BEREL LEIB (ZACHARY) EPSTEIN, Ph.D.
JOHNS HOPKINS PHYSICS LABORATORY THEORETICAL PHYSICIST AND INTERDISCIPLINARY AUTHOR
Berel Epstein is a Jewish American theoretical physicist and interdisciplinary author with a background in nonlinear optics and laser physics. After studying under Dr. Phillip Sprangle at the University of Maryland, he joined the Johns Hopkins Physics Laboratory, working on innovative research projects aimed at maintaining America’s technological edge in defense. Berel lives with his wife and children in Baltimore, Maryland, where he also studies in Yeshivas Ner Yisroel. His recent book Emunah and Physics (https://mosaicapress.com/product/emunah-and-physics/) takes on the deepest questions challenging Jewish belief, showing how science and Torah not only coexist—but illuminate and enrich one another.
Rationalizing Both Truth and Falsehood
BEREL LEIB (ZACHARY) EPSTEIN, Ph.D.
I began to believe in God by reflecting upon the world around us and by asking the questions that many are too occupied to ask.
Why does the world exist, when it could not? How did we get here, and what are we? What is the source of spirituality? Why do we seek meaning, and is there any to be found?
The questions grew more refined.
Why is society today discovering the importance of “gratitude” and “mindfulness”? What is gratitude without the One to whom to be grateful? Is it really true that the class is “half full” if one believes that it is also half empty? Must one really lie to maintain a healthy attitude? What will be of one who has nothing better to be mindful about that his own breath or the tragic transience of his worldly experiences? Why should we see a society thousands of years more “advanced” than that of religion trying to recreate our edifices out of sand?
Why does math exist? Why can so many phenomena be described with its formulations? Why are we able to perceive truth so far beyond what is evolutionarily necessary, to the point that we can map the dark matter distribution within far-off galaxies and probe subatomic particles?
Why is so much wisdom found among those devoted to God, and so much less where the devotion is watered-down or absent altogether? Is wisdom not found where truth is found?
However, I have grown to know of God through an awareness deeper than my very selfhood. It is something deeper than the science which merely echoes it and calls upon us to look beyond ourselves.
What is this sense of reality that we have of our own selves? Why do years of thinking deeply instill within us the awareness that the ‘I’, the ‘you’, and the other ‘selves’ - not only as individual entities, but at the core as a single, unified entity? And why does modern physics (1) so broadly verify this intuition?
From the beginning of time, God has endowed us with an intellect which is capable of rationalizing both truth and falsehood. One may construct theories in which all of the accounts of the divine across space and time are fabricated or misconstrued, and all scientific and philosophical indications of the divine coincidental or inconclusive. Theories in which consciousness and spirituality are an incidental biological phenomenon, and religion the product of and beneficiary of social evolution. But to the discerning mind, such theories are only a forced escape route, and the very presence of both good and bad, religion and atheism, in itself bespeaks the will of the Creator.
If only as a lesson learned from all the secularist nations of modern history who have explicitly devoted themselves to their own self-pleasure and to evolution of the fittest yet emerged in bloody ruins, (2) let us continue our growth within what is far more of a beneficial and “socially evolved” belief system.
Footnotes:
1) For example: The electromagnetic perturbations and sea of virtual particles across empty space sing that no space is never truly void [See A below]. The collisions of quasars away vast swathes of lightyears clap and attest to the greatness of God [See B below]. The volumetric and entropic unity of the initial singularity of the universe point to God’s oneness, along with the quest for a Grand Unified Theory to reveal the unity of the four fundamental forces [See C below]. We see oneness in the non-local nature of quantum entanglement, in the phenomenon of fermion pressure, and in their implication that all of matter is a single, unified wave function.
A) [Psalms 24:1, Bereishes Raba 68:9, Deuteronomy 4:35]
B) [Psalms 90:4, 92:6, 148:4, Isaiah 40:26]
C) [Deuteronomy 6:8, Zohar Vayikra 73, Zechariah 14:9]
2) We see this from Stalin to Hitler, from the Reign of Terror to the Khmer Rouge. We see it from Fidel Castro to Enver Hoxha, from Mongolia in the 1960s to North Korea in the present era.