Before the Beginning: Between Ancient and Modern Cosmology

I am drawn to Krauss’s work because he repeatedly points out an important idea about scientific thinking in general: almost all scientific ideas proposed turn out to be wrong or, at least, incomplete. They are unable to withstand critiques that may come from multiple directions such as better theorizing, mathematics, observations, and experiments. He allows that scientific ideas, including his own, are regularly disproven and invalidated. A few ideas, however, make it through the gauntlet of skeptical challenges, emerging unscathed or, more often, slightly scarred and thereby improved. Then, they advance a notch, from the status of ideas to that of theories. The very best, the most robust, insightful, and useful advance from theories to the status of laws.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwzbU0bGOdc. Krauss’s reference to Genesis 1:1 is at 12:48-14:26. YouTube contains many versions of this lecture delivered around the world since 2009 as well as interviews in which Krauss explains how and why his work, building on that of others, leads to new conclusions. In 2012, he published A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing (New York: Atria). Some ideas developed in this book appeared in slightly different more expanded formulations in earlier works referred to below.

Footnotes accompanying this translation draw readers attention to the fact that others translate the opening words of verse 1 as “In the beginning God created,” the translation to which Krauss referred; and the last words of verse 2 as “the spirit of God.” with a lower case “s.”

Everett Fox, The Five Books of Moses: A New Translation with Introductions, Commentary, and Notes, New York: Schocken Books, 1995, pp. ix, 11-13. Footnotes that function as a slight commentary indicate that these verses describe God ordering the chaos, not creating something from nothing; that Hebrew tohu va-vohu, translated as “wild and waste” indicates “emptiness”; that “rushing-spirit” is intended to reflect Hebrew ruah that refers to both wind and spirit; and that Hebrew merahefet, rendered “hovering” could mean “flitting”, suggesting the image of an eagle protecting its young as in Deut 32:11. Unlike the Tanakh translation, Fox properly repeats the phrase “over the face of”, ’al pney, that occurs twice in verse 2. [5] Rashi understands the second Hebrew word of verse 1, br’, as a nominal form, not as a verb, and glosses it in his comment with the noun bry’t , “creation of.” He, as do the Tanakh and Fox translations, reads the relevant Hebrew word as the construct infinitive of the word for creating, /bero/. This exact form occurs in Bereishit 5:1: [O]n the day of the creating, br’, of God….” The same construction occurs also in Bereishit 2:4b with a different word: [O]n the day of the making of the Lord, ‘swt ’lhym, the heavens and the earth ….” For a slightly technical discussion drawing on ancient Near Eastern parallels, see Ephraim A. Speiser,Genesis (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1964) 11-12; for a technical discussion developed on the basis of Rashi’s comment, see John Skinner, Genesis (Edinburg: T& T Clark, 1930) 12-15. [6] Only the light of day 1 seems out of place, given that the luminaries were created on the fourth day. (I will explain its significance later.) [7] On these occasions, even when God said yehiy, “let there be” or something similar, the import of the words was “There should be X and I will now undertake to make it.” In verse 20, yishretzu and ye‘ofef are used: “Let the waters swarm living swarming creatures” and “let flying creatures fly.”

Two cases of calling for a change in circumstance are in verse 9, where the waters gather themselves together so that dry land emerges, and verse 11 where the earth sprouts vegetation from beneath its surface. Verse 11 may reflect the idea of spontaneous generation unless what is referred to as ’arets, earth, was known to include seeds that naturally germinate under opportune circumstances.

Memes borrowed from cultures neighboring Israel may have been recast in the formation of his ideas. With a single exception, I will not discuss this topic in this devar torah. [10] The narrative describes only the vertical, but not the horizontal, spatial relationships between the primeval slime, the deep/Ocean covered over by the dark stuff, and a second body of waters over which a rushing-spirit wind moved. [11] Meir Malul, “The Family Hearth in the Ancient Near East and the Social-Legal Significance of Light and Darkness,” in K. Abraham and J. Fleishman, eds, Looking at the Ancient Near East and the Bible through the Same Eyes — Minha LeAhron: A Tribute to Aaron Skaist, Bethesda, MD., 2012, pp. 285-86. [12] Or, the author may have intuited something else vaguely. Lacking the ability to conceptualize and visualize it, as well as a vocabulary with which to express it, he was unable to record his ideas on parchment. He was writing about what he could neither see nor experience. [13] See, Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, Volume Two, Translated and with an Introduction and Notes by Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), part III, chapter 13, pp. 448-49.

Susan Brayford, Genesis (Septuagint Commentary Series), Leiden: Brill, 2007, pp. 32-33.

Maimonides, The Guide, Part II, chs, 16-25, pp. 293-330. He did not base his arguments on what he considered inconclusive scriptural texts, but on philosophical grounds alone. He was aware that biblical texts could be cited against his position if they were read literally. See chapter 25.

See L. M. Krauss, Quintessence: The Mystery of Missing Mass in the University, New York: Basic Books, 2000, 33-42, 98, 109-110, 138-168, 332-336; Hiding in the Mirror: The Quest for Alternate Realities, from Plato to String Theory, New York: Viking, 2005, pp. 257-72; A Universe from Nothing, pp. 39-104, 153-56. [17] Krauss is not the first physicist to use nothing as a technical term. However, his discussions of “nothing” in the “Preface” to A Universe from Nothing and of varieties of nothing and “almost nothing” in chapters 9 and 10 support my contention that his arbitrary decision to use this word in a popular book makes it difficult to comprehend parts of his argument. [18] The types of observed data used in their theoretical cosmology differ, of course. [19] He uses the word, tov in the sense of good/satisfactory for the first time in verses 10, 12 on day three. [20] They too are good/satisfactory. [21] In Part II (ch. 47) of The Guide of the Perplexed, Maimonides claims that books of the Bible employ parables and hyperboles, similes and metaphoric language to convey their meanings, and that this figurative language is a product of human imagination. Consequently, he encourages readers to apply their intellect in discerning between such language “and what has been said exactly according to the first conventional meaning.” Maimonides’ suggestion is useful for modern readers, as it enables us to interpret Gen 1:2 as poetic language expressing a particular idea about the co-existence of God- power and primal matter before God-power augmented the primal matter and worked it into the recognizable world. [22] Maimonides, The Guide, pp. 409-410.