My daughter asked me today, if the rabbinical method of argumentation was different, illogical, and un-modern.

"What do you mean?" I asked her.

Well when Jesus debated the Sadducees who did not believe in the Resurrection, he combined the verse "I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob" with the common appellation for God as "the living God", to argue:

Matt 22:29 But Jesus answered them, "You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God: 'I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob'? He is not God of the dead, but of the living."

"It seems like equivocation, it doesn't seem like a logical argument," I asked her, "is that the problem?"

"Yes", she said. "Is it just a different way of arguing?"

"Actually", I told her, "it's very logical. It all depends on what you take as incontrovertible truth."  In the West, we think the text illuminates a profoundly true idea that exists in the mind, and we fit the text to the idea. But the Jews believed that every word, every syllable was inspired directly by God, and the truth resides in the text, ambiguities and all. The rabbis were then justified in holding multiple ideas about what the text meant, as long as the text supported them: the ideas were fit to the text.  The truth is not a propositional statement, but the words of a person. Jesus was operating in that very ancient tradition when he moved the adjectival participle 'living' from before the noun to its semantic equivalent after the noun, and thus uncovered a new meaning.

The same question plagues Science: what is truth? Is it in the theories, or in the data? Is Science merely the power to manipulate matter (a Function), or is it an explanatory framework (a Form)?  An experimentalist will say, "the data never lie", whereas a theorist will say, "Never believe the data until you have a theory to explain it." At least, this is how they talk over the fence, but when theorists are among friends, they have the greatest disdain for their next-to-last theory, and when experimentalists are writing proposals, they have their greatest disdain for their previous data set. They know the approximations of their assumptions, the limitations of their equipment. So where do scientists turn for truth? They both believe implicitly in the existence and rationality of the universe outside their mind. They are both realists and idealists.

But why should the universe exist at all, not to mention in such a placid sort of way amenable to investigation? And why should the logic of mathematics actually be rational, much less describe the universe? The scientist has no answer, at least, disregarding his bluster, for it is faith, plain and simple, but faith with peculiar roots and even more peculiar fruit. For it requires a rational God who is also a Creator.

Paul Davies is a theoretical physicist who has spent two decades researching and writing on these sorts of questions. His faith has evolved over the decades to a Whiteheadian sort of quasi-deism, but he was no friend of Christianity when he wrote "God and the New Physics" in his Russell-decade circa 1983:

Few would deny that religion remains, for all its pretentions, one of the most divisive forces in society. Whatever the good intentions of the faithful, the bloodstained history of religious conflict provides little evidence for universal standards of human morality among the major organized religions. Nor is there any reason no believe that love and consideration are lacking in those who do not belong to such organizations, or are even committed atheists.

In 2007, however, he writes in the NYT:

Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too. For that reason, both monotheistic religion and orthodox science fail to provide a complete account of physical existence.

This shared failing is no surprise, because the very notion of physical law is a theological one in the first place, a fact that makes many scientists squirm. Isaac Newton first got the idea of absolute, universal, perfect, immutable laws from the Christian doctrine that God created the world and ordered it in a rational way. Christians envisage God as upholding the natural order from beyond the universe, while physicists think of their laws as inhabiting an abstract transcendent realm of perfect mathematical relationships.

And just as Christians claim that the world depends utterly on God for its existence, while the converse is not the case, so physicists declare a similar asymmetry: the universe is governed by eternal laws (or meta-laws), but the laws are completely impervious to what happens in the universe.

The argument is compelling, and has led many fine thinkers to the conclusion that science both presupposes and concludes with the God of the Bible. But Davies is not so persuaded.

It seems to me there is no hope of ever explaining why the physical universe is as it is so long as we are fixated on immutable laws or meta-laws that exist reasonlessly or are imposed by divine providence. The alternative is to regard the laws of physics and the universe they govern as part and parcel of a unitary system, and to be incorporated together within a common explanatory scheme.

In other words, the laws should have an explanation from within the universe and not involve appealing to an external agency. The specifics of that explanation are a matter for future research. But until science comes up with a testable theory of the laws of the universe, its claim to be free of faith is manifestly bogus.

I'm afraid Davies is willfully ignoring something he knows only too well: Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, discussed in Chapter 7 of his 1983 book.  For in 1931, Kurt Gödel proved that no mathematical system (including the parts of the universe known as "laws") could be made self-consistent, complete, or self-explained. So Davies is holding out for something he knows cannot be true.

Notice the dilemma Davies has placed himself in. He wants the gnostic world of ideas, of rationality, of mathematics to be true, to be explained., but he wants it to be found inside the universe, accessible to him. He is looking for a chimera, what Screwtape called "an abominable amphibian", a thing that is both mental and physical, spirit and body. He wants God and in the flesh.

I know only three things that have these properties, and Davies has met them all: God, man and words. What is more reprehensible than Science's disregard for God, more astounding than its inability to explain mind or self or science, is its unconscious, unreflective use of language. For words are a mystery as profound as self, crossing the gulf between matter and mind, traversing even the chasm between imminent man and transcendent God.

The rabbis understood this well when they fit the idea to the text, for it is the word that brought the universe into existence, and not the other way around.  And the Gnostic elevation of mind over matter, or the materialistic insistence on matter over mind are both giving lie to the lips that speak them, or to the pen that writes them.

 In a subsequent blog I will look at how this scientific schizophrenia has destroyed not only modern philosophy and theology, but even something so prosaic as education.