Hebrew Voices #196 – Reconciling the Bible with Science: Part 1

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Gerald: God created the laws of nature that predate the universe; they’re not physical, they’re outside of time. They can create something from nothing. That’s the definition of God in this universe.

Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today with Dr. Gerald Schroeder. He has his bachelor’s, master’s and PhD from MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is a renowned physicist who has written about reconciling the Bible with science. Shalom, Dr. Schroeder. We’ve had you on the program before, I think you probably don’t remember.

Gerald: No, I do remember but I don’t remember the date.

Nehemia: Oh, it must have been almost 10 years ago.

Gerald: Really? Wow!

Nehemia: I was trying to get a Minion cake from a bakery. I think it was called New York Bakery, or something, on Emek Refaim Street in Jerusalem, and your wife was right in front of me, and she got my cake!

Gerald: Okay! That I don’t remember.

Nehemia: It was the day before we did the recording! And you mentioned, as we were getting to know each other, something about a Minion cake, and I was like, “That was my Minion cake!” That was your wife! It’s a small world!

So, Dr. Schroeder, let’s jump into it. I had another guest on my program recently who talked about, from a scientific perspective, his explanation that the world is only 6,000 years old. And you have a different explanation of the age of the universe. The age of the Earth in particular, I think, is what we’re more interested in.

Gerald: It’s the age of the universe, so it’s the same thing.

Nehemia: So, how old is the Earth?

Gerald: Who was the person, so I have some perspective here?

Nehemia: It was Kent Hovind.

Gerald: Ken?

Nehemia: Kent Hovind. He is a Christian Evangelical Young Earth Creationist.

Gerald: Okay. The first question I have to ask him is, how fluent is he in Hebrew? That was the first question you should have asked him. I didn’t hear the recording. If he’s not fluent in Hebrew, he should stay out of the argument since the whole text is based on the Hebrew text. The whole argument is totally related to… There’s a proverb that says, “A word well spoken,” it’s Proverbs 25, “A word well spoken is like apples of gold in dishes of silver.”

The commentator Maimonides in about the year, I’m making a guess, 1110, 1120-30, almost a thousand years ago, writes, “What was King Solomon talking about when he wrote ‘A word well spoken is like apples of gold in dishes of silver?’” And he writes like this… this was well before anyone was worried about dinosaurs or cavemen. We’re talking about almost a thousand years ago. He says, “The Torah has several levels of meaning. ‘A word well spoken is like apples of gold in dishes of silver.’ The ‘dishes of silver’ is the literal text of the Torah. And when you look at a dish from a distance, you see the silver dish, but you can’t see what’s inside it. Only when you look deep into the dish itself do you find the apples of gold. What’s the silver dish? The literal text of the Bible. What’s the golden apples? The secrets of why one word was chosen over another.”

Now, you’ll notice that it wasn’t apples of silver in dishes of gold, it was golden apples in dishes of silver. The silver is the literal text; the gold, being more valuable, takes that text way beyond the meaning. The silver dish has huge value, obviously. No one’s throwing out a silver dish, at least not in my house. I don’t know about your house, but not in my house.

Nehemia: I don’t think we have any silver dishes.

Gerald: I beg your pardon?

Nehemia: I don’t think we have any silver dishes in my house. But if we did, we probably wouldn’t throw them away.

Gerald: So anyway, the deeper meanings are the subtleties within the text, and the subtleties within the text allows you to see that there’s a reality of two different perspectives of time. And that’s the whole answer to the age of the universe. The universe is 6,000 or whatever years old from the biblical perspective looking forward. But we don’t live in that perspective, that’s the Bible’s perspective. I don’t know how to say God’s perspective. It’s the perspective that God gave in the written text, and that is why in the six days of Genesis… and when I get to Gerry Schroeder, I’ll tell you it’s my idea, okay?

Nehemia: Okay.

Gerald: The calculations are totally mine. But the idea that the Torah perspectives is thousands of years old. And it is Maimonides and… it doesn’t matter, they’re all from the same period, about a thousand years ago that… why is the numbering of the six days of Genesis rather bizarre? The numbering of the text is six days; at the end of each day there’s a couplet that appears nowhere else in the entire Hebrew Bible. And that is, in the English translation, “And there was evening and there was morning,” and then the day is numbered. You’re probably familiar with that, this and this happens, “in the beginning God creates the Heavens and the Earth,” and there’s this and this, “and there’s evening and morning, day one.” More things are happening, “a second day,” “a third day,” “a fourth day,” “a fifth day,” “the sixth day.”

So, the question stands out like a flame. Why does the text say, “day one”? Evening, morning, day one? It says, “second day,” “third day”, “fourth day”, “fifth day”, “the sixth day”, give me a first day. Why does the text say there is evening… this is not me speaking. As I said, I’ll let you know when it’s my idea. But this forms the entire basis for all the calculations that the universe is 6,000 years old, and the universe is 14 billion years old, from two different perspectives.

The text writes “day one” because there had not yet been a second day. That means the perspective of time is from the beginning looking forward in Genesis. It’s not from Sinai. By the time you get to Sinai, there have been hundreds of thousands of days. If the perspective of time in the Bible for these six days was from Sinai, the text would have written, “Evening and morning, a first day,” because it’s been thousands of days until you get to Moses on Sinai. You had to go through the whole Egypt experience, and the Exodus, and the wandering, et cetera.

So, the text says “day one” because the Torah sees time from the beginning looking forward. That’s not now. There wasn’t yet a second day means it’s from the beginning. The only time there wasn’t a second day is on the first day, and therefore the text writes, “evening and morning,” “yom echad,” “day one”.

I’ve got to tell you, there are many unfortunate… you refer to me as Gerry or Yakov. I refer to you as Nehemia, right? My Hebrew name is Yakov. So, there are, unfortunately, many mistranslations that write “there is evening and morning,” into English and into other languages also. “A first day.” The fact is, the Hebrew says, “day one.” There’s no question about the Hebrew.

So, the Torah sees time from before there was a time there was a second day, which means the Torah… the Torah, meaning the Hebrew word for the Bible… The word Torah is the Hebrew name for the five books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. So, the Bible, the Torah, sees time from the beginning looking forward until you get to Adam, where the description of time changes and becomes Earth time. So, we have this cosmic view of time looking forward from the beginning.

Nehemia: So, it’s really interesting what you’re saying. I just pulled it up on BibleHub.com, because I read it in the Hebrew like you do, so I actually wasn’t aware, or I certainly didn’t remember, that in Genesis 1:5 a lot of translations have “the first day”. I’m looking at NIV, New Living Translation, King James Bible, New King James. But then the New American Standard Bible has, “There was evening and there was morning, one day.” So, some of them do have in English, “one day”, but then other ones have “the first day.” They’ve even added the word “the.” So, that’s interesting, I didn’t remember that. So, you’re making a distinction between “the first day” and “one day”.

Gerald: No, no, no! The commentators a thousand years ago made the distinction. I put the numbers in.

Nehemia: Okay, alright.

Gerald: I didn’t make that distinction.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gerald: And the commentary is, “The reason that the Torah says day one,” it’s not me, Nehemia. I’m not stealing from anyone, okay? When it becomes my idea, I’ll tell you.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gerald: I’ve got to… thank God. I’ll tell you. I think God got the address wrong that He let me be the one to make the calculation, but anyway…

Nehemia: Alright.

Gerald: The text says, “day one,” to quote Maimonides, Nachmanides, they’re all from the same time, around 1,000 to 1,500 years ago, “because there was not yet a second day.” That is the commentary on “day one” from a thousand years ago. Now, why would that interest anyone? Because Nehemia, in a static universe, it makes no difference where you see time from. Zero! The only difference in perspective of time that we have in this universe is because the universe is expanding. And the commentary on the creation of the universe, again, from these same commentators, it reads like something out of NASA. A very small point… This is not a modern comment, remember, it’s a thousand years ago. A very small point, not “matter” as we say, the Hebrew is “Dak me’od ein bo mamash,” “So thin there’s no physicality.” We call that stuff “energy” today. “Dak me’od,” “It’s so thin,” “ein bo mamash,” there’s no… you can’t call that air because air has plenty of “mamash”, you get caught in a hurricane and you know how much “mamash” air has. And then this, “dak me’od ein bo mamash”, as the universe expands, changes into “mamash”, into “matter” as we know it, and that’s when the clock begins.

Again, now I’m about to tell you when it’s Schroeder. Then it says in the commentaries, “When this first matter forms, time grabs a hold.” Now before that time, time is going by…

Nehemia: Where does it say that?

Gerald: In the commentaries, Nachmanides and Maimonides.

Nehemia: Okay. Nachmanides says that before there was matter there was no time, basically, is what he’s saying…

Gerald: No, I say that. He writes this, “mi she’yesh,” “When we finally get matter, time grabs hold,” “yitfos bo zman.” “mi she’yesh yitfos bo zman,” a strange statement.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gerald: So, that’s in his commentary on Genesis chapter 1 verse…

Nehemia: Verse 5.

Gerald: 1 or 2 or 3, one of the first few verses. So, time grabs a hold. Now, before that, time is going by, but he uses the word “tofes”, “but it grabs a hold”, because energy is outside of time. Time is only linked into something, so that’s the beginning. I call it the cosmic clock. Now comes Gerry Schroeder.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gerald: So, I say, when is the first matter that formed? And I have no wiggle room here, I’m stuck. Electrons, protons… what’s the first stable matter? Well, let’s see. Electrons are formed when neutrons decay. Neutrons decay into protons and electrons. Neutrons are not stable unless they’re inside an atom, so they have a short half-life of a few minutes. So, that’s the reason that electrons and protons match. In the universe, by convention we call protons positive and electrons negative, and that’s why they match, because neutrons, like the word neutral, are essentially, in simplistic talk, a combination of a proton and an electron. But they disintegrate, and then you have a proton and an electron.

That’s the beginning of matter. Because protons define matter. If I say I have an atom with one proton, I’m saying hydrogen. If I say I have an atom with two protons, it’s helium; six protons, carbon; eight protons, oxygen. My background is nuclear physics. And the Earth science is just lucky, it’s the two things together, or fortunate. I was told once… I was on with Pat Robertson once, and I said I was just lucky, and he said something… I apologize for getting off track, but it was a huge lesson. I said, “I was just lucky,” and he said to me, “You weren’t lucky, you were blessed.” Now not blessed like, “Oh boy, I am blessed.” No, it’s a gift. He said, “It wasn’t luck. You studied physics and Earth sciences so that you can put these together. It wasn’t luck.” It wasn’t like, “you deserved it.” It was like a gift. We think some things are… you know what I’m getting at, right?

Nehemia: Well, I think there’s this thought that luck is this kind of force in the universe, and we can influence it. Sometimes we can’t influence it; we can do things that cause bad luck… and that’s not a Torah concept, that there’s such a thing as luck.

Gerald: Well anyway, getting to being blessed. But in any event, so what’s the first stable matter that formed? Protons.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Gerald: So, I say the clock of the Bible is when matter forms, time grabs ahold. “Mi she’yesh yitfos bo zman,” that’s Maimonides… I’m sorry, it’s Nahmanides, let’s get it right… but let’s stick with Nahmanides. So, time grabs a hold when stable matter forms. That’s the beginning of Gerry Schroeder’s calculation.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Gerald: So, the Bible sees time from there looking forward.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Gerald: We see time from looking back from today. We measure 14 billion years looking back, the Torah makes six days looking forward, however it goes, and with those two different perspectives you get a universe that can be 14 billion years old or only a few thousand years old. They’re both true.

Nehemia: Okay. So, when they… So, talk to me about… there are radiometric dating systems, like potassium argon and uranium lead. So, when those date a rock, and that rock gives a date of a billion or two billion years… I don’t think we have rocks on Earth that are more than two billion years old according to those dating systems, or those methods. What are you saying?

Gerald: I’m saying that Earth is… I’m going from memory now. I had a bad fall about a half year ago and it really knocked out the science…

Nehemia: I’m sorry to hear that.

Gerald: It has affected my memory, so I… from memory. But the Earth is about 4.6 billion years old, I think that’s the number. The Earth is four billion years old, four and a half billion years old. The Earth is that old, the universe is just under 14 billion years old. On Earth as we measure time… and that’s where we live, I mean, where else are you going to measure? You measure on Earth, even before… We’re using an Earth based clock. The radioactive measurements of the decay of those nuclei you can measure quite accurately. The choices were 100% correct, that we have an Earth that’s billions of years…

Nehemia: Other people say, “Well, they’ve done Carbon-14 dating on the age of the Earth.”

Gerald: I hope you correct them with that.

Nehemia: Carbon-14, even according to the most maximalist claims, doesn’t go back millions of years.

Gerald: The half-life of Carbon-14 is about 5,000 years.

Nehemia: Right.

Gerald: So, after 20 half-lives, there’s nothing left to measure.

Nehemia: So, you’re saying maybe 100,000 years.

Gerald: No, what did you just say? I heard a sentence about 100,000 years.

Nehemia: No, you said there were 20 half-lives, so 20 times 5,000…

Gerald: Oh, just for the number.

Nehemia: I think it’s considered accurate to 50,000 years, if memory serves me. I could be wrong.

Gerald: It for sure isn’t measured to billions of years.

Nehemia: For sure. So, in any event…

Gerald: But let your readers know, because you said it before, there are about six radioactive clocks.

Nehemia: Uranium, lead, potassium, argon… So, if you take uranium lead dating and you find a rock that says it’s two billion years old…

Gerald: I have one right here in this room.

Nehemia: Do you? You’re saying this isn’t a satanic lie of the scientists who want to destroy our faith, this is actually correct.

Gerald: As we measure time on this, it’s absolutely correct. And the argument… I had this once in front of a whole group of students, and their teacher was there, and he had always taught a Young Earth. He started saying how the flood could have caused the changes because that’s often the argument. “Well, the flood would have mixed up all the…” the flood messed up nothing because we happen to have fossils from before the flood that were dated in several different ways, not just radioactive, and they match. The flood couldn’t have changed… in brief, the flood could not have changed the radioactive decay of these elements. It takes nuclear events like atomic bombs to change rates of decay.

Nehemia: Which… we’ve had atomic bombs, so there is a little bit of a problem. But…

Gerald: I’ve actually seen quite a few.

Nehemia: Right. I understand you were involved in nuclear testing; I think we mentioned that in the last interview.

Gerald: Yeah, the SALT Talks, the Strategic Arms Limitation.

Nehemia: Alright, so… let me ask this question. You talked in the beginning about the plate of silver with the apples in it, which is a phrase from Song of Songs if I’m not mistaken.

Gerald: Proverbs 25, I think it’s Proverbs 25.

Nehemia: Oh, Proverbs 25, okay. It’s from, you say, King Solomon. So, what you’re saying is, there is metaphor in the Bible and there’s non-literal meanings. So, if you were to get into a time machine, which you’ll probably tell me doesn’t exist because you’re a physicist, but if you were to get into your Tardis and travel back and meet Adam, was there a literal man named Adam that walked the Earth and he had a wife named Chava, Eve? Do you believe that was the case?

Gerald: I think for certain there was. And there were other homo sapien sapiens around at the same time. He was the first homo sapien sapien to have a soul, a neshama.

Nehemia: Ah! Wow!

Gerald: That’s verse 26 through verse 27 of Genesis chapter 1. It makes it very clear. And this is from memory now, so anyone who’s looking it up in the Bible, it’s Genesis chapter 1 from verse 26, I hope I remember. God says, “Let us make Adam,” “na’aseh Adam,” “let us make,” I’m emphasizing the verb now, “let us make Adam”. And the next sentence says, “God created the Adam,” the English misses that totally, the “the.” … God says, “Let us make Adam.” Making is a process verb, and he wrote, “it takes time and stuff.” And that’s why it says for six days, in the opening, “God created the Heavens and the Earth.” And then later in chapter 2, it says, “For six days the Lord made the Heavens and the Earth.” “Made,” “asiyah” takes time and stuff. Creation does not. And Nehemia, stop me if I’m blabbering away too much.

Nehemia: No, this is great.

Gerald: So, Genesis chapter 1 verse 26, God says, “Let us make,” and I’m emphasizing “make Adam”. Stuff and time. The next sentence says, “And God created the Adam.” Well, if I got Adam made in verse 26, why do I have to create him in verse 27? Because the making is the physical body; creation is something from absolute nothing, and whatever it brings into the world, it brings it in instantaneously. So, something over time was made Adam, and it’s Adam there, but the next sentence God creates “the Adam;” the Hebrew has the “the,” “the Adam,” “et ha’Adam”. And that creation can’t be his body; we already mentioned in verse 26. That creation is the spiritual creation, the soul.

Because according to all the ancient commentaries that I have read, and I have not read all of the ancient commentaries by a long shot, but I’ve read a lot of it, all commentary says that there was one physical creation, the opening sentence of the Bible. All the other creations are spiritual. So, when God says in verse 27 of Genesis chapter 1, “God creates the Adam,” that’s a spiritual creation. It changed a homo sapien sapien person into a homo sapien sapien human.

Nehemia: Wow.

Gerald: That’s the problem.

Nehemia: Wow!

Gerald: Nehemia, I promise you, I’m not bending it in any way. God forbid.

Nehemia: No, I’m not saying you’re bending it. I want the audience to understand, because there’s some subtleties here. So, we have two Hebrew verbs; asah, Ayin-Sin-Hey, and you’re saying that’s a process, that’s “to make”, and there’s bara, Bet-Reish-Alef, which is to create, what we call ex nihilo, something out of nothing.

Gerald: Only God does creation. People can do making.

Nehemia: So, in verse 26 God said, “Let us make man.” But then in verse 27 it says, “and He created man,” and that creation is something out of nothing.

Gerald: He makes Adam, and then God creates “the Adam”.

Nehemia: The Adam, ha’Adam. But also, it says “Zechar u’nekevah bara otam,” “He created them male and female.”

Gerald: Yeah, beautiful. “He called their name Adam.” Nehemia, it’s a beautiful quote, “and He called their name Adam.” That sentence you just quoted ends, “and He called their name Adam.” We don’t even know if that Adam in that verse in Genesis could have been Adam and Eve, because He called their name Adam.

Nehemia: Well, it says, “Male and female He created them.” That’s female as well.

Gerald: Yeah.

Nehemia: Alright, so, if I can put it maybe in layman’s terms… and correct me if I’m wrong; you’re arguing that evolution took place, there was Australopithecus afarensis which evolved into some later…

Gerald: … the word developed. If you skip out the word evolved, use the word developed.

Nehemia: Okay. It developed into more advanced hominids, and at one point God decided… I hope hominids is the right word; “this particular hominid I’m going to give a soul, and it’s no longer going to be an animal, it’s going to be ha’Adam, ‘a human being.’” Is that what you’re saying?

Gerald: A hundred percent.

Nehemia: Okay, wow.

Gerald: And those hominids, homo sapien sapiens, they go back over 120,000 years. They look just like you and me. They invented farming 11,000 years ago, long before Adam. That takes brains!

Nehemia: But those were people who didn’t have souls.

Gerald: They were people. They weren’t humans.

Nehemia: Okay. Do all humans today have souls?

Gerald: Well, I live in the Middle East, where I question that sometimes.

Nehemia: But joking aside, meaning you could say, “Hamas isn’t responsible for raping little boys and killing people because they’re not human,” but that’s the atrocity of it. When a lion kills a person nobody says, “What an immoral lion,” because lions, that’s what they do. But when a human kills another human, then it’s because they have a soul that makes it so abominable.

Gerald: Yeah, it makes them responsible, yeah. Your description was one hundred percent of what I was thinking. I thank you for making that statement, yeah.

Nehemia: Wow, so this is mind-blowing. I find what Kent Hovind and other Young Earth creationists teach, I find it very attractive because it has this very literalistic approach. “All the scientists are wrong, the world is only 6,000 years old, and when you find a tree down in a coal mine, it’s really a tree that couldn’t be more than 6,000 years old.” And at the same time, I feel like I have to do these mental gymnastics to make it work.

Gerald: I was just going to mention another person who is very much like yourself that I won’t mention the name of; you probably know the name also. In fact, if we turn off the speaker a second, I can just tell you.

Nehemia: We’ll edit it out. I have an editor here.

Gerald: Do you know the name Zola Levitt? Did you ever know Zola Levitt?

Nehemia: He interviewed me once, yeah. I’ve met Zola Levitt.

Gerald: We met, he read my book, and he said it changed his life because he’d always been a Young Earth person, and suddenly he realized there’s no reason for the gymnastics.

Nehemia: Would you mind leaving it in? It’s up to you.

Gerald: I don’t mind, no. I was a good friend of his. I slept at his house…

Nehemia: I mean leaving in that you mentioned his name, if that’s something you’re comfortable with.

Gerald: I didn’t know if you were comfortable with it.

Nehemia: Yeah, I think people would find that interesting. Look, I’m not a Christian, so part of the audience that’s Christian is saying, “Well, it’s just those Jews, and the Jews don’t take it literally.” And look, this is one of the things I asked Kent Hovind. I said, “Well, you’ll agree there are things that aren’t meant to be taken literally,” and of course he agreed.

Gerald: Yeah, … literally, but you have to understand the perspective of the Bible.

Nehemia: Right. I was once having a conversation with a Flat Earther, and I mean literally a Flat Earther. And there’s a verse in Yeshayahu, in Isaiah, which says, “The Heavens is His throne, and the Earth is His footstool.” And this Flat Earther told me that’s literally true. God sits on a really big chair with His feet on… I’m like, that’s just stupid to me. I mean, I shouldn’t insult other people’s beliefs, but from my perspective that’s irrational. Obviously, that’s a metaphor, and yes, the Bible is full of metaphors.

So now, this brings us to, for me, what’s a fundamental question. When it says, “God made man out of the earth,” out of a clump of dirt, you’re saying that’s metaphorical? What are you saying?

Gerald: Chapter 2 verse 7.

Nehemia: Here, it’s verse 7, “Va’yitser ha shem Elohim et ha’adam afar min ha’adamah,” “And the Lord God made the man dust from the earth.”

Gerald: “Made.”

Nehemia: What’s that?

Gerald: Asiyah.

Nehemia: Well, no, it’s va’yyitser there, yatsar.

Gerald: Va’yyitser, double Yud. There’s two Yuds in that, by the way.

Nehemia: Right.

Gerald: Other than the yatsar, when he forms the animals, there’s only one Yud. There’s a nice little derash on that.

Nehemia: Alright, well you can share that derash too, but I guess the non-literal interpretation. So, you’re saying that’s metaphorical; God didn’t actually…

Gerald: No, no, it depends what you mean by forming. I don’t think He did it like a pottery, that He formed him. That’s why I don’t use the word evolution. The problem with evolution, it didn’t need to have, but it’s been built into it, that the first stage in evolution is random; random mutations, random changes. The word random is the problem, so I say developed. That life did develop by God twinkling, because I don’t see how any way, in my understanding, that rocks and water and all the oil slimes or whatever… well, there were no oil slimes. Rocks and water, that’s what you have, turn into life.

Nehemia: Could I call your approach “guided evolution”?

Gerald: I’d call it guided development. Okay, guided evolution. Yeah, okay, if it’s guided, yeah.

Nehemia: Alright. In other words what you’re saying is, in Genesis 2:7, “And God formed man,” or ha’adam, the man or humankind, “from dust from the earth,” He did it through a process that took, from some sort of perspective, millions of years.

Gerald: Yeah, that’s why it’s formed, asah. If it had said, “And God created…” notice it doesn’t say, “God created Adam from a bunch of…” it’s “God formed.” Those are process verbs. By process I mean stuff and time.

Nehemia: Tell us the derash, the non-literal interpretation of the second Yud there. The word vayyitser there is with two Yuds.

Gerald: Look, when it says, “And God formed the Adam,” it’s spelled with the one Yud, ve’yatsar is spelled with one Yud, it’s the Hebrew letter Yud. It’s the tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet; it’s the beginning. “Ve’ya”, it sounds like “ya” for the English speakers. And when it says, “God formed the animals,” it’s the same thing, sequence word, “God formed the animals, this, this and this, God formed the Adam, this and this.” But the ve’yyatsar for the “formed” for the animals is one Yud, and Yud is the first letter of God’s explicit name in Hebrew, so they get one soul. Adam gets two Yuds, he gets a double soul. All life, all animal life, has the first; it’s the creation in which God creates these animals, and that’s the nefesh. All animals have a soul, a nefesh, it’s the soul of life. I don’t know how else to say that. But we get a nefesh, because we’re part animal, and then some verses go by, and then God creates the Adam. That’s the second soul, so we have a nefesh and a neshama.

The nefesh knows, “Me, me, me, and I’ve got to survive.” That’s why an animals’ basic instinct is food, survival, and even if you have a pet… I don’t suggest doing that… a friend of mine wanted to pet one of his favorite cats while he was eating. Well, that caused him to have a bunch of stitches in his hand, because although he’d been feeding this particular animal for a decade or so, he made the mistake of putting his hand near the animal’s head and food. That’s the nefesh, “it’s all about me”.

And there are people who are nefeshdiks, that they think the world is spinning. That’s the great song, “Let me tell you babe, this world isn’t spinning just for you alone,” it’s a wonderful song. The neshama takes the “me, me, me” and it makes it like “we” or “us”. The neshama knows that there’s a spiritual oneness that connects the whole world; that everything you do affects further issues, but as an effect it’s universal. So, the neshama knows… the jargon, I think, would be “the other”. The neshama knows you have to act in a way that’s decent to other people. You’ve seen people that are nefesh. Nefeshdik people throw their garbage in the street, and they don’t even care about it! I have to walk in that street, so why do I have to walk by his garbage?

Nehemia: I want to summarize in… maybe in more simple English terms. The way the word in Genesis 2:7 is spelled has what we would call an extra Yud, which isn’t actually necessary for the spelling of the word, and that indicates that humans have both this life force and some kind of a soul which animals don’t have. Does that summarize, basically, what you’re saying?

Gerald: Yeah. Any dog lover would say that dogs have a soul, but we have a higher soul.

Nehemia: Okay, alright. But all human beings, all homo sapiens alive today… because here in we’re in dangerous territory…

Gerald: Yes, I agree with you before you even say it. They all have a neshama. They’re all humans. They’re all humans.

Nehemia: Because for example, there are these… what do they call it? Christian identity, which is kind of like this white supremist movement, who say that they’re actually descended from different lines. That Jews are physical descendants… they have this weird theology that they’re physically descended from Satan, who raped Eve and produced offspring, which was Cain. So, they want to say there are humans who don’t have the same inherent… they’re not made in the image of God in the way that others are. And that’s where we get into really dangerous territory, I think. Certainly, from a Tanakh perspective, it’s un-Torah.

Gerald: I don’t see the basis for that theologically. I mean, maybe they can try to read something into verses. I would not call that the golden apple, I would call that the rotten apple!

Nehemia: So, there’s an old joke… well, it’s not a joke. The Greek word for parshanut, for “interpretation,” is exegesis. “Gesis” is reading, G-E-S-I-S, and “ex” is from, and then there’s eisegesis, which is you read into. It’s not a joke, that’s actually the terms.

Gerald: I’ve never heard of that.

Nehemia: So, what they’re doing is eisegetical; they have a racist doctrine they’re trying to justify, and they’re grasping at straws in the biblical text to try and read something into it which… you would never get that from the biblical text alone. But if you’re trying to explain, “I know this person is inferior to me because I’m a racist bigot. How do I explain that from the Bible?” That’s basically what they’re doing.

Gerald: Yeah.

Nehemia: This is kind of mind-blowing. And look, Dr. Schroeder has many books he’s written. We’re going to put links on my website, NehemiasWall.com, where you can…

Gerald: Can I just say one thing about… If there’s no time I won’t say it.

Nehemia: No. there’s time. I think we have another hour, technically, so go ahead! There’s as much time as you need, go ahead.

Gerald: The Bible gives the ages of people. Later, I’ll get into something else, if you remind me, about a subtlety about why nothing is superfluous in the Bible. But the Bible gives the ages of people. Now, why does the Bible break our heads? It’s hard enough to study the Bible, let alone to know that Adam and Eve had 130 years until they had their third kid, Seth, and Seth is 105 years until… In any event, why do we have to know these ages? Because they let us form a calendar. Otherwise, there would be no 6,000-year calendar that people are concerned with. The only reason they have it is because you add all the ages in the Bible, they’re all given, and you add kings and queens, and it comes to a number less than 6,000 years. Not the biblical, but you get to the end of the Hebrew Bible, and then you have to add the kings, queens and everyone else. Christians would add on Jesus, et cetera, and you get to less than 6,000 years. If the numbers hadn’t been given, if the ages of people hadn’t been given, there would be no calculation, no problem. So, the ages are given… and why was I getting onto this point? Sorry, I forgot, I was getting there for a reason.

Nehemia: You were talking about, why is it that we’re told the ages of the people? Because it gives us a calendar. And so, I think really the question for me is, are you saying that from the time of Adam and Eve were given a neshama, a soul, that the world really is around 6,000 plus-minus years? Give or take a couple hundred years.

Gerald: Exactly. Because then it says Adam lived 130 years and had a kid named Seth. He was doing that on Earth, not in outer space. From Adam on, it’s an Earth-based calendar. Okay?

Nehemia: Okay.

Gerald: So, we add up those years and we see how long-ago Adam was. Then Barbara, my wife, Barbara Sofer, she writes every two weeks for the Jerusalem Post called The Human Spirit. It’s really worth getting on her blog. Her pen name is Sofer. She has a blog every… for the readers I’m saying this, she has thousands of people… Every Friday she puts out about 20 lines or so on Facebook. I don’t have Facebook, it’s her Facebook. Sofer, her name is, B. Sofer.

Nehemia: And you said this is your… who is this?

Gerald: My wife.

Nehemia: Your wife! Okay, Barbara Sofer, we’ll put a link on my website as well.

Gerald: Okay. She has a pen name; sofer means “writer”. In fact, it was her name before we married, and so it’s her professional name. So, she has a website and every Friday she puts out a blog of about 15-20 lines, which she spends hours on, on a summary of what we’re reading in the Bible the next day in the synagogue. So, if you want to go through the Hebrew, it’s a summary in English. It’s written in English.

So, what am I getting at? Okay, leave that aside. If we add up all the years… Oh, here’s what I was getting at. Barbara and I were in London giving lectures back-to-back. She’s a great speaker and a great writer. We have an afternoon off, and we go to the British Museum. Not the Science Museum, the British Museum in London. We walk in on the Mesopotamian Wing; it’s a whole wing, and what do we see? A sign, “The First Cities”, a whole section related to the first cities that are known in the world. Not the first little towns, the first big cities. They date back to, Nehemia, the time of Adam.

National Geographic a half a year ago had something very similar. They date back, and the year is given, they say, “Such and such, approximately this amount of years ago, the first cities appear.” I look at the number and I say, “Barbara, look at the number!” Of course they give in BCE, they say BC, so you have to add 2,000 years onto that. It matches the biblical. I know the numbers because I work with this stuff all the time. So, it matches Adam! I say, literally, Nehemia, “Thank God the curator of this entire exhibit…” and I said literally “thank God”, because these people are busy all the time, and he was there to answer my question. I didn’t mention Adam, I didn’t mention neshama, I didn’t mention the Bible, nothing. Why did the cities form at this time? That was my question. Do you know what his answer was? “We’ve no idea. We have no idea because it’s strange, because the population explosion of humans starts thousands of years earlier when farming was invented.” Farming was invented 11,000 years ago, and we’re talking about something like 6,000 years ago, that’s thousands of years. He said, “We have no idea why suddenly…” and it was sudden. Do you know what the answer is? He gives a year that’s about 200 years after the biblical date. He gives it in BCE or BC, so you add the 2,000. So, what does it mean? I know what it means. Before the creation of the neshama, there were homo sapiens all around, but they weren’t humans, they were people. They had all the drives of an animal but all the skills of a human; opposing thumbs, intelligence to invent farming, how to treat this one… they were animals!

The neshama comes into the world, and for the first time ever you could have people of different clans that smell differently and who had different folks and grandfolks live together. You couldn’t have a city before the neshama, because if you didn’t look like me, talk like me, and come from my mishpachah, “extended family”, my chamulah, I had you for dinner, either roasted or boiled. I mean, it was literally a dog-eat-dog world. The neshama changed the world, and suddenly people who weren’t from the same family line, the Hebrew word being chamulah or mishpachah, could live together. You couldn’t have a city before this.

What’s amazing, Nehemia, at this time also… in fact, that’s what the plaque said besides the timing, I’m seeing it in my head. “However, the most important discovery at the time was the invention of…”

Nehemia: Agriculture.

Gerald: What did you say, poker?

Nehemia: No, I said agriculture.

Gerald: No, that goes back 4,000 years before that.

Nehemia: Ah, okay. What was the most important discovery?

Gerald: Writing.

Nehemia: Writing! Okay.

Gerald: Now, why was writing invented? Because cities appeared. And what happens with cities? Now Sam and his family lives in the city. Frank and his family live on a farm; all rainy season, all winter long, Sam in the city is weaving baskets, and Frank on the farm is growing corn. Come the spring, Sam in the city picks up his 50 big storage baskets, carries them out to Frank on the farm, and Sam in the city said to Frank on the farm, “You need these baskets, they breathe and you can store your corn, and you’ll have corn for the whole year…” there’s no supermarkets, “and it won’t get moldy.” And Frank on the farm says, “Sam, you’re a gift from heaven. I really need those storage baskets. I’ll give you two baskets full of corn for your family if you’ll give me the other 48 baskets for me.” And Sam in the city says, “It’s a good deal. I’ll trade you these for two big baskets for my family.” Then Frank breaks the bad news: “Sam from the city, you came out two weeks too early. The corn won’t be ripe for another two weeks. Don’t break your back carrying the baskets back to town, leave them here and write out…” And that’s why all the first writing is economic transactions. All the first writing isn’t, “Hallelujah, there’s a God.” All the first writings are, “Frank on the farm and Sam in the city owes this and that.” Writing is invented because of trading. Trading is invented because of division of labor. Division of labor is because Frank lives on the farm and Sam lives in the city, and they do separate stuff.

Nehemia: So, trade is the basis of civilization. Is what you’re saying?

Gerald: Yeah.

Nehemia: At least the writing part of civilization. So, let’s go back around 6,000 years… what is it? 5,780?

Gerald: 5,780, yeah, about 6,000.

Nehemia: Around 6,000 years. So, we have a human being, his name is Adam, and he has a wife named Chava. Are there other people who have souls at that time who aren’t their physical descendants?

Gerald: No, and that’s what… Oh, I get you. I’m going to say two things about this. First let me say what’s on my mind, and then please say that again.

Nehemia: Sure, please.

Gerald: What’s interesting about the age that’s given at the British Museum for the first cities is it’s a few hundred years after the biblical age of Adam, which is exactly what would be needed because the soul has to spread. The soul spreads biologically, and according to Rashi, sociologically also. To answer your question, I think one couple gets the soul…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Gerald: And it spreads biologically and also sociologically. Supposing you were soulless. You’re a mom and dad and have kids and they’re soulless, but they see this family over there and they’ve really got something going for them. They sing on Friday nights. They just seem to have a better life. “Junior, why don’t you go play with those kids, maybe you’ll pick something up from them.” And Junior picks up a neshama, because, if Rashi’s correct, the commentator Rashi from the year 1050 approximately, we see one particular place where it implies that if a souled person, an ensouled person, raises another child that wasn’t from souled parents, that child will have a neshama also. In other words, the neshama is able to be instilled sociologically as well as biologically.

Nehemia: So, at the time of Adam and Chava, Adam and Eve, which you take to be literal people if I understand correctly…

Gerald: I think so, for sure.

Nehemia: There may have been thousands of people in the world, tens of thousands maybe. Not every one of them was given a neshama, but by a couple of hundred years later or something that soul had spread to every human being. Is that…?

Gerald: I don’t know if to every human being, but it certainly had spread enough so you could start having cities. Notice there are only cities in the Middle East. There are only cities in the Fertile Crescent. There weren’t cities over in China yet; the soul hadn’t spread. It doesn’t mean that the Chinese are inferior because… no one had souls in those days. There’s only this one little… and it spread.

Nehemia: It’s interesting you mentioned China. So, I lived in China for a year, and I was a high school teacher there. My students used to tell me that what they were taught is that every human today is descended from… they said a monkey, but they meant an ape. And they said, “We’re descended from a different monkey than you’re descended from.” I said, “What do you mean?” They said, “Well, they found fossils, Australopithecus robustus.” It used to be called Peking Man, and Chinese people are descended from that. I don’t even think it was a hominid, Australopithecus; he didn’t walk up. Anyway, “and we’re descended from something else.” So, that’s what they were taught.

I don’t think mainstream anthropologists or physical anthropologists accept that; I think that might have been what their ignorant teacher taught them. Are you saying that not every human being today is a physical descendant of Adam and Eve? Some are descended from people who were… the idea of neshama was transmitted to them, a soul was given to them…

Gerald: I never thought about it that way. I would say yes, they still have the same neshama, because when neshama comes into the world and it bifurcates, it spreads. And again, the commentary of Rashi said about how you can get it biologically. It says, “These are the children of Moses,” but then it mentions Aaron’s children also. I don’t remember the verse, but I remember the context of it. And it’s because those children had been raised and influenced by Moses. I guess that’s what the point being there, that that’s how they could be called the children of Moses even though they’re children of Aaron. That happens in the Book of Exodus.

Nehemia: So, in the Andaman Islands there’s a famous island called North Sentinel Island, which according to mainstream anthropologists and scientists has been cut off from the rest of civilization, from the rest of humankind, for ten, or tens of thousands of years. They call it the last uncontacted tribe. And there’s a question about whether they’ve actually gone through… whether they actually have fire on this island. It’s 500 people or something like that. We don’t actually know if it’s 50 or 500 people. So, they were never really in contact… It’s a thought experiment.

So, the people on the North Sentinel Island… There was a Christian a few years ago who said, “These are the last people who have never heard the good news of Jesus.” And he went to, what they call “share the Gospel” with them, and they killed him. They killed him because they’ve had bad experiences of people coming in the past and kidnapping. I think it was the British government or the Indian government, kidnapped 10 or 20 of them to try to bring them back and to teach them the language, teach them our languages so we could communicate with them, and then they ended up dying of disease. So, they have bad experiences with strangers coming and kidnapping them. But the people who are there virtually have no knowledge of the outside world except for the boats they see go by and the planes maybe that they see fly over.

So, do they have a neshama? And you don’t have to answer; it’s just kind of a thought experiment here. Let’s get to the flood. Young Earth Creationists would say everyone on North Sentinel Island is a descendant of Noah, a physical descendant of Noah and his children. So, talk about the flood.

Gerald: Well, one thing that’s very interesting about the flood. Just before the flood… I’m bypassing your question.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gerald: Just before the flood… why does God bring on the flood? Because the world, I’m almost certain it’s chapter 10, but I’m not sure it’s chapter 10…

Nehemia: It’s chapter 6.

Gerald: It’s Exodus…

Nehemia: No, the flood is Genesis chapter 6.

Gerald: Okay.

Nehemia: And you’re looking for verse 5. It says, “Rabah ra’at ha’adam ba’aretz,” “Great was the evil of man on the Earth,” “V’kol yetzer machshavot libo,” “and all the,” “yetzer,” “the thought of his heart was only evil all day long.”

Gerald: Okay.

Nehemia: It’s chapter 6 verse 5.

Gerald: Okay, I’m going a bit further than that then. When does it say the flood is going to come? I’ve got the wrong glasses.

Nehemia: Well, technically you could say it says it in the previous…

In 6:3 it says, “My soul will not remain for man.”

Gerald: Here we go, “The world was filled with violence.” Where does it say that?

Nehemia: You’re looking for verse 11.

Gerald: Of what chapter?

Nehemia: Chapter 6 verse 11. It says, “Va’tishachet ha’aretz lifni ha’elohim va’timaleh ha’aretz hamas.”

Gerald: Ah yeah! Okay, yeah, so, tell your readers about it… or maybe you did already. Have you told them?

Nehemia: I’m going to do a separate discussion on that. But please, share your… So, the word there for “violence” is hamas.

Gerald: Yes. The readers… it’s literally hamas. And we read that on the day when Hamas attacked our people on October 7th. That was the portion that we read in the synagogue that day! It’s frightening. And it says, and the word there, you’re going to do a session on it, so I don’t want to pre-empt you…

Nehemia: No, go ahead, please share it, share your thoughts.

Gerald: … that is violence, the Hebrew text there is, and I’m going to use my glasses.

Nehemia: Is “hamas”.

Gerald: Is “hamas”! At the end of this it says, “And God says that hamas must be destroyed.” That the violence must be destroyed. And the word violence… your readers, you’ll hear this from Nehemia in more detail, but the word for violence is hamas. It’s not changing the transliteration; that’s what the Hebrew says and that’s how you pronounce it. It’s the exact same sounding word. Now, hamas for the Arabs is an abbreviation of several things, but no one knows, and I doubt if there’s a person listening to this knows why everyone calls it Hamas. The UN calls them Hamas. The American president calls them that. Everyone calls them that because it is Hamas. In the Middle East here we call it Hamas. And we read it in the synagogue that day!

Nehemia: It almost sounds like it’s prophetic.

Gerald: Yeah.

Nehemia: And maybe not almost.

Gerald: It was, because we tore the country apart politically, and God said, “You want to tear it apart? Run the system yourself.” God stepped back. The attack was coming, this is now Gerry Schroeder, okay? The attack was going to happen. You don’t build 500 kilometers worth of tunnels, and you have weapons and machines that can fly in the air that can carry people… It was all happening. That wasn’t what brought on the attack. I mean, our being separate. But the fact that we were torn politically… people may not realize, but our country was torn politically into two camps as whether we should reform our Supreme Court… it wasn’t getting rid of democracy, that’s what the people who are against the reform… “They’re trying to destroy democracy.” It’s not true. In my opinion we were trying to make sure democracy is balanced. Our Supreme Court is the strongest Supreme Court in the world. It has power that no other Supreme Court has. And they’re not elected officials, they’re appointed by themselves. I just plead for one thing; make it like the American system where each new justice is vetted. It may be brutal. We listen to some of these vettings on American TV that gets here. It’s almost brutal, but it keeps the Supreme Court honest. Not just honest, but… how should I say it? It’s directed to what it’s supposed to do. We don’t have that here. We don’t have that here, so it’s a problem. I’m not going to get into it. I never took part…

Nehemia: Aharon Barak was once described by an American judge as… I think they called him a judicial buccaneer. Buccaneer in the sense of a pirate. But anyway, that’s a whole separate issue.

Gerald: But the result of the attack was… the attack was coming, but the disaster of the attack was because God stepped back and said, “You want to tear your country apart? I’ll help you get it back together.” Because the entire password of this war is, in Hebrew, yachad, “togetherness”. I’ve been with the IDF… I don’t want to get into my history with the IDF… I mean, I was part of it. I’m an old guy now, but… we never had the byword, “we’re together, we’re together” … we were torn apart… Anyway, I don’t want to get into politics, but it was so sad. Okay, let’s leave that aside.

Nehemia: I would say as a side point that I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Hamas is called Hamas. When they formed their organization, these were people who had some knowledge of Hebrew and Israeli culture, and I think they chose that word very deliberately. It is an acronym in Arabic for the Islamic Resistance Movement, but it couldn’t have been lost on them the significance of this word in Hebrew as well.

And by the way, in Arabic it has a meaning, which is “intensity in war and religion.” Basically, it’s being a zealot; that’s what hamas means in Arabic. It’s hard to believe that they weren’t aware of it. Look, Yahya Sinwar, who is now the leader, he wasn’t before, he speaks fluent Hebrew. What was different between Hamas and the PLO is that Arafat was born in Egypt and didn’t know the first thing about Israel. He didn’t know the first thing about Palestine. Hamas is different; they grew up under Israeli rule. They were formed under Israeli rule. They had served time in Israeli prisons before they broke off and formed their Islamist movement.

Gerald: We cured him of some kind of disease!

Nehemia: Yeah, he had a heart disease that Israel cured him of. Well, he’s not the founder, but the point is that the founders back in the 80’s, a lot of them were very well versed in Israeli culture and the Hebrew language. Let’s get back to the flood.

Gerald: I don’t have an answer for the flood.

Nehemia: Fair enough.

Gerald: I have no… I used to teach… until a few years ago. I taught for 25 years at what’s called a yeshiva, a place where you come to study about God, and I taught science and Bible there. For a few years running, about three years running, all the teachers got together… we closed the doors, and we tried to figure out the flood. We did that for three years running, and we never got an answer of how you can show that in the world that there was a flood. I do not know from my studies, which doesn’t mean I know everything. I want to make that very clear; my Earth science wasn’t focused on trying to find a flood… earth science and nuclear physics, my two majors. But I don’t know of data that are strongly pointing in favor of the flood. Now, other persons may have, and so I’m saying I haven’t studied even 1% of the information. However, I can say explicitly: the flood could not have changed radioactive decay chains. No matter how hot you get water, the temperatures that change nuclear reactions occur in atomic bombs. Those are the temperatures that you require. Obviously, there’s nothing left.

Nehemia: To me the easiest explanation is that the word for eretz, which we translate usually as “earth”, could also mean “land”. So, there could have been a regional flood that flooded parts of Mesopotamia, or the Black Sea is one of the popular theories these days. I’m not saying that’s the answer. Maybe Kent Hovind is right, and the world is only 6,000 literal years old, and all the fossils in the world are explained by that. I don’t know, I’m not an expert.

Gerald: No, no! That couldn’t change the fossils.

Nehemia: No, I’m saying I don’t know. So, you’re saying, though… there were fossils before the flood.

Gerald: Oh, sure, the fossils from before the flood have… show a strata layer that you can guess ages of, and a radioactive age that matches the strata layer that, if there would have been a flood, they would have been changed… they were pre-flood. The Bronze Age fossils are good ones, they…

Nehemia: So, dinosaurs weren’t walking around with humans?

Gerald: No, dinosaurs died about 30 or 40 million years ago. Dinosaurs were way before there were people. Would you say were or were not?

Nehemia: Would I say? This gentleman that I interviewed, he argued that there were dinosaurs on the Ark; that Noah built a really big boat and there were dinosaurs on the Ark.

Gerald: No, there were no dinosaurs; dinosaurs disappeared. The number is quite strongly confirmed now… the last 40 years. The impact in the northern part of the Caribbean, off the Yucatan…

Nehemia: Chicxulub, or something like that. I can never pronounce it.

Gerald: Yeah. That date is around the whole world.

Nehemia: Let me ask you another question. So, we have… is it 93 naturally occurring elements?

Gerald: I think it’s 92, but I don’t know.

Nehemia: 92 or 93, whatever the number is, it’s definitely not my field. So, the standard explanation from mainstream scientists is that originally, from the Big Bang… do you believe in the Big Bang? Let’s start with that.

Gerald: My first book is called Genesis and the Big Bang.

Nehemia: There you go.

Gerald: The Big Bang… The Big Bang is the best news for God since Moses came down from Sinai. If you’re Christian, you could say Jesus also, but as a Jew I say the Big Bang is the best news for God since Moses came down from Sinai. The Big Bang is just another way of saying there was a creation to our world, which was big news 40 or 50 years ago, because 100 years ago the universe was considered to be eternal.

Nehemia: Oh, so this brings up something which maybe, if you don’t want to talk about it, it’s fine, it might not be your expertise. But what comes to mind for me is Olbers’ Paradox. Because the Big Bang essentially solved Olbers’ Paradox, didn’t it? That’s this idea that there’s an infinite number… the universe is infinite and there’s an infinite number of stars, so at night there should be no darkness because every point in the universe should end in a star.

Gerald: Yeah.

Nehemia: And scientists struggled for centuries; why isn’t the night sky light?

Gerald: Yeah. And the answer would be…

Nehemia: The universe isn’t infinite and it’s expanding.

Gerald: Yeah. It had a beginning and that’s it. If it was infinitely extant and infinitely old the light would be bright. Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Right. So, that actually solved a problem that had been in science, or Western thought, going back to the Greeks.

Gerald: There’s such strong data now that there was a creation… Robert Jastrow, one of the founders of NASA, which began as the Goddard Space Agency and became NASA… they bled together. He was one of the founders. He writes… it’s a wonderful piece of literature; I actually have a copy of the original. It was in a newspaper article back… when was it? It must go back at least 40 years, and he writes, “The story ends like a bad dream. We scientists have climbed the mountain of ignorance. As we finally pull ourselves over the final rock, we’re greeted by a band of theologians that have been sitting there for centuries.”

Nehemia: And the term Big Bang originally was to mock the concept, if I remember correctly.

Gerald: Yeah, Fred Hoyle. Fred Hoyle on the BBC in the 1950’s. Big Bang.

Nehemia: Because it implied God, that there was a creation. So, you made a statement when we were talking about the flood, that you don’t know of any data that support a flood. Am I right? It seems like your approach is, you look at what the scientific data are and then you try to see how it fits in with the Bible along with historical Jewish interpretation. Would you say that’s your approach?

Gerald: I would say that. And I’m saying that if it doesn’t match, and it’s significant, it means you just haven’t found the data. But if it conflicts… as an example, that until the mid-1950’s, I think it was, we said that the universe is eternal. I would say the science is wrong.

The Bible has a tremendously good track record of being correct. And for the Christian listeners, I want to make it… and Jewish ones even more especially, when it says God chose the Jewish people, it doesn’t mean that they’re wonderful or better, it just means that they’re the marker.

You should make it very clear; there are only two peoples, two nations in the entire Hebrew Bible, that’s The Five Books of Moses and all the writings and Judges, et cetera, and Joshua and Judges, et cetera, all of them. In all the Hebrew Bible there are only two nations that God says explicitly, “If I had my way I would destroy them.” One was Amalek, and that’s where we relate Hamas to Amalek. And what’s the second nation that God said, if he had his way, He would destroy them? It’s in Deuteronomy; the Jewish people. He said, “You’ve been such a bunch of lousy people. You didn’t follow My laws.” Read it, it’s chapter 32. “You’re such a bunch of lousy people. I give you the laws, you rebel right and left. If I had my way, I would destroy you, but I can’t.” I’m paraphrasing the literal Hebrew text, but I’m paraphrasing. “The nations of the world would say it was by their power that this happened, and they wouldn’t realize that it was I that made it happen.” God made a covenant with us that we would be a marker in this world.

I had a very close Christian friend that her mother said to her, “You want to believe in God? Follow the Jewish people. The history doesn’t make sense.” And it doesn’t make sense, and that’s why God says, “I would like to destroy you, but I made you My marker. Not for the better; you’re such a bunch of schlemiels. You don’t follow,” et cetera, et cetera, “but you are My marker.”

And it is identical to the argument that Moses used. When we come out of Egypt, we’re about to go into the Promised Land, and we, our forefathers, say, “No, no, no!” The women didn’t say this, by the way, the men said it; the text is very clear about who dies in the desert in the next 40 years. Only the men over 20 years old, and under 20 they didn’t because there’s a connection between the amygdala and the frontal cortex… we’ll leave the biology out of it. The men say, “Let’s go back to Egypt. We can’t beat them; we can’t beat them.” And God hits the roof and says, “You know what? I’m going to destroy you and make you a new people.” And what’s the logic that Moses uses? He’s always used it, always. It’s never… his argument with God is never, “Oh, they’ll be good people…” Moses knows the facts of life.

Nehemia: He’s met the Jewish people.

Gerald: He knows it. So, what does Moses say? “You can do it, but it’s not in Your best interest. Because if you destroy them now, on the edge of going to the land, the people of the world will say that You destroyed them here at the entrance of the Promised Land because You weren’t strong enough to beat the nations in there to give them the land.” And God backs down. You can read the text. People don’t like to read it that way but it’s exactly what it says, “Va’yinachem,” “And God repents.” Yinachem means “repents” or “rethinks” the actions, and He says, “You’re right, I won’t. But they’re going to walk for 40 years now in the desert. And those people who were old enough to know better, they will perish in the desert. They won’t come in. But the children under 20 will come in.” Because if you’re under 20 you’re not responsible, because of the connections in the brain.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Gerald: But it’s always the argument… the argument works, and this is the problem God has Himself in Deuteronomy. “I would have destroyed you but you’re My marker.” And look at the history of the Jews. If you’re looking for the invocation of God in the world, there are many. Just try to look at the chemistry of how you remember anything. I’d just been working on it before we got onto Zoom. The complexity is frightening, and it’s all going on right in here.

Nehemia: So, you’re saying that the complexity of the human brain and of life couldn’t just be accidental, is that what you’re saying?

Gerald: Yeah. And I don’t think… like, these arguments that are used by Dawkins, that climbing the mountain… that step by step, if the complexity exceeds what would normally develop over time in many, many people’s opinion who have studied the complexity in really great depth…

Nehemia: There’s a concept they call intelligent design; irreducible complexity. There are things if you take away one element the whole system breaks. So how could it have gradually evolved?

Gerald: Yeah, I’ve heard about that. I don’t think we even have to hang onto that, just the extreme complexity. Because it’s always risky to say, if you can’t define something that you know if you… I apologize, but there’s a book… I’m sorry, I have it on my shelf. There are so many wrong choices. In the development of the world, at each stage of mutation there are a million wrong choices and one or two that will work to make things go forward in a way that will allow for the complexity to develop towards life. Now, it didn’t have to develop life, but the likelihood is so slim. Nehemia, even if you look at the creation of the universe, the universe is made for complexity. The construction of an atom that has a heavy nucleus and these almost ethereal electrons that weigh… each electron has the identical charge of the proton but it weighs almost 2,000 times less! Why should something that’s 2,000 times lighter have the identical charge of this massive proton? And it’s electrons that allow life, because it’s the sharing of electrons among atoms that make atoms bond to form molecules that form life! If the universe wasn’t like that, you couldn’t share electrons. You couldn’t move them; they’d be too heavy.

Nehemia: So, you’re saying even the rules of physics are so unlikely to create the elegant world in which we live that that has to be divine intervention. Is that what you’re saying?

Gerald: And Scientific American a few years ago, which is very highly materialistic, said, “This is another proof that there must be an infinite number of universes.”

Nehemia: Right! And we just happen to live in the one where everything is elegant and works out.

Gerald: Yeah! There’s always an answer!

Nehemia: Well, so they need a huge amount of time and an infinite number of universes to make it work from a materialistic perspective. I know you’ve got a bunch of books; we’re going to put links to those on the website. Any final things you want to share?

Gerald: www.geraldschroeder.com. There is a God in the world. God is active in the world. I urge you to watch The Proof of God in Five Minutes, please. It has three million views, it’s enough already. And as I say again, I get nothing from it, zero. But it’s important to have arguments on how to answer a skeptic. It is crucial, there are a lot of skeptics in the world… that… for instance, I’ll give an example. There’s a wonderful book, the science is fantastic, it’s A Universe from Nothing by Krauss… pardon me for the Christians in the group, but he’s a Jew that wrote it. The science is magnificent. I urge you, just forget the last chapter, the last chapter could not be stupid enough than I can imagine. And he has quotes from Dawkins and other ones. This is the final nail in the coffin. We creat the universe from absolute nothing. He fails to point out the fact that you create the universe from absolute nothing provided you’ve got the laws of nature.

And that’s exactly what The Proof of God in Five Minutes is about. In fact, he once, in an interview, the author of this book, A Universe from Nothing, if you read all the book except the last chapter and then at least wrap your head around the fact about the stupidity that this argues against a God. God creates the laws of nature that predate the universe. They’re not physical, they’re outside of time. They can create something from nothing! That is the very definition of God in this universe.

And the only name for God in Genesis chapter 1 is Elokim. God is made manifest in nature. There’s several names for God in the Bible but the only name for God in Genesis chapter 1 is Elokim, and that’s the name of God physically acting in the universe. God is manifest in nature. So, if you want to know the physics behind the universe, A Universe from Nothing is extraordinary, but you have to watch the last chapter. And when he was confronted by someone saying, “But you have to have the laws of nature.” He says, “Don’t be a nitpicker; who cares where they come from.” The laws of nature… that’s the whole story!

Nehemia: It’s kind of an important thing, you would think.

Gerald: The laws of nature! It’s the whole story of God’s gift to the world.

Nehemia: Fascinating, wow. Thank you so much for joining us on the program, we’ve learned a lot. We need to have you back on to talk about so many more things.

You have been listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon’s Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

We hope the above transcript has proven to be a helpful resource in your study. While much effort has been taken to provide you with this transcript, it should be noted that the text has not been reviewed by the speakers and its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. If you would like to support our efforts to transcribe the teachings on NehemiasWall.com, please visit our support page. All donations are tax-deductible (501c3) and help us empower people around the world with the Hebrew sources of their faith!