Imagine you are an explorer, traversing a desert where no man has been before. The landscape is barren; it contains nothing but rocks and sand. Suddenly you stop in you tracks; it’s incredible, you can’t believe your find. There in front of you is a pristine iPhone lying in the sand!
The scientific world is stunned. How did the phone get there? Surely, no man had been there before?
They suggest that continued sand storms, together with the rays of the sun, could perhaps over millions of years have formed this iPhone.
You are an intelligent honest thinking person – would you settle for that?
I think not.
Judaism believes that design implies designer. The universe is far more complex than a little iPhone. If already that could not have randomly appeared – all the more so the universe did not just develop on its own.
Professor Fred Hoyle, an acclaimed scientist – who in fact coined the term big bang, calculated the chance of a simple enzyme randomly forming. The results were (1040 000), a number so large that it contains more zeros than the number of words in this newsletter. He wrote that this is equivalent to “a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard which might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.”
The opening words of the Torah might allude to the challenge some people encounter in associating the world with a creator. The narrative begins , בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים , ‘in the beginning Hashem created’. If you observe the last letters of these opening words they are the very letters of the word אֱמֶת which means truth: the creation story is the truth. Why however are they in the wrong order? Surely if the Torah intended to allude this to us, it would have written בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים בְּרֵאשִׁית, spelling out אֱמֶת the way it is read? Why do we have to unscramble the letters ourselves?
This however is the very point—G-d’s creation is certainly the truth, however this information may not be served to us on a silver plate — there will be voices out there who try to teach otherwise. Our duty is to look, to investigate, to unravel and to do some unscrambling ourselves. Once we’ve looked past the surface, then the truth becomes blatantly obvious, בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים.
Shabbat Shalom