Genesis 1:1
בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ׃
(That's Hebrew for: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.)
The notes below relate to the perennial question posed by the skeptic: Can you give scientific proof of God? To be sure, a skeptic has nothing to fear here that these notes should prove scientifically some feature of God, as though God, Creator of sky and earth, should be reducible to human measurement. Nevertheless, we do note the term "science" simply means knowledge without any particular restrictions, of course. But when we speak of science in its more common use in recent centuries, we mean that particular knowledge of the material cosmos that arises by the use of human senses and measuring instruments, by the processes of observation. The instruments themselves can be simple devices like rulers, scales, magnets, lenses, and clocks used in the smartest ways humans can muster to measure things and events. People improve the instruments to detect ever finer distinctions, so, for example, space telescopes, electronic sensors, cesium clocks, or particle detectors in hadron colliders. But this essay is not about that.
Two comments here reflect on the perennial question. The first (A, below) couples the opening line of the Hebrew Bible with what likely is (currently) a most fundamental mathematical relation describing the natural world, E = mc^2 (advanced by Einstein in 1906). The second comment (B, below) couples the biblical witness for Creator with a most revolutionary logic-mathematical development in the 20th century: Godel's incompleteness theorems (published in 1931).
A. Einstein. The physics borne theory of relativity equation, E = mc^2, contains within itself four basic measurable aspects of the observable world, including some of the rules describing the fundamental physical constants. These are energy, mass, length, and time. The equation seeks to describe the relationship among them all, affirming energy and mass are equivalent. Energy is the ability to do work. Mass measures the stuff of the universe. Length is the distance or displacement between one point and another; in three dimensions it describes space. Time is about change. The equation holds length and time within the symbol "c", the speed of light; light travels such and such a length in so much time. Human convention expresses these dimensionally as E = energy; T = time; L = length (or displacement); M = mass.
Now, here's an interesting fact. The opening verse of the Hebrew Bible (noted above) says this: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The following table shows the verse in the three columns: Hebrew transliteration, English translation, and Science concepts.
Hebrew English Science
bereshith In the beginning of time
bara created energy
elohim God
eth hashamaim the skies space
weth haaretz and the earth matter
The first term or phrase, "in the beginning," in the Hebrew language is a so-called construct case, a genitive of sorts, that would typically translate as, "in the beginning of (something)". It does not explicitly address what that something is. So thoughtful translators yield what we usually read as given above. Occasionally one may find a line like, "When God began to create ..." or "In the beginning of creation ..." or something like that. In any case, the phrase, "in the beginning" is an adverbial phrase of time. It sets the start of time for the events of interest, namely, creation. (We'll skip the "God" part of the verse and return to it later in part B.) Next the verse says, "created," a verb whose subject/actor is God. "To create" is the same as "to work"; it simply specifies the kind of work involved.
We note that the two nouns, work and energy (in physics), share precisely the same values and dimensions; the work done on an object is exactly the amount of energy put into it. So the work done in creation is precisely the amount of energy put into it. (That's the amazing puzzler of the Big Bang theory; where'd all the energy that was put into the singularity come from?) The next phrases in the verse, two direct objects, tell what was created. First is the skies, a noun. Skies is space, it contains length in three dimensions. The second is the earth, also a noun. The earth is matter, measured by its mass. (Oh! And one more puzzle about the Big Bang: The initial energy of creation was so immeasurably hot that it destroyed anything observable before it, so how can a human see what the cosmos was made out of before the singularity?)
So, the first verse of the Bible presents time (T), energy (E), length (L, in three dimensions), and mass (M), the fundamental building blocks of the observable universe, noted above in the relativity equation analyzed however briefly.
B. Godel. Until almost a century ago, humans tried to find a comprehensive and self-consistent system that could be expressed beautifully through mathematical logic. The thinking was that you could build a really smart project or program that could answer any proper true-false question posed to it correctly. In 1931 Kurt Godel, a young man right out of college, proved mathematically that such a system is impossible. The best you could do is to build a system that might give true answers ... or not.
It's kind of like the statement, "This is not a true sentence." Our question then is: Is that sentence true? Well, we consider whether the sentence follows the grammatical rules for making a sentence. Yes, it does. So, we would be tempted to answer, True: It is a true sentence. But the meaning of the sentence itself denies it is a sentence. So, we would be tempted to answer, False, it is not a true sentence. Either way, we are stumped by the thing. We need more insight (rules) to solve the question.
In a similar but far smarter way, Godel showed that when you develop a complex enough system, you can always ask it a valid question that it cannot answer correctly. You have to invent a new rule from outside the system to make the system yield righteous answers. But adding a new outside rule changes the whole project so as to interject a new, different unsolvable question. This process of adding new rules to fix lower level problems would just go on forever, giving yet ever newer, still unsolvable problems. Of course, that's just math, right? So what's the real problem? It's this: The cosmos is a system, and the rules (that is, the laws of nature) its humans have discovered/developed can never explain the cosmos true. The cosmos is not sufficient of itself to answer all human questions completely. (And, anyway: How does a system evolve an entity within it that can ask a question about something outside that the system can't even know about? but we'll leave that for other discussions.)
This state of affairs does not bring us inexorably to God. It does, of course, point to some other rule outside the system to help explain -- a new rule that becomes part of a new paradigm, and which will need another new rule to continue the explanations. And so on ad infinitum. But to what? At this point people just start making up stuff for which there can never be scientific proof throughout all those infinite recursions/regressions.
Rather, this state of affairs brings us inexorably to faith. That is, it points to something reasonable perhaps, but unprovable scientifically because it cannot ever be measured (and thus, properly observed) by human sense or instrument.
So now. The oldest known Hebrew and Greek manuscripts of Genesis 1:1 were written no later than twenty-one centuries ago. And most folks interested in them recognize their earlier sources were written through a millennium before that. How did the author of that first verse present so succinctly, so pithily, what human beings identified as scientifically fundamental factors of the universe two thousand years later?
The biblical witness is straightforward: God did it. God himself forced energy into the system's singularity initially creating time, space, matter, and the specific rules by which they operate: all the universal constants. The biblical witness further asserts: by faith we know that the worlds were created by the word of God so that things that can be seen came from things that cannot be seen. In other words, the observable things arose from unobservable things, the measurable from the unmeasurable. That same witness affirms further the same God continually sustains the cosmos by his deliberate and intentional underpinning. God has designed the cosmological system to point an observer of the cosmos to something beyond its finite self into the infinite, pointing inexorably to faith, because without faith it is impossible to please God.
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