An Evolving View of God

54 T I K K U N W W W. T I K K U N . O R G M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 0 David Nelson is the campus rabbi and an assistant professor of religion at Bard College. SPECIALSECTON:GODANDTHETWENTY-FIRSTCENTURY I n 1997, I began to search the basic concepts of physics to find new metaphors for God. For years I had listened to folks tell me: “Rabbi, with all due respect, I don’t believe in God. You know, the whole old-man-with-along -beard-in-heaven thing just doesn’t make sense.” SuchcommentssuggestthatitisnotGodpersethatpresents difficulties, but the traditional metaphors used to describe God: shepherd, father, king, and so on. I wanted to develop new, more plausible metaphors. Since physics had always seemed to me to hold the secrets to existence, that’s where I focused my search. The result was my book Judaism, Physics and God: Searching for Sacred Metaphors in a Post-Einstein World. My conclusions can be summarized this way: God is the complex set of natural laws and forces that created the cosmos, caused it to evolve with elegant structure and order, and continue to govern its behavior, from the bizarre antics of subatomic (quantum) events to the exquisite dance of stars and galaxies. This description allowed me, a fairly traditional Jew, to recite with comfort such traditional texts as “How great are Your works, O Eternal,” (Psalm 92:6) or “who orders the stars in their appointed courses in the heavens, according to His will” (from the evening service). However, it turned out that all my new God metaphors were nonpersonal. They did not portray God as being a sentient, caring Being. This God could create and control the universe, but could not enter into a covenant with Abraham and Sarah, or command the Israelites, or be angry when they built a calf. I could not interact with this God, unless one considers the experience of being overwhelmed with wonder at a sky full of stars on a clear night as interaction. For me, such a profound experience is moving and inspiring, but it is not interaction. Interaction is having a conversation. I talk, you respond, I listen and reply, and so on. I was troubled by the impossibility of such interaction with God in the framework of physics metaphors that I had created, and so I started a new search. This time IsoughtsomewayofthinkingaboutGodasconscious, sentient, and interactive, without compromising my rational worldview. The search led me to a model used in neuroscience to explain human consciousness. Consciousness is a fundamental human characteristic, yet there is no single part of the brain where consciousness “happens.” Rather, consciousness is an “emergent” phenomenon.Whenaverylargenumberofsimplethingsinteract in a highly complex way, a new “thing” comes into existence onahigherlevel.Thenew“emergent”thingobeysdifferentrules from those that govern the lower-level things, and sometimes the emergent thing even affects the lower-level things. A human brain is a collection of a huge number of neurons (conservative estimates start at 30 billion), simple nerve cells that either pass along a simple message to other cells at their connection points (synapses) or don’t. Not one of these neurons thinks, dreams, or remembers . But when billions of them are packedintoaskullandinterconnected in trillions of ways, you get a human beingwithlikes,dislikes,hopes,fears, and more. Using this model, I am developing a sense of God, with each human consciousness being like one neuron. When billions of human consciousnesses interconnect in trillions of ways, I propose that the inevitable emergent result is what we have always sensed as a personal, sentient God. Like the neurons , no one person is God, but when they all interact, God appears ,andwecantalkwithGod,obeyordisobeyGod’slaws,and find comfort in God’s presence. Such ideas are experimental models, not dogmatic, theological “truths.” They are attempts at thinking in new, rational ways about God, without either disparaging religious tradition or assuming a conflict between traditional religion and modern science. They may be a useful approach to religious belief in the twenty-first century. I ANEVOLVINGVIEWOFGOD by David Nelson ISTOCKPHOTO/KTSIMAGE ...