Avraham Avinu is My Father: Part 1

thetorah.com/torah-history-judaism-part-1/

– PART 1 –
A Journey Through Previous
Paradigm Shifts

A well-known scientist… once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the
earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast
collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of
the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate
supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before
replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,”
said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”— Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of
Time

The Loss of Geocentric World

Religiosity has survived a number of paradigm shifts before this—ones that are much more
challenging than the current one—and successfully reinvented itself each time. It may be
difficult for us to digest this fact, since we are products of those very reinventions, but allow
me to describe some of them and outline the conceptual and religious challenges that they
posed.

Once upon a time it was a given that the earth was the center of the world. The planets, the
stars, the sun and the moon all circled the earth. Humanity ruled over the axis of the entire
universe. In this world-view it is hardly surprising that humans would see their actions and
life-choices as having cosmic importance.

The first chink in this armor came from Nicolaus Copernicus, whose research into planetary
orbits unseated the Ptolmaic system and established the sun as the center of the solar
system. His findings, soon supported by the mathematician Johannes Kepler and the
telescopic observations of Galileo Galilei, changed the geocentric world into a heliocentric
world, where the center of the universe was the sun, not the earth. The implications of this
discovery with regard to the central importance of humanity rocked the religious world.
Many Christian (and Jewish!) religious leaders declared this idea to be apostasy,
acceptance of which would mean the death of religion; the Bible describes a geocentric
world after all. Yet, the truth of the Copernican paradigm shift was eventually accepted, and
religion adapted itself accordingly.[3]

The shift to heliocentrism was only the first step in a massive rethinking of the nature of the
universe. In addition to demonstrating the truth of the Copernican system, Galileo turned
his telescope on the Milky Way and discovered that it was composed of stars. Although
people were already aware of stars in general, the understanding of the Milky Way as a
galaxy of stars (the word “galaxy” derives from the Greek word “galactos” meaning milk)
demonstrated that our solar system and local stars were actually part of a larger system of
stars.
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Interestingly, it was a religious figure, Giordano Bruno, who forcibly declared the meaning
of this discovery: our sun is just a star, and each one of those other stars is a solar system
distinct from ours. In Bruno’s understanding, this fit well with a view of God as infinite.
Nevertheless, the “galaxy model” certainly poses a challenge to the central importance of
humanity. Bruno’s belief in an infinite God who creates a universe with infinite centers was
a brilliant and powerful way of reapplying religious vision for a more complex world.

The shrinking of humanity did not end with galaxies, but continued with the Great Debate
between Heber Curtis and Harlow Shapley (1920) about the nature of nebulae, like
Andromeda or the Pinwheel Galaxy. It was clear that these nebulae were made up of star
clusters, but where were they? Shapley believed that these star clusters were inside the
Milky Way, which, in his view, made up the entirety of the universe. Curtis, however,
believed that these nebulae were separate and distinct galaxies (“Island Universes” in
Immanuel Kant’s terms). A few years later, Henrietta Leavitt, followed by Edwin Hubble,
after whom the telescope was named, proved conclusively that Curtis was correct; there
are more galaxies than just ours. Soon after this, Bart Bok and Clyde Tombaugh
demonstrated that these galaxies were organized in clusters of galaxies, which were in turn
organized into superclusters.

In other words, the earth is a satellite of one star, which is a small part of a galaxy of stars,
itself part of a cluster of galaxies, itself part of one of many superclusters of galaxies—this
is scientific fact. Furthermore, if any version of the “multiverse” theory—the idea, touted by
many scientists nowadays, that our own universe is only one of an infinite variety of
universes—turns out to be correct, this would shrink humanity’s stature to an
incomprehensibly small piece of the universe. And yet, religious belief seems to be able to
withstand all this and continue to give meaningful inspiration to countless people.

Apes and Stardust: The Loss of Humanity’s Unique Nature

Other scientific discoveries have contributed similarly to the shrinking of humanity’s place in
the world. When Charles Darwin first began to advocate a theory of evolution that included
the evolution of humanity from a primate pre-human ancestor, many Christian (and
Jewish!) leaders declared that this heresy would extinguish the light of religion and God in
this world. The fight rages on even to this day, but many traditionally-religious people
believe in evolution and feel that this does not contradict their belief in God or in God’s
interest in humanity.

When the fact that stars run out of energy and explode in a supernova became better
understood, it was realized that all the elements on our planet, including our own bodies,
are made up of star dust which coalesced after an ancient star exploded over 5 billion years
ago. This “parent star” itself was formed from the explosion of previous stars going all the
way back to an infinitely small and dense point 13 billion years ago that exploded—the Big
Bang. This explosion “created” the materials for every atom in every supercluster in our
universe—a universe that has been expanding ever since.

In short, following the understanding of modern science, humans are made up of “star
stuff” (to quote Carl Sagan), which coalesced around the sun and evolved many forms of
life, including us. This solar system is just one of many in our galaxy, which is one of many
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in our galaxy cluster, which is one of many in our supercluster, which is one of many
superclusters in our universe.

The Total Perspective Vortex

In Douglas Adams’ comic science-fiction novel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe,
he describes an invention called the Total Perspective Vortex. The idea behind this
invention was to allow its occupant to see in one instant the whole infinity of creation and
his or her relative insignificance in relation to it. “When you are put into the Vortex you are
given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and
somewhere in it a tiny little marker, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says ‘You
are here.’” When its inventor, Trin Trigula, first tries out the machine on his wife, the shock
kills her. Trigula comes to the humorous conclusion after this that, “if life is going to exist in
a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.”

Looking at the universe objectively is bound to make a person feel insignificant, and, at
times it does. Nevertheless, most of us are aware of these facts and remain firm believers
in importance of our life-choices and values. How is this possible?

→ Part 2 The Nature of Human Faith

3For more on the Jewish reactions to the Copernican system, see Jeremy Brown, New
Heavens and a New Earth: The Jewish Reception of Copernican Thought (Oxford
University Press, 2013); David B. Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in
Early Modern Europe (Wayne State University Press, 2001).

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