Amassing over 350,000 Facebook Likes isn’t too shabby, but does the WSJ’s recent op-ed entitled “Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God” close the book on atheism? Considering that along with these Likes, there were also thousands of comments, you can probably figure out the answer.
So what’s going on here? Let’s assume that it was a well-founded article in support of Intelligent Design. That according to the facts, according to the statistics and all the variables needed for a planet to support life, the results point to a Supreme Being.
The article is on “lockdown” on the WSJ website (which means you now need to subscribe to read it), but given that all the author says about the statistical need for a Creator is correct, why then haven’t the headlines declared that atheism is dead, and that the unbelieving scientists of the world have done teshuvah, repented?
The answer is that in our generation, we are more enthralled with virtual realities and movies like the Matrix than we are about debates over the nature and development of real reality. In a landmark class delivered close to six years ago, Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh explains the various proof for the existence of God according to the Kabbalistic Four Worlds.
Without going too heavy into the material there, we can sum up the topic like this:
If you spend your time in the World of Creation, relating to reality as something virtual and your thoughts as something real (e.g., “I think therefore I am”), then Intelligent Design is not going to sway you. Intelligent Design works for people who take reality as a given, and are interested in learning how reality developed. Who created reality? But if reality already appears virtual to you, then a discussion about who created reality is not going to sway you.
What about the Matrix fans?
The proof that interests the intellectuals is that reality is virtual and God is real; as taught in Chassidut, “Divinity is a given, reality is a novelty.”
The first stage doesn’t require much effort as popular culture and scientists now suggest that thought creates reality:
“A fundamental conclusion of the new physics also acknowledges that the observer creates the reality. As observers, we are personally involved with the creation of our own reality. Physicists are being forced to admit that the universe is a “mental” construction. Pioneering physicist Sir James Jeans wrote: “The stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. – R.C. Henry, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, “The Mental Universe”; Nature 436:29,2005) (source)
Once the “real” nature of reality is put into question, and we begin to think of reality as a collection of thoughts or consciousness, then the next stage is to transition from the subjective “I think therefore I am,” and the mental “creation of our own reality” world of Descartes and Greek Philosophy, to the Jewish belief in one omniscient, one omnipresent Creator.
Whereas a collection of subjective thoughts remains subjective, in order to get to our objective reality we need to first realize that nothing that I can sense, makes itself. You’re not going to get a universe no matter how many Greek Philosophers you stuff in a room, or brains you put in vats.
For more of the proof for the existence of God at the World of Creation, please read the unedited transcript referenced above.