Month: March 2021

Cat Links Mysticism, Philosophy

Speaking Truth to Genesis

Posted on The WCM

I was puzzling over a friend’s essay on whether the creation account in Genesis or the modern-day scientific account were true. She concluded they both were.

To reach this conclusion, she drew a distinction between scientific truth and moral truth. It is scientifically true beyond reasonable doubt that the world began with a Big Bang and, after billions of years, evolved a sentient, self-conscious species of animal called homo sapiens. The story told in Genesis, however, isn’t meant to be factually true; rather, it’s an allegory, a metaphor. Its purpose isn’t to explain the creation of a physical world, but to proclaim the birth of a moral universe, where the concepts of good and evil exist and can be known by its human inhabitants. So, the story of Genesis tells a moral truth.

The moral truth it tells appears not in the creation account in the first chapter, however, but in the third, where Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit. This is where the knowledge of good and evil enters the picture. But I’m more interested in the first chapter. I propose another reading of the creation story—one professing a mystical truth, but not exclusively a religious one.

“And God said, Let there be light . . .”

What to make of how the world began has plagued philosophers, theologians and cosmologists of all stripes for millennia. The problem, expressed in Latin as creatio ex nihilo, creation from nothing, is often posed as a question: How does something come from nothing? Despite speculation about “initial singularities” or “spontaneous creation,” today’s generally accepted scientific account sidesteps the question altogether and simply asserts a description of the event: The Big Bang.

Moses, the mythical author of Genesis, of course is working in a different cognitive environment, the world of metaphor and allegory, not science and fact. (Aside from certain religious fundamentalists, almost no one believes he is describing a literal truth.) God is the central figure in this world—all powerful, able to create something from nothing, an entity unto itself, immaterial, existing in eternity, not susceptible to empirical investigation or scientific proof, and unknowable by mere homo sapiens—a mystery. Inexplicable, yet perhaps not inaccessible to human experience.

Few would argue there is nothing to be learned from metaphor and allegory. They are the language of literature and the arts: pathways to a different kind of truth based in the life of the mind and the human condition. Like the story of Adam and Eve, the Biblical creation story is a metaphor, a narrative about a mystery vexing humanity for thousands of years. What, then, can this narrative tell us about our mythical beginning?

The first book of Genesis gets right to the point:

  • 1 In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.
  • 2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
  • 3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
  • 4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
  • 5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.[i]

Note that God created heaven and earth “in the beginning,” but not exactly. On the first day of creation, God created light. Heaven and earth God created on the second and third days. Despite God calling it Day and the darkness Night, the light created on the first day, curiously, is not daylight or moonlight or starlight. God created the sun, the moon and the stars on the fourth day, not on the first. No, this primordial light is a non-celestial light, a metaphorical light. The sort that’s generally capitalized in religious texts.

So, what to make of this non-celestial, primordial light? If it’s a metaphor, what’s it a metaphor for? In the verses above from Genesis, primordial light stands in opposition to primordial darkness: a positive symbol arrayed against a negative one. Other verses in both the Old and New testaments also mention this kind of light:

  • To bring back his soul from the pit, to be enlightened with the light of the living. – Job 33:30
  • The entrance of thy words giveth light; it giveth understanding unto the simple. – Psalms 119:130
  • Then I saw that wisdom excelleth folly, as far as light excelleth darkness. – Ecclesiastes 2:13
  • He revealeth the deep and secret things: he knoweth what is in the darkness, and the light dwelleth with him. – Daniel 2:22
  • And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not. – John 1:5
  • For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to [give] the light of the knowledge of the glory of God. – 2 Corinthians 4:6
  • This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. – 1 John 1:5

Clearly, whatever else it might signify, light connotes knowledge, understanding, enlightenment, comprehension. So, it seems plausible to say, in the Bible this light is a metaphor for knowledge and knowing. As it turns out, I’m not alone in this interpretation. In fact, it’s quite common among Biblical scholars and theologians. Many, if not most, regard it as a spiritual, or philosophical, light, as signified by the term enlightenment. In this camp are those who say it symbolizes knowledge of the Word of God.

Following a Kabbalistic interpretation,[ii] however, we might go so far as to say this kind of light signifies cognition or consciousness. The Oxford English Dictionary defines cognition as “The action or faculty of knowing; knowledge, consciousness; acquaintance with a subject.”[iii] Or, as the American philosopher and psychologist William James put it, “Cognition is a function of consciousness. The first factor it implies is therefore a state of consciousness wherein the cognition shall take place.”[iv]

Mapping these modern connotations onto the Biblical metaphor, it doesn’t seem a stretch to say light symbolizes consciousness. On this reading, the creation account in Genesis begins with God creating consciousness. I find this account very appealing. Although I don’t believe in God in any anthropomorphic sense, I do believe in consciousness. What some people call God is for me simply a recognition of the mystery at the bottom of my understanding. So, maybe the creation story symbolizes consciousness emerging from a mystery. Or, to put it another way, consciousness opens up the possibility of that mystery.

“. . . reality doesn’t exist if you’re not looking at it.”

Of course, there is more to Genesis than God’s letting there be light. Creation unfolds over the course of a week. Heaven and the entire physical world come into being over a span of time. It’s a process. Perhaps not coincidentally, consciousness, too, is a process. William James called it the “stream of thought,” comparing it with the flow of a river.[v]

Science writer Margaret Wertheim draws a connection between the flow of thoughts and the flow of subatomic objects. She points out that “just when the ‘stream of consciousness’ was entering our lexicon [Principles was published in 1890], physicists began to realize that consciousness might . . . be critical to their own descriptions of the world.”[vi]

Quantum mechanics, the work physicists like Max Plank, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger and others pioneered, was just coming into its own after the turn of the century. To say it revolutionized our understanding of how the universe works is probably an understatement. It even puzzled Albert Einstein, some of whose theories were undermined by the new paradigm. In Einstein’s equations, the speed of light was a constant, the upper speed limit of the universe. Experiments in quantum mechanics, however, showed that some things did indeed travel faster than light. Or, if you prefer, showed that one event instantaneously affected another event thousands of miles away without any cause or intervening medium. Einstein scoffingly called it “spooky action at a distance.”[vii]

Such paradoxes of quantum theory, where a subatomic object can be either a particle (matter) or a wave (energy) or maybe both, spawned quite a number of mysteries and not a few attempts to bolster esoteric religious doctrines, especially those of the Far East. I’m going to take a pass on their credibility, but I do want to look at one mystery in particular, wave-particle duality.

You may have heard of the “double-slit experiment,” where scientists show how particles (marbles, tennis balls), when shot through one slit in a wall hit the screen behind it in a pattern forming a single, vertical line. When shot through two slits, two lines appeared. The same thing was tried with waves (ripples of water, radio waves), but a different set of patterns appeared on the screen: a single line for one slit, but multiple parallel lines for two slits. The multiple lines, called an interference pattern, are a wave signature.

When scientists repeated the experiment with subatomic objects like electrons (tiny bits of matter inside atoms), they discovered something remarkable. Particles of matter, electrons, when shot through one slit, acted like any other particles. But when shot through two slits, they acted like a wave, producing the characteristic interference pattern. To find out what happened when the particles approached the two slits—did they go through one, the other or both?—scientists set up a device that could see (observe) what went down. Lo and behold, the electrons went back to acting like particles! The very act of observing changed their behavior.[viii]

In 2015, researchers at Australian National University pretty much settled the matter (no pun intended). Associate Professor Andrew Truscott told ScienceDaily their experiment with helium atoms shows that “[a]t the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it. . . . The atoms did not travel from A to B. It was only when they were measured at the end of the journey that their wave-like or particle-like behavior was brought into existence.”[ix] So, if there is no observer, no consciousness to pick up on it, the world doesn’t exist.

A metaphor. A paradox. A mystery.

Facing the mystery of creation, drawing on metaphor not science, the prophets and preachers of the Judeo-Christian tradition gave us an allegory with God in the leading role as “the mystery,” the Prime Mover who birthed light, cognition, consciousness, and then the universe. The physicists and professors of the scientific tradition, privileging reason over metaphor, have given us quantum theory, a paradox with consciousness as “the mystery” birthing reality itself. So, like my friend in her essay, I’m going to conclude they’re two versions of a single mystical truth.