Divine Wisdom at the Foundation of the Universe

One of the most interesting contemporary writers on religion and science is the Israeli-American Gerald L. Schroeder, an Orthodox Jew who earned his B.Sc., his M.Sc., and his Ph.D. in nuclear physics and earth and planetary sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and who currently teaches at Jerusalem’s College of Jewish Studies.

Here are a couple of passages from Gerald L. Schroeder, God According to God: A Scientist Discovers We’ve Been Wrong About God All Along (New York: HarperOne, 2009):

Albert Einstein discovered that matter is actually pure congealed or condensed energy, energy in the form of solid matter.  Everything from our bodies to boulders on a mountain is made of the energy of the big-bang creation.  The scientific discoveries of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have gone a step father in closing ranks with the creation, finding that matter and the energy from which matter formed are made of something totally ethereal.  In physics, we call it information or, more extreme, mind.  In the words of the knighted mathematician James Jeans, the world looks more like a great thought than a great machine.  Biblical theology agrees totally, telling us, as we will learn, that God used a substrate of wisdom with which to build the world.  This Divine wisdom or mind is present in every iota of the world’s being.  It explains how the energy of the creation, essentially superpowerful light beams, could become alive and sentient, able to feel love and joy and wonder.  Divine wisdom was and is present, guiding and forming the way.  (2-3)

The Bible drew this conclusion millennia ago: “I am wisdom. . . .   God acquired me [pure metaphysical wisdom] as the beginning of His way, the first of His works of old” (Prov. 8:12, 22).  Wisdom, the first of all creations, was and is the driving force behind the sentience of life.  Knighted mathematician Sir James Jeans paralleled this insight in his book, The Mysterious Universe:  “There is a wide measure of agreement, which on the physical side of science approaches almost unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality.  The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.”  (21)

One can, of course, debate such things.  What strikes me as extraordinarily interesting, however, is this:  More than a few scientists are now arguing that mind needs to be counted among the primordial elements of the universe, if not altogether as the first and primary one.

Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be.  (Doctrine and Covenants 93:29)

Posted from Laie, Oahu, Hawai’i