Kabbalah and Science:
Does Kabbalah Play Dice with the Universe?
"I do not believe that anything occurs by accident."
You may have heard words to this effect before and indeed the implications of this idea
are more profound for us than might be apparent from a first glance. Its veracity is at the
very heart of the relationship between Kabbalah and science, for example the debate
between evolution and creationism. It raises many questions about who we are, why the
universe and man were created, and our relationship with our world and God.
Einstein's Gambit
The title of this essay is a bit of a play on a question that the great physicist Albert
Einstein agonized over during much of his lifetime, which is "does God play dice with the universe?"
Einstein asked this question because he became increasingly uncomfortable with the direction that physics was
taking at that time (beginning of 20th century) - a direction toward a universe whose predominant modus
operandi was that of gambling with fair dice, or said in another way, a fundamentally random universe -
one that operates through a process of uncontrolled and unpredictable accidents waiting to happen.
Perhaps Einstein's
conundrum centered around the notion that a God who leaves things to chance or allows
life to progress through a series of accidents cannot possibly be an omnipotent God
because randomly occurring events appear to be outside the ability to be controlled.
Such a God does not fit the Jewish conception of Adonai Echad - the one God of all,
infinite, omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent.
For nearly three hundred years before Einstein's birth, the philosophy of nature
developed by the giants of physics, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Sir Isaac Newton to
name a few, was one of complete certainty and determinism. Newton's laws of motion
and gravitational attraction neatly explained the clockwork behavior of the planets in our
solar system and the movement of the stars in the heavens above.
The Fixed Laws of Nature
There was no room for
any deviations, mistakes, or accidents in these laws - they worked the same way
everywhere in the universe, and for all time. They could explain all the observed
phenomena in the universe. You could even reverse the flow of time and the laws were
immutable.
Even in the atomic realm the atom itself functioned as a kind of mini-solar system with
the nucleus playing the role of the Sun and the electrons orbiting the nucleus according to
the same rules in which the planets orbit the Sun. This science embodied a philosophy of
extreme neatness - there was never a need for having to "clean up a messy room." The
universe was therefore a kind of ideal utopia where its future course was perfectly
predictable. It also implied two important ideas. One is the notion of reductionism in
which the laws operate the same way at all size scales, just as in the example of atoms
behaving like mini-solar systems.
Reductionism implies that you can take an object, any
object, and chop it into smaller and smaller pieces - and that with the right kind of glue
you would be able to paste all those pieces back together again to recreate the exact
original object (remember Humpty-Dumpty?). Reductionism is closely related to the
concept of linearity - which is the notion that "the whole is equal to the sum of its parts"
and that the observed behavior of any system is proportional to the magnitude of the
effects upon that system.
The Prime Mover
One can see from this that there is great room for the role of a "Prime Mover" to function
as the cause of causes of such a neatly designed universe. It is in complete harmony with
the theology that God is the first cause who set all in motion and then sat back and
watched. There was no necessity for intervention once the playing field was set. God's
plan would unfold without deviation. He would have the role of a dispassionate observer
never interfering in the affairs of, well, anything! So, in one fell swoop science was able
to not only explain the entire mechanics of the universe, but could also explain the bases
of western religion by specifying God's job-description!
One implication of this scientific philosophy was that man's fate was completely
predetermined by nature's laws - this implies that man lacks free will. The only thing left
for us to do was to discover the laws that were still unknown at the time - at which point
we would have attained a perfect state of knowledge of our entire universe (we bite the
apple?)! In other words, no longer would we have need for the omnipotent, all-powerful
God. Mother Nature as embodied in all the physical laws of the universe would take His
place. They would not even "work" side-by-side. God would simply become
"unemployed."
Of course, the same rules that make the universe completely predictable
make them completely mechanical and boring! In such a universe there is no room for
miracles since by definition a miracle is a kind of "accident" in the sense of a highly
unusual event. Right there then, the God of this mechanical world is not the God of our
forefathers if you accept what the Torah teaches us.
Chink in the Armor
Well, as in all neat and tidy stories, in the latter years of the 19th century there appeared a
few nagging chinks in science's armor. It began with Darwin and his theory, and Einstein
himself ended up as the chief destroyer of that armor! At the very heart of Darwinian
theory is the randomicity of dice throwing. The evolution of species takes place through a
series of fits and starts fundamentally governed not by the tidy rules of linearity and
reductionism, but by the process of random selection. In other words, we humans evolved
through a series of random "accidents" in a semi-ordered, messy, yet relentless dynamic
process.
In the meantime, the physicists were having a great deal of trouble reconciling the
observed increase in the disorderliness of our universe with the increasing orderliness of
life itself. For example my office gets messier and messier over time, but a human
embryo in the womb gets more organized throughout gestation and development. Amidst
the messiness of events in the universe lies the increasing organization of life itself, like
salmon swimming upstream to reach their spawning grounds.
It was also observed that
the very nature of light itself could no longer be rectified with the old Newtonian physics.
It was discovered that light is dual-natured, sometimes behaving like a wave rolling upon
the surface of the ocean, at other times like a stream of bullet-like particles.
How could anything be both waves, embodying principles of infinitely extensible and ethereal
energy, and particle, embodying the finitude of corporeal matter, simultaneously?
This picture of nature was in direct conflict with the old physics of certainty and
determinism. To complicate matters (no pun intended), it was subsequently discovered
that electrons exhibit a wave nature which meant that the very matter that makes up all
the material of the universe has this same dual-contradictory nature. This was just one of
the great discoveries of Einstein embodied in his famous nonlinear equation e = mc2.
Matter, Energy and Chance
By demonstrating the inter-convertibility between energy and matter, and thus between
particles and waves, this revolutionary equation further enlightens us to an amazing
metaphysical principle: that the infinite is contained within the finite. Notice that this is
not the same as the reverse, that the finite is contained within the infinite, which in itself
is a trivial example of linear logic. Inevitably then, it must be so that each one of us also
obeys the law, e = mc2 , the infinite contained within the finite, our finite physical body
contained within the infinite soul and the infinite soul contained within the finite body!
Chance forms the basis of quantum mechanics - the branch of physics that explains how
the fundamental constituents of matter and energy, atoms and light, behave. The
emergence of quantum theory, which traces its origins to the 19th century, was not a quiet
one in science. It was a highly troubling and revolutionary theory at the time, and those
difficulties may have only worsened until now.
At the heart of the matter is Heisenberg's
Uncertainty Principle that posits that an observer cannot know simultaneously both the
position and momentum of particles such as electrons which make up all the matter in the
known universe. In other words the very nature of all material existence itself is
fundamentally indeterminate, or fuzzy.
Quantum mechanics remains today one of the
most dominant paradigms in both physics and cosmology. Indeed, it is in large part
responsible for the computer and the information revolution characterized by the growth of the Internet.
So it seemed after all, that God does play dice with the universe, much to
Einstein's chagrin.
But perhaps there is a kind of a middle ground between the worlds of pure chance where
God is not needed and man has complete free will, and where man has no free will
because all has been predetermined by God from the outset. Perhaps man has free will
AND God provides a roadmap simultaneously. Perhaps there is a world where miracles
occur right before our eyes - if we will open them.
The Chaos - Order Edge
If both energy and matter can be
simultaneously infinite and finite at the same time as we have demonstrated using the
principles of nonlinear logic, then perhaps the relationship between God and man can be
thought of in similar manner. This idea has in fact been presaged by another recent
scientific revolution - that of chaos theory.
In chaos theory, the behavior of a system that is judged to be completely random based
on purely objective criteria, may actually arise from a well-characterized, known
deterministic system, as long as that system operates from nonlinear principles. This represents a paradigm
shift in the history of scientific thought because previously it was fully accepted that
random appearing behavior could never arise from systems that were not nonlinear!
The so-called butterfly effect is an example of a chaotic system that demonstrates the
characteristic of "extreme sensitivity to initial conditions". In this example it is claimed
that a butterfly flapping its little wings in say Texas could be the first link in a causal
chain of events leading to a full-blown hurricane occurring in the Atlantic.
A more easily accepted example of chaos is that if the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir
apparent to the Austro-Hungarian throne had not been assassinated on June 28, 1914,
World War I most likely would have not occurred, and if so, the holocaust would likely
have been avoided as well. If the murder of a single man had been avoided, perhaps as
many as 100 million lives might have been spared! This helps me to understand the
nonlinear Kabbalistic principle that "saving one life is equal to saving the whole world."
It also hints at the potential that each of us has - to destroy a world or save a world - the
choices governed by our own free will.
But there is something even more interesting, indeed amazing that has been discovered
recently about chaotic systems. Instead of being less amenable to external control (which
one would intuit) such systems are actually easier to transform into orderly behavior
using actually less rather than more energy. That is because chaotic systems are actually
composed of an infinite set of orderly albeit unstable behaviors. Thus such a system can
be coaxed into following one of its orderly behaviors through a process of gently nudging
it to stay on course (example: keeping your drunk friend on a path while walking
together).
A New Position for The Almighty!?
This gives God a new job as a covert gentle "nudger" of events.
The nonlinear logic of chaos theory has in turn given rise to the science of dynamical
complexity. This science forms a foundation for understanding the basis of creativity
(and therefore of creation itself), and by implication, that miracles become manifest, even
inevitable. We begin to appreciate that there is a "method to the seeming madness" that
we observe and experience all around us. We come to accept the notion that what we
used to believe was randomly occurring events, chance meetings, and accidents, was only
so because we view the world through filtered glasses.
Now, we can accept the possibility
that if we take off those glasses and get in touch with our true inner selves these events
might fit into a well-intentioned pattern that can best be categorized by pure IS-ness
(recall God's answer to Moses question "what do I call you" at the burning bush - Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh
- I Am That I Am).
We can even begin to understand that a consequence of such a world, where we do have
free choice, is that bad things sometimes happen to good people allowing for
opportunities for redemption and for returning to our Source. Perhaps by changing our
point of reference in the world from "human beings having a spiritual experience" to
infinite soul-beings having a human experience, we can learn to recognize, invite and
indeed expect the miracles that impinge on our true-selves every day. The miracles
performed by God, witnessed and experienced by His children as described in the sacred
Torah.
Please contact us to learn how you can benefit from Kabbalistic healing and from
Kabbalah-oriented counseling and life coaching. We do phone sessions and remote healing work - distance is NOT a limiting factor!
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