In The Beginning, 13.73 Billion Years Ago- by Howard Smith

The Bridge: A Science and Spirituality Resource
April 28, 2008


In the Beginning, 13.73 Billion Years Ago- by Howard Smith

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Yonah asks, in the name of his teacher, why the Torah begins with the letter Bet — בּ. His answer is that this letter is shaped like a bracket — ] — closed behind, above and beneath, so that “we have no permission to discuss what is above or below, in front or in back, only onwards from the moment of creation.”

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The first mark in scripture then, after that signifying bracket, is the tiny dot inside the Bet that hardens its sound from “v” to “b.” This dot signifies the primal point of creation, the embryonic universe, what the kabbalists called the “Resheit.” “Beyond this point,” says the Zohar, “nothing is known, and so it is called the Resheit, the first word of all.” The Torah’s literal opening statement is thus, “With the Resheit God created the heavens and the Earth.”

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About 13 billion years ago, the universe as we know it exploded from an infinitesimally small point, much smaller than even an atomic nucleus, in a creative event dubbed “the big bang.” The universe has been expanding from this point and evolving ever since, with its current dimension being approximately 46 billion light-years. The foundations for the big bang description were laid by decades of mathematical thinking and meticulous studies that culminated with Edwin Hubble’s unexpected 1929 observation: Other galaxies are moving away from us with velocities that indicate a systematic recession, but yet, in accord with Albert Einstein’s then recent theory of relativity, the Earth has no privileged position. Hubble’s results shocked people who only a few years earlier thought that our galaxy was the entire universe and that — as Einstein, too, had originally thought — the universe was static and eternal.

Hubble’s data made use of 46 nearby galaxies. This past year, several different teams of astronomers reported progress on their programs to measure the recession velocities of hundreds of thousands of galaxies. Their results — with evidence from galaxies hundreds of times farther away than Hubble’s sample — support Hubble’s conclusion that the universe is systematically expanding. Read Full Article

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Dr. Smith is an active member of the Boston Jewish community. He is a senior astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and was the chairman of the astronomy department at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. His recent book is LET THERE BE LIGHT: MODERN COSMOLOGY AND KABBALAH, A NEW CONVERSATION BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION

"The Bridge" is devoted to exploring the link between science and spirituality from a variety of different points of view. It considers both science and spirituality as approaches to comprehending the mystery of the cosmos and ourselves.

"...the account is included to demonstrate to all the nations that God created the Earth, and that the land of Israel can therefore be given to whomever God chooses. Land belongs not to people, but to the Lord."

In other words Palestinians, we're not kicking you off your land, our invisible friend gave it to us!

Thank The FSM that will never happen HERE.

Science changes when new information comes to light. Religion can't do that because, in order to change, it must first admit that it was wrong.

I have yet to see a scientific organization hold a pancake breakfast. -- light and fluffy white, we'll make a fortune overnight...

sponsored by the Center For Disease Control? :)

Obviously the scientific data suggests a big bang by running back the expanding universe to its logical conclusion.

I wonder what would have been made of the data if the culture had an overwhelmingly cyclical conception of time, rather than a teleological one (that teleology in the West apparently being rooted in the structure of Judeo-Christian thought).