Spirit and Story Archive
Welcome to Spirit and Story, where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on the contours of our contemporary spiritual journeys. Every other week you will find something new and (hopefully) engaging here!
To access the CLAL Spirit and Story Archive, click here.
To join the conversation at Spirit and Story Talk, click here.
On God, Sea Ice and the Triumph of Life
By Walter Ruby
Last week I attended my first study session with Rabbi Yitz Greenberg in my new position as a CLAL scholar/fellow. As I listened to one of American Jewry’s pre-eminent religious teachers articulate new and profound ways of grappling with the meaning of God’s creation of the world, I suddenly felt the decades dropping away. There I was as a ten-year-old, sitting wide-eyed on the couch in our family’s suburban Pittsburgh living room listening to my father explain the mysterious workings of the universe.
Making that association between Yitz Greenberg and my father felt passably odd, however, given that Yitz is a theologian and a deeply devout Jew, whereas dad is a nuclear physicist and a convinced atheist. In those long ago conversations and in more recent ones, my father invariably argued that the universe came into being via a cosmic explosion known as the Big Bang and evolved according to immutable laws of nature from atoms and molecules to amoebae, ferns, amphibians, dinosaurs and human beings. His own mission in life has been to discover what makes the universe tick and, in the process, to contribute to the movement of human consciousness to a higher level.
It is due to my enormous respect for my father’s intellect and abiding faith in the truth as he explained it to me that I have never allowed myself to seriously contemplate the possibility that God might exist. Yet as I listened to Yitz lay out his vision of a world evolving from chaos to order, non-life to life, and unconsciousness to a human consciousness that is becoming ever more godlike, I was amazed at how similar those ideas sounded to the ones with which my father has been filling my head all these years.
After all, both men posit a universe humming along imperturbably and unerringly like the world’s greatest supercomputer. Certainly there is no inherent contradictions in their respective creation myths; once enlightened theologians like Yitz acknowledge that the creation of the world could have happened billions of years ago rather than in 4004 B.C.E., Genesis and Big Bang become two names for the same event. And both Yitz and Dad believe, each in his own way, in the prospect of the continuing evolution of the human species into higher and higher realms of consciousness.
So what are the implications if, in truth, Yitz’s convinced theism and my father’s determined atheism are really two sides of the same psychic coin? In that case, might not the intense and sometimes bloody argument that has been going on for centuries between believers and non-believers really be a huge misunderstanding? And might not I have discovered for myself the justification, the necessary intellectual fig leaf, for finally making a place for God in my life?
As I listened to Yitz giving eloquent expression to a theology affirming what he termed “the triumph of life,” I recalled standing with my father a couple of months ago on a steep hillside overlooking a gorgeous stretch of rocky, wave pounded California coastline. He expounded with evident deep emotion about the life of a rubbery-looking plant called sea ice that improbably attached itself to a sheer rocky cliff in front of us where nothing else had managed to grow. “I find it incredibly moving and nothing short of miraculous how this plant has figured out a way to scratch out a living on this cliff wall and spread so profusely,” he said with evident emotion. “It is the triumph of life against all odds.”
How striking to hear Yitz use the same term my father had--the triumph of life--and to realize they both used that phrase to articulate a common vision of the ascendancy of being over nothingness and life over death. Yet isn’t that vision at its core a spiritual construct? It seemed that way to me that day in California and I couldn’t help saying to my father, “You know, dad, for someone who disavows God so intensely, the way you relate to the sea ice and this whole coastline strikes me as profoundly spiritual.” Unlike past occasions at which he made a sour face when I mentioned spirituality, that day he responded affably, “Yes, perhaps so.” But he quickly explained that while he shares with the theists a feeling of awe at the fruits of creation, the difference between them is that believers "bring in God and causality, the idea that there is a higher intelligence running the show. In my view, the sea ice, the cliffs and the ocean were created by a series of accidents, by atoms and molecules bouncing randomly off each other."
Yet when I phoned my father the other day to tell him about my encounter with Rabbi Greenberg, I was surprised to hear him remark: “When one considers the miracle of organisms evolving over billions of years from chaos and nothingness into ever more complicated life forms, it is hard to accept that this all just upped and happened.” Actually, he went on to say, creation and evolution did not really happen haphazardly at all, but took place according to immutable natural laws. He added, “While I might join with your rabbi in celebrating that process and wanting to keep it going, we part company in that I see the process as blind and apart from purpose, whereas he sees intent in the whole thing.”
My father went on to conjecture that human beings invented the concept of God because “we evolved into complicated gadgets which by their very nature need to have intention and meaning in their lives.” Yet, as he immediately acknowledged, he counts himself among those human gadgets needing more to hang his existence on than “a bunch of dumb atoms flying around.” He noted, “Yes, the universe is composed of dumb matter, but the whole thing was empty until minds evolved that were capable of appreciating the grand design.”
I passed up the opportunity to point out to my father that it seems profoundly contradictory to maintain that everything happens both by pure accident and according to immutable laws of nature. My mind was elsewhere, realizing that dad had just given me insight into a more personal question, namely, how -- at the age of 76 -- he confronts the prospect of his mortality without the consolation of God, causality or meaning. Now I understood that while he has eschewed God, he has had deep spiritual meaning all along. For while he is convinced that he himself will cease to exist, he also believes that the great cosmic dance which has been the subject of his life’s work will go on and evolve toward greater things. His main disappointment is that he won't be around to see where physics will be in 100 years or into what sea ice will have evolved 100 million years from now. For my father, I now realized, physics has been a lifelong immersion in the theology of the Triumph of Life -- a religion in everything but name.
As for myself, I have a new perspective on life’s ultimate question. It now seems intuitive to me that those perfectly functioning natural laws which both Yitz and my father hold in such awe were more likely to have been set in motion according to some master design rather than having come into being by pure accident. Why? Because I know from my life’s experiences that accidents tend to be a whole lot messier and work a lot less well than the handiwork of creation. Does this mean I have come to believe in God? Well, I don’t expect to be putting on a kippah or keeping mitzvot anytime soon. On the other hand, I have to compliment the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob for some first-rate work on that sea ice.
To join the conversation at Spirit and Story Talk, click here.
To access the Spirit and Story Archive, click here.
