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Before There Was Light: The Astonishing Mystery of Creation · Plausibly Live - The Dave Bowman Show Podcast

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Well, coffee stuffy elitist history buff himself.
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It's plausibly live The Dave Bowman Well, good morning, good
2:05
evening, or good afternoon, wherever you are, whatever you
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do. A lot of things happening in the
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world today, most of them are far beyond our control, you
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might say. So perhaps it's time we took a
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pause and thought about life and thought about the laws of
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gravity. And when I say the laws of
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gravity, I mean the laws of gravity.
2:24
Because you see gravity, it's an amazing thing when you get right
2:28
down to it. I often get asked, or I used to
2:33
more often get asked what my favorite story in all of
2:37
Scripture was. And it kind of depends.
2:40
If we're talking about people, then my favorite story is are
2:44
about King Ahab. Don't have time to get into it
2:47
today. But if we're talking about just
2:50
in general, what is Dave's favorite part of the Bible?
2:53
Well, it's the beginning because it was in the beginning where
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the whole story started. You want to join the show today?
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209565 Dave, 209-565-3283. e-mail Dave at the Dave
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Tell those who oppose liberty. Don't tread on me and don't eat
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that apple. They may be some of the most
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familiar words in all of history.
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In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
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It's there, though, that the things kind of take off.
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And I, you know, I've spent my whole life in religion and
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theology. My parents were ministers, my
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grandparents were lay pastors there.
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My great grandparents were heavily involved in, in their
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church and in our church, I guess.
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And, and from my earliest days, I have always been fascinated by
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space, not just going to space. There was a time when I wanted
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to be an astronaut, but that faded with with age and start
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realizing that, you know, this is this is not the most
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comfortable thing in the world, nor would I want to travel
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across the United States in a Conestoga wagon.
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So as you get older, you think so, but that fascination with
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the space, the stars, the sky has never faded.
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I can tell you that in the 1980s, that was the thing that
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really going to see on a submarine was the hardest.
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That was the hardest thing for me personally about it was not
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being able to go outside, not being able to look up in the
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sky. I would love to have seen the
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sky in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with no light around us
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anywhere. I, I, I've seen skies like that
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in places and I just imagine it would have been amazing.
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Anyway, I couldn't, couldn't do it.
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So for me, looking at the sky has always been the same.
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There's a verse in the Psalms that says to the effect and, and
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this is the new Dave's translation where God is
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speaking and he says, look at the stars because they explained
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to you how I did this. And it's, it's one of those
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verses that when you read it and because of the English
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translation of it, it, it's you just kind of go by it.
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And, but if you stop to consider it, what, what is God saying to
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us? He's saying, look, you want to
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know what I did, You want to know how I did it?
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Boom, there it is. Just look at it, figure it out.
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And I've long believed that God wants people to know how he did
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this. He wants us to understand these
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things. Because if we did understand
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them, because if we did see them, if we did know this stuff,
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then we would see the glory of creation in in everything.
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And as I've so often said, I, I don't need faith to tell me that
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that God created the universe. I need faith to tell me that in
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all of this universe, this 15 billion years that we know of
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universe, that this one little speck on this tiny planet in a
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small mediocre sun system on the outer edge of a Galaxy far from
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the center of everything matters.
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And it matters because, well, I tend to believe that creation
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was made for me just like it was made for you.
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And so when I read those words in the beginning, God created
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the heavens and the earth. That is my favorite part of all
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of scripture. And it's, it's appropriate today
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because last week being Simchat Torah, this week, we, we start
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over again, we start reading the Torah again.
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So that is the portion that we read the first 5 or 6 chapters
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of Genesis and we, we read about the creation of the earth.
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We read those words. And I came across a phrase this
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week that just stopped me in my shorts.
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I mean, it just it, it, it brought me to a halt.
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And one of the things that I have always loved, and it
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doesn't matter if you're talking about scripture or theology,
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doesn't matter if you're talking about the Constitution, the
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Declaration of Independence, doesn't even matter if you're
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talking about, you know, whatever history, there's always
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something that you've missed. There's always some small thing
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that changes how you look at things and it it changes what
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you see and it changes what you feel.
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And as I was reading those words this year, I did it a little bit
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differently than I normally do. Normally I just use the, the
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English translation. This year I went to the
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transliteration. So I actually got the sound of
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the Hebrew into it and it said it changes slightly how you look
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at it. In the beginning, God created
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the heaven and the earth. And actually it's, it's more
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present case than that. It's actually in the beginning
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God creating the heavens and the earth and and almost implying
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that it's an ongoing process, which it kind of is.
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And then it says this and the earth was without form and void.
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That's what the English translates those words into.
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The actual Hebrew words toho and boho are much they're difficult
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to translate into English, Formless and void without form,
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without shape and void. It's one of those words that
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we've, we've used so often in our in our language that we
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don't even really grasp the meaning of it anymore.
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What does void mean? I, I know that sounds like a
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stupid question. Well, David means you cancelled
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it. Or does it mean it's empty?
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What does it mean? What does it?
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How does it imply things toho and boho actually have become in
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recent years? They have actually become
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scientific phrases to describe something that hitherto we
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really haven't gotten into. Tohuvahuho is is the way it's
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actually said. You get this idea.
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God creates heavens and earth. The earth is described as
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Tohuvahuvahu and darkness covers the face of the deep and the
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spirit of God, or is more precisely the wind from God,
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hovers over the face of the waters.
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It's only after that that God commands light to exist.
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Now when we think about this, what is actually being described
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here, what is actually happening in this moment of creation, We
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tend to imagine creation is this magnificent instantaneous event.
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Whether you're a creationist in the sense of, you know, a €6000
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worth or whether you're a Big Bang theorist, what it doesn't
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matter. You have this mindset of ex
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nelio creation. All of a sudden there's nothing
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and then there's boom. Something that's not what
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scripture says is it says God created something heavens and
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earth that were Tohu Valvojo, void and formless and all of
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them that from that was created light, The Big Bang.
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That phrase Tohufufuhu actually translates better.
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The root words of that Rashi points out are much more
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difficult human emotions to capture.
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The world was formless and it was in, in, in his using the
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root words of this astonishingly empty.
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And that's the moment that I was reading and that that that's the
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moment that just brought me to a halt.
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Astonishingly empty. That's a weird phrase, isn't it?
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It's a, it's a weird way to think about this.
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The actual language has those possible meanings.
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And in classical Jewish commentaries, particularly Rashi
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and later Hasidic interpretation of that, you start to see
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something that intrigues me because you begin to see a much
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a, a, an ideology and a, a thought process that sort of
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matches up with modern cosmology, the scientific study
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of the early universe. The problem with familiar
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translations of, of scripture is that we are used to them and we
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speak English. English, for the fact that it
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has millions of words, doesn't always capture exactly emotions
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and feelings quite the way that it should.
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If you translate this as formless and void, you get an
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absence of recognizable structure.
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If you translate it as desolate and empty, you get an emptiness
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and a lack of habitation. If you get it wild and waste,
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there's one translation that takes it that way.
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It's untamed, the Wild West, primordial chaos, reality before
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recognized, order before plank time, 10 to the -43 seconds,
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unshaped potential. Perhaps something that's a
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waiting organization. But those words, astonishingly
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empty, speak more to the psychology of what's being
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perceived. If you could transport a human
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being to that moment and have them look at what was God was
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doing right then and there, what Rashi is saying is that you
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would be astonished at the emptiness of it all.
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The the fact that it's just primordial, whatever soup.
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I guess each translation changes kind of the mental pictures.
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What thing? If the earth is formless and
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void, we just imagine empty space.
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If it's wild, we, we waste, you know, the Wild West and so forth
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and so on. But there's a difference between
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emptiness and nothingness. Genesis, the 1st chapter, the
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second verse does not simply describe philosophical
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nothingness. It mentions the earth, It
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mentions darkness, it mentions the deep, it mentions waters.
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Whatever the precise meaning of those images are, remember
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you're talking about a human being trying to write about
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something that they could could visualize, but could not
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explain. Whatever the meaning is, the
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text describes that condition rather than offering a
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scientific definition of absolute nothingness, non
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existence. So the question becomes, are we
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reading Genesis as though it were describing a physical event
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with modern precision, or when the language might be doing
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something very differently? And one of Judaism's most
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influential commentators understood Toho in a way that
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makes the opening of Genesis considering more unsettling.
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Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki, also known also known as the Rashi,
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was he lived from 10:45 to 11:00 O 5.
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His commentary remains the foundation of the Jewish study
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of Torah. In fact, no, that's not it.
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I have. I have Rashi's commentaries.
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They're available online. You can read them.
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He was not attempting to explain cosmology, not in the modern
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scientific sense. He was.
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He was concerned with the meaning of biblical language.
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What does the Torah actually say?
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Rashi takes the word Toho and he he associates the root word of
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that till he with the experience of being bewildered and
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astonished. He explains that a person would
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be amazed at how vast the emptiness was, I guess.
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And that kind of changed for me the the perception of this
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dramatically. Imagine being a human being.
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Imagine if I could just go to that moment and stand there on
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the edge of creation and confront a reality that has no
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landmarks, no no familiarity to it whatsoever, no recognizable
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organization and nothing, No frame of reference for those of
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us that are missile steely eyed missile men.
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No frame of reference whatsoever to Orient myself to.
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Imagine being in an elevator that's just hanging there.
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That you have no, no idea what direction it's going.
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How would you? How would you reference?
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How would you Orient yourself? You have no idea if you're
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upside down right side up. You don't know.
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What would that experience be like?
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Toho and boho are different concepts.
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So who being the astonishingly the astonishing quality of the
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unformed condition and more importantly, its effect on you
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as the observer, that astonishment that you would feel
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Bohu becomes an expression of emptiness literally means it's
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empty. You're astonished at how much
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emptiness there is, and yet there's this sense that it's
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going to become something that Xmilio, that's going to become
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something, as I said, consider if you could be transported to a
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place where every familiar reference has disappeared.
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I I think I think Stanley Kubrick was trying to do this in
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2001. Remember the scene where Dave
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Bowman, not me, goes through that, goes through the monolith,
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and every familiar reference is gone?
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No horizon, no visible direction, no way to measure
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distance whatsoever. Even describing what you see
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becomes difficult because language ordinarily used to
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describe these things depends upon things, directions,
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distinctions that are no longer available.
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And that's that feeling that Rashi is talking about when he
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talks about astonished tohu. In the Talmud, we read that
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there is a description of tohu as a green line that encompasses
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the world from which darkness emerges, and bohu emerges as
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stone submerges in the depths from which water emerges.
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This is rabbinical cosmological imagery, not a description of
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scientific structures. We need to be careful about
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that. There's a tendency, I think, to
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in too many theological worlds to take scripture and go, well,
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this means this cosmologically. It doesn't, because you're
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trying to describe things from a human standpoint.
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Don't necessarily agree. The Big Bang is the leading
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scientific model, as you know. It is the evolution of the
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observable universe from an extremely hot, dense state in
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its beginning, but it does not by itself establish what caused
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the universe to exist or whether there was something before that.
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For whatever it's worth, and I don't really care what you
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think, I am a Big Bang cosmologist.
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It makes sense. It fits the scientific evidence.
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And if I'm going to look at the stars, as God said, and figure
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out how he did all of this stuff, well then the best
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evidence comes from those stars. I could sit here and explain The
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Big Bang theory to you. I'm not going to, not going to
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get into COBRA, background radiation, those sorts of
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things. What I want to do is draw a
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comparison. Rashi's discussion considers the
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bewilderment of a hypothetical observer confronted by the
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completely unformed world, the unformed universe.
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Chaos theory, this idea of cosmology in The Big Bang,
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concerns the behavior and predictability of mathematical
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and physical systems. Both challenge familiar
20:11
expectations about order, but they do so in fundamentally
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different ways. The comparison is philosophical
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and illustrative, not evidence that Rashi was anticipating 20th
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century physics. And then we get to Albert
20:28
Einstein. I've said this before and I will
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say it again, Whatever your redemptive theology is, and I
20:36
don't really want to get into that, whatever your redemptive
20:40
theology is, is God's greatest gift to you.
20:44
The second greatest gift that he gave us as human beings was
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Albert Einstein, because Albert Einstein, man, Ben asked me the
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other day, if you could sit down with somebody and have a
20:56
discussion, who would it be? Albert Einstein's got to be at
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the top of that list. He proved to us that time is
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relative. Time is not an independent
21:06
universal clock. Just because it's 24 hours today
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doesn't mean that it's always 24 hours and then it's 24 hours
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everywhere. Under relativity, we demonstrate
21:20
that elapsed time depends upon motion and gravitational
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conditions. There's a gravity thing.
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The claim in one source that relatively straightforward
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reconciles 6 days of Genesis with billions of years is strong
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and stronger than established physics supports.
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If our ordinary understanding of time is tied to our experience
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of the universe, how cautious should we be about imposing that
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understanding on the beginning of the universe itself?
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In other words, we know that time is relative, so we've got
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to be careful about saying, well, it couldn't be that way
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because our perception of time is this way.
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In Kabbalistic and Hasidic thought, tohu can refer to a
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spiritual world characterized by extraordinarily intense divine
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light and insufficiently integrated vessels to carry that
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light. The idea that being becomes
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tikkun. The healing, the rectification,
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the integration, the harmony of the world.
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You'll often hear Jews Speaking of Tikan alone.
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Alone, the healing of the world. That's our mission, to heal the
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world so that God can be a part of it.
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If we consider the broader philosophical idea, structure
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allows distinctions. In other words, when we're
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astonishingly empty, we have no structure.
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But structure allows us to make distinctions.
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Distinctions make relationships possible.
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Relationships allow complex systems to develop in a physical
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universe. The existence of stable matter
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and consistent natural laws permits the emergence of
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increasingly complex structures. And, if you want to get mystical
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about it, properly ordained vessels.
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Holy vessels. Kadosh permit divine energy to
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be received then and expressed. It's that creation that allows
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God to put into us his divine energy.
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Those are two different accounts of how things become ordered,
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but they both seem to work. Science doesn't teach us that
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the universe simply moved from maximum disorder to steadily,
23:51
increasingly order. In fact, kind of teaches the
23:54
opposite. The early universe, though, does
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present us with complicated questions involving entropy,
24:01
gravity, the formation of local structures.
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Likewise, some of these Jewish concepts of tikkun cannot be
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reduced to the to the ordinary scientific meaning of of
24:11
organization. But this idea of tohu and bohu?
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Astonishingly empty fascinates me because I sit here and I
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think to myself, what would it have been like?
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What does it all mean? What does it all do?
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What does it all cause? And if the idea of creation, the
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idea of seeing a universe that's astonishingly empty but becomes
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full and all we got to do is look at the stars to figure all
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this out because that's what God told us to do.
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It's an amazing emotion, isn't it?
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It's an amazing feeling. It's an amazing idea to me.
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And once again, it's one of those things where my week
25:17
started with that and it's been building all week.
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And I, I have hours of notes on this, none of which I'm going to
25:24
get to today because I'm not actually here, but you get the
25:29
idea. I hope that you're, I hope that
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the skies fascinate you. I hope the scripture fascinates
25:35
you. I hope that you take time to
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spend in your contemplation of things and understand that
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everything in creation was given to us by God for those reasons,
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to draw our attention to him, to look at the sky and see how he
25:55
did these things. All right, that's enough
25:59
preaching for today. I guess we'll be back on Sunday
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for what? The frock Monday for plausibly
26:05
live. We're trying to set up Tuesday
26:06
for Bill, and we'll see how that all goes.
26:08
Take the time right now tell the people that matter in your life
26:10
you love them very much. You'd miss them if they weren't
26:13
there. So don't pass up those
26:14
opportunities. You don't want to have that
26:16
regret plausibly live. I'm Dave Bowman.
26:18
This is my show possibly live the Dave Bowman Show and we'll
26:21
see you next time right here on the on air across American
26:24
network.