the present are the basis for speculation about the past. (See "Proofs of God," above, at 539-41.) The fallacy is known as the post-hoc fallacy. (See Ferris, above, at 300.) What is more accurate is that through a natural process of cosmological and then organic evolution, including natural selection and adaptation, over a long period of time human life emerged. Rather than the universe being suited for humankind, humankind and its predecessors adapted to the universe that was available.
The AP also fails to conform to reality. To assert as a principle that our universe is fine-tuned for life is contrary to some rather obvious facts. Only about four percent (4%) of the universe is made up of conventional (baryonic) matter, with almost all of the balance being composed of dark energy (~70%) and dark matter (~25%), about both of which we know precious little. (See Adams, above, at 55.) What we do know is that almost all of the universe is empty and frigid, and, because of accelerating expansion, getting visually emptier and colder. (See Id. at 60, 62-63, 219-20.) So, it is not surprising that to date we have no evidence of any life, much less intelligent or human-like life, on other planets.
Even on our planet, life flourishes in a limited number of locations. And where it does is often a scene of harsh and bitter struggle. If the universe really were fine-tuned for life, especially human life, then why isn't it flourishing and visible? And why would a Fine-Tuner create such vast amounts of wasted space and a system dependent on conflict? Conversely, if our search for extraterrestrial life is successful, what does that mean for the AP? Does that confirm that the universe is fine-tuned for life or does it suggest that life is not as unique as we once thought? And what if that life is not human?
The AP is also premature. The universe is just shy of fourteen billion years old. Our genus emerged about two million years ago, with our species, Homo sapiens, arriving about 300,000 years ago. (See Coyne, Why Evolution is True (Penguin 2009) at 203, 206.) So, we have been around for just two ten thousandths of one percent of the life of the universe. For the other 99.9+% of the time, it would not have been at all obvious or perhaps even plausible that humankind would arise.
Similarly, the complete story of human existence on the home planet has not yet been written. If, in the next one thousand or one hundred thousand years, another massive meteor struck the earth triggering extinctions, including of us, would that mean the Anthropic Principle was false? Or just a temporary principle?
But what about the long odds on us being here, of each cosmological constant and ratio being just right to allow for the universe to form and evolve sufficiently for heavy elements to be formed in stellar nuclear reactions, spewed into space, and collected in a solar system which includes a planet at just the right distance from a correctly sized and aged single star and with just the right chemistry to allow for life to emerge?
Let's start by considering the probability that any human now alive would be alive today. Each of us is the product of some twelve thousand generations of human evolution over the last 300,000 years. Each of those generations is the product of the fertilization of a reasonably random egg by an even more random sperm. Change the egg or the sperm in any one of those encounters and the current beneficiary of the process would not be here. The retrograde analysis of the AP would argue that we should not be here, but we all are – despite the odds. To paraphrase lyricist Oscar Hammerstein, improbable things are happening every day.
Still, what of Penrose's calculations? Recall that Gerald Schroeder relied on certain calculations of Roger Penrose in The Emperor's New Mind to buttress his argument for the AP. Schroeder, however, failed to note that in that same book Penrose also stated that the improbabilities of the AP do not fully explain the improbabilities of our universe. (See Penrose, The Emperor's New Mind, above, at 354.) More recently, Penrose has characterized the AP as a "highly contentious set of ideas," upon which "too much reliance is frequently placed" to support "implausible-sounding themes." (See Penrose, Cycles of Time (Knopf 2010) at 171.)
Perhaps we can put the math aside. Physicist Victor Stenger argues, essentially, that the probability question is misplaced. He contends that there is, in fact, nothing unusual about the processes that preceded our existence or the situation in which we find ourselves. He argues, in short, that the values identified by Rees or Ross are within the range one would expect from "established physics." (See generally, The Fallacy of Fine Tuning (Prometheus Books 2011).)
Now, if you are having problems with the Schroeder/Aviezer claim that the universe is as God designed it, and you don't like Stenger's view that the universe is what it naturally is, there is another option. Martin Rees, among others, finds "compellingly attractive" the admittedly speculative theory that ours is but one of many universes. (See Rees, above, at 166.) Postulating a theoretical multiverse naturally improves the odds that a universe like ours would be among other universes, and Rees is, therefore, not surprised our number came up. (See also, Carroll, "Welcome to the Multiverse" (2011).)
But is it necessary to imagine a multiverse in order to explain our existence? Doesn't that just substitute one mystery for another? Moreover, doesn't a multiverse violate a principle of problem solving known as Occam's Razor which favors, among competing theories, the one with the fewest assumptions. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks thinks so, which is one reason why he favors "a single unprovable God over an infinity of unprovable universes." (See Sacks, The Great Partnership (Schocken 2011), at 269; but see also, Stenger, above, at 292.).)
In sum, the Anthropic Principle is an intriguing and seductive but ultimately unsatisfying concept for believers and non-believers alike. Its adoption by believers in support of a supernatural god is understandable, but it does not really advance their claim, does not provide proof. Nor is it even necessary for a believer to rely on, or even refer to, the AP. As Rabbi Sacks teaches, "faith is the defeat of probability by the power of possibility." (Id. at 283.)
Non-believers, too, are attracted to the AP for its purported non-theistic explanation of the seeming miracle of our existence. Some, conscious of the apparent overwhelming improbability of that existence, seek to improve the odds by changing the number of universes under discussion. But, based, on the available data, there is no reason to think that what we observe is anything other than what one would have expected from the normal operation of physics and chemistry, over time, and adding new universes, for which there is no current observable evidence, does not make the argument stronger or resolve the logical fallacies inherent in the AP.
At its core, the AP represents a return to pre-Copernican thinking, placing humanity, if not at the physical center of the universe, certainly as the reason for the origin and evolution of the universe. But we do not need to regress. The fact of our existence, even if not at the center of our universe but just on a speck of rock at the outer spiral of a conventional galaxy in an obscure region of space, is in and of itself reason enough for wonder and joy. And the truths of our emergence from stardust and our historic relationship to each other, to all of life, to all matter and all energy are truths to be cherished and nurtured with humility and gratitude.
Amen or Q.E.D., as you prefer.]]>